MC4T once again kicked off the Pure Michigan Governor’s Conference on Tourism (PMGC) with a volunteer project. For this year’s project, industry professionals helped refurbish two historic buildings within Grand Rapids’ Oak Hill and Greenwood Cemeteries. Volunteer tasks included painting, purging unwanted items, cleaning, and restoring woodwork. The Grand Rapids Parks and Recreation (GRPR) Department is hoping to turn these underutilized spaces into functioning office space, with your help we can make this a reality! Another way conference attendees helped give back this year, was by donating household items to the Ronald McDonald House of Western Michigan (RMHWM). The RMHWM mission is to “provide a ‘home-away-from-home’ for families traveling to Grand Rapids for critical medical and mental health treatment for their children.” RMHWM registers over 300 families each year. Families stay at the House for 19 nights, on average, though they have had families stay with them for close to a year. RMHWM usually has 35-45 guests at the House each night. Our volunteers made door signs for each guest of the RMHWM, along with notes of encouragement to them and their family. We challenged conference attendees to step up to the plate and help stock the shelves of the RMHWM, and they over-delivered! THANK YOU and GREAT JOB to all who helped give back in some way during PMGC 2020!

Event Photo Gallery

For the 2019 pre-conference volunteer event at the Pure Michigan Governor’s Conference on Tourism, we had attendees of the conference volunteering at Norte and Munson Manor Hospitality House in Traverse City, MI. At Munson Manor Hospitality House, volunteers painted, wrote notes of encouragement, and cooked 260 dinners + desserts for guests at the Manor. MC4T was able to give Munson Manor a new freezer, and our volunteers were able to fully stock it! At Norte, volunteers helped build a bicycle playground at the Grand Traverse County Civic Center park. Throughout the conference, attendees also dropped off travel-sized toiletry items and other food and cleaning supplies to donate to Munson Manor. HUNDREDS of toiletries were collected over the two-day conference. THANK YOU to all of our volunteers and attendees who made a donation for helping give back to the conference’s host city. Click here for photo gallery.

For the second year in a row, MC4T kicked off the annual Pure Michigan Governor’s Conference on Tourism with 50 industry volunteers making an impact on Grand Rapids parks following massive flooding that damaged many of the 74 city parks.  And, they did it in the rain! 

The Pure Michigan Governor’s Conference on Tourism once again kicked-off its annual conference with a volunteer clean-up event made up of conference attendees. This year’s conference was held in Grand Rapids, so our volunteers tackled four of downtown GR’s city parks. Probably the most labor-intensive effort of the clean-up was digging sand out of flower beds in Ah-Nab-Awen Park. Due to recent flooding of the Grand River, the flower beds essentially became sand traps. Our volunteers also did lots of debris clearing, sweeping, and pruning at Fish Ladder Park, Douglas Park, and Westown Commons Park. It was a rainy morning, but that didn’t phase our volunteers, and they truly made some great progress in our local parks! Click here for the photo gallery!

The 2017 Pure Michigan Governor’s Conference on Tourism kicked off on Sunday, March 19 with a volunteer clean-up event on Belle Isle in Detroit. This was a free pre-conference event for attendees, and we had 50 hard-working volunteers from throughout the hospitality industry come out for three hours of painting and deep cleaning. We LOVED seeing some of our #MC4TFaithful come out for this, along with many #MC4T first-timers! Volunteers worked on three locations: the Casino Building where they painted a good portion of the buildings HUGE basement; the Flynn Pavilion where volunteers scrubbed windows and heating vents, and washed down all of the rental bikes and canoe oars; and in the Detroit Yacht Club, volunteers helped a demo crew tear down and remove the debris of an old manager’s office in the Yacht Club’s kitchen. THANK YOU to all of our wonderful volunteers, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR), and the Belle Isle Conservancy for making this event so successful! The DNR estimated that what our volunteers accomplished in just three hours, it would have taken them two weeks per building to finish on their own. One more #MC4T volunteer clean-up event in the books, and once again we’re amazed by what the people in our industry can accomplish together! Click here for the photo gallery!