image description — Mary Wheat, middle, a longtime leader of the Thanksgiving Angels, with other volunteers who were preparing boxes and bags of meal items for pickup on Monday.

Thanksgiving Angels Descend with Meal Kits for Residents

By Brittany PolitoiBerkshires Staff
01:08PM / Tuesday, November 21, 2023Print Story | Email Story

Berkshire United Way President Thomas Bernard and state Sen. Paul Mark. United Way gave administrative support to the Thanksgiving Angels this year; the senator was in charge of handling the turkeys for pickup.

PITTSFIELD, Mass. — Upwards of 2,000 families will have their tables filled by the Thanksgiving Angels this year.

For more than a decade, dozens of religious and community organizations have worked together to create free meal kits for those who would otherwise go without. These include everything needed for a Thanksgiving spread — even the turkey.

Gretchen DeBartolo, co-chair of this year's donation, explained that 1,700 people had signed up but they are prepared for about 2,000 to account for last-minute recipients.

"We try never to ever turn anybody away," she said. "We never have. We don't want to start now."

Berkshire United Way has supported the Thanksgiving Angels over the past several months through volunteer management, printing name tags and to-do lists, and keeping it a well-oiled machine.

"This is that real proof of the power of service, actual people giving their time and making a difference and the person receiving a turkey, the person you're working side by side with, they don't care about politics, they don't care about your beliefs," President and CEO Thomas Bernard said.

"You just know that this is the best of our community and this is what we should be aspiring to and we know that people are hungry and food insecure and facing challenges every day and the responsibility is to keep this up and keep this happening."

An initiative page was created in BUW's Volunteer Center, supported by Greylock Federal Credit Union, that showcased all the ways to be involved in this year's program. There are more than 800 registered volunteers in the system and this recruited around 100 more.

Director of Volunteer Engagement Brenda Petell reported that over the 13 days of preparation and distribution, there have been nearly 2,000 volunteer hours from nearly 600 volunteers. There were nearly 200 volunteers on Monday.

"We recognize that there are people that are struggling, there are people that are working one job or two jobs and it's still hard to make ends meet, and we think about our goals around children's education but a child can't learn if they're hungry and there's so much need right now in our community," she said.

"We felt this was a way that we could contribute to the overall project really through the in-kind hours and the skill set of printing databases and managing databases and nametag processing all of that. So we thought it was a way that we could come to the table and contribute to this amazing group."

The Thanksgiving Angels steering committee meets monthly all year long and around 23 organizations are involved, each responsible for some part of the meal kit.

This year, DeBartolo and Hope Amandos were the chairs under the direction of Mary Wheat, who led the program for many years. It was founded over 15 years ago.

Wheat said they were doing a great job and everything was going smoothly. This year, she was very vital in processing and coordinating deliveries to hundreds of people over the weekend.

Meal kit recipients pulled up to the South Congregational Church on Monday to have their cars loaded with the items and there was a shorter distribution on Tuesday.

"We just want to make sure that each household, each individual person is fed," steering committee member Gracie Walton said. "We even had people that walked."

Among the volunteers was state Sen. Paul Mark. Now that he represents all of Pittsfield, he was invited to be in charge of getting the turkeys into the cars — an important job. He estimated moving a couple hundred turkeys throughout his time on site.

"It's fun," he said. "People seem really happy to be getting it."

Tags: food, good news, thanksgiving,

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PCTV Turns 40, Anniversary Celebration This Friday

By Breanna SteeleiBekshires Staff
03:30PM / Monday, September 14, 2026

PITTSFIELD, Mass. — Pittsfield Community Television is turning 40 this week, and it's celebrating with its viewers and listeners.

This Friday, Sept. 18, PCTV will celebrate at the Berkshire Hills Country Club. Ryan Peterson, WTEN News10 ABC anchor and Pittsfield High School graduate, will give the keynote address.

Executive Director Shawn Serre, who has been with the station for over 32 years, said it's their chance to celebrate all they have been able to bring to the community.

"It's a chance to reflect on everything that the organization has done over those years, all the people that have been involved. From board members to volunteers to producers to crew people to staff members, and all the different programs that we've produced," he said. "Everything from public programming to education, sports, graduations, parades, government meetings and forums, and election night coverage, and all kinds of other things that just year upon year of history that we've been able to create and document here for the Pittsfield community over those years."

Serre took over as executive director about nine years ago. Originally a volunteer fresh out of college.

The original board included former mayor Edward Reilly, Dan Dillon, Diane Morgenstern, Bernard Avalle, and John Fukes of the Berkshire Athenaeum. The operation was all-volunteer until PCTV hired the first executive director in January 1989.

PCTV has operated out of its station on Federico Drive since 1999. But originally they worked out of a basement.

"The first location that we ever had, we had all of our equipment stored in cardboard boxes in the basement of the Berkshire Athenaeum, because the Berkshire Athenaeum at the time was very gracious and allowed us to have some space while we sort of got our feet on the ground and sort of got things organized," he said. "But we had no location. We had no studio. We just had this equipment that was ordered with the money that we had from the original cable franchise grant."

"So that lasted a couple of years, and then we signed and got a lease over in our first studio location, which was over on Fourth Street in Pittsfield," Serre continued. "That was around the time that I first got involved, just before we moved to Fourth Street. So I was there in the basement of the library, opening those boxes up and seeing what we had for equipment. So we stayed there at Fourth Street for about 10 years, and then this building that we're currently in now, over on Federico Drive, was constructed in 1998. It was built kind of custom-made for the cable company and for us and for one other company."

Serre said one of their proudest moments was saving the radio station WTBR-FM back in 2018. PCTV made space for them so they could continue operation.

"We carved out some space here in our facility for that, and we've been operating that radio station ever since. So those are some of the big milestones of growth of the organization over the years, and the things that we've done," he said.

They have also invested in advanced technology to keep their programming accessible to all.

"Technologically, there's another whole series of things that we've gone through," he said. "We've started out with a single cable TV channel. We grew to three cable TV channels. We started out as standard definition on videotape, and we grew to digital, and then to high definition, and then everything went to the internet. So we're able to offer video on demand and live streams and video on social media. And then with the radio station, we also have a live stream there and podcasting. So we've seen a lot of technological change and tried to roll with that over the years."

Serre said that PCTV strives to keep people informed while also allowing space for people to create their own media.

"The whole idea behind PEG [Public Education and Government Access]...the whole idea behind that back in the 70s and 80s was that people could be left behind with the technology that's available to the big corporations," he said. "So, if you had a cable system at the time, ordinary people maybe they had camcorders at home, but they didn't have access to a TV studio; they didn't have access to the kind of technology that we had to allow them to create programs and share it with the community. So we filled that gap, and that was one of the main things that we did. And then also to be able to create programming for viewers and for the city, so that the municipal meetings can be shown, and so school committee meetings can be shown, and it really brings people in and involved."

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