By Tommy Jarvis, FinancialForce4Good Council Chair
Here at FinancialForce, I can’t think of a better way to celebrate the closing of our 2016 volunteerism efforts than to announce our formal commitment to the Pledge 1% community and their efforts to build a movement of corporate philanthropy.
From its inception in 2009, corporate social responsibility, and the philanthropic leadership of the 1/1/1 model led by Salesforce, has been a top priority for FinancialForce. This was viewed on day one when our co-founder and CEO Jeremy Roche initiated FinancialForce4Good, the philanthropic wing of FinancialForce. The vision of this initiative has always been rooted in the belief that we are stronger and more effective when we work together. Therefore, FinancialForce, via FinancialForce4Good, is committed to provide our employees and non-profit partners the resources to maximize the collective impact of their efforts.
Over the past seven years our work to address social causes in our communities and improve lives of others by harnessing the talents, passions, and generosity of FinancialForce employees, partners, and customers has grown tremendously. Whether it was collaborating with our closest partner Salesforce on a number of events (ranging from a National Park cleanup in the San Francisco Bay Area, the Wine to Waves Ride to benefit MS research, or processing food at the Central Texas Food Bank) or raising funds for some of our beneficiary NPO partners (ex. St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in the US or St. Michael’s Hospice in the UK), we are committed to making a positive impact in our communities.
Recently FinancialForce has taken a number of exciting steps to ensure that we are maximizing that impact. First, we have formally “Taken the Pledge” to commit to giving at least 1% of our employee time for our community. This has long been a goal of ours, but we wanted to formalize this commitment via Pledge1Percent.org not only to celebrate our current efforts, but also to collaborate with other pledged members to grow our Pledge of 1% to equity, profit, and/or product in the future.
Second, and perhaps most importantly, FinancialForce4Good has put forth a new charter of our philanthropic efforts. Now, for the first time since its founding, FinancialForce4Good will be governed by a diverse group of employee volunteers. Tasked with maximizing the resources we provide our employees and partners to achieve the most impact, the Council took on the unique experiment to ask our employees directly where we should focus these efforts and we collectively selected Underserved Youth Education to focus the majority of our efforts.
In conclusion, it is an exciting time to be at FinancialForce and we are excited to leverage the continued leadership of the Pledge 1% corporate community and our partnership with Salesforce to achieve even greater philanthropic success in 2017.
Originally posted: November 30, 2016
