This story was submitted as part of the #Pledge1Gives GivingTuesday campaign, which celebrates the many ways our member companies are having an impact around the world.

Donating time and money is an important part of Spotlight’s culture. One thing that was important to the co-founders (Rick Nash and Andrew Hsu) as we started incorporating philanthropy into our culture was making sure the causes we were donating time and money to were important to the employees of Spotlight. Rick and Andrew have causes that are important to them, but they understand the employees of Spotlight have different things they are passionate about.

What follows is a serendipitous story about two separate philanthropic efforts Spotlight worked on that ended up being connected. Last Spring, Spotlight employee (and co-chair of our philanthropy committee) Jenni Keyes signed Spotlight up to help maintain 17 garden beds that were two blocks from our office. Jenni is particularly passionate about locally grown food, so she helped lead this effort by teaching us how to prepare the garden beds, plant the sweet potatoes we grew, weed on a regular basis, and ultimately how to harvest the sweet potatoes. It was a fun, dirty, gratifying process that resulted in 550 pounds of sweet potatoes donated to Harvesters (a local food bank) in October.

In November, a few Spotlight employees volunteered at NourishKC, a community kitchen that provides meals to those in need. NourishKC is devoted to the philosophy of “dining with dignity” which means the volunteers that come to NourishKC serve the patrons as if they were in a restaurant setting. The day Spotlight was there, Linda, the woman who helped guide the volunteers through what needed to be done, talked through what was to be served that day. On the menu was a side dish of sweet potatoes Linda said came from Harvesters. The Spotlight employees shared with Linda that there was a chance the sweet potatoes being served that day were the ones we had grown in the garden by our office. We all thought it was special that not only did we grow the sweet potatoes, we had the opportunity to see what ultimately happened with them, and meet some of the people those sweet potatoes fed.

We always planned on continuing our efforts with the garden and with NourishKC, but this fun turn of events helped solidify that plan.

We work closely with PrepKC to help prepare low-income high school students for college. For two years in a row, we have hosted 25-30 students at Spotlight for a day. We taught them about Analyst Relations, shared with them the importance of virtually working with our clients, and gave them a project which showed them a real-life example of how we do work every day. This mentor program also gives students exposure to presenting, creating presentations, and researching as a part of experience they can utilize in their studies and potential future careers. This event is always well-received and we plan on continuing this for years to come.

This story was submitted as part of the #Pledge1Gives GivingTuesday campaign, which celebrates the many ways our member companies are having an impact around the world.

In 2005, I founded Language Lizard to provide creative, fun, educational products in over 50 languages to schools, libraries, and bilingual families. Our aim is to offer resources that not only enhance dual-language literacy and promote early language learning, but also teach children about other cultures and traditions, thus helping to build welcoming and inclusive classrooms.

Nearing our 15th anniversary, our Customer Outreach Representative, Nicole Smith, introduced Language Lizard to Pledge 1%. She inspired our company to make a formal commitment to supporting global literacy with a pledge of funding and time to the non-profit organization, Room to Read.

Nicole is a founding member of the New Jersey Chapter of Room to Read. Room to Read focuses on literacy and gender equality in education in 16 countries across Africa and Asia. The organization helps children learn to read and develop a love of reading from an early age. Room to Read ensures girls complete secondary school with the life skills necessary to negotiate key life decisions, be leaders in their own lives, and act as agents of change. Room to Read has benefited over 17.6 million children across 38,000 communities and aims to reach 20 million children by 2020.

Nicole has spent countless hours as a volunteer for Room to Read. Since 2011, she has run programs throughout New Jersey to enhance awareness for Room to Read’s work and to promote global giving. Nicole was familiar with Pledge 1% through her work with Room to Read and felt it was an ideal match with Language Lizard’s values and mission.

Over the last decade, Language Lizard has partnered with charitable companies and local organizations to provide literacy materials to dual language families. By joining Pledge 1%, Language Lizard is able to formalize its commitment to global giving as part of our company culture.

