It's 10:30 in the morning when my colleague Reto and I, accompanied by Pete Laasner, president of the SWISS Staff Foundation for Children in Need, arrive at Operations Center (OPC) 1 at Zurich Airport. The OPC is the heart of SWISS’s flight operations: the place where the company’s cockpit and cabin crews prepare for their flights; where, on the upper floors, units such as Network Operations Control, Crew Control and Flight Dispatch keep SWISS flight operations running as smoothly and seamlessly as possible; and where, in the midst of all this activity, the coin sorters – the unsung heroes of SWISS’s loose change collection programme – go about their work.

Retiree Karl Laasner, sorter-in-chief

They’re not hard to make out: the eight retirees gathered in the OPC café, devouring their rolls and cheerfully chatting away. And in the midst of them is Karl Laasner, the human hub for all the various strands of the long-standing collaboration between SWISS and the SOS Children’s Villages Foundation on the passenger change donation front.

Karl’s story to date would be worthy of a novel in itself. Many are the countries that he worked and travelled in over his Swissair career. And his eyes still gleam as he talks of those times today. It was back in 1974, while he was based in Nairobi, that Karl first came across the SOS Children’s Villages organization. And he was taken immediately by the cause and its ambitions. Years later, having returned workwise to Switzerland, Karl became vice-president of the Swissair Staff Foundation for Children in Need. His Swissair boss at the time, who was Head of Product Management, asked him to take charge of a new loose change collection programme aboard the company’s flights, at a time when other airlines had also started to raise such funds for good causes. Karl did so, and laid the foundation for a decades-long partnership with SOS Children’s Villages that has continued with SWISS to this day.

But how did Swissair (and now SWISS) retirees come to be the sorters of all the loose changed collected? “That was pure economics,” Pete Laasner explains. Pete, who is Karl’s son, is a pilot with SWISS, and has also been giving his time and his energies to his company’s staff foundation and to SOS Children’s Villages since 1998. “When it all started, the logistics were just too much,” Pete recalls. “So the coins and the banknotes were sent to England to be sorted. But once the associated costs were deducted, we found we were left with too little money to use for our charity purposes.”

‘We could do this better,’ one of Karl’s then-colleagues felt. And so, with the enlistment of like-minded individuals from other Swissair units, the foundation started sorting and counting all the loose change itself. It was a huge undertaking: the collections on board were bringing in coins and notes in over 140 different currencies.

A sea of coins

Just how vast the sorting task can be is something we now witness for ourselves. Their coffee break over, the retirees go back to their work. Their enthusiasm is truly impressive as they return to a table stacked with coins, notes, bags and multicoloured boxes.

At the end of every long-haul flight, SWISS’s cabin crew members collect the envelopes containing the loose change donated by its passengers, which will all be used for selected charity projects. And once a month, nine members of Karl’s retiree team meet up to sort all the money. They all know precisely what to do; and they each set to work on their own assigned task. It’s mainly coins that are placed in the inflight envelopes, though banknotes make their appearance, too. “In the past we’d even get the occasional thousand-Swiss-franc note,” one team member recalls. “And even today we regularly find 200-franc banknotes in among all the change.”

Gold vrenelis, wedding rings and coins from the German Empire

Every now and then, the general calm is broken when one of the sorters finds an unusual note or coin. This is where Erich and Hans-Peter come in. They’re in charge of the ‘exotics’ – coins outside the usual currencies generated by the SWISS route network. Finds such as these require an expert eye. And it’s amazing how varied they can be, from gold coins from the former German Empire to Swiss gold vrenelis and one-centime coins. “We even had a gold tooth once. And somebody’s wedding ring,” Pete says with a smile. “Who knows what story they could tell!”

Every effort to monetize to the max 

While Marianne puts all the banknotes in the commonest currencies (which can have a total face value of between CHF 5,000 and CHF 10,000 alone) into a blue box to take to the bank, Karl and Erich devote themselves to the more exotic coins and the older notes. No avenue is left unexplored when it comes to raising as much funds as possible for the children in need. Some of the more valuable items are sold via the Ricardo online marketplace; Swiss one-centime coins and obsolete banknotes are sent to the Swiss National Bank in Appenzell; and many of the foreign coins and notes are either exchanged by the globetrotting retirees themselves while they are abroad or are sold to other travellers. Not all currencies can be exchanged by the team themselves, though; and twice a year the monies that are left are sent to Germany, and then on to their respective countries of origin to be locally exchanged.

Helping children in need by raising up to a quarter of a million each year

The tireless efforts of Karl and his team have earned their rewards. In the pre-pandemic years, they were regularly raising some CHF 250,000 a year for the staff foundation and its causes. “Today we’re only at about half of that,” Pete adds. “But we are seeing a rise again in people’s willingness to give.”

The past generosity of SWISS travellers has enabled three particular projects to be realized through the SWISS Staff Foundation for Children in Need’s support. Each of the SOS Children’s Villages in Dar es Salaam, Phuket and Cartagena has had a further house built from the funds that SWISS passengers have donated. The running costs for the families now living in these ‘SWISS Houses’ are also met by the SWISS Staff Foundation, which further receives regular donations from SWISS’s own employees. “This combination of donations from staff and from customers is pretty unique,” Pete points out. “And it’s quite a model to emulate, too.”

And what about all the coins and notes that people put into the heart-shaped donation boxes at Zurich Airport: what happens to them? Once again, it’s our seasoned retiree team who gather every month to carefully sift and sort all these notes and coins. And with every shiny coin they process, they help put a gleam in the eyes of disadvantaged youngsters the world over, or help support the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) or the Swiss Red Cross.