Sustainable gardening comes in all shapes and sizes. In April, Carlson Hotels Reservations Center in Omaha, Nebraska, dedicated the Omaha Responsible Business Community Garden, an initiative that will share freshly grown produce with a local food bank.
“The idea of the community garden was birthed during our planning session for the 2010 Earth Day events,” said Lisa McDonald, Human Resources generalist and training specialist, Carlson Hotels, Americas. “The fresh food grown in our community garden will be donated to the Omaha Food Bank, which supplies resources to the homeless or those who are in need.”
The Food Bank for the Heartland is the largest food bank in Nebraska and Iowa, encompassing 93 counties in a two-state region and distributing approximately seven million pounds of food annually.
Radisson Aruba Resort goes the extra mile. The Radisson Aruba Resort, Casino & Spa scheduled a roadside cleaning, as part of its commitment to the community of Aruba. The cleaning was in conjunction with the Aruba Hotel And Tourism Association- sponsored Adopt-A-Mile program.
The resort crew, made up of members of the Human Resources Department, the Executive Office, the Sales Office, Banquets, Landscaping and Security, met early in the morning and spent over two hours collecting debris and trash between the Radisson Aruba Resort, Casino & Spa and the Sasaki highway.
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Carlson Hotels, Americas is alarmed by this statistic and supports our hotels in joining programs like the Global Soap Project and Clean the World to assist in recycling their used bars of soap and amenities to help save lives.
The Park Plaza Hotel Bloomington housekeeping team started collecting used bars of soap for the Global Soap Project in late 2010. In the first few months, they collected more than a quarter of a ton of soap which has been sanitized and sent to third-world countries.
Wearing their Yes I Can! T-shirts, they picked up mostly plastic bottles, cups and food take-out containers, and had a lot of fun fishing the hard-to-reach litter out of the Bubali nature-reserve water-filled ditches.
The Radisson Hotel Phoenix Airport North created their own version of a sustainable garden using 5-gallon buckets to grow the herbs previously purchased from their produce vendor. “We feel that this gives us a step up on our competition, reduces our carbon footprint and saves money,” says Executive Chef Chris Syrjanen. “In the future I also want to start growing flowers to use as centerpieces in our lobby.”
Saving lives, one bar of soap at a time. A bar of soap can save lives, you ask? That seems like a tall order, but UNICEF reports that “hand washing with soap is among the most effective and inexpensive ways to prevent diarrheal diseases and pneumonia, which together account for 3.5 million child deaths annually. Meanwhile, each day, 2.6 million bars of soap are discarded by the US hotel industry.
Southern Hospitality operates Country inn & Suites Bloomington West and Country inn & Suites Eagan which recently adopted Clean the World’s soap recycling program. Owning and operating hotels can be grueling, especially during difficult times, but the work can be rewarding when there is an opportunity to give back to others.
“It’s been a very difficult couple of years for hotels, and this project has brought a sense of hope, energy, purpose and well-being to our entire staff,” says Jami Pogue, Chief Executive Officer of Southern Hospitality, Inc.
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