Caring for our Communities

Our passionate associates logged more hours than ever in our 2021 Volunteer Olympiad, logging more than 20,000 total hours.

While supporting our human resources team while the Milliken Guest House was closed during the pandemic, sous chef Nicholas Sanders was challenged to develop a new way to encourage associates to log volunteer hours.

"It was all about encouraging engagement" said Sanders. "If you want to boost engagement, you have to make participation simple and accessible to all associates."

Nick partnered with Information Technology to optimize our internal volunteer portal to make it as simple as possible for associates to log their hours. His vision for the contest was to drive associates at all levels to engage with their communities.

"Competition drives people," said Sanders. "But so does doing the right thing."

Thanks to Nick's efforts, we saw a noted increase in volunteer hours in 2021, helping us to cross the halfway point to or 2025 goal of 100,000 hours.

"I was very pleased with the engagement and outcome of the Volunteer Olympiad and look forward to making it an annual event."

Nick Sanders, Sous Chef, Milliken Guest House

Milliken-Onterra actively engaged in fundraising initiatives and volunteer programs to help build homes for homeless youths in Australia. Together, we developed the “purpose-orientated” product pathway initiative to pro-actively raise funds for homeless youth through some of our floor covering collections. A percentage of revenue of every specification of nominated collections will be donated to Property Industry Foundation.