Horizon helps fulfill its Pledge 1% goals for both time and profit through its robust partnership with Perspectives Math & Science Academy (MSA), a high school located on Chicago’s south side focused on educating the whole child. Providing classroom instruction isn’t enough to help these students get and stay on a path of personal success. Daily, many students confront poverty, violence and trauma, which affects how they show up in the classroom and can derail them at any point during their academic journey.
Horizon’s partnership with MSA began in December of 2016, with a holiday donation drive for MSA’s 50 homeless students. Due to the generosity of employees, Horizon was able to provide the homeless students and their families a brighter holiday.
Since then, Horizon has expanded the partnership with MSA to focus on three main areas of impact: infrastructure support, programming support and employee engagement.
Horizon’s infrastructure support led to the addition of water stations throughout the school, so the students can access lead-free water. Additionally, Horizon was able to underwrite the cost of students creating and installing multiple large mosaics at the school, construct a peace and meditation room, a central front office, a technology lab, as well as paint the rod iron exterior fence.
Horizon underwrites several programs at the school, including the robotics club, a personalized math, science and humanities curriculum, an entrepreneurship class, a drone after school program, a poetry club, and a workshop series on storytelling and documentary film making.
Horizon employees have donated more than tens of thousands of dollars through its quarterly donation drives, as well as more than 100 hours of their time to help beautify the school and mentor the students. Employees are frequent visitors at the school, conducting mock interviewing sessions and talking with the students about their STEM career paths. Additionally, employees have leveraged their day-to-day jobs in creative ways that lead to impact. For example, our IT department has donated 133 refurbished laptops and 10 printers and our facilities team has donated more than 100 items of furniture no longer needed.
Providing resources that help meet the school’s infrastructure, programming and students’ social emotional needs has been incredibly rewarding, but the personal connection between students and Horizon employees has been the most inspiring. Students are encouraged to grow intellectually and explore STEM career options, while Horizon employees have internalized that they can positively influence the local community at a personal level with the support of their company.
We often wonder “how tough is my life?,” but if we look around, there are many people who are facing tougher challenges than us. It is not always about food, shelter, or clothing, but also getting the right education to stand on your own feet so that you can offer a helping hand to someone tomorrow. Giving back is not an act, it is a feeling which is beyond words, and the biggest reward is the realization that you’ve made a change in someone’s life.
When CEPTES joined the global Pledge 1% movement, we had only one thought in our mind, “Let’s try to feed every hungry soul.” There are hundreds of families who go to bed on an empty stomach. Every human deserves food, shelter, and clothing with education & healthcare. So in order to give it back to the community 1% of our time, profit and product, we started an initiative called “Community Fridge“. This initiative is being led by our co-founder Mr. Priyaranjan Panigrahy for CEPTES.
A community fridge is a small initiative which is enabling allies in and around the Indian city of Bengaluru to join hands in order to offer food to poor and needy people. We have placed a public fridge for those having surplus food to supply. Needy people can then come and get food from this community fridge. It allows us to feed people who are unprivileged without hurting their dignity.
This initiative soon caught the eyes of many local residents and nearby restaurants who are now keeping food inside the fridge. Initially, our community fridge was feeding 20-30 people every day, but with time the number of food donors has significantly increased, and our community fridge is now serving around 80-100 people every day. Whenever we see someone needy having food from our community fridge, it gives us great motivation and belief that we are really giving it back.
Sometimes the tiniest generous act can ignite change and spread a positive impact in the society by offering a revived sense of hope. The small community fridge which started serving food is now offering free books, as well as toys, to unprivileged kids. Every month, we conduct an event in our office for all our employees, where each one of them contributes their time in collecting food as well as books, clothes, and toys for our community fridge.
At Strillobyte, we strongly believe that businesses, no matter the size, have a responsibility to improve the world we are living in. A ‘giving back’ business culture is fundamental to us to fulfil our mission.
As a company that builds chatbots, websites and mobile applications, we see tech as a tool that can empower people to spread their messages of hope and change all around the world.
The importance of giving a voice to these people is a mission to which Strillobyte pledges.
How does Strillobyte do that?
We pledge at least 1% of our time to give back to the community. As a micro-business, this type of commitment is the perfect fit for us. Our staff have very specific skills in designing and building digital products. At the beginning of 2018, we decided to offer our expertise to the team of volunteers who run TEDxLondon.
