DoubleTree committing more service hours in community

Cooper Hotels is the franchise that owns the Doubletree Hotel in Jackson – along with four other Doubletrees in Tennessee.

They signed an extension with Hilton in December for 17 years, which is an agreement that’s considerably longer than normal agreements.

While Cooper Hotels tries to be community-minded in the places it serves, the company is trying to do a little more in the coming months.

“The hotels that Cooper owns just celebrated 100 combined years of existence, and one of the ways we want to celebrate that is 100 hours of community involvement in each of our home cities,” said Mary Ross, the director of sales, catering and marketing at DoubleTree.

There are three groups that DoubleTree specifically impacts already – West Tennessee Veterans’ Coalition, Regional Inter-Faith Association and the Boys and Girls Club of Jackson.

Ross, whose husband is a veteran, has been involved with the veterans coalition since its inception over a decade ago, and she’s a board member that takes an active role in many of the group’s events including the Veterans’ Day Parade and other celebrations.

DoubleTree hosted the inaugural West Tennessee Veterans Military Ball in November.

For RIFA, DoubleTree is one of the businesses that sends employees to serve in the soup kitchen a few times a year and also helps at least once a year assembling packages for the snack backpack program.

Employees will also spend time at different points in the year at Boys and Girls Club talking with the children, teaching them how to do different things in the community and bringing them a few batches of cookies DoubleTree hotels are known for.

“That’s not all of the service hours that we do, but that is the majority,” Ross said, adding that they’re connected with Women of Hope and employee a few of the women who are part of that group and they do a summer mentoring program for teenagers to get part-time work and learn a few skills while on the job at the hotel. “I appreciate being a part of a company that wants us involved in the community and wants to give back to the cities where it has hotels, because that kind of service is something a lot of us here want to be involved in and are glad to do that for DoubleTree and Cooper and Jackson.”

Brandon Shields, brandon@jacksonpost.news