For the children

Unilever employees build Boys & Girls Club playground site

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Some 200 volunteers, 150 of them Unilever employees, poured out buckets of sweat Feb. 1 in a major physical makeover effort that turned the plain-Jane local Boys & Girls Club into a Taj Mahal playland in less than five hours.

Sales, marketing, financial and corporate middle and top-level executives from across the country representing the world's largest consumer products company descended by the busloads on the Adams Boulevard facility at noon and joined forces with about 50 dedicated residents to not only assemble and install a playground unit, but also paint all of the interior and exterior walls of the club, build planter boxes, dig holes and plant shrubs and assemble and varnish picnic tables.

The company also donated 20 computers to the club.

"This is absolutely unbelievable," said Connie Poling, who as a leader of the city's Green Team knows quite a bit about volunteer efforts. "This is the most efficient operation I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot of them.

"You should have seen the espirit d'corps they had when they got off the buses. If they weren't sure about something, they started improvising and like good managers they took over and did what had to be done."

The Unilever workers who came to Boulder City were part of an overall contingent of about 700 corporate volunteers who came to Las Vegas for their annual sales retreat. But during that day they also turned their attention to doing a less-intensive project at the Andre Agassi Boys & Girls Club, building two Habitat for Humanity homes in Las Vegas and doing general outdoor work at the Lake Mead National Recreation Area.

All three agencies -- the Boys & Girls Clubs, Habitat for Humanity, and the National Park Service -- are the focus of the corporation's triad of community service projects.

"We've been all fired up for this because after being in meetings since Sunday night this is our afternoon off ,and believe me, it's great to have the time off instead of being in a meeting," said Art Drogue, senior vice president of customer development for Unilever, USA. He added that normally on the afternoon of their get-together, retreat-goers play golf or pursue some other type of recreation. "Our mission is vitality because we believe so much in giving back to the community. We want to make every city we come to a better place than when we got there. We've got 700 people scattered around Las Vegas putting in 3,500 hours of community work, so I'm really proud of them."

Drogue, a six-year employee of Unilever who previously worked for General Mills and Nabisco said his Rotterdam, Netherlands-based corporation -- with $10 billion in sales during 2005 -- completed 13,000 community projects around the world and donated $50 million to charities and causes last year.

Ironically, Jennifer Pasqua, a Charlotte, N.C., grocery chain sales manager who made sure her three-person team correctly assembled the decorative panels for the jungle gym, turned the tables on senior VP Drogue and supervised him.

"Yeah, it's sort of like bossing the boss, but I've known Art for years because we met in Atlanta before," Pasqua said. "This is a great experience, but I don't think I'll have this opportunity again."

While workers hauled stockpiled wood mulch to the playground site, mixed concrete for the gym's support poles and transplanted five-gallon plants into the ground -- all under the watchful eye of project manager Chris Romero of KaBoom, a Chicago planning and consultant firm -- a beehive of activity was going on inside.

All the rooms received a new coat of paint -- a different color for each room -- and Boulder City's Lee Lorentz performed magic with her brushes. She hand-painted a pastoral mural on the check-in area wall but had to wait until the robin's egg blue semi-gloss finish had dried in the movie room before she could tackle her second mural, a beneath-the-sea scene.

"I've always done murals at home, but this is the first time I've done public murals," said the 73-year-old Lorentz. "I guess it's not any different other than it's a larger canvas. I'm using a grid and scaling it out to size so that way the snail's not larger than the whale."

Working with Lorentz in the room was Build Captain Goldie Begley and Unilever Customer Service Manager Doug Markle of Chicago, who said that even though all 150 Unilever people work for the same company, many have never met each other before.

"This really gives us a chance to know each other," said Melissa Marshall, also of Chicago, a Unilever Walgreen's sales account executive. "Some of us have the same function and we don't know each other, so this lets us interact."

As the 4:30 p.m. closing ceremony drew near and the exterior painting frenzy reached a crescendo, some Unilever employees reflected on the day's work.

"When we get done, I want our people to walk away and say, 'Look at what we've done,' " Drogue said.

"We should all feel like we did something productive when we get done," added Marshall.

Keeping all the workers on-task was not an easy chore, but it went smoothly thanks to the build captains who acted as team leaders. They included Begley, Poling, Paul Adams, Cokie Booth, Tom Casey, John Chase, Mark McGinty, Sarah Mojzer and Carmel Pacheteau.

Work came to a close -- or so the workers thought -- with a plaque presentation to Unilever by Mayor Bob Ferraro and a plethora of thank yous from city officials, the same city officials who only a week earlier approved an eleventh-hour agreement to allow the project to move forward and will consider a rent-free, five-year lease of the site to the Boys & Girls Club of Las Vegas at their Feb. 14 meeting.

"I guess I'm the typical politician who shows up after all the work is done," Councilman Roger Tobler joked. "This is a worthy project. It's nice to see it go through to completion. Thank you for all your hard work and coming to our community and making a difference. I thank you, the city thanks you."

But before all the shovels were put away, the wheelbarrows rolled into place and the paint rollers neatly stowed, Drogue had a not-so-welcome parting comment for his workers.

"We have some more painting to do," he said, "so the buses won't be leaving until all the painting is done."

Undaunted by the call to brushes, weary Unilever employees, without a single complaint, headed over to the building where some partly coated walls and trim needed some more paint and, once again, picked up their tools to finish the job.