No one could actually think that all those old hotel pillowcases that are discarded so regularly could actually have a second life – what more, a really useful second life.
It is with great pride that the Embassy Suites Hotel in the Charlotte area, North Carolina had just recently won a top honor for the chain all because of their charity effort.
Their project is very simple, yet very useful. It involves the conversion of old pillowcases into beautiful and colorful dresses for the girls in impoverished Haiti to wear. It was only during the last fall that the 308 room Embassy Suites Charlotte/Concord Golf Resort and Spa had joined hands with a local church group to create more than 450 dresses using mainly all the old hotel pillowcases. The hotel had on a total, donated about 300 pillowcases to use for this project.
According to the general manager of the hotel, Terry Crawford, the credit for this charity work and idea should go to the longtime employee of the hotel, Frank Bethea. A hotel bellman and a member of Charlotte's Greater Providence Road Baptist Church, it was he who had brought up this idea of the partnership deal to the hotel. Moreover, his church in Charlotte has been actively helping Haiti for many years now and it was after the earthquake that he thought of this innovative idea.
As soon as he had proposed the idea, the general manager was all game for it. As they discarded linen every day, they just had to combine the material using the church group's skill set. For some time, the hotel provided the space required for producing the dresses. The church members also helped by dyeing some of the dresses so that the girls had dresses of different styles and colors. In March the church sent more than 450 dresses to their ministry in Haiti for distribution sake.