Hasta la vista, hopelessness – The Martin Group

Recently, The Martin Group was pleased to sponsor the Flower City Habitat for Humanity Marketing Leaders Build Day. It brought some of Rochester’s marketing professionals together for a day of bent nails and feeling really inadequate next to wiry foremen who can build just anything from the stuff they carry in their tool belts.

Because we were the sponsor, at lunch I was asked to say a few words about why The Martin Group chooses to support Habitat for Humanity and why we think the cause is important. I think I said something like this…

In our Rochester office we have a piece of art on the wall that says, “Our ideas are as much Schwarzenegger as Edison.” To us it means that we want ideas that are bright and insightful, but also ideas that are muscular and that work really hard for our clients. We pride ourselves on the fact that The Martin Group ideas are more than thinking.

As we sat on the grass in the backyard that would soon befilled with young kids rather than old marketing people, that metaphor luckily popped to mind as a good explanation about why we choose to support Habitat.

We love to be able to contribute to worthy nonprofits with our heads—at the monthly committee or board meetings where we sit around and talk about strategies and plans. But of all the organizations out there, there aren’t many that let us contribute with our hands and our backs like Habitat. Habitat lets us be Schwarzenegger for a day—lifting and hauling and hammering in the sun, doing real work toward the worthiest of goals.

Habitat provides people with more than a house. They provide a new cycle of possibilities for the homeowners—one that improves education and employment, finances and families. The very idea of Habitat for Humanity is one that is as much Schwarzenegger as Edison—as powerful as it is brilliant.

As the volunteers walked away at the end of the day, we all had the same thought. In my head, it took the form of the words of Arnold…

I’ll be back.