by Brittney Wolff Zatezalo, June 26, 2020
Located an hour’s drive outside of New York City, our Wilton office found itself thrust into the US epicenter of the virus. Yet in the midst of a crisis, many of our colleagues went to great lengths for our business, but even more importantly, for our communities at large. Over the course of a week, several Connecticut hospitals will receive $250,000 worth of critical PPE, thanks to a determined local ASML team.
Vic Cappelli, director of Integration, Quality and Reliability Engineering at ASML in Wilton, Connecticut, has a daughter named Ariana who works as a nurse in a local hospital’s intensive care unit (ICU). In a situation like in many other hospitals around the world, Ariana works amid thousands of sick patients and has to contend with an overwhelmed staff and insufficient personal protective equipment (PPE). At one point she was even using the same mask for multiple 12-hour shifts, while seeing double the standard volume of patients infected with COVID-19.
Vic checks in with her every day on the phone but feels helpless to aid her. “There’s not much you can do except be there to talk when the phone call comes in,” he says painfully.
“We need to do something,” Vic thought to himself. He quickly found that his desire to help was shared by his local team and colleagues around the world. In the Netherlands, ASML donated more than 420,000 face masks to Dutch hospitals, 400 tablets to the elderly to help them stay in touch with their families, and 500 laptops to students in the Brainport Eindhoven region. These actions spurred a movement among colleagues around the world to support their own local communities.
Wilton takes action
Inspired by the news of the successful donation in Veldhoven, Vic assembled a cross-functional team in Wilton that decided to take local action.
One of the team, Philip Choi, who works in reliability engineering, reflects on the group’s first meeting one Sunday night in March: “We felt that despite everything that was going on, we were still pretty fortunate, so we wanted to help in some way. We had our jobs and our health, and we were in a pretty good space to support and give back to the community.”
Another team member, Thomas Liaskas, had built strong relationships with suppliers around the world in his role as project manager for ASML, so he helped facilitate an immediate ‘win’ for the team – donating 500 N95 masks to Nuvance Health Systems. It was tangible, rewarding progress. The team wanted to do still more, but never would have predicted what would transpire over the moths that followed.