TEDxLondon is a non-profit organization devoted to spreading ideas surfacing hidden stories of London and Londoners that might not have a voice otherwise. At a TEDxLondon event, TED Talks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connections. All of our team have joined the organisation as volunteers, on average spending 2.5 hours per week on related activities. These include managing the TEDxLondon website, offering assistance and guidance with any tech-related issues and also helping with the communication strategy on the various social media channels.
Pledging part of our working hours to supporting TEDxLondon has helped Strillobyte achieve its goal of making a positive impact through our people. It has also improved our company culture, and we’ve had the opportunity to meet people with extraordinary stories and points of view that helped us grow as a team and as individuals.
We recommend joining the Pledge 1% initiative to all our fellow tech and creative companies around the world. Pledging 1% of your resources can be as a little as the equivalent of the time you spend in
your coffee breaks, but it can make a great difference to someone else’s life.
This commitment led to the creation of Mumspring Foundation. This year, through the Genesis Project, we empowered and provided over 100 at-risk women with sterile delivery kits to prevent infections during childbirth. Our 1% program enabled our employees express their HEARTfor the community by making a difference with their paid expertise and time.
The process
We don’t think giving money is enough and don’t think giving with blind faith is enough. So we make each person do a dragons den style business case with the following process:
- Explain the root problem they are passionate and the outcome they value.
- Identify the charities that are providing solutions.
- Explain that charities bottlenecks and struggles.
- They choose the best way to help them whether consulting time, money or organizing something else.
Examples of maximising ROI
David supports a charity that works with suicide prevention. When they saved a person’s life he sent them a 100 packets of lifesavers to help them celebrate the wins and keep morale high. That $30 investment boost productivity and commitment to the cause.
Mark supports a charity working with vulnerable families. He went to their offices and helped them optimize their internal processes.
Sebastien cares about the environment. He saved a charity time by implementing a document generation tool for them after they do environmental assessments at homes saving them thousands in volunteer time.
Daniel despises human tracking. So he offered free advice around marketing and fundraising campaigns. He then provided them cash to fund their next fundraising campaign would have the best ROI.
The outcome
Everybody gets to live out their values, our impact is a catalyst for positive change and we are helping others be wise about how they invest. We encourage you to not give to a big brand charity but really dwell on the ROI of your giving.
Originally published on Medium by Sean Dukes of Learnsmarter
Just recently we’ve seen some great stuff coming out about taking Trailhead into your communities. The timing is great, because we’ve been working on doing just that and finally had our launch event today.
The charity we’re working with is called Trinity Winchester. They’re based in the city where I live and work, helping vulnerable people in the community and particularly the homeless and victims of domestic abuse. Winchester, like many cities, has changed greatly in recent years and I’m sure that many of us have felt that it would be great to do something really positive to help the people you see living on the streets. I’ve raised a bit of money doing a few charity sleepouts, but after hearing about some of the Trinity clients and talking to a few of the staff, I thought “wouldn’t it be awesome if we could help someone get a job by teaching them new skills using Trailhead?”
Turning that thought into action took a while. First, we had to sell the idea to Trinity. They were interested, but it was hard to get beyond that. I kept pestering them and finally we got a meeting. Things progressed pretty quickly from there, but it took six months from our first conversation to our first session.
I realised I couldn’t do this on my own. I’m a leader of the Hampshire user group so asked Alison from the group and Elise from my team to help out. That was a good move.
We did some prep for the big day. We set up our developer org to track the badges, installed the Trail Tracker and had a quick go at setting up some Chatter Free test users and linking them to Trailhead. Alison bought biscuits and I even wrote a speech!
The first thing you notice when you go into the Trinity Centre is that there are a lot of homeless people that you never see on the street. There’s a friendly atmosphere at the centre and we were greeted enthusiastically by the learning manager, Niamh, but neither she nor we had any idea what was going to happen next.
Before we started, I thought if we got three people that would be great and five would be amazing. We had one. The speech seemed a bit pointless so I started talking to Felix explaining what Trailhead was and tried to encourage him to have a go. He signed up.
Then Jade and Adrienne walked in. I explained again and they signed up too. It was so helpful having Alison and Elise there. We had all the technical issues you could wish for — PCs running windows updates, monitors that didn’t work, locked email accounts; you name it. The team did a great job of smoothing the path, but it wasn’t easy.