On Giving Tuesday 2019, Language Lizard is initiating an ongoing pledge to support Room to Read’s Book Publishing program. Through this program, Room to Read volunteers conduct writer and illustrator workshops around the world where participants learn best practices in children’s storytelling. Many of the manuscripts developed in the workshops are then produced and distributed in Room to Read school libraries. Room to Read also collaborates individually with talented authors and illustrators who create books for these libraries. Books developed in partnership with Room to Read are regularly recognized for their superior quality, winning several national book awards. In 2011, the UN acknowledged Room to Read’s contribution to children’s book publishing with the UNESCO Confucius Prize for Literacy.

To date, Room to Read has published over 1,500 original titles in 35 languages and distributed 20 million books to students. As a publisher, I love the idea of supporting writers and illustrators throughout the world, and ensuring that culturally relevant books go to children who will learn and be inspired by them.

The coming year is an exciting one for Language Lizard. We will be celebrating 15 years supporting dual language learners. We are publishing a new manual to help educators in diverse communities build welcoming and inclusive classrooms. Language Lizard will be rolling out several new educational product initiatives. I am most excited about this new collaboration to support children’s literacy around the world.

This story was submitted as part of the #Pledge1Gives GivingTuesday campaign, which celebrates the many ways our member companies are having an impact around the world.

By Xandr

Xandr is building a new kind of advertising company that leads with curiosity and courage as we move toward the future. We believe this future, and our long-term business success, is intrinsically tied to the strength and health of our communities and the world.

Xandr Cares, our company-wide Corporate Social Responsibility program, helps us create meaningful change for our communities and for our business, harnessing the passion and generosity of teammates worldwide and leveraging AT&T’s deep commitment to building a better tomorrow.

One of our most recent initiatives is the “Xandr Cares $100K Challenge.” Running throughout the month of November, we have gathered a group of employee social good champions across our global offices to advocate for causes near and dear to their hearts, including: pancreatic cancer treatment, homelessness, increased diversity and humanity in STEM, childhood education, and support for disabled veterans.

 With a total donation grant of $100,000, employees are invited to vote for the organization or cause that matters most to them, with the non-profit with the most votes receiving the largest grant. The Xandr Cares $100k Challenge not only provides meaningful contributions to non-profits worldwide, but it creates opportunities for Xandr teammates to deepen their support for the causes they care about after the campaign through volunteerism, lunch and learns, and other activations.

Watch each of the nine stories, and our campaign sizzle, here.

Learn more about Xandr Cares at www.xandr.com/social-responsibility.

This story was submitted as part of the #Pledge1Gives GivingTuesday campaign, which celebrates the many ways our member companies are having an impact around the world.

K15t, a 4 year Pledge 1% member, has teamed up with Scienta, a tech consultant company out of Norway. They put together a team of inspiring conference speakers to present at a free and local developer conference in Kathmandu.  Our team member, Sven Peters used his Pledge 1% leave time to prepare a workshop, travel to Nepal, and educate 100 developers, project managers, and team leaders working for local companies on how they can start a successful remote work career in the tech industry. A day after the conference, the team of speakers visited the Kathmandu University to learn more about the state of its developer education and to give a guest lecture to the Masters students who attend.

State of Software Development in Nepal

Software development is still a relatively young industry in Nepal. Although Kathmandu University has been teaching software engineering for over 18 years, it benefits a lot by bringing in experienced developers from abroad as guest lecturers. We had insightful discussions on how the western software industry is developing products in a practical, methodical way: Version control, deployment pipelines, serverless development, and agile development practices. It also became clear that students in Nepal can benefit a lot from these real world development experiences from companies abroad.

Continue to Help

Offering sponsored internships, exchanging experiences, and offering guest lectures can help the Nepalese software industry. Organizations like Gitlab, Trello, Zapier, Stack Overflow, and many more are fully remote companies and have proven that it shouldn’t matter where in the world we’re based as long as we have a good and stable internet connection. There’s a lack of software developers in every industry and Nepal is buzzing with great talent. We should continue to work on bridging the gap between theoretical knowledge and the practical development experience in Nepal.

This story was submitted as part of the #Pledge1Gives GivingTuesday campaign, which celebrates the many ways our member companies are having an impact around the world.

