How We at Healthcare IT Leaders Give Back to the Community

Written By Jaime Grimes
cares HIT
HIT employees tie a Christmas tree to someone’s car.

We’re on a mission to give back to the community we work in, and we base it on the Salesforce.com Foundation’s 1/1/1 model.

The Salesforce.com 1/1/1 philanthropic approach leverages the company’s “people, technology and resources to build collective knowledge and enable action to improve communities throughout the world.” In essence, Salesforce.com helps its people find meaningful ways to volunteer in their local communities, donates and discounts products to help nonprofits and makes grants with a focus on employee/team-volunteering activities and matching gifts.

Like Salesforce.com, Healthcare IT Leaders and its parent company established the Cares Program to promote the humanity of employees, foster teamwork and help community members live better, healthier lives through volunteerism and charitable giving.

Through our Cares Program, we support charitable causes, comprised of individual and group volunteer activities, with a preference toward organizations located in the communities where our employees work and causes that focus on children, education or health and human services.

“We have all been overly fortunate in our professional lives, so as we founded our company, we followed Marc Benioff’s lead at Salesforce.com to create a program that truly gives back to the communities we serve,” said Bob Bailey, Principal of Healthcare IT Leaders. “We are proud of our Cares initiative and see it as a primary tenet of our culture.”

Here’s how our Cares Program works:

  • The Cares Committee, made up of non-executive employees, selects charitable causes and at least one major volunteer activity/outing per quarter.
  • The company offers up to four hours PTO per quarter for personal volunteer endeavors.
  • Select charities – chosen by employees annually – receive an annual 1 percent net income donation.

In 2013, we supported projects from Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Camp Sunshine, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, MUST Ministries, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, North Fulton Community Charities and Christmas Tree Santas. For these events, we made 200 ham sandwiches for hungry children in Atlanta; donated camp supplies to children with cancer; played softball (badly) for the Wish for Wendy tournament; and donated Christmas gifts to children with cancer, food for an area food bank and nearly 600 Christmas trees to needy families in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Georgia and North Carolina.

Cheers to a year filled with “Cares,” and we look forward to even more giving 2014!

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