Road-Tripping for Some Life-Changing Souvenirs

This post is by Jackie Norris, executive director, and Sarah Boison, marketing manager, of the Points of Light Corporate Institute. It is part three in a seven-part blog CSRWire series exploring the community engagement practices of winning companies in The Civic 50, an initiative launched in 2012 by Points of Light, the National Conference on Citizenship and Bloomberg. The Civic 50 identifies the top 50 community-minded S&P 500 corporations that best use their time, talent and resources to improve the quality of life in the communities where they do business.

Olivia Zanfardino

After years at various jobs, a stint in the military and volunteer experiences all over the country Olivia Zanfardino, like many young people, often asked herself, “What do I want to do with my life?”

“Throughout my years, my goal has been to live a life I truly believe in and can wake up happy to,” says 29-year-old Zanfardino, who is now a business student at University of Phoenix, a subsidiary of Apollo Education Group. “Now that I’ve settled in one city, I’m still doing that. I recently quit my job to focus on finding a career that I enjoy.”

Zanfardino, of Pasadena, Calif., credits Roadtrip Nation for helping her get to this critical point.

Roadtrip Nation, a California-based nonprofit career exploration organization and a series on PBS, believes that students can learn about different career opportunities, lifestyles and philosophies through road trips. The organization captures the stories of young adults as they embark on cross-country self-discovery journeys in a green RV.

The “roadtrippers” stop in various cities to interview professionals in different fields who have turned their passions into careers. By learning from those who have gone before them, the roadtrippers are inspired to take the next steps in their own lives to pursue their ambitions.

A New Way of Learning

Since 2010, the University of Phoenix Foundation, founded by Apollo Education Group, and Roadtrip Nation have worked together to serve nontraditional students with learning experiences that can help link interests and studies to real-world careers. A nontraditional student may be someone who delayed enrollment, attends school part time, works full time, has dependents, did not finish high school or has a GED instead of a high school diploma.

From left, Olivia Zanfardino and “Roadtrip Nation” castmates, Tele’jon Quinn and Ed Whittle pose with the University of Phoenix mascot on campus.

“We started Roadtrip Nation because we didn’t feel like there were any resources in school that could truly empower students to explore what was possible for their future,” says co-founder Mike Marriner. “That was the genesis of our first road trip, to get outside our comfort zones and connect with leaders to learn how they got to where they are today.”

Now it’s time for the next step.

The advice leaders share during the road trips will be featured in a curriculum developed by Roadtrip Nation and made available to University of Phoenix students and nearly a million alumni. The goal is to encourage adults to engage in a new way of learning that utilizes self-reflection exercises and real-world exposure through Roadtrip Nation’s vast interview archive. With this help, individuals may identify their interests and discover compatible educational and career pathways.

“Roadtrip Nation is all about career exploration and we’re all about education to careers, so what better way to have a partnership than to marry our interests and illustrate pathways to careers?” says Pat Gottfried, vice president of corporate social responsibility for Apollo Education Group.

The curriculum will explore themes relevant to adults, such as single parenting, drug addiction and recovery, veteran integration and more. The curriculum will also enable students to share their own “Roadtrips” to success and share the map they used to get there.

“We get to ask leaders … how they got to where they are and what inspires them to be where they are now,” says Zanfardino, who appeared on season 11 of the “Roadtrip Nation” PBS series. She hopes the wisdom of leaders will guide her in making decisions that reflect her values and goals.

Roadtrip Nation programs already have a proven track record of improving student behavior and performance. According to a 2012 study conducted by the Educational Policy Improvement Center, Roadtrip Nation students demonstrated marked improvement in self-efficacy and increased their GPAs at twice the rate of non-Roadtrip Nation students over a nine-month period.

Commitment to Career Readiness

Through strategic grant making, scholarships and volunteerism, Apollo Education Group continues to work to expand access to education by supporting nonprofit partners focused on areas such as lifelong education and career readiness. Their commitment to organizations like Roadtrip Nation is one of the reasons why Apollo Education Group was ranked #1 in Strategic Investment from The Civic 50, a ranking of America’s most community-minded companies.

The strategic investment dimension evaluates how a company leverages resources from other institutions and provides skills-based or pro bono volunteer support and strategic grant making for maximum benefit to nonprofits. In the past year, for example, Apollo Education Group provided resources to organizations such as the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, the American Red Cross, Clean Tech Open, Junior Achievement, National Park Foundation, Jobs for the Future, America’s Promise Alliance, Jobs for America’s Graduates and DonorsChoose.org.  

