Volunteering & Community

Keep America Beautiful, the nation’s iconic community improvement nonprofit organization, has selected 11 high school students from across the country to serve on its seventh national Youth Advisory Council. Keep America Beautiful’s National Youth Advisory Council provides a unique opportunity for high school students to participate in a service-learning and leadership development program focusing on environmental stewardship and sustainability.

Pro Bono is a fancy term for donating your unique skill set — as an engineer, program manager, salesperson, and more — to partner with nonprofit organizations and help take their impact to the next level. It’s an opportunity to sharpen leadership skills while also making a meaningful impact in your community or around the world. Over the past year, employees from Cisco Global Virtual Sales and Customer Success answered the call to “donate your skills, not just your time.”

El Departamento de Estado de los Estados Unidos, el World Environment Center (WEC), Le Groupe-conseil baastel Itée (Baastel) y RioSlum Studio se enorgullecen en anunciar a los nuevos miembros de La Red de Innovación e Impacto (La Red), una red internacional de organizaciones innovadoras que apoyan micro, pequeñas y medianas empresas (MiPyMEs) con el fin de fomentar el crecimiento económico sostenible y la prosperidad en América Latina. Estos nuevos miembros fueron seleccionados a través del concurso internacional: El Poder de Crecer.

Hunger. It has crept into our cities. It has found a way into our neighborhoods. It’s affecting the lives of millions of men, women and children domestically and internationally, cementing itself as a real threat to our well-being.

See, hunger isn’t prejudiced. It doesn’t care about gender, age or ethnicity. Hunger doesn’t know if you are homeless or a part of the working class. It only has one job, and it performs it very well.

Twenty-one Indiana nonprofit organizations are receiving $315,000 in Duke Energy Foundation grants to make a difference in their communities. Their projects range from a holiday food drive for the needy in Howard County to Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra concerts for elementary students from around the state.

Young people are told that if they want to retire comfortably, they need to start saving a little money early in life. Deposits, even with low interest rates, over time, add up to surprisingly large yields of cash.
This same concept can be applied to trees. The “deposits” are trees planted, and the yields are the myriad benefits trees provide.

Last year we debuted a concept called The Knitting Factor, which helps explain how skills-based volunteering knits together the expertise from the corporate and nonprofit sectors to create sustainable solutions that don’t come undone when partners part ways. We also introduced three key ingredients to the success of The Knitting Factor: Panoramic Perspectives, Skill Sharing and Sticky Relationships. In celebration of Pro Bono Week, we wanted to share a quick review of how the Knitting Factor has worked in practice over the past year.

Last week, we partnered with Stanford Social Innovation Review, Charles Schwab and Boys & Girls Club of America to host a webinar around creating long-term sustainable partnerships, or what we refer to as sticky relationships. As a follow up to our webinar, our Senior Consultant, Season Eckardt sat down to reflect on the role she played to deepen the impact of this partnership and help Boys & Girls Club chapters across the US operationalize a common strategic vision.

The term “capacity-building” tends to be thrown around quite a bit in the nonprofit sector. And as jargon, it has the unfortunate fate of being pretty obscure outside of our sector—not to mention losing its meaning when overused within the field. But at the heart of it, nonprofit capacity-building is one of the most exciting and inspirational ways to support an issue. Quite simply, it’s about achieving a multiplier effect—creating more change in the world by helping to strengthen the organizations that are tackling society’s greatest challenges. At Taproot, we are driven by a strong belief in the exponential impact that can come from supporting nonprofits in this way.

Verizon offers free Innovative Learning labs in 36 stores across the United States. It is part of the company’s commitment to invest $400 million from 2012 to 2023 to bring tech education programs to millions of students. The Verizon Innovative Learning labs offer technology-focused lessons created by Project Lead the Way (PLTW), a leading educational nonprofit that empowers students to develop and apply in-demand, transportable skills by exploring real-world challenges.