PROVIDING MUSCLE PATAGONIA ENCOURAGES EMPLOYEES TO GIVE BACK TO THE NATURAL WORLD Patagonia encourages employees to give back to the natural world by allowing us paid time away from our desks to volunteer. Many of us seize the opportunity to spend a day working and socializing with our colleagues, planting trees, cleaning up beaches, building trails, weeding invasive plants and other constructive projects. This year employees at our Ventura headquarters volunteered with Los Padres Forest Watch, Ojai Valley Land Conservancy, Santa Barbara Botanical Gardens, and Ventura Hillsides Conservancy. From our Reno Service Center, workers put in more than 1,000 hours with the Sugar Pine Foundation, Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship, The Nature Conservancy/ Nevada, South Yuba River Citizens League, Tahoe Divers Conservancy and the Sagebrush Chapter of Trout Unlimited. Though retail schedules can be a little trickier to juggle, employees from our stores also help, this year working with Friends of Casco Bay, Colorado River Alliance, Friends of the Urban Forest and other groups in their communities. Rick Bisaccia, preserve manager at the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy, commented recently that though he only has so much time to devote to organizing volunteer opportunities, he never turns down volunteers from Patagonia. “Whenever we have Patagonia folks working with us, we always get a lot of great work done,” he said. “It’s a smart, hardworking group of people who pay attention and stick with it till we get something good accomplished.”
Photos: (top to bottom) TIM DAVIS, HÉLÈNE ALLÉRA-MARIE, JIM LITTLE; (bottom right) ETHEL MURPHY
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