This piece is shared as part of Pledge 1%’s #GivingTuesdayNow campaign, which highlights how Pledge 1% members and the business community are coming together as a force for good to combat COVID-19.
Giving is part of what we do every day at B1G1. But today, it is even more important.
In fact, we’ve been working for 12 years to make giving – specifically effective giving – part of what businesses around the world do. Our mission is to enable and empower all kinds of businesses to celebrate their wins by giving regularly to projects they want to support. We work with cafés giving access to water for every coffee they sell. We work with consulting firms that help educate disadvantaged children for every successful meeting they have…
But what happens when businesses are hit by unexpected challenges?
The impact of this pandemic has been huge to our own business too.
Many of our members – businesses that participate in our initiative – have faced significant challenges. As a social enterprise, we have suffered the consequence of this pandemic in various ways. To our dismay, the major conference we were planning to have this July was postponed. It just didn’t seem like the best time to be talking about giving – when so many of our members and partners were having challenges of their own.
And yet, here is what we, actually our team, did as we entered the downturn:
We hired additional team members
Our team has taken this time of remote work and quieter period to execute on some of our important projects. For so long, we wanted to bring in more team members so that we could accomplish more. But finding the right people and onboarding them seemed overwhelming when we were so busy with our day-to-day work. The pandemic gave us a chance to do this and we discovered that we could still attract and bring in good people working remotely. We have never changed our stance to take care of our team members first. They are like our family members.
We connected with our partners even more
It’s easy to get bogged down in our own challenges. Yet when we look outward, we can always find those who may face greater challenges than us. So, our team reached out to all of our charity partners first to see how they were all doing. As a result, we discovered some additional ways we could help them. Our members can now support women in Kenya to sew thousands of reusable masks to protect people in their communities, or give much-needed meals to families in quarantine in the Philippines, or even help equip community clinics and health workers in disadvantaged communities. By having more intimate conversations with many of our business members, we realized that the spirit of giving is still there, strongly.
We increased our giving
Just like what we help our members coordinate, our own business has regular giving activities. With new team members onboard and having the time to re-think everything we do, we decided to engage the team more in the planning of our giving. Now, each team member is given a budget to add additional giving to their own wins.
We think the occasional reminders like #GivingTuesdayNow can help all businesses re-think the purpose of their own business and renew their goals.
Because now, that giving spirit is needed more than ever.
