Volunteers from Goldman Sachs To Enhance Vanderbilt Museum Gardens

By Patrick Keeffe

For the fourth consecutive year, Goldman Sachs volunteers will work with the Suffolk County Vanderbilt Museum’s corps of volunteer gardeners on Monday, May 11, to repair and update garden-irrigation systems, restore the mansion-courtyard gardens, and to prepare, plant and mulch the large organic garden whose produce is donated to a local food pantry.

During the past three years, volunteers from the Goldman Sachs Community TeamWorks (CTW) program have expanded the vegetable garden and, with a corporate grant, installed an advanced drip-irrigation system that has increased the yield per plot.

CTW is Goldman Sachs’ global initiative that allows the firm’s employees at least one day off each year to volunteer their expertise and ideas in team-based projects coordinated with local nonprofit organizations in communities where they work and live.

Susan Flynn worked with other Goldman Sachs volunteers last year and will return. “Knowing that our efforts will yield fresh produce for nearby food pantries throughout the summer motivates the team to work hard,” she said. “It’s a great opportunity to give back and support our local community.”

In 2014, more than 25,000 Goldman Sachs employees from 52 offices worldwide partnered with nearly 900 non-profit organizations on more than 1,580 projects.

The 43-acre Vanderbilt estate, Eagle’s Nest, was built in the early twentieth century by William K. Vanderbilt II, great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, founder of the New York Central Railroad and builder of Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the estate includes a spectacular, 24-room, Spanish-Revival style mansion. The museum complex includes a marine museum as well as natural-history, ethnographic-artifact and animal-habitat galleries, and the state-of-the-art Charles and Helen Reichert Planetarium.