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RETURN ON INVESTMENT

ICSC’S FALL MARKETING CONFERENCE TOOK A BREAK TO HELP REBUILD ITS HOST CITY

By Steve McLinden

They had hoped a few dozen stalwarts would show up a day early and pitch in. Why not?

“They” were the planners of the ICSC Fall Conference, in New Orleans, who had conceived a special project to help rebuild sections of the city in the wake of Katrina for that October Sunday, the day immediately preceding the meeting’s official opening. But as the daylong event, dubbed “The Passion Team: Helping to Rebuild the Gulf South,” neared, sign-up forms showed that over 100 attendees planned to participate. Who would have thought?

And yet no one, not even in the wildest dream, ever anticipated the final turnout: over 300. Jackpot! Nor did anyone gauge the level of enthusiasm those participants would bring to that “voluntourism” venture, which was sponsored by American Express and facilitated by AmeriCorps, the Louisiana Serve Commission, Rebuilding Together and Trinity Christian Community.

As that sea of volunteers clad in red Passion Team shirts began washing into the Hilton Riverside at 8 a.m. to await marching orders, conference program chairwoman Barbara Faucette lauded them for their willingness to sacrifice time to help New Orleans. “This is history in the making,” said Faucette, vice president of marketing at CBL & Associates Properties. “ICSC has never done anything quite like this.”

Six buses waited outside the Hilton to transport the volunteers to 13 project sites in the battered Hollygrove-Carrollton section of New Orleans. Local resident Kevin Brown told the participants that their efforts would be “especially meaningful” to him. Brown, who heads Trinity Christian Community, a community development organization, lost his Hollygrove home to the floods but was determined to rebuild and to stay to support the neighborhood. “Every house there took on at least six feet of water,” said Brown. “The needs are still profound, as you will see.”

When the volunteers arrived at their destinations, they saw that many homes still bore the X signs with accompanying number code that told officials when the house was searched and the number of casualties and survivors. Beverly Anderson, a homeowner whose modest lot on Olive Street was having its landscaping redone by a dozen ICSC volunteers, made it a point to preserve that mark on her home. “I’m leaving it as a symbol of this catastrophe, and for what people should learn from it,” she said. Anderson rode out the storm in her house, only to watch the floodwaters rise and enter her home the next day. “I got out the Thursday after … by floating on my son’s shoulders,” she said.

At a tattered home on Monroe Street, Temple Mall general manager Trish Lee was perched atop a ladder, scraping off old paint alongside daughter Kathleen, whom she brought from Texas to earn school-related community service hours. “In 2002 my house burned, and we walked away with only the clothes on our backs,” the older Lee said. “We’re thankful for the support we got then, and we saw an opportunity to do the same here.”

Another project participant, Wendy Ellis, vice president of marketing at Loveland, Colo.-based developer McWhinney Enterprises, says she too gained perspective. “When you see all these people still living in FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency] trailers more than two years after the fact, well, you realize just how lucky you are.”

In an overgrown vacant lot on Hollygrove Street, Robert Thornton, general manager of Concord Mall, Elkhart, Ind., was part of a team that was vigorously clearing the property. He stood perspiring over his shovel in the midday sun on this 83-degree day, as he chipped away at a layer of sediment that covered the property’s edge. “This was a great opportunity to come together as a profession and to give back to people who really need the help,” he said.

At a tiny house on Cambronne Street, Oliver Davis, COO of Boulder, Colo.-based Concept3D, said ICSC members “are now able to get a clearer picture of what really happened here. “Typically, we’re all focused on making money at these meetings,” he said. “Today we’re focused on giving.”

The largest of the teams, a contingent of about 50, landed at a former public school on Carrollton Avenue that reopened as the Lafayette Academy Charter School after being shuttered the past four semesters. In minutes point persons for the charities had the group toting wheelbarrows full of supplies, planting trees, prepping hallways for painting and clearing rubbish.

In the aftermath of Katrina, dozens of desperate people sought refuge, food and water in the school. Many ended up staying for days until they were rescued, says Mickey Landry, the school’s principal. “You can still see the letters ‘SOS’ scratched on the roof,” Landry said. “We are extremely grateful for the overwhelming generosity [ICSC] displayed here today.”

Elizabeth Gillespie, director of corporate sponsorships in the Atlanta office of Jones Lang LaSalle, was hard at work masking floorboards in preparation for painting. “Helping out here is something I wanted to do since Katrina happened, and I’m thrilled we’ve decided to do this as a group,” she said. “When all these people go back, they’ll have a greater sense of how they can help their own communities. In effect, every one of these people will be taking a little bit of New Orleans back with them.”

Homeowner Debra Brown, whose compact Olive Street house took in 10 feet of water, was near tears and called the effort “awesome and inspiring.” Marilyn C. de Illy, real estate asset manager at Cost Plus World Market, helped repaint a home on Dixon Street for a retiree who was still living in a FEMA trailer. The effort “was something I wanted to do both for New Orleans and for myself,” she said.

“It’s tragic the way the city still is, but you have to admire people who are still determined to live here,” said Victoria Clark, marketing director of Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust. “I wish I could stay longer and do more for them.” Sherry Burton, marketing director of Memorial City Mall, in Houston, shared the sentiment and noted that the storm brought the situation close to home for her because so many of the displaced residents ended up in Houston. “Many would like to return, but they have no place to go,” Burton said.

That is changing, though, thanks to nonprofit groups such as AmeriCorps and volunteer groups such as ICSC’s. In the two years since hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck the Louisiana and Texas coasts, some 1.1 million people have invested roughly 14 million volunteer hours in the Gulf Coast recovery, according to an October research report by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government and the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana. The report also notes that institutional donors, corporations, foundations and professional groups have contributed in excess of $1 billion, including in-kind services. City officials estimate that, since the storms, the New Orleans population has climbed to 320,000, about 70 percent of the pre-Katrina population of 455,000.

The rebuilding project was in part the brainchild of Fall Conference planning committee members Kate Wendel, who is group marketing manager for New Orleans’ Riverwalk Marketplace and several other General Growth properties, and Ken Lamy, of the New Orleans financial consulting firm Lamy Group. “It became clear from what we saw that this is the kind of thing [ICSC] wants to perpetuate in the future,” Wendel said. “I think there will be more projects like this.”

The largesse of ICSC members did not stop with the sweat equity. A few days before the event, roughly $1,000 worth of tools got stolen from a warehouse, leaving AmeriCorps with an insufficient amount of equipment to go around that Sunday. At one site a team headed by Developers Diversified Realty Corp. sent members to a home-supply store and bought $500 worth of tools to work with and then donated the equipment to AmeriCorps at day’s end. At another site an AmeriCorps project leader mentioned that the organization was suffering a shortage of work boots. As the volunteers reboarded their bus at the end of the day, those who had been wearing work boots donated them to AmeriCorps, arriving back at the hotel in their stocking feet, according to Faucette.

At the post-event reception at Riverwalk Marketplace, where soot- and paint-covered volunteers ate, drank and shared experiences, funds were taken up to help AmeriCorps further recover the tool losses. The net take: $1,100 in cash, more than the value of the stolen tools.

“What a perfect way to end an amazing day,” said Faucette, “for ICSC and for New Orleans.”