Holding Hands with Casa

Dear Friend of Unity Through Creativity,

Over nine days in May, Unity Through Creativity led seven Singing Tree® Mural workshops with the Casa Auto Group based in El Paso, Texas. Casa Auto Group was started in 1969 by Wally Lowenfield, the grandfather of current owners Justin, Luke, and Ronnie. The Lowenfields have been expanding their company rapidly in the last few years, and Casa has grown to thirteen dealerships in El Paso and in Las Cruces and Alamogordo, New Mexico.

Wally started the company with a culture of putting people first. The goal that Justin, Luke, and Ronnie have is to deepen that culture in their established dealerships and to extend it to the stores that have come under the Casa roof in the last three years.

The Lowenfields asked Unity Through Creativity to bring the Singing Tree® Mural process to Casa to reinforce this process. We took our starting point from the vision Casa Auto Group has of itself: Casa is home, and home is heaven.

The Casa Singing Tree project began with a Lead Design Team (above) that included the three owners and twenty managers and executives. They selected the theme of trust, love, and community, designed the mural, and painted the background.

Then the five UTC facilitators took the mural to six locations for employees to add leaves, birds, stars—and for this mural, acorns, because the tree the Lead Design Team chose is the Texas live oak, a favorite of Wally’s, a tree that spreads its branches wide enough to include everyone beneath it.

We worked with 419 other employees over the next week. These are co-workers who in many cases had never laid eyes on each other before, as their shifts and departments gave them little chance for contact. These are people who had little idea of what is going on inside the person working alongside them. These are people who did not know that many others in their department or their store were facing the same challenges and sorrows that they are and share the same hopes and dreams.

The 442 people at Casa Auto Group who created the Casa Singing Tree of Trust, Love, and Community experienced the depth of the connection they have with each other, many for the first time. They began building the wider community of Casa Auto through stepping outside their routines and seeing each other not as sales people, as service people, as accountants or managers or owners—but as human beings. They had an immediate experience that their contribution to the mural and to Casa Auto Group is unique and essential, that each one has something to give that only she or he can give.

At Casa they say: Casa is home, and home is heaven—and for the people at Casa, heaven is holding hands, creating connections with each other, building their community on a foundation of love and trust.

Laurie and the UTC Team