ZEBULON — More than three dozen GlaxoSmithKline employees descended on the Boys & Girls Club Friday, paint brushes and hammers in hand.

The 42 GSK employees were part of a company-wide initiative to spend a day on community service activities.

GSK employees around the world stopped work on Friday and volunteered at non-profit agencies.

In the Triangle, volunteers fanned out to more than 30 sites in 10 counties, including Habitat for Humanity sites and the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina.

At the Boys & Girls Club, volunteers painted the inside of the building, landscaped around the outside, replaced old steps and repaired broken picnic tables.

Martha Snyder, the team leader of the Boys & Girls Club group, said the focus on the club was an effort on the part of Zebulon’s GSK employees to give back to the local community.

“We formed a committee to look at where we might want to volunteer. A lot of these people are from the Zebulon community and they wanted to volunteer in our area,” Snyder said.

GSK’s volunteer initiative is called Orange Day. Volunteers all showed up at the work site Friday wearing orange shirts provided by the company.

For many of the employees who volunteered, Friday was their first glance at the Zebulon Boys & Girls Club.

Dale Parrish was among those who had not seen the facility before he picked up a paint brush on site.

“All I really knew about the Boys & Girls Club was the sign (announcing a future site for the club). But there isn’t a building out there yet and I always wondered where the club was,” Parrish said.

He said he hopes to return in a few weeks when children return to the clubhouse after the start of school.

That’s the kind of reaction Boys & Girls Club director Karl Thoma hopes for when volunteers turn out at the club.

“For a lot of them, this is their first exposure to the club. Hopefully for some of them, they get a chance to see what we are about and this becomes just the beginning of their relationship with the club,” Thoma said.

Thoma said the scope of the volunteer’s work on Friday was remarkable.

“When we first started talking about this in March, we were thinking there would be maybe a dozen employees who would be here. Then it grew to 20, then 35 and today we have 42 people here,” Thoma said.

The club’s new look also gives club employees an opportunity to teach club members the importance of taking care of the facility.

“We can kind of revisit that lesson. When they come back and see all the work that these volunteers have done, hopefully, they will feel like they have something worth taking care of,” Thoma said.