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Why Your Business Should Take an Active Interest in Your Parks

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Thu, 04 Feb 2016 18:00:37 +0000

These days parks across the country are underfunded. In fact, if all the local volunteers who donate their time to provide access, management, funding and maintenance suddenly quit, the parks would have to close down. In most states, parks are kept open only due to the love and care of local residents and non-profit members. Many who vote against additional funding for the parks argue that the locals benefit the most, and therefore locals should provide most of the support. But there is another group that benefits greatly from the existence of well-maintained and well-managed parks. It’s local business owners and their staff!

How can your business benefit from the parks? Several ways, not the least of which is recruitment. At the higher end of the pay scale where specialties become scarce, you are competing for qualified candidates from all over the country. Country wide, other businesses are doing the same.

Many of these candidates have families. Aside from the job, the benefits, and the career opportunities, they want to know what the lifestyle is like where you are asking them to move. They want to know about the obvious – good schools, low crime, good neighborhoods. But they also want to know about recreational opportunities, such as the parks and open space. Before they make any career decision, they want to know if they and their family will be happy and healthy in the new area. It may be more important than the compensation offered.

So now, from a Human Resources recruitment standpoint and from an employee’s tenure and loyalty standpoint, the parks and open spaces near your business are critical in attracting and keeping the talent you want to hire. Parks and access to open space can be the deciding factor in the candidate’s decision to work for you.

Your HR people should already be aware of the natural attractions immediately surrounding your place of business. But do you, as a business owner, contribute your fair share to this local resource you depend upon? Or do you take it for granted? Maybe you think, “I pay my taxes, so the government should provide these services.” If you do, you haven’t been reading the news. The parks are considerably underfunded and have huge backlogs of deferred maintenance. The parks also are now dependent on volunteers to help with management and maintenance. Chances are the trails you walk on in your local park were built and maintained by a local non-profit.

We believe all businesses have a responsibility to help support the parks that are supporting their communities. You can do this by writing a big check, which would be very welcomed by these non-profit groups, but there are other ways, too.

You company already has heath programs that involve some kind of exercise to keep employees in shape and reduce medical costs. Why not join an organized group to do clean-ups, trail maintenance, and ecological restoration projects in your nearby parks? Your people will love it and you will be helping to pay the parks back for their positive influence on the recruitment and tenure of your staff.

If your business or your affiliates are in construction, building materials, engineering, water, or maintenance, you can donate supplies to the parks and take it as a tax deduction. It will reduce their expenses and be very well received. Further, most parks will allow signage that says donated by your company for all visitors to see. Now you are improving your company image!

Time for your business to say “Thank You” to your local parks that make your business a more attractive place to work!

Who We Are

Michael Houlihan and Bonnie Harvey co-authored the New York Times bestselling business book, The Barefoot Spirit: How Hardship, Hustle, and Heart Built America’s #1 Wine Brand. The book has been selected as recommended reading in the CEO Library for CEO Forum, the C-Suite Book Club, and numerous university classes on business and entrepreneurship. It chronicles their humble beginnings from the laundry room of a rented Sonoma County farmhouse to the board room of E&J Gallo, who ultimately acquired their brand and engaged them as brand consultants. Barefoot is now the world’s largest wine brand.

Beginning with virtually no money and no wine industry experience, they employed innovative ideas to overcome obstacles, create new markets and forge strategic alliances. They pioneered Worthy Cause Marketing and performance-based compensation. They built an internationally bestselling brand and received their industry’s “Hot Brand” award for several consecutive years.

They offer their Guiding Principles for Success (GPS) to help entrepreneurs become successful. Their book, The Entrepreneurial Culture: 23 Ways To Engage and Empower Your People, helps corporations maximize the value of their human resources.

Currently they travel the world leading workshops, trainings, & keynoting at business schools, corporations, conferences. They are regular media guests and contributors to international publications and professional journals. They are C-Suite Network Advisors & Contributing Editors. Visit their popular brand building site at www.consumerbrandbuilders.com.

To make inquiries for keynote speaking, trainings or consulting, please contact sales@thebarefootspirit.com.

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The Surfrider Foundation Australia Cleans Manly Beach

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Thu, 03 Sep 2015 17:08:00 +0000

Last week we joined in on a beach clean-up on Manly Beach near Sydney, Australia. It was co-sponsored by the Manly Beach division of The Surfrider Foundation and Barefoot Wines. We have been to many beach clean ups before but, not counting Bonnie’s spontaneous and constant solo clean-ups around the world, this was our first organized and publicized beach clean-up outside the US.

What impressed us was the number of young people who pitched in. As bag after bag of trash showed up to be sorted it became clear that the beach trash here in Australia was the same as we‘ve seen on the west coast and east coast of the US and Canada, it’s the same we’ve seen in Chile and Greece, Honduras and Costa Rica. The brand names change but the materials are much the same. In order of quantities, they are: cigarette butts, Styrofoam, single-use plastic containers, and broken glass. There are several other categories, but these continue to be the majority of the pollution. We’re sure the polluters thought they were throwing their trash “away,” but there is no “away.” It’s all still here on the planet.

