Richard N. Velotta
VEGAS INC Coverage
If you saw a Southwest Airlines-painted recreational vehicle cruising the streets of Las Vegas last week, no need to fear.
The busiest air carrier serving McCarran International Airport hasn’t developed a comfortable new aircraft that sprouts wings and takes off from freeways. And it hasn’t developed a ground transportation subsidiary.
What you saw was the mobile headquarters of Southwest’s Conservation in Action Tour, a four-and-a-half-month, 25-stop collaboration between the Dallas-based airline and the Student Conservation Association of Charlestown, NH.
Several months ago, the Student Conservation Association, which coordinates young adult volunteers on conservation projects across the country, approached the airline about a collaboration tied to Southwest’s 40th anniversary. Leaders from both entities emerged with the “Conservation in Action Tour: 40 Projects for 40 Years.”
Two SCA project leaders and five core members agreed to make a circuitous nationwide trip, not unlike a Southwest Airlines short-haul routing, stopping in 25 cities to do conservation projects.
The biodiesel-fueled RV tour began in San Antonio on May 12 and will end in Houston on Sept. 28. Last week, it stopped in Las Vegas.
Prior to each stop, Southwest organizes a group of its employees to participate in the day’s project and the SCA also mobilizes its own volunteers.
In Las Vegas, the project was at the Springs Preserve, the 180-acre center-of-town cultural center dedicated to the desert ecosystem. Organizers at the preserve and the SCA planned a morning of tree planting, mulching, weeding and general garden cleanup. But the night before the event, Mother Nature intervened with a flash flood-producing microburst and the tour stop evolved into a recovery project that included replacing some downed trees.
“Thanks to the weekend storm, the gardens really needed some help,” says Cristina Lopez, a human resources analyst for volunteers at the Springs Preserve.
In three½ hours, the 60 volunteers worked through the heat to get the place back in order, a project that probably would’ve taken the reliable contingent of Springs Preserve volunteers days to complete.
“They didn’t even want to take water breaks,” says Tyler Lau, an SCA project leader for the Tour 40 team.
The SCA workers come from all over the country, so a midsummer outdoor project in Las Vegas probably had as much appeal as airline food. But the Las Vegas Southwest volunteers were used to the weather and the group had just made a stop for a project in Phoenix a few days earlier so they knew what to expect. The SCA volunteers have done invasive plant removals, habitat restorations and wetland and riverbed cleanups, but fixing up a desert garden after a storm was something new.
The result was a huge help for the Springs Preserve. “We always need more volunteers,” Lopez says.
After finishing their work at the preserve, the Southwest RV was heading for Denver, where workers were scheduled for a project at Barr Lake State Park near Brighton, just north of the Mile High City.
Southwest spokeswoman Michelle Agnew said the Tour 40 project was something new for the airline, but giving back to communities is something it has done for years. Last week, VEGAS INC chronicled the importance of corporate philanthropy, but imagine how tough that is for an airline that flies into 72 cities.
The company initiated a program called Tickets for Time in which for every 40 hours a Southwest employee volunteers for a nonprofit organization, the benefiting organization is eligible for a complimentary roundtrip flight for fund-raising or transportation needs. Southwest employees logged 45,000 hours of volunteer work in 2009, according to the company website.
Southwest has been good to Las Vegas in other ways.
Airline employees play as hard as they work and Southwest several times has staged its Spirit Party, bringing 10,000 Southwest workers from across the country, to downtown Las Vegas to celebrate the company’s successes. It has the same economic impact on the city as a big convention.
On last week’s visit, the SCA crew got a day off from RV living to spend a night at Bally’s on the Strip.
“I never thought that in the kind of work that I do that I’d ever spend a night in Las Vegas,” Lau says.
But that’s what happens when tourism, business and conservation intersect.