Additionally, every employee at Apollo Education Group is provided with two paid days per year that they can use to volunteer at charities of their choice. And the numbers have been spectacular.

In 2013, employees donated more than 67,000 hours of service, valued at $1.2 million; the majority supported education-related causes. Even University of Phoenix students and alumni got involved by identifying companies and individuals across the country for road-trippers to consider.

By bringing the real world into the classroom and helping students match their personal interests to potential careers, the University of Phoenix Foundation and Roadtrip Nation hope to increase the relevance of students’ studies and keep young people engaged in their futures.

Making the connection is critical. As Gottfried puts it, “This experience will help provide invaluable tools, resources and inspiration for young adults out there still struggling to understand how to turn their passions and interests into a meaningful career.”

More Kids Have Books to Read Because of What This Company Did

This post is by Jackie Norris, executive director, and Yvonne Siu Turner, senior manager, corporate resources and programs, of the Points of Light Corporate Institute. It is part two in a seven-part blog CSRWire series exploring the community engagement practices of winning companies in The Civic 50, an initiative launched in 2012 by Points of Light, the National Conference on Citizenship and Bloomberg. The Civic 50 identifies the top 50 community-minded S&P 500 corporations that best use their time, talent and resources to improve the quality of life in the communities where they do business.

Do you remember your favorite children’s book? Was it “Goodnight Moon,” “Where the Wild Things Are” or “James and the Giant Peach”? For many of us, being read to by our parents is a fond childhood memory, and something that also got us on the right track for success later in life.

In many parts of the country, however, millions of children in low-income families have no access to books. They haven’t been exposed to reading aloud. And when they start kindergarten, they’re not on the same playing field as the other kids in their class.

A Literacy Crisis

Addressing this literacy crisis is something Bring Me A Book is dedicated to solving. By creating age-appropriate school libraries and organizing workshops, the California-based nonprofit provides access to new books to underserved schools, and helps parents and teachers understand the importance of reading aloud to children every day.

But as is often debated scale is critical for nonprofit initiatives to thrive and maximize their impact, which is where the private sector can step in and help. Bring Me A Book is no exception, and recently welcomed support from Morgan Stanley to think strategically about how they could reach more children – but the financial services company didn’t just write a check.

In their latest Strategy Challenge pro bono volunteer competition, a team of finance and legal professionals from Morgan Stanley worked with Bring Me A Book to provide recommendations for an ambitious expansion of its programs through digital media using new technology and training for parents and caregivers.

“Bring Me A Book is walking away from this experience with a blueprint for our future work that we believe is game changing in the field of early literacy. We now have an actionable plan that has all of the components for success: an understanding of our market, potential partners and a resourcing model that will immediately allow us to offer increased book access programs to support our preschool families in California,” said Mialisa Bonta, executive director of Bring Me A Book.

The Strategy Challenge wasn’t only a game-changer for Bring Me A Book, it was also a transformative experience for Morgan Stanley’s volunteers.

As Meryl Craig, an associate with Morgan Stanley who participated on the team providing pro bono strategic consulting to Bring Me A Book, put it, “Strategy Challenge was an incredible opportunity to collaborate with an inspiring organization. Bring Me A Book now has additional tools to help them combat early childhood illiteracy, and they have implemented our final recommendation to pursue the use of digital media. Seeing the continued impact of Morgan Stanley’s work in the local community is truly rewarding.”

Over the past five years, Morgan Stanley’s Strategy Challenge has delivered more than 32,500 hours, valued at about $4.9 million, to 61 nonprofit organizations.

“Morgan Stanley employees value the Strategy Challenge because it’s a special opportunity to give back to their community while leveraging their own talent and expertise. We work together with the nonprofit participants to navigate significant programmatic issues like scalability, geographic expansion and organizational optimization,” said Joan Steinberg, head of Morgan Stanley Community Affairs and president of the Morgan Stanley Foundation.

Recognizing Morgan Stanley’s Organizational Commitment to Community

That is just one reason why Morgan Stanley was ranked #1 in Organizational Commitment from The Civic 50, a ranking of America’s most community-minded companies. The Organizational Commitment dimension evaluates the scope of a company’s community engagement program, such as how broad-based employee involvement; community investment, advocacy and leadership are in the program.

At Morgan Stanley, community engagement is seen as much more than traditional philanthropy. A critical and integrated part of leadership development for the firm, engagement is about using distinctive competencies to increase the impact of nonprofits. 

