Despite the heat and the wind Tuesday afternoon, the folks in the white T-shirts with the letters MVP on the front were all smiles while they worked.

That’s what helping other people will do for you. It will make you smile.

The folks in the MVP T-shirts were employees at the Mars Pet Care plant in Joplin, but they weren’t working at the plant. They were working at the Children’s Center, 921 E. 34th St. The Children’s Center provides victims of child abuse and their families a safe, friendly and certainly less intimidating place where interviews, examinations and investigations can take place.

Kathi Olson, assistant executive director at the Children’s Center, said that before the center opened, most interviews and investigations involving abuse were conducted at local police stations, which often put the victims in an uncomfortable and frightening situation.

The folks at the Children’s Center do good and important work. That’s why the gang in the white T-shirts spent Tuesday and Wednesday there landscaping, painting and redecorating.

All told, more than 30 Mars Pet Care employees will spend the better part of this week working at the Children’s Center and at the Joplin Humane Society. The volunteer effort is part of the Mars company’s MVP week — a companywide effort that sends employees all across the country out into their communities to volunteer their time and talents.

Gregg Albus is the local Mars plant manager. He said Tuesday that the company doesn’t force any employee to volunteer. The program at each plant, he said, is strictly voluntary. When I asked Gregg if the company bigwigs at least encourage employees to participate in the program, he smiled and shook his head.

“They support it,” is what Gregg said.

See, it’s one thing for a company to “encourage” its employees to do volunteer work in their communities. It’s another thing, and an important other thing, for a company to actively support volunteer work.

For example, most of the Joplin employees taking part in the MVP week were on the clock, even though they were not working their normal jobs at the plant. The Mars corporation is footing the bill for the local volunteer work. Gregg stressed that not all the employees volunteering were getting paid. Many workers from the plant’s overnight shifts also donated time — time they will not be paid for.

The volunteers at the Children’s Center were freshening up the outside of the building, painting and redecorating the family room. Kathi said the family room offers a place for non-offending family members to stay while the abuse victim is being interviewed by staff members. She said that in this time of limited budgets, something like redecorating the family room would have been way down on the list of doable priorities, which is why the Mars employees’ efforts were so important.

“It’s just that we feel our money is better spent providing services to our children,” she said. “We wouldn’t be doing this (redecorating the family room) if it wasn’t for them.”

Kathi said many people don’t realize how important donations of time and materials are to agencies like the Children’s Center.

“If it wasn’t for the support of the community, we couldn’t keep our doors open,” she said.

Last year, the Mars folks took the Joplin Humane Society under their wing. Chad Sweet, the local plant’s operations manger, is a member of the Humane Society’s board of directors. He said employees spent their MVP week last year making improvements to the shelter on Swede Lane. He said employees since have gone back — on their own — to the shelter to do additional volunteer work.