Creating Smiles, Inspiring Creativity, and Doing Good

Here at Moncur, we have a team that simply likes to do good.

We do good for our clients on a daily basis, consistently going above and beyond to deliver the highest caliber work. We do good for our industry, constantly raising the bar on the standards of branding, web design, and more. And most recently, Moncur shut down operations a few hours early to do something really cool: do good for our community.

Last week, the Moncur team got together to volunteer at Arts & Scraps, a “Detroit nonprofit organization that annually recycles 28 tons of material to help 275,000 children think, create, and learn.”

In other words, the organization collects “scraps”, often from local manufacturing facilities, that would typically be sent to the dump — things like foam cutouts, cardboard, and fabric scraps. They then rely on volunteers like us to help prep these materials either for sale in their store, or for use in craft kits for kids.

It was obvious why Moncur chose Arts & Scraps for our volunteer outing — not only does the nonprofit divert materials from landfills (I may have a reputation as the office “tree-hugger”), but it also repurposes these scraps to help feed kids’ creativity. And if you didn’t know, creativity is kind of our sweet spot.

Once we made our way to Arts & Scraps on the northeast side of Detroit, we entered a secret door into a massive warehouse of semi-organized madness. Our first task? Separate the “lungs” (or rather, lung-shaped foam cut-outs) and sort them into boxes for crafting at a later time. Next up: take bathing suit fabric scraps donated by a local manufacturer and cut them into 12” squares.

At the end of the day, the warehouse manager shared with us that our work would translate to approximately 3,000 smiles — the number of people we will ultimately impact from our efforts. We couldn’t be more proud to make a difference in the lives of so many!

Afterwards, we rounded out our fun-filled afternoon of good deeds with some cocktails and arcade games at the newly-opened Ready Player One downtown — and we definitely brought our A game. Our fearless leader, David, couldn’t stop himself until he had secured the Galaga top score, and we had a group of four run the table for two hours playing Gauntlet 2. And with that, our January happy hour was a wrap!