Staff members at the Peter Lougheed Centre (PLC) have discovered a way to escape the stresses of working in a large hospital while contributing to a program which assists the city’s homeless.

The office of Anthony Mancini, the unit manager on the hospital’s fifth floor, resembles a warehouse as he houses boxes of socks filled with toiletries destined for Calgarians in need.

Anthony heads the ‘Socks of Love’ program, an initiative of the PLC Spirit Committee.

“Socks were donated to the hospital and staff take them and stuff them full of necessities for the less fortunate,” said Anthony.

The collected socks will be provided to a number of local shelters for the homeless. The program began a number of years ago, but Crystal Cunningham of Alberta Health Services says, since Anthony took over the program’s reigns last October, it’s reached a whole new level.

“Anthony is himself an inspiration,” said Crystal. “In prior years, we actually had to do fundraising and get the money and use the money to buy the socks, but Anthony took it upon himself to engage some of our community stakeholders and went to these stores and asked them for donations.”

Anthony convinced management at local Real Canadian Superstore and Army & Navy stores to donate the empty socks to the initiative and hospital staff responded in droves. The number of stuffed socks earmarked for donation skyrocketed this year.

“In years past, we've done 180, 185, 200 hundred pairs of socks,” explains Anthony. “This year we’ve smashed it. We've done 726 pairs of stuffed socks.”

Crystal says the program’s impact on hospital staff is apparent in the halls and during meetings.

The staff love it,” said Cunningham. “It becomes a bit of a competition for everyone to get more socks than the other one. We all talk about it at meetings ‘I've got more socks than you’, ‘I've got 68, so how many did you get’.”

“It becomes a team builder.”

Anthony has lofty goals for the 2016 edition of the ‘Socks of Love’ campaign.

“We're going for more, 750 to 1,000,” explains Anthony. “Let's keep it going. It's a great cause!”

For what he does to encourage team building at the hospital while helping the homeless, Anthony Mancini is this week’s Inspiring Albertan.