The Meeting Professional

When about 180 employees of the North American division of Saint- Gobain—a 350-year-old, Paris-based international glass manu- facturing company—came to Miami last year for a meeting, they wanted to include a corporate social responsibility (CSR) activity that would go beyond assembling bicycles in a hotel ballroom and reach into the community for a genuine, interactive experience in which the group could leave a worthwhile footprint behind.

“You see a lot of that these days in Florida,” says Stuart Gardner (MPI South Florida Chapter), president of Fort Lauderdale-based Florida Meeting Services, the destination management company that worked with the Saint-Gobain group to craft a creative and unique CSR event—restoration of a hurri-cane-ravaged island in Biscayne Bay. “We are ;inding groups that come to destinations all across the state want to put something back into the destination in which they are meeting and leave some kind of mark of their stay there. We came up with the idea of a restoration project on Virginia Key, which was devastated during Hurricane Andrew 24 years ago. Virginia Key is a small island on the way to Key Biscayne—which has a Ritz-Carl-ton and a lot of other development—but Virginia Key had been relatively ignored since Andrew. It’s been an unwanted stepchild of a little island.

“But as one who likes the idea of refur-
bishing something that has been forgotten, I
felt this was a classic place to do just that,” he says. “The Saint-Gobain group felt
this was a great idea for an activity that offered everything from team building
among the group members to something that gives the participants a true sense
of reward that one gets from doing something good for the community.”
So, with the help of a vendor who gathered up tools and supplies and han-
dled logistics, Gardner and the Saint-Gobain group trekked off to Virginia Key
(which is reachable by causeway from Miami) to rake and sweep and dig and
plant and otherwise do what was necessary to restore a portion of this little
island, drenched by the sun but not necessarily by public attention for the past
couple of decades.