Yesterday, my friend Lauren and I were able to help out filling “goody bags” for the golfers participating in this weekend’s Will Golf 4 Kids charity tournament. According to their website, “Will Golf 4 Kids is a nonprofit organization that raises funds to support the mission of Arkansas Children's Hospital.” They sponsor an annual golf tournament (originally started by Walmart but now coordinated by vendors/suppliers) and charity auction. It apparently does pretty well - in 2009, the tournament and Color of Hope Charity Gala raised more than $770,000.
As part of the event, all participants are given a swag bag – full of sample product from all of the tournament’s sponsors. Thinking it would make for an entertaining morning away from work, we volunteered to help stuff these bags. Now, I had imagined that these would be basically gift bags with a few small product samples and some coupons…nope. They’re huge, 45-can capacity thermal cooler-bags that we stuffed TO THE BRIM with all kinds of stuff: detergent, brownie mix, dog treats, rubber duckies, sunscreen, granola bars, lotion, toys, mustard, golf balls, Duck tape… And it wasn’t all samples, some of this stuff was full sized.
The bag stuffing happened in Walmart’s layout center (so I couldn’t take pictures of the event…no cameras allowed in the building). Each of the volunteers grabbed a bag and walked down a long line of tables, putting one of each donated product into the bag. Our first few times down the line, our bags were almost too full to be zipped, but after about bag 4, we both had a nice little method and the bags zipped easily (by “nice little method” I mean my compulsive nature had taken over and all of my bags from that point forward matched because I had found a perfect spot for each item…). Anyway, we were there for about two hours and filled about 15 bags each. In total, all of the volunteers assembled 1400 bags. Bonus: each volunteer got to take a bag home! Nice, right? Gigi, especially, was SUPER excited. She could smell the dog treats through the bag.
Until I unpacked it on the living room floor, I don’t think I realized just how much stuff we’d put in that bag. I ran through what was there, and my roommate and I played our own little version of The Price Is Right. By our estimates, each bag is worth about $200 (NOT including all the coupons for free stuff)…(and if they gave away 1400, that’s about $280,000 worth of product). Wow, thanks Walmart.
One thing I LOVE about Dannon – they actually believe in social initiatives. It’s not just words in an annual report or a plaque on a wall, it’s part of the culture. They believe that it is our duty to give back – to our communities, to the nation, to the world. And they live it. I told my boss that I needed to miss the morning to help out the charity, and he was excited that I had found an opportunity to lend a hand (not annoyed that I’d be a few hours late to work). Reactions like that make me love my internship (and company) more and more every day.
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