On Monday, Oct. 12, employees of SECU gathered at Towson University’s SECU Arena for the credit union’s seventh annual Day of Kindness. Volunteers assembled meal and hygiene kits for nonprofit groups, wrote appreciation cards and bookmarks, and joined activities that included adoptable pets and a bone marrow donor registry. CBS Baltimore reported from the gathering as it unfolded.
Charlotte Owsianny, executive director of the SECU MD Foundation, told CBS that more than 400 employees and 20 nonprofits were gathered. Those figures are attributed to an organizer, not an independently audited count. CBS placed the gathering at the university arena and described it as the seventh annual Day of Kindness.
Kit assembly gave volunteers a concrete task for the day. CBS reported that employees prepared meal and hygiene kits for nonprofit groups, but it did not give a kit total, identify every receiving organization, or say when supplies would be distributed. The available account documents the assembly work; it does not establish how many items reached people after the event.
Participants also made appreciation cards and bookmarks. CBS said the event featured adoptable pets from the Baltimore Humane Society and cheek swabbing through a bone marrow donor registry program called There Goes My Hero. The report does not say how many attendees took a swab, registered, or adopted a pet, so those possible outcomes remain separate from the activities it observed.
SECU’s 2022 annual report described another part of the campaign’s reach: employees received Kindness Kits with tools and ideas for continuing the work during October, and kits were available at financial centers or shipped to 12 states and the United Kingdom. Those are details from the 2022 campaign, not the number of items assembled or distributed in Towson this week.
Owsianny described the Day of Kindness to CBS as an annual tradition for employees to support Maryland communities. CBS said the campaign began in 2020 during the pandemic. The credit union’s 2025 campaign page called that year’s effort the sixth annual campaign; CBS described the 2026 gathering as the seventh annual Day of Kindness. SECU and its charitable arm, the SECU MD Foundation, lead the campaign together.
The 2022 annual report called that year’s October effort the third annual Kindness Campaign and separately described a Day of Kindness at SECU Arena, where teams worked with 15 nonprofits. Listed projects included thank-you notes, birthday-supply bags, care packages, bikes, skateboards and dog toys for shelters. SECU said employees completed 107,000 acts that day, an organization-reported count, while the monthlong campaign had a 280,000-act goal. It also said the event helped connect teams with local nonprofit partners.
Elsewhere in the 2022 campaign, SECU’s report listed paying for groceries, delivering bagels to health-care workers and first responders, holding fall activities for patients at Kennedy Krieger Institute, and packaging nearly 1,500 meals for Moveable Feast. These were separate monthlong actions, not work reported at the 2026 Towson event.
The 2025 campaign page offers a more recent comparison. SECU said its 2024 campaign recorded 590,579 acts of kindness and set a one-million-act goal for 2025. It planned nearly 30 service events with 30 community partners and projected 350,000 acts from the annual service day. Those were SECU-reported prior-year results and plans, not totals from the Oct. 12, 2026 gathering.
The 2026 gathering also coincided with SECU’s 75th anniversary. Owsianny told CBS it was an extra-special year for the credit union, while describing the service day as a way for employees to come together and spread kindness in Maryland communities. That anniversary detail came from the organizer; it was not a separate measure of community impact.
At Towson, the account is a snapshot of people doing practical tasks together: assembling kits, writing cards and bookmarks, and taking part in the other stations. The attendance figures and October plans came from SECU’s foundation director, while CBS reported the activities it observed. The record is specific about what happened at the arena, and leaves later distribution and participation totals for another update.
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