Like Stakeholder Centered Coaching’s Pay It Forward program, many organizations support charitable giving. Some do so with a passion and have found that corporate charitable giving strengthens employees’ sense of purpose and importance of their contributions to the company’s success. Here are some examples.
Smith Drug Company is a pharmaceutical wholesaler headquartered in Spartanburg, South Carolina. It does nearly $3 billion per year and has 531 employees. Now retired, Ken Couch served as company president for 23 years. He remains president of the J M Smith Foundation.
According to Couch, company founder J. M. Smith, Sr. had a credo that has been passed on through the generations: “(1) Take care of your employees; they are the company. (2) Take care of the customers, both the ones we sell to and the ones we buy from. (3) Take care of finances. (4) Be a good and gracious corporate citizen.”
In the mid 1990s, the company launched the Foundation. It’s funded by a designated percentage of company profits before taxes. In addition to direct gifts to organizations such as the United Way, the Foundation matches each employee charitable gift up to a maximum of $7,000 per employee. To date, the Foundation has donated over $40 million.
Here’s how the employee match works. The employee makes a donation to the Foundation, thus giving the employee a tax deduction. The employee designates the recipient. The Foundation then makes a gift to the recipient in the employee’s name in double that amount. “It doesn’t matter what institution,” Couch says. “If the nonprofit is a 501(c)(3), we don’t question or evaluate. We simply write the check and make it clear that the gift comes from the employee.”
Reflecting on his many years as company president and Foundation president, Couch believes this program covers all four prongs of the founder’s credo. It’s made the company “a good and gracious corporate citizen.” It’s helped “take care of employees.” It’s enhanced “taking care of customers” because, Couch says, “happy employees make for happy customers.” Finally, it’s helped “take care of finances” since “happy customers are good for the bottom line.” Couch calls it a “win-win-win-win all the way around.”
When The Father’s Table was founded in 1998 in Sanford FL, the family ownership had already realized significant business success in another food related venture. The owners decided they would accept no compensation from the company, which currently has over 800 employees and generates approximately $200 million in annual revenue. Instead, 50% of the profits go directly into The Father’s Table Foundation. Over the years, the Foundation has donated over $25 million to charitable organizations around the world, with a focus on engaging, equipping and empowering disadvantaged women and children.
Company CEO and Foundation Board member Paul Rahill believes connecting company profits directly to the Foundation’s charitable mission generates a sense of purpose throughout the organization. “The mission helps us attract and retain good people, including senior executives who know and embrace the Mission with full knowledge that with the 50% profit to charity allocation, they potentially won’t earn here what they would likely earn in purely for-profit companies.”
Following the, to put it mildly, challenging 2020 year, the Father’s Table Executive Team wants to build a closer connection between the Foundation and all employees, not just those at the executive level. “We want every employee, regardless of position, wage or salary, to feel that what they do not only supports their family,” Rahill says, “it helps God’s family, others in need.” To this end, the Executive Team looks forward to hosting informal gatherings with employees to talk about the Foundation, the good work it does, and to get employee input on how to maximize their sense of connection with it.
USANA Health Sciences in Salt Lake City is an international manufacturing and marketing company of high-quality health supplements. Annual revenue exceeds $1 billion. The company has always had an ethos of giving back. In 2012, it created the USANA Foundation. Since then, the foundation has provided food and nutritional support to disadvantaged people in 37 countries around the world. The Foundation helps with immediate food needs, long-term sustainable needs, and advanced nutrition.
In addition, the company created another charitable organization, USANA Kids Eat. Its goal: to provide weekend nutritious meals to help Utah schoolchildren in disadvantaged circumstances. The schools typically provide weekday meals but there’s nothing for the weekend.
To support this effort, the company provided a 17,000 square foot building to assemble the food. It also provides transportation and covers all administrative costs. 100% of donations to the charity, a 501(c)(3), go toward food for the kids and their families. Donors are encouraged to adopt specific schools. For example, if the teachers and administrators of a certain school identify 90 needy students, 90 backpacks will be filled with nutritious food and delivered each week of the year.
USANA employees are highly engaged in these charitable endeavors, including helping assemble, package and deliver food. Moreover, approximately 50% of USANA employees have donated cash to this charity. It’s truly a holistic effort.
According to Brian Paul, president of the USANA Foundation, plans are underway to extend the USANA Kids Eat program beyond Utah. “It’s a wonderful way for the company, its employees, donors and others to come together on an important shared cause.”
Bridge Investment Group (“Bridge”) is one of the largest privately-held real estate investment management firms in the U.S., with over $25 billion in assets under management and over 4,200 employees. The firm maintains a significant focus on rehabilitating and preserving affordable housing for America’s workforce.
The firm’s Bridge Cares: COVID-19 Relief Fund was designed to help support residents during the COVID-19 Pandemic. In addition to $1 million funded out of the Bridge Workforce & Affordable Housing “Bridge Community Enhancement Initiative (BCEI)”, the partners of Bridge have personally committed $500,000 to date, with more expected to come. Bridge’s commitment includes a special and supplemental matching program funded out of the Bridge Charitable Gift Fund, in addition to the $1,000 charitable gift match provided to each employee per calendar year.
In collaboration with their non-profit partner of 25 years, Project Access, this program is structured to maximize dollars that end up directly in the hands of Bridge residents who are struggling from the economic impacts of the shutdown of nearly all businesses across the world. Bridge has also updated the Bridge COVID-19 Financial Hardship Assistance Program through this pandemic to best aid its multifamily residents through flexible rent plans and placing a moratorium on evictions, as well as launching the Bridge Employee Emergency Support Initiative to ensure all Bridge employees are safe, healthy and well taken care of through the pandemic.
Alongside Project Access, Bridge continues to support the communities in which they operate, including financial counseling, nutrition advice, college scholarships, and after-school support for its residents.
Reflecting on their charitable efforts, Charlotte Morse, head of Investor Relations at Bridge in New York City, remarked that “giving back is really part of the Bridge culture, from the bottom up. It’s inspiring to work for a company that is committed to helping others, particularly during such challenging times.”
1-800 Contacts is the largest seller of contact lenses in the U.S., serving more than 20 million customers for the last 25 years. Based in Draper, Utah, Charlotte, North Carolina, and Dallas, Texas, the company has long had a philosophy of giving back to others, and engaging employees in charitable efforts, including a pre-COVID expedition in which company employees flew to Nepal and distributed glasses to indigent villagers.
More recently, the company created a 501(c)(3) foundation. It has four points of focus: (1) Providing eye care for kids; (2) mental health assistance for people suffering from depression and other issues; (3) Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), including supporting organizations such as the Thurgood Marshall College Fund; and (4) providing local community support.
Company employees are actively involved in these efforts, including making donations of their own that the company matches dollar for dollar, and contributing time and energy, including helping assemble feminine hygiene kit and backpacks for local schools.
Post-COVID, the company plans additional charitable expeditions to other needed places around the globe. “We are in the early stages of our 501(c)(3),” states Misty Paxton, HR Director. “I envision our charitable programs continuing to grow expand and develop. I’m excited about the future.”
Peng Se Lim, who runs the company’s DEI initiative, is also excited about future work to be done. “The goal is not to get credit for our support of racial justice and equity initiatives,” he states. “It’s to make a meaningful, sustainable, lasting difference.”
Attention Coaches
What if you shared this article with your clients? Might it inspire them and their organizations to get on the giving bandwagon? The successful companies featured here demonstrate that an organized, committed, pay it forward program benefits the company, the employees and the planet. Win-Win-Win.
