Monday, February 13, 2012

Van Metre Honored for Philanthropic Work by NAHB!

Quiet Leaders

Virginia’s Van Metre Homes has been a reliable behind-the-scenes corporate steward for nearly six decades.
This spring, groundbreaking is scheduled for the 48,000-square-foot, 21-bed Adler Center for Caring in Loudoun County, Va. The Center—an inpatient hospice care facility associated with Capital Caring—will sit on four acres donated by Van Metre Homes within its Stone Ridge community. Each June since 2007, Beau Van Metre, the company’s chairman, and his wife Dee have hosted the Van Metre Polo Cup, which has raised nearly all of the $15 million needed to complete the Adler Center, slated to open in 2013.

The Polo Cup perpetuates the legacy of Al Van Metre, Beau’s father and the builder’s founder, who until his death in March 2008 had been a longtime supporter of Capital Caring, a hospice dedicated to palliative care and counseling for advanced illnesses.

A world-renowned sailor and yachtsman, Al Van Metre and some friends in the 1970s came up with the idea of a charity race on behalf of Capital Caring (then called Capital Hospice). That regatta, known as the Hospice Cup and held on the Chesapeake Bay in Annapolis, Md., celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. During that timespan, it has raised more than $9 million to help fund patient programs, education, and research. “The Van Metre family and the company have been absolutely pivotal to Capital Caring over the past several decades,” says Dr. Cameron Muir, the hospice’s executive vice president of quality and access.

The Adler Center might still be in limbo were it not for the builder’s land donation, “which was the tipping point,” says Muir. Al Van Metre was his patient, and Muir notes that the family’s and builder’s longstanding involvement with the hospice “isn’t just a business transaction; it’s a heartfelt commitment.”

Since 1982, the Van Metres and their company also have been faithful contributors to Children’s National Medical Center. In 1991, Richard Rabil, the builder’s president and CEO, who is a runner, helped launch the Van Metre Five-Mile Race on behalf of the Medical Center. (Rabil’s son was born with heart disease and has been treated there several times.) To date that annual race has raised more than $1.7 million, which enabled the construction and operation of the Van Metre Cardiovascular Operating Room, a state-of-the-art surgery suite that opened in 2010.

Between 70 and 80 company employees volunteer each year to help manage the race, and Beau Van Metre last year hosted a party on his 110-foot yacht in Palm Beach, Fla., that raised $2 million for the Medical Center, an event he plans to repeat in late February.

Rabil says the families and the company focus their philanthropic activities on those areas where “we can really make a difference.” That is certainly true of the 37 acres that Van Metre and Rabil recently donated to George Mason University for its new Loudoun County, Va., campus. “That moved the campus from wish list to reality,” says Rabil. Marc Broderick, the university’s vice president of development and alumni, couldn’t agree more. “I’m glad [Van Metre Homes] is being honored because they are terrific people.”

Read the article in Builder Magazine.

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