Providing Life Saving Nutrients: NeoCell’s 2014 Vitamin Angels Campaign

By Jessica Mulligan, Vice President Sales & Marketing
As a company, this is without a doubt our favorite time of year. We are embarking on our 4th annual fall drive for Vitamin Angels (www.vitaminangels.org). From October 1 through December 31, NeoCell will donate $0.25 cents for every unit we ship from our warehouse to the Vitamin Angels charity. Last year alone, we raised $190,000. With your help, in the last three years we have collectively donated enough to help over 1,000,000 mothers and children in need!

I want to thank our leader and CEO, Al Quadri, for this tremendous commitment to do good in the world and his continued support of this incredibly important cause. We also want to thank all of you! Because of your support we continue to be able to make bigger and bigger strides in our efforts to help Vitamin Angels.

As many of you know, Vitamin Angels is an organization that provides at-risk mothers and children with life saving nutrients. Forty-five percent of all child mortality worldwide is caused by undernutrition. To put that staggering percentage into context, that’s more than a million innocent lives lost every year – and millions more that will never reach their full physical or mental potential. Improved nutrition through vitamin supplementation can eradicate childhood blindness, reduce mortality rates, and break the poverty cycle.

I wanted to share a personal story with you all. I was lucky enough to be able to accompany Vitamin Angels on a vitamin drop high in the Andes of Peru in August 2013. We were at altitudes of 14,000 feet, and at that high up nothing can be cultivated except potatoes. I spoke to mother after mother who said their families eat potatoes for breakfast, lunch and dinner, all year round. Potatoes don’t provide the vitamins and minerals that are needed for children to grow and develop properly. In these communities this lack of nutrition causes something called “stunting”. My heart broke a thousand times when I met these beautiful little children who looked to be about 5 years younger than their actual age, all due to poor nutrition.

Vitamin Angels had been in Peru at that point for about 3 years so I also met the younger children who had been receiving vitamins their whole life. These kids were bigger, stronger, and had healthier immune systems than their older siblings who hadn’t had access to the vitamins. There was had no stunting, physically or mentally.  Seeing this very real difference that our contributions are making in the lives of children was without question one of the most moving experiences of my life.

We ask you to please reach out to your friends, family, local health food retailers, and anyone else you can think of that can help promote this campaign. We will use the hashtag #GivingIsBeautiful to promote the campaign and ask for your support on social media to spread the message. Most importantly, we want you to feel proud that every bottle of NeoCell you purchase during the campaign directly affects the entire lives of these precious children. In true holiday spirit, let’s end 2014 knowing that we have helped more kids than ever before!