Voice, the MGM MIRAGE Philanthropic Foundation, Hits a High Note with its Katrina Response.

In the parking lot of the hurricane-battered Beau Rivage Resort and Casino in Biloxi, Mississippi, hope takes many forms: a warm meal, an early paycheck, a tetanus shot.

Hours after Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, the senior-most management of MGM MIRAGE toured the devastation in the region and responded with resolve. Beau Rivage, they announced, will be completely rebuilt and restored as the jewel in the crown of Mississippi’s gaming industry. All of its 3,500 workers were guaranteed full pay and benefits for 90 days, with the promise that their jobs would be made available to them when the resort reopened. But, even these extraordinary measures seemed but a drop in the waist-deep floodwaters of Katrina.

So management turned to the Voice Foundation, the MGM MIRAGE inhouse, employee-funded charitable foundation, with a mission…and a million dollars.

“We needed to give the employees of the Beau Rivage a tether to the world,” says Punam Mathur, Sr. V.P. of Diversity and Community Relations as well as overseer of the Voice Foundation, who spent six days in Biloxi, helping to organize a makeshift emergency management center in the parking lot of Beau Rivage. Within 48 hours, they had established a call center in Las Vegas, where employees could check in and leave word for family members.