On Saturday, April 6, the Vegas Golden Knights in partnership with Southwest Gas spent the morning cleaning up and revitalizing Ansan Sister Park as part of Southwest Gas’ Building Lives Up Everywhere (BLUE) event. BLUE is a Southwest Gas employee volunteer program, where employees give back to their communities and make a positive difference in the lives of others.
Throughout the morning, VGK Insider Gary Lawless, Vegas Golden Knights mascot Chance, the Vegas Vivas and Knights Guard and members of VGK staff helped plant 25 trees and remove trash from the park. The group from the Golden Knights and Southwest Gas employees and their families were part of a team of 120 volunteers who collectively removed 440 pounds of weeds and debris from the park.
The planting of the trees at the park supported the City of Las Vegas’ Tree Planting initiative which aims to plant 60,000 trees throughout the city by 2050 to combat urban heat island effects. As the trees grow, their canopy will help cover the area, providing shade and cooler temperatures, improving the air quality, restoring ecology and creating a more supportive habitat for local animal species.
This volunteering was the first of many joint efforts between the Vegas Golden Knights and Southwest Gas, the Official Natural Gas Partner of the team. Participating in this event allowed the Golden Knights to highlight areas of their own sustainability-focused initiative: The Knight SHIELD Project. The acronym SHIELD stands for sustainability, healthy air, improve and inspire, energy and water efficiency, landscape protection and decrease waste generation. The Golden Knights demonstrated two different tenets of their SHIELD initiative with the revitalization of Ansan Sister Park: healthy air and landscape protection.
