Rock Financial Celebrates the Opening of the New Flint Boys and Girls Club Gym

By C Niemiec

PROUD is the only word used to describe how I felt during the Flint Boys and Girls Club gym dedication. Rock Financial/Quicken Loans was one of the sponsors that helped make this renovation possible.

On the day of the dedication, the Community DIFF team and Patrick McInnis, president of Rock Financial/Quicken Loans, arrived early to get a good look at the new gym, and it looked gorgeous!

The first thing I noticed was the beautiful center court logo highlighting our investment along with the Detroit Shock, the Pistons Palace Foundation and the IMA Recreation Association. The renovations also included new lighting, bleachers, a new electronic scoreboard, paint and the addition of a brand new gym floor!

About 20 minutes later, 100 students arrived to see the new gym. As the kids took a seat on the floor for the dedication, I thought to myself, we donated much more than a new gym floor….we donated a safe place where kids can go to play and learn and essentially have a brighter future.  WOW, what a PROUD feeling!

Flowers!

By W Kemp

This is strictly my opinion, but flowers can brighten up a room or an outside area with their vibrant color and the way they dance when the wind hits them just right. When flowers bloom or are added outside it lets you know the dreary days of winter are gone and it’s time to head outdoors for some fun in the sun.
For several years, Quicken Loans/Rock Financial/Title Source have been involved with a non-profit called JARC. This organization is dedicated to helping people with disabilities live full, dignified lives while providing support to their families.

A couple of weeks ago more than a dozen Community DIFF volunteers headed out to one of the twenty JARC group homes to help them with their annual Flower-a-thon. What is a Flower-a-thon? Well,  it is just what it sounds like…a volunteer event that allows pros and novice to plant flowers, vegetables, assist with weeding and other gardening chores that will give the home that wonderful spring time look and feel.

Let us “plant” the picture..

....11 QL Team members comprised of Quicken/Rock Financial, Fathead and Title source volunteers in a sea of other like-minded volunteers; students, individuals and companies armed with shovels, pick axes, and wheel barrels – all of us getting instructions on how to plant a tree from the Greening of Detroit Experts, incredible people whose life work is keeping the earth green, literally one tree at a time. 

Too our surprise, there is more to planting a tree than just planting a tree, there’s the hole; man-made is better than machine-made and these holes are wide and deep! Picture standing in one up to your thigh.  Then there’s the tree – between 12 and 15 feet tall with their roots bundled in burlap and weighing a hundred pounds or more each – you cannot move these things by yourself, there’s the sod to be placed around the tree once it’s planted grass-side down so as not to compete for the nutrients the tree will need in its infant stage and then the 3 buckets of 15 gallons of water to get the little one feeding; then the cedar to cover it like a warm blanket…it takes a team of people who know what they are doing – thanks to our crash course – we were up for the job. 

Making a DIFF together

By J Christe

Have you ever wanted to make a difference in someone’s life and have fun at the same time?

I had that opportunity last weekend while serving dinner at Grace Centers of Hope in Pontiac, Michigan along with team members from Rock Financial/Quicken Loans & Title Source. I also brought along my daughter Christina and my friend Mr. Love. It happens to be our favorite place to volunteer.

Me..In a Pistons Trivia Contest??

By C Niemiec

As a member of the Quicken Loans/Rock Financial  Community Relations team, crazy tasks come my way everyday….I’ve done everything from climbing through mounds of storage boxes to planning a trip to Cleveland so we could build a playground for schoolkids in one day – with the help of a bunch of teammates, of course!  But what I was asked to do a couple weeks ago may have been my most challenging task thus far…..I was entered into a Pistons trivia contest with questions dating back to the 1950s! 

Job Shadowing at Quicken Loans

By W Kemp

For several years Rock Financial/Quicken Loans has been involved with Junior Achievement (JA).  We started our relationship with JA by partnering to build the Rock Financial Junior Achievement Finance Park in Detroit. It’s wonderful place where students can learn about personal finance and budgeting, something that is not taught on a regular basis in schools.

Well, that was some background about how we started with JA but they also have another program we enjoy being a part of, their job shadowing program which brings high school juniors and seniors to companies to shadow for a day. This is the second year that Quicken Loans has participated in the job shadowing program, and I gotta tell you, everyone has a great time with this.

Making Wishes Come True

By W Kemp

As children and even as adults we enjoy sitting back and letting our minds wonder to a wonderful fantasy world filled with wishes and dreams. As adults, we sometime want to be the whimsical Fairy Godmother or Godfather or maybe even Gilda the Good Witch from the Wizard of Oz granting wishes and making dreams come true.

I have to commend the work that Dennis Sampier from the Detroit Pistons and his community relations team for putting together the Make-A-Wish telethon in about 45 days. It started with a call asking me if we were in…can we (Quicken Loans) make wishes come true for two wonderful little girls who were dreaming of going to Quicken Loans with their families. How could I say no?

My Experience at Maple Fest at the Cranbrook Institute of Science

By C Linder

This past weekend I had the pleasure of volunteering my time with my fellow Quicken Loans/Rock Financial/Title Source team members at the Cranbrook Institute of Science in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. The event was the Maple Fest which was a two-day kids event put on by the center, and is run primarily by volunteers. Sometimes it is so easy to get caught up in the demands of everyday life and it feels great to volunteer your time to help others in need to bring you back down to earth. This is what I was seeking through this opportunity- and it also helped that I am a complete science nerd.

I was somewhat disappointed that it happened to be yet another freezing, windy, snowy day in Michigan because some of the kids were going to go outside to participate in activities- and I unfortunately was missing gloves and a hat. This prevented me from being able to volunteer outside, which was my original plan. I thought it was inspiring, however, that they still took groups of kids outside to learn about making maple syrup and tapping it from the trees.

Get Sucked In, Be Moved… Make a Difference.

My Quicken Loans corporate email greeted me with an invitation to an event – the annual Keith Hamm Foundation fund raiser. Do you know Keith Hamm? I don’t. But, I know Mark Miller, the person who sent the email, and so I read on.

It’s so easy at this point, when reading any email, work or home, to simply delete it and move on. But, I’d like to challenge you to ask a few questions: Who is Keith Hamm? Why is he important? Who is Mark Miller? Why is he doing this? If you take the time to get the story, you just might find a connection. And that connection may surprise you!

Trying to Understand What I’ll Never Understand

By M. Dunklee

Quicken Loans/Rock Financial, the Detroit Pistons and the Detroit Shock pulled into the final stop of our “Know Your Black History” tour on February 25. For the second year in a row, we ended the tour in Flint, Mich., inviting several area high schools to come, be educated, be entertained, support their respective classmates, and, for one lucky student, win a $1,000 scholarship, courtesy of Quicken Loans/Rock Financial.

The goal of the tour is to educate the students about the tragic story of slavery, the quest for freedom and equality, and the perseverance and amazing contributions of great African Americans throughout their tumultuous journey through history. But those of us who participated in the tour as competition judges received a valuable education as well.

Let me come clean with the facts: I’m a white male, raised in a middle class, mostly white suburb by white parents raised in middle class, almost entirely white suburbs.