CDW Employees to Help Build Housing For Tsunami Victims Chicago Sun-Times, July 8, 2005 - Employees at CDW Corp., the Vernon Hills supplier of tech products to business, government and schools, have always been encouraged to serve their community, volunteering at such organizations as Children's Memorial Hospital and the Chicago Food Depository. And hundreds of employees on company time have built three new Habitat for Humanity homes for poor families in Waukegan. Now their community has gotten larger. A team of nine CDW employees is leaving today for Thailand to spend two weeks in a Habitat for Humanity effort to build and repair housing damaged by the Dec. 26 tsunami. CDW is footing the bill for the trip and also will pay the employees their regular wages. K.C. Tomsheck, of Mundelein, leader of the CDW team and CDW's senior director of information technology operations, said: "My No. 1 goal is to come back feeling like we made a difference. We're going to be working as hard as we can to make sure it happens." He said the group will build cinder block housing in the village of Khao Lok in southwestern Thailand. "There already was a homeless problem in this village, which was magnified immensely by the tsunami," he said. All but one of the CDW team come from Chicago area offices. They work in a variety of departments, including sales, marketing, purchasing, training and finance. The project is part of a bigger CDW tsunami relief effort that raised more than $300,000 from employees and company and board member matches. All employees who made donations were eligible to make the trip. The volunteers were picked from a raffle. They are, along with Tomsheck: Maureen McDermott; Todd Knight; Damian Gonzalez; Rey Sanjuanero, Andrea Pulito; Tina Walker; Tony Williams and Margarite Showers. "What is special to us about this project is that it is co-worker driven," said John A. Edwardson, CDW's chairman and chief executive. "As with so many aspects of our business, our co-workers make the difference and lead the way."