2008 Woodie Awards
Spotlight Profile: Guy Grace, making DVC a well 'grounded' campus.
Adalto Nascimento
Issue date: 12/4/08 Section: Features
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He could walk in, do his job and go home every day.
But that is not Guy Grace's style.
DVC's buildings and grounds manager makes it a point to be involved with students, even serving as an adviser to clubs, a task usually undertaken by faculty members.
"He really goes out of his way to help someone out," says Norm Haukaas, an office assistant at the buildings and grounds department.
Grace strongly believes every action one takes eventually comes back to that person.
"[If] you make other people happy, you will be happy," he says.
Grace has had a long history of helping students.
He recalls Tien Jiang, a Chinese DVC student who worked at buildings and grounds many years ago and eventually became a successful business man.
Jiang, he says, is a perfect example of how helping someone yields a positive outcome.
Jiang had known that one of Grace's dreams was to someday visit China, the country in which his grandfather was born.
Recently, Jiang funded, through a business deal, an 11-day-trip to China.
"Plane fare, driver, tour guide," Grace says. "[We] ate at the finest places… I didn't spend a penny."
Someone can be at a stage in life where they are idling, he says, but at DVC, suddenly "they catch fire" and know what they want to do and go after it.
"I am lucky enough to be there when that happens sometimes," Grace says, "and that is what I was with Tien."
Joseph Hackett, a student working at buildings and grounds, is the focus of Grace's tentative plan to have a paid student coordinator for a recycling program.
Grace says he came up with the idea when the recycling program added too much work to his other responsibilities.
Hackett says Grace is a man who understands the circle of life.
"As you become successful, you reach [out] and pick from your community…You bring them along with you," he says, "And that is what he did with me."
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