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As volunteers took Angel Tree tags off Christmas trees at the Desert Ridge Marketplace in the Phoenix area, Nox Group President and Chief Operating Officer Greg Ayres asked what they were doing.
Ayres had a family tradition of volunteering through The Salvation Army Angel Tree program, (called “Christmas Angel” in Arizona), which provides new clothing and toys for hundreds of thousands of children around the U.S. each Christmas. In Arizona, more than 50,000 children receive gifts through the Christmas Angel program each year, across 11 distribution days.
Several years prior, in 2021, Ayres’ wife was invited to volunteer in the Christmas Angel warehouse by Phoenix Metro Advisory Board Member Tom Bilsten, who had sent a request out to his clients to join in.
The Ayreses took Bilsten up on the offer, volunteered and came back the following season for another night at the warehouse preparing gifts.
When the volunteer at the mall explained the tags were considered “forgotten angels”— their due dates were coming up, and the registered child’s Christmas wish list remained unfilled—Ayres knew the impact and asked for the tags.
“No one should be forgotten,” he said.
They gave him the stack. He asked if there were more. There were—in the end, he left with some 450 tags.
He then called Nox Group Chief of Staff Krystle Bryan to involve those across Nox Group’s enterprise, which aims to humanize construction across large-scale industrial projects.
What started that night was the beginning of Nox Group’s commitment to help children have Christmas gifts through The Salvation Army Christmas Angel program in Arizona.
When Bryan got Ayres’ call, it was late. To meet the deadline the next day, they needed to move quickly. She put out the SOS to Nox’s employees for help securing the company-sponsored gifts for the Christmas Angel children. Since it was the end of the year, many had volunteer time off hours remaining—something Nox Group encourages in its workplace culture.
“This isn’t just buying toys…it’s real life impact and it’s real life families.”
Tom Bilsten
“We only had about six hours to get them to the warehouse so they could be handed out to the families in time,” Bryan said, noting about 30 volunteers came to help first thing in the morning. “We split up the tags and hit all the Targets and Walmarts we could go to and made it happen. I think we delivered within five minutes of our time that we had to get it there, but we fulfilled all the tags.”
This year, Bryan said Nox wanted to continue with Christmas Angel since the group is passionate about not only building but also making sure the next generation of builders are thriving. Only this time, they made plans before the start of the season for an intentionally bigger impact.
After talking again with Bilsten, they learned the first day of Christmas Angel distribution has the most forgotten angels, because of the faster turnaround involved with getting the gifts before they are given to the families.
“We said, ‘All right, how many are there? Let’s make sure that this doesn’t happen,’” she said. “He sent us the list a couple of weeks ago, and we just took them all on.”
The list? An Excel sheet with the names and requested items of almost 3,000 children, amounting to some 7,000 items.
Bryan said for the last few weeks, she has been sourcing the gifts from various stores and online. Additionally, the company has reached out to peers in the industry who have made their year-end contributions to help level the cost of the gifts.
By taking the day-one angels, Bilsten said Nox Group has allowed The Salvation Army to source the remaining days’ donations through traditional means, like the donors at the mall.
“The exciting thing for me is that we’re still at the beginning stages of the Nox Group and The Salvation Army story,” Bilsten said. “We don’t know what the full extent of the impact of their involvement is. They’re impacting thousands of families and they’ve been able to shine a light to these families for the last couple Christmases and that’s amazing.”
Bilsten said he’s particularly drawn to Christmas Angel as a father of two girls, 11 and 14. He wants to model living in service to others.
“I thought I understood the impact of the Christmas Angel program until I saw the distribution and the families brought to tears when they put a bag in the trunk of their car,” he said. “This isn’t just buying toys…it’s real life impact and it’s real life families.”
At the Wellness Center at Nox’s Headquarters, the basketball court is covered in toys.
“We’re getting pallets of 500 skateboards, 250 scooters,” Bryan said. “It’s been really fun to watch it all come together.”
As this year’s deadline approached, Bryan aimed to have the items secured before the Thanksgiving holiday. Some gifts hadn’t arrived on time, so she hit the stores that week to purchase the 200 missing items.
“I think that the construction industry has been looked at as…we only build stuff. We have dirt on our boots and hard hats on, and so we really want to set the standard for our peers in the construction industry that it goes above and beyond building the job and showing up to the job site,” she said. “We’re taking care of our community, we’re taking care of our families, we’re taking care of the kids… It’s definitely one of our passions to make sure that our next generations are taken care of and supported and exposed to the construction industry.”
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