“Today, I am proud to join my fellow Pottery Barn team members as we volunteer across the San Francisco Bay Area to celebrate the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. We’re not taking the day off – for us, it’s a day on!”
Marta Benson, President, Pottery Barn
Volunteering deepens our presence in the community and strengthens our own community of associates. Since 2017, associates from the Williams-Sonoma, Inc. family of brands have volunteered more than 37,000 hours on MLK Day and beyond. The program originated with the WSI African American Network, formed in 2016, when members helped to organize our first company-wide volunteering day. More associates joined each year, participating from Williams-Sonoma, Inc.’s headquarters in San Francisco to Rejuvenation’s offices in Portland to West Elm’s home base in Brooklyn.
Williams-Sonoma, Inc. provides associates with eight hours of paid Community Involvement Time and encourages them to volunteer for local causes. This year, Pottery Barn teams volunteered across the San Francisco Bay area, packaging food to distribute to community organizations and cleaning up shorelines, while Rejuvenation employees cleaned up the trails at Portland’s Forest Park Conservancy.
Volunteering doesn’t end on MLK Day. Associates across our family of brands log 10,000+ volunteer hours annually, with steady increases each year. They choose where to devote their time, with efforts ranging from school renovations to habitat restoration. Together, our brands have supported a wide variety of organizations, including Habitat for Humanity with in-store Restore partnerships and online donation collections, the Trevor Project with volunteering and donation collections, and St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital with associate drives and donation collections. To feed kids throughout the Coronavirus crisis, our brands organized online donation collections for No Kid Hungry at Pottery Barn, West Elm, Williams Sonoma and Rejuvenation. When we leverage our strength as a company, from our digital teams to our dedicated retail associates, we make the greatest possible impact.
Image: WSI B2B Team