Columbus Hilton Downtown Touching Lives Through Holiday Giving

The Hilton Columbus Downtown is known for many things.

It’s known as a AAA Four Diamond full-service hotel. It’s been named Best Columbus Employer with fewer than 500 employees. And it’s won Hilton Worldwide’s highest honor – the Connie Award – two years in a row.

The company named Christian Coffin, the hotel’s general manager, 2015 Leader of the year. And the hotel has received the top score within the brand for housekeeping cleanliness every year since the hotel opened in 2012.

Awards and recognition are welcome. But more important are how its employees are touching lives.

In October every year, Hilton Worldwide sponsors a global month of service, says Quentin Pease, the hotel’s director of human resources. 

“Each hotel property is encouraged to participate in an activity to support their local communities,” he says.  “We supported the Feed Ohio initiative and donated our food to the Mid-Ohio Foodbank. “

Feed Ohio is a statewide volunteer humanitarian initiative to provide food assistance to families and individuals that need a helping hand. With more than 1 in 4 children at risk of hunger, the hotel martialed its troops to bring in a long list of food items, encouraging each employee to bring one can to work every day through the month.

At the end of just one month, hotel employees amassed nearly 350 pounds of food.

“This exceeded our goal of one pound per team member,” Pease reports. 

This month, the Hilton turned its attention to clothing those in need by participating in Broad Street United Methodist Church’s sock drive.

“Socks are the most needed but least donated article of clothing in homeless shelters,” Pease notes.

Collected socks will be distributed to homeless visitors to the church’s Manna Café soup kitchen. The church hopes to collect 400 pairs of new socks for men, women and children.

Pease says the drive fits well with how the hotel approaches community giving.

“We try to do things that everyone can contribute to,” he says. “Something that has an impact when all participate, but doesn’t create too much of a time or financial burden on any one person. 

One of our team members presented this idea, and we thought the timing was great – and we have done work for the homeless before. Food and shelter is kind of what we do.”

Warm feet, warm hearts. It’s what the holiday season is all about.