Spirit to Serve

A week and a half ago Marriott had it's annual Spirit to Serve our Communities Day. This was the tenth year that the company has done this. In case you do not know someone who works for Marriott and have not heard of this, let me enlighten you. Our company is very service oriented and one day a year is dedicated to as many people in the company as possible going out in their communities and serving. Wondering how many people that is? Marriot has more than 300,000 employees at 3,200 properties worldwide.

We do a lot of fundraising and serving throughout the rest of the year for charities like United Way and Children's Miracle Network and local food banks, but this one day is special. When you are on property like I have been for the past 5 years, not as many people can go at once, so it stretches out over a week or two with various different activities.

Being here at corporate this year has given me a whole new perspective on it, and I liked it a lot. There are a lot of employees at a large hotel- several hundred, but at corporate there are several thousand of us. On May 13th about 2,000 employees from corporate went out into the DC area and served our community. It started that morning with breakfast at the associate entrance, music playing as we walked up, and everyone in jeans and their Spirit to Serve t-shirts. Everyone gathered outside the associate entrance for a quick rally and Mr. Marriott gave us a pep talk. Then we headed over to our buses- there were 20-30 buses in 4 lines across the parking lot waiting to take the first round of teams to their service site. Not everyone left the building, some people stayed at HQ and did service projects in the building like making sandwiches for a homeless shelter in the kitchens.

The Global Revenue Management Team went to the CHI Center (except for a handful that went with the Fairfield Inn team to a Habitat for Humanity site). The CHI Center serves handicap people in our community by helping them find employment in the community if they are able, providing employment at the center for people who are not able to go to a job site but can still do things like stuff envelopes and put mailing stickers on them or other simple tasks like this, and some are so severely handicapped that they come for daycare. They also help their clients to find living situations appropriate to their abilities and check on them periodically to make sure everything is well at home. I was very interested to learn about the center because my friend Kelly in Minnesota used to work for a similar type of organization (from what I understand).

We mostly worked outside on the grounds weeding, cleaning windows, washing and cleaning buses, picking up trash, etc. We did get to see some of the clients when they were arriving in their buses (and some of them were very curious about us!) and we also saw them at lunch time. In order to keep from disrupting their routines we did not do much work inside the building. Despite the centers lack of organization in preparing for 40 volunteers, it was a good time.

If you are interested in reading more and learning what some of the Marriott teams in other countries did, check out this story.