Spreading the Cheer in Mission, BC
Double NWR Donation Brings New Life to Local Firehall and Hospital
PUBLISHED IN DEC 2021
Photos Courtesy Mission Memorial Hospital and Mission Fire Rescue
This year, we’ve been more grateful than ever for our community’s first responders, medical professionals, and care workers. So, how are we helping to care for them?
Today, North West Rubber is North America’s largest manufacturer of recycled rubber products, but our roots will always be in the Fraser Valley. Earlier this Fall, we had the opportunity to give back to our local Mission, BC community – not just once but twice – with gym flooring donations to both the Mission Memorial Hospital and Mission Fire Rescue.
In November, North West Rubber gifted and installed nearly 600 sq ft of premium recycled gym flooring to the Mission Memorial Hospital. Beyond providing inpatient, outpatient and hospice beds, this local “Campus of Care” offers primary acute care services, general medicine, and diagnostics, with a 200-bed long term care facility and a Community Health Centre onsite.
This is such wonderful news and collaboration with our community partner – it looks fantastic and will be appreciated for years to come.
We were happy to learn that the Mission Hospital, with roughly 400 personnel working at any given time, had an in-house gym – and we knew our SportFloor Stamina vulcanized recycled rubber mats, with unmatched durability and 99.5% anti-microbial cleanliness (“hospital clean”), would be a perfect fit.
NWR outfitted the linoleum space with new red-speckle 10 mm Stamina mats
Our NWR team (left) and Mission Hospital Staff (right) collaborating in the install
With support from the hospital’s Wellness Committee, we outfitted the linoleum space with new red-speckle 10 mm Stamina mats, bringing some much-needed joint support to the hardworking health staff who are on their feet all day.
The new gym floor is great, especially for doing plyos. Much better support for the joints!
“It will reduce the impact to our employees during their workouts, keeping them safe while they are caring for their bodies and overall health,” we heard from Julie Jacob, the hospital’s Coordinator of General Site Operations. “You have an amazing team. Please share our heartfelt gratitude and appreciation for the personal time and effort they donated to make this happen for us.”
But the hospital install wasn’t our only local collaboration this fall. In October, we had set our sights on another anchor of the Mission community: Mission Fire Rescue Service’s Station No. 1. For our local NWR staff, this project had special meaning: Not only is Fire Captain Dave Taylor a familiar face in the community — with his crew responding to everything from fires and floods, to road accidents, medical emergencies, and even the odd stranded pet – but he’s a member of the North West Rubber family in his own right, having worked at the company from 1995 to 2004.
“I started at the Pitt Meadows “Red Barn” and during that time I worked as a die cutter, a mat maker lead hand, as well as a relief truck driver,” recalls Taylor. “I still have close friendships with most of the people I worked there with over the years.”
The Mission Fire Rescue Service hired its first four firefighters in September of 2009, and Taylor joined shortly after. Today, three separate fire stations serve the Mission community, employing approximately 80 paid call firefighters (including 16 career Firefighters, 1 Fire Prevention Officer, and a Fire Chief with 2 Assistant Fire Chiefs). It’s no surprise then, that the Mission Fire Department gym — a staple for any Fire Rescue Service – sees a lot of use… and plenty of wear and tear.
“We have 4 full time crews working out in the gym daily as well as Fire Chiefs and Paid Call Firefighters, so it gets a lot of wear,” says Taylor.
Enter North West Rubber. We knew our 10 mm Stamina mats would be ideal for the kind of use and abuse we could expect from the men and women who make being fit their job, and we couldn’t wait to outfit the 800 square foot gym space and put our recycled-rubber surface to the test!
“The flooring is very important to our daily fitness routine,” says Taylor. “Our gym is on the second floor so it muffles the sound, it protects the building floors, it provides cushioning for aerobic activity, it saves on the wear and tear of our weights constantly being dropped on the floor.”
And Taylor’s not the only one who’s impressed with the new floors. Firefighter Jon Tam was quick to weigh in as well: “These mats hold up to the daily life of a firehall, which includes mopping, walking, crashing, banging, and general misuse.”
With the use of these mats, [the gym floor] always looks brand new
It’s been a tough year for the men and women of the Mission Fire Rescue Service – with community COVID outbreaks, local wildfires and brushfires, and most recently the Fraser Valley floods – so we were especially keen to give our homegrown heroes a little something extra: the Mission Fire Rescue Service logo, specially cut in our SportFloor ProXL colours red, graphite, smoke and yellow detail into their gym flooring. The bonus? The very hands who designed and oversaw the cutting and assembly belong to NWR’s own Shawn Kavanagh, a longtime friend and former coworker of Captain Dave Taylor.
“The Firefighters have been very impressed by the logo you donated to us,” Taylor tells us. But we’d venture to flip the story: all of us at NWR are impressed by the brave work the first responders of our Mission Firehall and Hospital do each and every day.
To learn more about our Corporate Social Responsibility Programs email dees@northwestrubber.com