Corporates Pledge Support for National Volunteer Week
5 May 2017 at 9:41 am
Corporate employees are being called on in their thousands to Take the Volunteer Pledge ahead of National Volunteer Week.
The campaign, launched by social enterprise GoodCompany, aims to encourage more people to make a difference by volunteering their time and talent for the community.
It also promises to connect charities with thousands of skilled and general volunteers.
GoodCompany chief executive officer Ash Rosshandler said they were committed to increasing volunteering take up with a concrete call to action encouraging all of their partners to get their staff on board.
“Approximately 200,000 staff will be asked to Take the Volunteer Pledge during National Volunteer Week, which delivers our charity partners thousands of skilled and general volunteers,” Rosshandler said.
GoodCompany, which was founded in 1999 as one of Australia’s first skilled volunteer portals, supports more than 1,500 charities and has facilitated over 177,000 volunteer hours, engaged over 50,000 members and disbursed nearly $8 million to charities.
Rosshandler said the number of people submitting applications and volunteering for roles through GoodCompany had increased by 23 per cent since last year, supplying an increasing number of corporate partners with “meaningful ways for their staff to give to causes they care about”.
He said volunteering was about ordinary people coming together to do extraordinary things.
“That’s the magic of volunteering. It may be just a few hours or a day of your time, but the impact on the community will often be felt long after then,” he said.
National Volunteer Week is the largest celebration of volunteers and volunteerism in Australia, and provides an opportunity to highlight the role of volunteers in the community and to say thank you to the more than six million Australians who volunteer.
It runs from 8 to 14 May with thousands of events taking place across the country.
