The Edge September/October 2025

BUILDING YOUR TEAM

Committing to a Cause: The Power of Community Service

By Jill Odom

THERE ARE COUNTLESS CAUSES THAT YOUR BUSINESS CAN SUPPORT AS A form of community service. Rather than letting choice overload prevent you from giving back at all out of a concern that you can’t help everyone, starting off with just one effort can open the door to other opportunities.

retreats and it made a huge impact on her,”says Seneca Hull, president of Franz Witte. “We contacted them and they came out to meet with us. It was a very moving meeting, and we were all in tears by the end of it!” Hull says she selected Expedition Inspira tion because her OBGYN was very involved with them, and she had recently passed away from metastatic breast cancer. “Another reason to pick the two we did was to hit breast cancer from both ends,” Hull says. In another case, Kujawa Enterprises, Inc., a Sperber company based in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, became involved with GreenCare for Troops because Chris Kujawa, president and CEO of KEI, served on the Project EverGreen board when the initiative was first launched. GreenCare for Troops provides complementary land scape services to the families of deployed active-duty military members. “Once I got back to our company, all of us there thought it was a great initiative as well,” Kujawa says. “Helping the families of deployed troops. It’s needed. It’s appreciat ed. It is a no-brainer.” David Koehn, regional director for the Southeast for Bland Landscaping Company, headquartered in Apex, North Carolina, says they are always looking for organizations they can help by donating their expertise. “We sit down as a team and decide,” Koehn says. “I always like to put it out there. Is there anything that you guys are

to work with are selected for personal reasons. For instance, Nasrallah launched Ground Works Out Drives Alzheimer’s Golf Outing after recognizing the impact of his moth er’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis on his wedding day in 2017. “We were doing the mother and son dance, and that’s where it really hit me, because she got really confused, and she didn’t know what to do,”Nasrallah says. “The whole thing got very emotional.” He began to consider the disease’s impact on other families and launched the golf fundraiser in 2019 with the help of friends. Over the years, this outing has raised over $220,000 that has gone to fund the Alzheimer’s Association’s research. Similarly, Franz Witte Landscape Con tracting, Inc., based in Nampa, Idaho, cre ated the fundraising event OktoberBreast to give back to local nonprofits, Casting for Recovery and Expedition Inspiration. Casting for Recovery offers free retreats to Idaho breast cancer survivors, while Expedition Inspiration strives to find new cures and prevention strategies in the fight against breast cancer. “One of our then employee’s (now a partner) wife had been through treatment and recommended Casting for Recovery because she had gone to one of their

“One of my favorite quotes is, ‘I can’t help everybody, but we all can help one person,’”says Tony Nasrallah, president and founder of Ground Works Land Design based in Cleveland, Ohio. “It’s just very contagious and good for our employees and our vendors all to get together. So, it’s always a good thing.”

HOW TO CHOOSE A CAUSE You might think it’s best to select a

community service project objectively and leave individual preferences out of it. However, for many lawn and landscape companies, the organizations they choose

Photos: Ground Works Land Design

32 The Edge // September/October 2025