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Like most people I love Fridays. But last Friday was an especially good day. Because I spent the day with a team of volunteers at Dress For Success, a gutsy little NGO that helps prepare the least advantaged women to enter the workforce with confidence and courage.
Together we unpacked and sorted clothes as well as provided styling suggestions to ladies to prepare them for their first nerve-wracking interview. Amazingly, I was just one of hundreds of salesforce.com volunteers helping out across Australia and around the world to celebrate the company’s 15th Birthday on 7 March.
To mark this special milestone our CEO Marc Benioff had called for a ‘Global 1/1/1 Day’. From Tokyo to Toronto we rolled up our sleeves and got to work. What a joy it was to let everyone know via my out of office that I was celebrating our birthday with a day of volunteering.
Since the company’s inception, Salesforce.com has followed a 1% model - a promise to donate 1 percent of equity, 1 percent of employee' time and 1 percent of the firm's products to community organisations. As a Salesforce.com employee this means I get 6 days a year to volunteer with whomever I choose. What's more incredible is when I complete the 6 days, I’m rewarded with a $1000 grant to give to any charity I like. My choice last year was Kids Xpress, an NGO that provides support for kids with emotional trauma.
To date I’ve worked on a Youth Development program called BizAcademy, volunteered with an NGO in Vietnam and helped out at Sydney Homeless Connect. And what I love most, is that volunteering is just something we all do, no questions asked. Our culture of community service is a strong and visible part of our identity as a business. It’s backed by our leadership and one of the main reasons I think we are the best place to work in the world.
On Friday Salesforce Australia staff volunteered almost 700 volunteering hours to inspiring NGOs including:
North West Disability Services
Why not celebrate with us and volunteer 1% of your time to one of these great causes? Your 1% is their everything.
To learn more about the Salesforce volunteering programs visit www.salesforcefoundation.org or contact Foundation Coordinator Davinder Mann at dmann@salesforce.com
