All Smiles at the 2015 Employee Appreciation Event

Members of our Food & Beverage Team were proud to serve up delicious fare for their fellow employees at the 2015 Employee Appreciation Event.

Members of our Food & Beverage Team were proud to serve up delicious fare for their fellow employees at the 2015 Employee Appreciation Event.

Dreama Fumia

For the past several months, POA Board member Marilyn Mazeika urged the residents of Quail Creek to open their hearts and wallets to show our POA employee team just how much we appreciate them – and our residents responded. At the 2015 Employee Appreciation Event, held on December 7 in the Madera Ballroom, the POA Board was proud to announce that our residents had donated just over $23,000 this year for distribution to our employees!

Monies were given in varied amounts – from $10 to $1000 (that’s right, count them, three zeros) – and represented the appreciation our residents feel for all members of our employee team. Once the collection deadline passed on November 30, Marilyn and her committee (Ron Darrah, Gil Lusk, Dreama Fumia, Stephanie Reynolds and Ruth McDermott) met to allocate employee gift card amounts across our 174 full and part-time employees based on hours of service in 2015. The gift cards are purchased from Fry’s Marketplace in Sahuarita since they give us a nice discount plus their store offers a wide variety of foods and other goods from which our employees can choose.

As employees arrived for the evening event, a slide show, created by the Board, displayed employee photos gathered during the year. The evening’s program began with a welcome by our POA Board President Ron Darrah and expressions of thanks from Board members Gil, Dreama and Marilyn. Then, department by department, employees were recognized and presented with their gift cards and congratulated by the Board. Dinner was a beautiful buffet created by Chef Aris and his Food & Beverage team. (Chef Aris prefers to provide the employee dinner in-house since it is, as he says, “what we do!”). Committee volunteer Fred Doyle was our photographer for the evening and volunteer Tom Fisk served as bartender (soft drinks only) for the event. The evening concluded with all enjoying the wonderful desserts prepared by Chef Aris and his team.

It was a fun night of celebration and recognition for our hard working employees. Each department and each employee contributes to make Quail Creek the wonderful place to live that it is. In return, our employees expressed their gratitude for the residents who so generously gave this holiday season. So, it seems that thanks is a two-way street—at  least in Quail Creek!