Arizona Coyotes staff volunteers around Tempe in honor of Cesar Chavez Day
Once a month, Arizona Coyotes staff members engage in volunteer opportunities, and this week team employees were in Tempe doing work at several nonprofits.
It's meaningful time spent helping others, made even more so in celebration of the life and legacy of civil and human rights activist Cesar Chavez, an Arizona native who in his lifetime advocated for farmworkers rights through boycotts, picket lines and nonviolence.
Coyotes President and CEO Xavier Gutierrez called Chavez "one of the greatest Americans that we have ever known."
"Someone who sacrificed so much to point out the importance of those that don't have a voice, or don't feel like they have a voice, and to make them be seen and be heard, and to support them, and to empower them. And so it is clearly someone who is one of my personal heroes for all that he stood for," Gutierrez said. "Not just for all Americans, but obviously for Latinos in the U,S. But also, we celebrate him through service. But it's also yet another example of us as an organization, embracing this mission that we have."
Gutierrez himself had planned to volunteer on Wednesday at ACCEL, a special needs education center that provides instructional programming for children and adults who have developmental disabilities. He instead had to prepare remarks for a news conference Thursday in response to the city of Phoenix suing Tempe to block an agreement to allow construction of an arena, entertainment district and housing units near flight paths into Sky Harbor Airport.
The Coyotes await the results of a public vote in May that will determine if they can build what they hope to on landfill in Tempe, and have directed resources and energy to be a part of the community in the city.
"We really wanted to embrace not just being a Tempe business, not just being the professional sports team based in Tempe. But we also wanted to be a community leader," Gutierrez said. "And so we made it a very direct point this year, and a concerted effort to really look at the Tempe community and say, 'we're here.' And we want to support this community and its residents and the incredible organizations, the schools, the nonprofits that are here."
Nadia Rivera, the Coyotes' chief impact officer and executive director of Foundation & Community Impact, represented the organization at one of the volunteer sites, which also included Hope for the Homeless, Tempe Community Action Agency and Tempe Centers for Habilitation.
Activities ranged from building a playground to painting of facilities and gardening work. One group of volunteers put together bags of basic needs for homeless individuals.
The Coyotes being run by several Latinos at or close to the top of the organization wasn't lost on a day honoring Chavez, for whom there is a state holiday March 31. But the team has also been part of volunteer efforts on other heritage days and national holidays.
"It's part of who we are. But it's also, we try to find opportunities to showcase that and to bring our resources together," Rivera said. "Sports have the ability to bring people together like nobody else does, right? When sports speak, people listen. And so that's just kind of what we try to do or whenever we can, whether it's for Martin Luther King Day, or Cesar Chavez, and actually just a couple of weeks ago, we were doing another volunteer event with Habitat for Humanity. And two weeks before that, we were doing another event."
This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Arizona Coyotes pay tribute to the late Cesar Chavez as holiday nears