The Manly Beach cleanup was high profile. The trash was dumped into a large tarp which was sifted through by volunteers who sorted the debris into 5 gallon buckets, each filled with a particular type of trash. Thousands of people walk by keen on enjoying this sunny first day of spring on this otherwise pristine beach not far from downtown Sydney. One by one, they stopped and marveled at the interpretive signs supplied by The Surfrider Foundation, volunteers of all ages collecting and sorting garbage, and the sheer mass of the debris. Was this all picked up from their beach? It was. The sobering reality was hitting home. Many of the passersby grabbed a bag and joined in the cleanup.

For us as Americans, it was heartening to know that people the world over are starting to take notice of this increasingly dangerous international problem – and doing something about it. The volunteers were enthusiastic, felt like they were making a difference, and had a great time! It was their beach and they took ownership. And isn’t that the real message here: “Take ownership.” You wouldn’t want to trash your own home, so why trash your own planet. What we throw away doesn’t go away it. It comes right back.

One cigarette butt pollutes tens of liters of water, kills birds, and take centuries to decompose. And they are making millions more every day. Never mind the health consequences of smoking – what about using our beaches for ash trays. As Bonnie and others feel compelled to say,” Keep your butts off the beach!”

Foam and single-use plastics decompose in the presence of sunlight and then are eaten by fish. Those fish are eaten by larger fish that wind up being eaten by us! The plastics we discard wind up in our own bodies! So there is no real “away.”

The kids who witnessed and participated in the Manly Beach cleanup are learning these important lessons at an early age. Their experience will change their own behavior and encourage them to create and support a credible, monetarily-driven recycling program. The planet deserves to be treated with respect rather than as a receptacle for our discards.

We salute the Manly Beach Chapter of the International Surfrider Foundation and all the other Chapters who are taking action and making a difference in this man made blight of our time. They are living up to their euphemistic motto: “To Protect and Surf!”

Who We Are

To make inquiries for keynote speaking, trainings or consulting, please contact sales@thebarefootspirit.com.

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Park Users Should Take Out What They Take In

Michael Houlihan & Bonnie Harvey — Thu, 12 Mar 2015 17:00:30 +0000

When Michael was a young boy, his grandfather, a former police officer in the Mission District of San Francisco, would take him to play in Dolores Park where he would summersault down its pristine green banks. Last year almost 15,000 cubic yards of garbage were removed from this historic gem by a so-called progressive city. Times have changed and so has the impact of population, park usage and the proliferation of single use containers.

Today, the weekly trashing of Dolores Park is an unfortunate example of misplaced user entitlement caused in part by the Park Department itself. Every day, park users bring in food and beverages and discard the containers as if it is the park’s responsibility to provide comprehensive garbage service. And why? Because the park provides garbage receptacles. But there are never enough and it overflows throughout the park. When parks provide garbage collection services it gives users permission to leave their waste behind. Trash pick-up was manageable in the past when there was a much smaller attendance, but usage, especially in urban parks like Dolores Park, has skyrocketed over the years.

So what to do? Add more garbage bins? Maybe teach people to use special recycle bins? Both of these solutions avoid the real issue. Park users have been programmed over the years to walk in with their single use containers and walk out without them. The thinking goes something like this, “Someone else will pick it up. It provides jobs. I pay my taxes and I deserve to have my parks serviced no matter how impractical or how expensive that may be. They put a receptacle there, and they’ve always picked up the garbage in the past.”

Regional, State and Federal parks with no back country trash receptacles have a simple message at the trailheads, “Pack out what you pack in!” This policy has been whole heartedly accepted by most hikers, and many feel it’s their duty to pick up and pack out any discarded trash they see on the trail. Why should this be different in urban parks that are coming under increased population and budgetary pressure?

Instead of increasing the number of trash receptacles, why not reduce them and put up a sign on the ones that are left that says, “Please take out what you brought in! Do your part to save your park budget for maintenance, repairs and beautification.”

This approach has been used successfully in several parks across the country. It does not just help keep the parks clean, but it focuses public attention on disposable food and beverage containers by asking park users be responsible for taking them out as well as bringing them in.

We can no longer afford to say, “Bring in your garbage and leave it here.” We have already been successful in training people to take their own bags to the grocery store. So training them to take their own garbage home is not out of the question. But it’s got to be started by the parks themselves with good signage that appeals to people’s sense of community.

If park advocates and volunteers were to start an education process to make users aware of this accelerating situation, would the park users change their ways and take “ownership” of these precious lands made available to them? If children were taught to be responsible for the land around them that they use, how long might it take to reverse this alarming trend?

Let’s apply the decades old “Pack it in. Pack it out!” backpacker’s creed to all park users.

Who We Are

To make inquiries for keynote speaking, trainings or consulting, please contact sales@thebarefootspirit.com.

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