The Power of Community Service

Over the past few weeks I have been involved in a lot of conversations over the very real concern that “if the economy comes around are we are going to lose our great people because we have not given them a raise or a bonus in the past two years? Someone will make them a better offer.” Now I could go on and on however, you probably know where it leads and you wouldn’t have to worry about that if you were taking care of them all along and that your staff was stretched to the point of breaking. So, what is the solution – how do we reconnect, re-energize and re-vitalize our workforce? Here is an interesting way to provide a solution.

This week I attended and had the pleasure to speak at the CHART (Council of Hotel and Restaurant Trainers) conference in New Orleans. I also had the true privilege to facilitate CHART’s President Panel featuring four terrific leaders: Mark Running, Edie Ames, Jerry Cataldo and David Lloyd. If you are not familiar with them just hit Google and you will see why it was a privilege. And if you are not familiar with CHART then hit Google again and you will see one of the most amazing organizations in the hospitality industry. In fact, this conference was a celebration of their 40th anniversary. What makes CHART so special – you can find that in the heart of CHART in their core values – learning, sharing, caring and growing.

CHART is very committed to offering attendees service opportunities in every city where they host their conferences. For New Orleans the service event was with Habitat for Humanity. A little bit of background: I lived in Baton Rouge during both Hurricane Katrina and Rita and stayed two more years after the hurricanes. I have a very deep rooted belief that when you put the politics aside, this is the United States, and how can it be that this part of our country is still a mess five years later? I know part of it is politics and part of it is culture but all of it is unacceptable in the 21st century. So, when I saw what the service event was, with a bittersweet heart I knew I had to go help. So did 32 other attendees that all flew in a day early on their own dime and time to help rebuild New Orleans.

Here are a few highlights of what we accomplished:
We started at 8:00 am. We built a fence which required digging 27 holes, dropping poles, pouring concrete and tying on the links. We insulated the entire house with insulation made from recycled blue jeans. We touched up the exterior paint and repainted all of the trim. We finished exterior stairs cases, we leveled the clay and mid foundation in the front of the house, and we secured the construction area in case a storm called Bonnie came running through. We finished at 2:00 pm because there was nothing left for us to do without more supplies.
The good news for us was that it was 90 something degrees and overcast.

Here’s the punch line - it wasn’t just about what we did it was about what happened to us:
We started as a group of people wanting to help we ended as a tribe bonded by our experience.
We went to help and we left knowing that we had helped.
We wanted to build a house and in fact we built an opportunity for a family.
We did not know who’s house it was until we all starting working with James and he blessed us for working shoulder to shoulder with him to build his home.
We were asked to describe the experience in one word and through the sweat, heat, tears, laughs and exhilaration words flowed like – heartfelt, grateful, transformational, amazing, fantastic, eye-opening.

We all learned, shared, cared and grew in our experience and in our own way we planted one more seed of hope and opportunity. For you see, James's house was the fifth house in the neighborhood to be built out of blocks of houses still rotting in his neighborhood.


If you are looking for creative ways to inspire, motivate, retain and energize yourself, your team or your company, get out from behind the desk and the counter and go help someone else because in the process you will find how much you will have helped yourself. What’s more, the cost of doing it is a whole lot less than what your fatigued, exhausted and stressed out teams are costing you today!