And then more people came in. Soon we didn’t have enough seats and it was getting quite hectic. We had questions coming at us from all directions. Someone just got a badge. Fantastic! What was amazing was the energy in the room. I’d been a bit sceptical that anyone would really be interested at all but there was a real buzz. We were getting more and more interest. By the end of the day we’d got nine people signed up and we’d lost count of the number of badges. I just need the Trail Tracker to update so we can get the final score! (now done …)
An amazing start to this programIt was a fantastic morning and we all came away buzzing with enthusiasm. We’ve already booked up the next session and have promised cat recognition. I can’t wait and I have the feeling that some of our customers can’t wait either! I was careful not to promise that we could get anyone a job, but some of the group were really flying by the end. I wouldn’t bet against it.
Finally, a special mention of thanks to Scott Luikart who blazed the trail ahead of me and gave me so much great advice and support.
Key Takeaways:
- You need to sell your idea. Use examples from people who’ve had success already such as PepUp Tech and Scott Luikart.
- Get help. You can’t do this by yourself. Our little team is hoping to make this a weekly event and we’re going to need plenty of volunteers to make that happen.
- Prepare as much as you can. There’s a new Trailhead Workshop Basicsbadge which is the perfect place to start. Set up your developer org, the tracker, create any users you can, check out the room you’re going to use and practice the user experience so that you have some idea about what’s going to happen.
- Choose your trails ahead of time. Trailhead Basics and Trailhead Playground Management are my recommendations. And tell everyone in your team; I didn’t and we had to play a bit of catch up. Also have some trails ready to suggest for people to move on to. Users will find the choices quite daunting to start with.
- Give people a reason to come back. We’ve promised Cat Recognition for next time and people are genuinely interested. We’ll find out next week whether that works.
- Have fun. The biscuits were helpful and we had prizes. Not everything will go as you expect, so be prepared for that. Encourage all the positive signs you see around you and build on the enthusiasm you generate.
Make a difference where you are
What could you do to bring education and opportunity to people in your area? Join the movement and Be A Multiplier! Trailhead gives you the tools you need to be part of the change. Through five custom trailmixes, you’ll be guided through each step in organizing and hosting a learning event, wherever you are. Give back and lead a learning event today.
Originally published on the Salesforce blog. By: Robert Gavin, SVP Alliances, NewVoiceMedia
February 2016, NewVoiceMedia officially announced our participation in the Pledge 1% movement, applying a simple yet transformative idea: donate 1% of product, 1% of equity, 1% of profit or 1% of employee time to support non-profit causes around the world. Employees, shareholders, customers and the community all benefit when a company builds giving back into its DNA and, for us, it’s one of the best decisions we’ve ever made.
The program wasn’t our first charitable bid; our employees were already using their paid volunteering days to support charitable projects and taking advantage of our Matched Funding Scheme. But this was a natural progression and the biggest step we’d made towards committing a portion of our success to our community stakeholders and social impact. We are growing faster than ever before, and with a chiselled heart in the bedrock of our company, we want to continue building a kind and forward-thinking enterprise on top of it, supporting the communities that we serve in a way that is meaningful.
Since making our Pledge 1% commitment, our employees have embraced it wholeheartedly, mobilizing campaigns and flagging worthy causes for us to back.
In December, we ran one of our biggest mass fundraising and global volunteering projects to date, with ‘The Apprentice Week.’ The mission was for employees to work as a team to make as much money as possible for a charity of their choice. Starting with just $250 per team, ten groups found innovate ways of increasing it, from selling tickets to pie senior execs, to drawing caricatures and completing expense claims! From their week’s efforts, our entrepreneurs raised $30,000 for charities of their choice.
Caricatures for sale as part of The Apprentice Week, an initiative which raised $30,000 for charitable causes.
A program we’re particularly proud of is our participation in the Right to Read program. Established in the UK as a way for businesses to make a positive impact on education, employees have paid time off to volunteer as reading partners to children, to support their literacy development, while improving their confidence, communication skills and attitude towards reading. Similarly, in San Francisco, we took part in Jump Start, a national early education organization, where we prepared 100 literacy kits for children to encourage them to read throughout the summer. We also operate Code Club in three locations, to teach children aged 9-11 about coding and computing, and have seen them complete projects using applications like Scratch, Python, and HTML.