Children’s Cancer Institute (CCI) in Sydney, Australia ‘exists solely to put an end to childhood cancer’ under the guiding principal “It’s not if. It’s when”. The incredibly talented and passionate staff at CCI work tirelessly to make this vision a reality; they believe every child can be saved and work tirelessly with a focus on the patient. To increase collaboration between clinicians and researchers, CCI is currently undergoing a major organisational transformation; moving to a Comprehensive Childhood Cancer Centre (CCCC) which would mean a change of location, organisational structure, and way of working for the institute.

As part of our 1% Pledge, we worked with the CCI leadership team to help them devise a strategy for the future by, ensuring efficient allocation of resources and funding to enable the talented staff at CCI to focus on their patients in a clinical environment and continue to undertake world-class research, bringing them closer to curing cancer for children.

Venturetec worked closely with the executive team and staff across the organisation, giving them a platform to voice concerns, their vision, and where they see the biggest opportunities to be. With so many talented, and dedicated researchers in the organisation, this allowed us to deeply understand the organisation, and showcase ideas and passionate voices which may otherwise not have had a platform.

“[The diagnostic’s] findings reconfirmed a number of insights (or suspicions) we had about ourselves, our challenges, gaps and general organisational characteristics, but reinforced them in a way that fostered more constructive discussion about how to address them, including the recommendations from Venturetec…It also highlighted risks and opportunities that we hadn’t considered, or had given cursory attention to.” – Mark Bizeray, Head of Business Transformation at CCI

Through our diagnostic process we engaged with staff across the institute, with representation from all teams and levels of seniority. The resulting learnings and insights were presented back to the organisation along with a series of recommendations. Venturetec is now continuing to work with CCI to guide them through the process of implementing these recommendations, paving the way for CCI as they transition towards the Comprehensive Childhood Cancer Centre in the following years and allowing them to continue innovating and creating life-saving treatments for children with cancer.

“The recommendations translated a way forward into actionable work packages across a range of functional/strategic opportunities. The focus of the recommendations was on small quick wins, with an eye to longer term change/goals. This suited us at the present time, as a full program of changes across all recommendations would have been overwhelming for an already busy organisation.” – Mark Bizeray, Head of Business Transformation at CCI

The opportunity to work with CCI not only assisted them to do boost their internal innovation culture and capability, but uplifted our internal culture at Venturetec as well with collaboration across the whole team, and we are looking forward to our next 1% pledge project and continuing to work with CCI long into the future.

– Trey Zagante, Managing Partner at Venturetec

This story was submitted as part of the #Pledge1Gives GivingTuesday campaign, which celebrates the many ways our member companies are having an impact around the world.

By Cloudbyz

As part of Pledge 1% initiative Team Cloudbyz got together for the most fulfilling time spent on Nov 6th at Samarthanam Trust – an organization for the differently abled located at HSR Layout, Bangalore. The officer on duty at the Trust was very warm and explained about the early days of the institution and the Himalayan strides they have made with the help and support of many philanthropic minds. 

Samarthanam Trust is a registered nonprofit organisation founded in 1997 by Mahantesh G Kivadasannavar. The Trust caters to people who are differently abled, underprivileged children and women in distress. It runs schools for early phase education and provides practical support to more than 528 students in pursuing higher education each year paving the way to successful careers. The trust also promotes and participates in sports activities for the differently abled. Cricket Association for the Blind in India is one of its many sports initiatives. 

The Cloudbyz team split into various groups and engaged with students by conducting activities like drawing, clay modelling, mystery bag and other team games. There were more than 175 children aged 6 to 15 years on the day of our visit. The children thoroughly enjoyed all the activities and participated with great enthusiasm. The team was awestruck to see the children display their deftness in modelling the clay to beautiful creations and in creating colorful drawings that were picture perfect! 

The children filled the place with the spirit of living “in the moment” and brought out the child in us. We took back with us the learning that, with the right opportunities, each person on Earth can excel in their own special way. 

We signed off capturing the moments as pictures even though the experience will remain etched in our hearts forever! We thank everyone at the Trust for giving us this opportunity and allowing us to interact with the children. We look forward to continuing our association with the Trust. 

Cloudbyz is committed to help social and global communities through Pledge 1% global movement (https://pledge1percent.org/) to give back to society and bring a positive impact through Philanthropic activities. 

Message from leadership: 

While as a startup we are focused on building products and scaling our operations globally, we are also committed to giving back to the society in whatever way possible. We are delighted to be part of Pledge1% as it provides us a great framework and inspiration to actualize our philanthropic objectives – Dinesh, Founder and CEO – Cloudbyz Inc. 

