Limited Brands Provides Alternative Arrangement To Keep Its Associates Employed During Tough Economy

October 29, 2009

In August 2009, Limited Brands in an effort to avoid job layoffs, temporarily reassigned a group of 25 distribution center employees to help beautify the 380-acre Green Lawn Cemetery. Associates cleared brush and vegetation and also painted the iron fence surrounding the 161-year-old cemetery. It was a terrific alternative for Limited Brands because not only were we able to keep our associates on payroll but it gave our associates the opportunity to do something special in the community. Since this project, the associates have returned to working in our distribution centers just in time for the very busy holiday season.

"The project represented the first time any company has had its employees work 40-hour shifts volunteering at the cemetery," said Linda Burkey, Green Lawn's general manager. "We've never had this kind of volume of volunteers in this kind of coordinated effort," she said. "They were incredibly productive and committed and made the cemetery look so much better. Green Lawn provides an opportunity to explore the history of Columbus and the devotion of your staff has helped in a tremendous way to preserve that."

One associate shared his experience with the project, and noted the positive change just one day of volunteering made:

The superintendent of Green Lawn told us we would be clearing a mile long fence line for the next four weeks. Day one, we cut down trees, raked bushes and carried them to the road to be shredded. We also cleared a two hundred yard fence line. The next day when I drove back to where we had left off, I could see the difference that just one day of volunteering in my community had done for infants, veterans, mothers and fathers who had passed on. As the days passed, people would stop and ask, "who are you people and who sent you out here?" "You are doing a great job...my family is buried here." The Green Lawn experience taught me that giving is one of the most sincere things that a human being can do in life because it's from within. Thank you Limited Brands for this experience.

Green Lawn is the second largest graveyard in the state and employs only eight graveyard workers that primarily handle the cemetery's 600 annual burials. It is home to a wide variety of plants and trees, many native to Ohio, that provide a splendid background to the unique architecture of the monuments, obelisks, and mausoleums. Green Lawn is also the final resting place for many of Columbus's founding fathers, as well as many noted historical figures. Among them, Gordon Batelle (industrialist), Samuel P. Bush (founder of Buckeye Steel and grandfather & great-grandfather to Presidents George Bush & George W. Bush, respectively), Lincoln Goodale (physician & philanthropist), the Lazarus family (founders of the Lazarus department stores), James Rhodes (three-term governor of Ohio), and Eddie Rickenbacker (World War I flying ace).

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