SAN DIEGO—Beyond acquisitions and development, Steve Mendell, HEI president of acquisitions & development, is heading HEI’s newly formed social responsibility team and a program called CARE. The C stands for community, the A represents associates, the R is for relationships and the E represents energy.

“People do care more, and there is a greater sense of awareness amongst all of us to be more socially responsible,” he said. “We were recognizing throughout the company that we were doing a lot. In all our hotels, we have 33 hotels, each one of the different hotels has different community service, outreach programs that they do. We have quite a bit at the corporate office that we do. We were doing a very big energy program in order to try to be more socially responsible to the environment. We were just doing a lot. We realized we weren’t promoting it within our company. We realized if we could promote it more within, more and more people would become part of it and that was the purpose.”

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The company is celebrating earning a Corporate Energy Manager of the Year award from the Association of Energy Managers.

“We have basically embarked upon a very systematic program of being very energy conscious within the properties from electrical to our gas usage, our waste program,” he said. “We’re really very conscious to make sure that we’re tracking what we’re using and then decreasing the amount of usage.”

HEI created a program called the Energy Looking Glass, which allows it to take out the variation of what the occupancy is for the hotel on a year-over-year basis and what the weather was like on a year-over-year basis.