Every year our Airports group is proud to participate in URW’s Community Day held company-wide and across the country. This year, with the themes of Stronger Communities and Boosting Biodiversity, our teams partnered with tremendous nonprofits doing exceptional work
For the World Trade Center and New York Regional Office teams, Community Day included two vitally important volunteering opportunities, an incredible team of twenty-six hard-working URW volunteers, ferry rides across NYC’s harbor, wildlife, great fun…and a lot of mulch!
In May, employees joined the maintenance crew at the World Trade Center campus' National September 11 Memorial & Museum where they helped clean the memorial grounds visited by tens of thousands of people daily. The team helped maintain the property's pristine standards by picking up litter, weeding, clipping trees, and doing other light cleaning tasks. The timing was particularly important in helping the Memorial prepare for its commemorative ceremony marking 21 years since the formal end of rescue, recovery, and relief operations at Ground Zero.
An additional event found our team, including URW COO Dominic Lowe and Airports CEO Dany Nasr, boarding a ferry and setting sail to Governors Island, a stunning public space, arts center, and emerging center of research for climate crisis resiliency in major urban environments.
After learning the island’s history from our hosts, The Trust for Governors Island, the team was taken to a large pile of mulch (two hundred cubic feet to be precise). The task was to shovel the mulch into wheelbarrows and haul them across a beautiful orchard, and then spread the mulch around the base of 102 young fruit trees! The warm, sun-drenched weather served to highlight the task’s important benefits, the mulch will protect the orchard’s trees from heat and drought through the summer and enrich their soil and roots with essential nutrients for growth. With classic URW-style teamwork, the team quickly and efficiently cleared the mulch pile and moved on to weeding and cleaning the orchard.
The team then saw how wildlife helps maintain the island’s ecosystem and natural habitat and learned about the island’s sustainability objectives and composting practices, enabling it to be a zero-waste island. This highlighted synergies with the World Trade Center’s sustainability, zero-waste, and composting program, and the potential for collaborative opportunities.
We are grateful to our team and for these opportunities to truly make an enormous difference for two exceptionally important organizations that are close to the hearts of millions of New Yorkers.