Even more critically, the firm focuses on long-term partnerships, creating year over year value: Morgan Stanley doesn’t just want to help charities; it wants to make them stronger. To do so, the firm has created a broad continuum of programming from high volume projects like Global Volunteer Month, to high impact initiatives like Strategy Challenge and its Nonprofit Leaders Program, which trains its most senior officers to be better nonprofit board members.

Like the firm’s support of the New York-Presbyterian Hospital Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital. The hospital was founded in 2003 with employees raising $62 million for its Building Campaign – an unprecedented effort in New York City. Nearly 1,000 employees volunteer at MSCH throughout the year, collecting books or entertaining children at the annual carnival or pirate costume party.

Late last year, Morgan Stanley also organized a five-week celebration of the hospital’s 10th anniversary as one of the top children’s hospitals in the U.S. The firm hosted a speaker series with leading physicians and invited employees to volunteer with child life specialists to visit and entertain children at the hospital.

“Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital is a cornerstone of the firm’s global commitment to children’s health,” says Steinberg. “The 10th anniversary celebration was an opportunity to better understand and appreciate what the Hospital does for thousands of families in the community, including our own, and what the firm’s 40-year-long relationship with New York-Presbyterian will mean for future generations.”

To read the original post on CSRWire, click here.

A Storyteller Uses Her Skills to Help the Hungry and More

This post is by Yvonne Siu Turner, senior manager of corporate resources and programs at the Points of Light Corporate Institute.

Jasmine Youssefzadeh had a passion for storytelling, and she knew she wanted to incorporate that passion into a business that was dedicated to creating social good.

Looking for inspiration, she went to the HUB LA, a business accelerator and support group for the Los Angeles startup scene, and met Matthew Manos, the founder of verynice, a design consultancy that gives half of its work away pro bono to nonprofits. When Youssefzadeh heard about the social impact Manos was having with his unique approach to business and social causes, she knew she had found her inspiration and the business model for her social venture. 

A year after that initial meeting, Youssefzadeh founded filmanthropos, a creative agency that specializes in digital media storytelling for causes, nonprofits and corporate social responsibility programs. Through stories, the company humanizes social issues and develops cause marketing that builds awareness. Even as a new startup, filmanthropos’ clients include the Boys & Girls Club of Santa Monica, the Children’s Bureau of Southern California and the Zimmer Children’s Museum.   

To meet the goal of giving half of her organization’s work away for free, Youssefzadeh doubles filmanthropos’ workload and taps into a network of local volunteers to staff pro bono projects. In the company’s first year, Youssefzadeh was able to recruit 16 pro bono volunteers and take on 15 pro bono projects to meet local needs.

More than that — Youssefzadeh and her team place heavy emphasis on creative initiatives. For Pro Bono Week 2013, they completed their first pro bono “ProduceAthon.” A work-around-the-clock creative blitz, the “ProduceAthon” helped a nonprofit tell its story, highlighting the organization’s impact, in a short film produced entirely over 24 hours. The outcome of the event was a 60-second motion-graphic video created for Swipes for the Homeless, a nonprofit focused on alleviating hunger. 

 “Our volunteers pitched in and helped with scripting, storyboarding, shooting, animation, audio production, editing and more,” says Youssefzadeh.

And Dasha Orlova, filmanthropos’ creative director, recalls: “My favorite memory of the project was when we were doing a stop-motion scene outside, moving fruit a half-inch at a time. Everybody who walked by wanted to know what we were doing.”

For filmanthropos’ staff, the pro bono project was not only an opportunity to lend their professional skills to a good cause; it was also a fun team-building experience. “The most gratifying part was the bonding experience,” says Orlova. “You get to know other volunteers very well when you’re all together for 24 hours straight and your one goal is to produce a video.”

The pro bono marathon also generated media coverage for filmanthropos and helped the company develop its client base.

For Rachel Sumekh, executive director of Swipes for the Homeless, a program that enables college students to donate their excess meal points to buy food for those in need, the ProduceAthon was a huge boon.

“The video helps us communicate the impact of our work, makes our organization look edgier and has already helped drive more traffic to our website” says Sumekh, Swipes for the Homeless’ sole staff person. “We often don’t qualify for services from larger foundations or companies, but with filmanthropos’ focus on smaller nonprofits, we could.” 

Watch the video that filmanthropos created for Swipes on YouTube. Interested in applying for filmanthropos’ next “ProduceAthon” in March? Email [email protected].