This year, we are hyper focused on diversity and inclusion which has been launched globally. We hosted our fourth Annual Women in Industries Panel in San Francisco, featuring Corinne Sklar, CMO of Bluewolf, an IBM Company; Tara Ryan, CMO of Skuid; Poly Sumner, Chief Adoption Officer at Salesforce; and Allyson Fryhoff, Chief Revenue Officer at Salesforce.org, to discuss how to get to the next level towards your “dream” job. They shared their personal stories of career progression and the tips/lessons they learned that helped get them where they are today. We also partnered with Salesforce and Bluewolf in Sydney to host a “Men as Allies” discussion, and continue to expand our efforts across global internal mentoring programs and quarterly foundation activities.
Employee volunteering in action: Volunteers from NewVoiceMedia spent two days at a local school, painting, decorating and making improvements to the grounds.
We’re extremely proud to be sponsoring the ninth annual Concert for the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals, presented by Salesforce.org in conjunction with Dreamfest on September 26th. Held in San Francisco, the concert will directly benefit the hospitals, helping to advance pediatric health in our community and worldwide.
NewVoiceMedia is joined by an impressive network of entrepreneurs and companies across the globe that have committed to philanthropic efforts through the Pledge 1% movement. We’re proud to be able to contribute to the efforts of creating social impact on a global scale, while enabling our employees to support the causes that are important to them.
Even back in 2007, Deloitte’s Volunteer Impact Survey revealed that 62 percent of millennials would prefer to work for a company that provides opportunities to apply their skills to benefit nonprofits. More recently, the Millennial Impact Report, released in 2014 by Achieve Consulting Inc, found that 94 percent of millennials are interested in using their skills to benefit a cause, while 57 percent wish that there were more company-wide service days available to them.
In a stark mismatch, Deloitte’s 2018 Millennial Survey shows a negative shift in millennials’ feelings about business’ motivations and ethics. Only a minority believe businesses behave ethically (48 percent vs. 65 percent in 2017) and that business leaders are committed to helping improve society (47 percent vs. 62 percent in 2017).
Millennials will account for 75 percent of the workforce by 2025. Attracting and retaining them begins with workplace culture and making the world more compassionate, innovative and sustainable.
It’s not just millennials, though. In a new study of U.S.-based Fortune 1000 employees conducted by Povaddo, for nearly 60% of today’s employees, there is an expectation that corporate America and CEOs should play a more active role in addressing some of the most systemic societal issues facing the country. This point of view is consistent across employees of all ages, gender and geographies.
Recent research shows a majority of corporate employees care about working for companies where corporate leaders are making an effort on social issues.
The Povaddo study found that significant majorities of employees who feel their company encourages them to support causes they care about are more likely to recommend their company as a place to work, more likely to stay longer, and more likely to increase their overall engagement at work when their CEO makes a real effort to address an important societal issue. Yet, despite these findings, only 37 percent of employees in the Povaddo study said they felt encouraged to support causes they care about.
The good news is: Your organization can step up and make a difference.
As Marc Benioff told Forbes last year, “The business of business is improving the state of the world.”
Find out how you can build giving back into your company culture at www.pledge1percent.org.
Andrea Korte, Enterprise Solutions representative at Boulder-based Scaled Agile, Inc., tends to one of the horses used for Equine Assisted Therapy at the Rocky Mountain Riding Therapy Center during Scaled Agile’s recent Day of Service for Pledge 1% Colorado.
Korte was one of more than 50 Scaled Agile employees who volunteered to support Scaled Agile’s commitment to Pledge 1%, a growing global movement that encourages companies and individuals to contribute one percent of equity, resources, and expertise back into their communities. Throughout the day, Scaled Agile employees volunteered to provide assistance to Rocky Mountain Riding Therapy Center and five other Boulder County organizations: Attention Homes, EFAA, Harvest of Hope Pantry, Sister Carmen Community Center, and Wish for Wheels.
In July, Scaled Agile made a $115,000 contribution between Pledge 1% Colorado, a program of Community Foundation Boulder County, and the foundation itself. An additional $60,000 in cash donations was made to Attention Homes, EFAA, Harvest of Hope Pantry, Rocky Mountain Riding Therapy, Sister Carmen Community Center, and Wish for Wheels following the company’s Day of Service.
About Scaled Agile, Inc.
Scaled Agile, Inc., is the provider of SAFe®, the world’s leading framework for enterprise agility. Through learning and certification, a global partner network, and a growing community of over 250,000 trained professionals, Scaled Agile helps enterprises build better systems, increase employee engagement, and improve business outcomes. Scaled Agile is a contributing member of the Pledge 1% corporate philanthropy and community service movement. Learn about Scaled Agile and SAFe at scaledagile.com and scaledagileframework.com.