Spring Cleaning with Dharma Green

Spring cleaning just took on an exciting new meaning here at Dharma!

Last month we launched Dharma Green ( www.dharmagreen.com ) – a hospitality grade professional housekeeping service specializing in apartments at modern, amenities-rich residential complexes.

Led and staffed by the same team of experienced housekeepers that care for guests staying with Dharma Home Suites (www.dharmahomesuites.com ), this new service makes available to the general public, home cleaning on par with 4 and 5 star hotels and other types of leading accommodations providers.

About Dharma Green

The inspiration for Dharma Green began a few years back, when we began getting inquiries from friends and satisfied guests on whether we can provide the same quality of housekeeping to homes other than Dharma managed apartments. In recent years, those inquiries grew increasingly frequent, to the point that we started receiving advice from interested parties on how to do it!

Working closely with our housekeeping staff, many with years of front-line experience, we started exploring how to make their capabilities generally available without compromising Dharma’s guests’ experience.

We also had to take into account that customers are likely to want different tiers of cleaning capabilities with associated flexible pricing depending on factors including but not limited to:

– their individual tolerance for the level of “messiness” before cleaning is desired

– desire for regularly scheduled or on-demand cleaning

– ability to be on-site while cleaning takes place

– thoroughness ranging for tidying up messes to comprehensive disinfectant cleaning

In other words, while the quality of our staff’s work is the same, a customer-focused general cleaning service faces very different operational challenges compared to our standard guest servicing.

Early this year, we felt we were finally ready to launch an offering that preserves and enhances Dharma’s brand as a hospitality services provider.

Our Cleaning Service

Dharma Green offers 3 types of hourly cleaning:

SpruceClean – for when you just want someone to make your bed, tidy up messes, vacuum floors, empty trash, and disinfectant-wipe hard surfaces like furniture, mirrors, and windows.

FreshClean – for when you want a comprehensive clean that includes all SpruceClean services plus cleaning and sanitizing toilets, sinks, stovetops, and even running your dishwasher.

MintClean – for getting an empty home ready for move-out inspection or new resident move-in.

In all instances, and just like when we clean our Dharma managed units, our housekeepers use non-toxic and environmentally-safe cleaning products from Seventh Generation – a certified “ B Corporation .”

For anyone not familiar with B Corporations, the following is a short description from their website:

“Certified B Corporations are a new kind of business that balances purpose and profit. They are legally required to consider the impact of their decisions on their workers, customers, suppliers, community, and the environment. This is a community of leaders, driving a global movement of people using business as a force for good.”

Living Wage Pledge

As many have commented is implied in our company name, Dharma as an organization believes in spreading good karma and doing business in a responsible and socially-positive manner.

That’s part of why we use cleaning products from a certified B Corporation, and also why we believe in providing our housekeepers, who as a class of professionals are all too often under-compensated, with a “living wage”. While there is no widely accepted standard of the level of compensation for a living wage – the principle is that it should take into account what an individual should make, relative to the local cost of living, in order to support a non-frivolous lifestyle either independently, or with 1-2 dependents and an income generating partner.

We believe that paying our professional housekeepers a living wage leads to lower staff turnover, a more positive working environment, higher quality service for our clients, and greater economic value add to community stakeholders in general – in short, it just makes good business sense. $15 per hour of what we charge our customers and 100% of gratuities go directly to the housekeeper.

We’re currently operating in the Greater New York City and Miami metropolitan markets. If you live in these areas and are in need of hospitality grade housekeeping, contact us via our website. We look forward to helping you “Live Clean, Live Well”!