Westin celebrates milestone birthday with random acts of kindness

When it comes to celebrating major milestone birthdays, its usually customary for others to do something nice for the birthday boy or girl. One long-time resident of Halifax is flipping that script on that for their 85th birthday —not only are they the ones doing something nice for others, but they’re doing 85 nice things for others.

Who’s that generous soul? Well, it’s more a ‘what’ than a ‘who’ — it’s the Westin Nova Scotian.

The hotel opened its doors down on the waterfront on June 23, 1930, and the current management is hoping to give a lot back to the community that they’ve enjoyed being a part of for so many years between now and the big day.

“We were looking for something to do, or some things to do to acknowledge it,” says Glenn Bowie, the director of sales and marketing for the Westin Nova Scotia. “We were looking at a way to involve the community in some way, shape, or form … One of the ideas we came up with was, let’s look for people doing good and try and do something nice for them, in a way of thanking them.”

The hotel plans to have committed 85 random acts of kindness throughout HRM by the time June 23 rolls around, and since they began their #Westin85 campaign around the end of May, the hotel has already gotten a good head start on that goal.

“We’re about a week into it now, and we are probably almost halfway there,” says Bowie.

Some of those acts of kindness so far have included having a surprise draw for prizes for members of a rotary club that often uses the hotel’s board rooms for meetings, delivering treat baskets to the CTV offices the day after their annual IWK Telethon, and rewarding one little girl who created a business (Mackenzie Joy Photography on Facebook) to give back to the children’s hospital.

“The Westin contacted us via Facebook,” says Renena Joy, whose 10-year-old daughter Mackenzie operates a small photography business, with all its proceeds going towards donations to the IWK. “Because Mackenzie was doing such a good job giving back to the community, and contributing, and being a good citizen, they wanted to reward her for that with a free night’s stay.”

“I thought that was fabulous. And, of course, Mackenzie was just absolutely over the moon when I told her what the Westin wanted to do for her,” adds Joy. “Seeing that excitement and enthusiasm, if they’re doing that and that’s happening for every person that they’re touching, that’s really cool, and extremely inspiring.”

But the Westin staff aren’t just targeting charity operators or leaders of good will in the community to be the recipients of their random acts of kindness — even smaller kind gestures in the community are being rewarded.

“It could be helping an elderly lady across the street, it could be opening a door for someone, or it could be bigger than that,” says Bowie, who says Westin staff and sometimes even customers are given items from the hotel and are tasked with passing those items forward to people they see in the city doing something nice. “You can never do too much good, quite frankly.”

In fact, the hotel is hoping regular citizens might take on the challenge as well, and see if they can commit 85 random acts of kindness before their big anniversary.

“That certainly is quite possible, even just in our own neighbourhood,” says Joy, who is contemplating ways she might be able to extend a gesture of good will to her neighbours as part of the challenge. “I think the scale that the Westin is doing it on is certainly a lot larger than what any small family could do, or even any individual. But I think it’s important for people to know that those kinds of things are important. They make the community better.”

“Philanthropy is so important in all of our communities, and good deeds start at home,” says Bowie, who says that the hotel is committed to helping those who help the community whenever they can throughout the year. “We just want to be a part of seeing people do the right thing.”

If you want to see what others are doing to spread kindness around their community through this campaign, or to add to it yourself, the hotel encourages you to share your good deeds with the hashtag #Westin85.