Building innovative solutions and solving customer problems leveraging technology is all exhilarating but what is more rewarding, and fulfilling is being able to channel the team’s collective energy to making a difference to society even in some small way. Our heartfelt thanks to Samarthanam Trust, for allowing us to spend the day with the amazing kids. – Hariharan, Co-founder and COO- Cloudbyz. 

A day well spent is a day well lived!! – CSR by Team Cloudbyz 

This story was submitted as part of the #Pledge1Gives GivingTuesday campaign, which celebrates the many ways our member companies are having an impact around the world.

Our purpose at Charter Hall is to secure a better future for all. This year, as we celebrate #GivingTuesday, we’d like to share how we used a humble jigsaw puzzle to symbolise the grave impact violence has on women, children and families in Australia, and raise funds for domestic violence shelters.

A Pledge 1% pioneer

Charter Hall’s values focus on thinking bigger, doing better and going further to create value. Community has been a vital part of how we give back for many years. It’s incredibly important to us that we support the communities in which we operate, connect with them and positively benefit them. 

So it’s not surprising that we were the first Australian property company to join Pledge 1% in 2017, aiming to give up to one percent of our people’s time, space in our places and our profits to our community partners.  

Two Good + Charter Hall = a lot of good

One of those community partners is social enterprise, Two Good.Co which directly assists survivors and women’s refuges with the generous help of Australian culinary superstars like Neil Perry and Maggie Beer. It’s grown from an ad-hoc roadside barbeque to an organisation that delivers meals across 26 communities nationally. 

“We are delighted and privileged to partner with Two Good. We take our responsibility of giving back seriously,” says Greg Chubb, Charter Hall’s Retail CEO. “One in four women in Australia experience domestic violence at some point, and many of them end up in refuges whilst they work through this very challenging time in their lives,” 

“Two Good is doing extraordinary work in supporting these shelters and the women in them, and Charter Hall is honoured to be able to support Two Good to reach into regional Australia.”

Delivering more good than ever

Our “Delivering Good” campaign with Two Good brought a powerful social message home in a very simple way. We engaged 26 of our retail centres to raise awareness about domestic violence and the wider community’s vital role in supporting survivors to rebuild their lives by hosting giant jigsaw puzzles. Shoppers were then encouraged to add to the puzzle, symbolising the way domestic violence survivors rebuild their lives piece by piece, and the way in which the wider community can help. 

Every piece represented a meal which was donated to the local community and there were ambassadors on hand to discuss the campaign as well as the topic of domestic violence with shoppers.

“We had a lot of our tenant and retail customers engage with us on the topic of domestic violence and how important it is”, says Margot Black, Head of Sustainability and Community at Charter Hall. “They found it fantastic that we were focusing on the issue and providing education on it.” 

The twenty thousand pieces transformed into 20,000 meals for domestic violence shelters – Two Good’s biggest ever donation to date. The meals themselves went directly to shelters and refuges close to our retail centres. 

But the benefits didn’t end there. The campaign also resulted in women who had been directly affected by domestic violence being trained and employed by Two Good to deliver the meals out to communities.

Our one percent commitment

Partnerships are an important pillar of the Pledge 1% initiative at Charter Hall. We work closely with national partners and local community groups, to create a positive impact for our people, customers, environment and local communities in which we operate. 

Community involvement for us is about participating in programs and activities and services where we can touch and feel the impact we’re making. We want to create a meaningful place for our tenants to work and customers to visit, and for all our people.

Building communities of the future

Although the Delivering Good campaign may be over, our partnership with Two Good  continues to flourish. 

We introduced Two Good’s beautiful bathroom products to shoppers in our retail centres. For every product sold, we give one to a domestic violence shelter. In our offices we also have Two Good Thursdays where all catering is provided by Two Good. And we have a regular Tuesday morning breakfast, where the muesli provided to our employees across Australia are provided by Two Good as well.

Margot Black, again: “The power of community lies in finding creative and effective ways to work together. We believe we’ve found that through our partnership with Two Good and our involvement with Pledge 1%, we’re able to build stronger communities and better futures for so many Australians.”

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