Employee Engagement

Xylem colleagues toured one of YES Prep Schools facilities in Houston, TX last week in celebration of the completion of a new school building. Xylem Watermark donated to YES Prep to support building classrooms in response to the devastation from Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Xylem also participated in water monitoring educational events at the time, adding to its efforts to solve water and educate youth about water issues. YES Prep School is committed to providing students in underserved communities access to superior educational opportunities, and Xylem is proud to support this effort.

Skills-based volunteering is one of those loosely defined areas of our practice that can sometimes confuse people. I have spoken to several practitioners about their definition of skills-based volunteering and the answers are all over the map. It made me think that if we’re going to advance this practice, we’d better agree on some basics.

For Kite’s Week of Service, employees spent the day decorating for Halloween with local chapters of Boys & Girls Clubs of America in Santa Monica and Venice, which offer programs to inspire young people to reach their full potential as productive, caring and responsible citizens.

The only voice in the corporation that can authentically stand for purpose is the voice of the employee. Explore with us how companies are entering the conversation about corporate citizenship and civic engagement and how you can connect your company’s purpose and values to the activism of employees.

You’ve built a great pro bono program and you have a group of motivated nonprofit partners eager to get started, but you’re struggling to get the right employees signed up. Does this sound familiar? Taproot has seen this time and time again and wanted to share a few tactics that we’ve seen be successful.

Today, American Express, the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Main Street America announced the winners of the 2018 Partners in Preservation: Main Streets campaign. The 11 winning historic sites will receive a total of $1.6 million in grants to fund their respective preservation projects. At the outset of the campaign, an additional $400,000 was allocated to the 20 Main Street communities that participated in the program to increase public awareness of the importance of these historic places and build grassroots support for the participating Main Street districts.

212 companies—including Okta, Tiffany & Co., Rackspace® and Major League Baseball—have joined Benevity's growing community of over 500 enterprise clients since this time last year.

A solid grantmaking process is key to maximizing the social impact of your funding. Here are some tips and techniques that will help you fine-tune your process, so you can better serve non-profits and measure the impact of your foundation’s efforts.