Cheers to our “Day of Caring” volunteers!

A young volunteer from the University School of the Lowcountry hauls mulch across the sanctuary during the 2011 Day of Caring.

Today was Trident United Way’s annual Day of Caring. It was also our seventh year participating in this wonderful community-wide volunteer blitz. (And this time we even made the news!)

Each year around the time of the 9/11 attacks, our tri-county area has marked the anniversary with a massive, coordinated volunteer drive. This year, many local businesses gave their employees—over 7,500 of them—the day off work to help schools and charities complete over 400 projects.

We love the opportunity to do some major end-of-season clean-up around the property (mowing, weed-eating, raking, etc.). Fall is also the ideal time of year for planting in our warm and humid climate, so we always try to get our Day of Caring volunteers to put some plants in the ground for us. (This year we’re going to try persimmons and blackberries.) And we’re grateful for the help in taking care of back-burner issues that we seem to have a hard time getting around to—like archiving our special VHS tapes to DVDs or finally scraping that annoying black residue left over from some old vinyl floorcoverings off of our office’s hardwood floors.

We’re thankful for the teams from the University School of the Lowcountry (the kids were great), our nearby Publix supermarket (where we get a lot of produce for the gibbons), and the International Association of Administrative Professionals (some very hardworking ladies), as well as video guru James Haskell from Trident Tech, who all chose to lend us a hand. Everyone was a busy bee the whole day, and many kept asking us for additional tasks to do! (We posted an album on our Facebook page.)

Our gibbons were on their best behavior, too, serenading the volunteers at regular intervals. And we didn’t lose a single camera or pair of sunglasses to an inquisitive ape, either.

We’ll definitely be participating again next year!