An employee volunteer program is any formally organized effort by a company to motivate its staff...
One of the most popular service pillars for corporations in the United States is helping community members with food insecurity. Some companies give funding, but more give time. Engaging corporate volunteers in hunger relief programs is essential for nonprofits working in the basic needs sector as a result.
Communities are fighting hunger everywhere. Over 49 million Americans turned to food relief services in 2022, in every single county in the United States. Those hunger relief agencies depend on volunteers to help gather food donations, distribute the food, and raise funding and donations for their causes.
Corporations play a large part in helping these types of charities. But the volunteer management processes can be onerous and time consuming. New tools and resources can help streamline systems across the volunteer lifecycle, from recruitment, to training, project implementation and evaluation. Here we’ll give you some of the top tips toward improving engagement.
The Benefits of Involving Corporations in Hunger Relief
Hunger affects everyone. At least one in six children are hungry on a consistent basis in the United States. This statistic has barely shifted up or down since tracking tools have been in place for decades now.
The reality is that there will always be community members who are struggling, regardless of their backgrounds. Social security nets may exist, such as school lunch programs and food stamps, but it is usually up to the community itself to help those most in need with additional resources.
For over a hundred years, corporations have played a central role in taking the lead on community giving and volunteering for hunger relief. This engrained structure has a myriad of benefits for all of the stakeholders involved.
For the Community
Hunger ultimately perpetuates the cycle of poverty for the most vulnerable.
Hunger most drastically affects children, limiting their life opportunities and causing both physical and mental problems. It impairs cognitive development, making it more difficult to get ahead in school. According to World Vision UK, some nutrient deficiencies can cause irreversible brain damage. It also lowers the immune system, leading families to spend more on health care resources in the long run.
Seniors are also at risk, especially given inflation and the rise in food prices and living costs over the past few years. Hungry seniors are often isolated and have limited capacity for transportation. They need targeted relief services.
For the Company
Corporate volunteering has a number of benefits for the corporation involved in the work. Just some include:
- Improved employee attitudes and morale, which in turn improves retention of the best employees..
- A stronger perception of the corporation by the community.
- It can improve certain soft-skills (i.e. team building, leadership, and communication) for employees.
Every company can get behind helping the most vulnerable amongst us. Food relief is an issue that transcends political opinions and world views. This is likely why it is one of the most common corporate volunteering pillars in the world.
For Employees
People increasingly want to work for “purpose-driven” companies. Doing so has a number of benefits to their personal development and wellbeing. A few include:
- New skills and opportunities to add to a resume that go beyond workplace requirements.
- A way to integrate hobbies into the work environment to make the job more enjoyable.
- Stress management, as giving back to the community through volunteering has been proven to lower blood pressure and support better wellbeing.
Some Strategies for Engaging Corporate Volunteers in Hunger Relief
There are dozens of ways that companies can structure their corporate volunteer programs for supporting hunger relief. Which ones are the most effective, however, especially given the new suite of tech tools that top volunteer management platforms offer? How can you best engage volunteers to work for causes and maximize their personal benefits, while streamlining administration?
Partnering with Local Organizations
The best strategy for corporations is to partner with local nonprofit organizations that have missions for hunger relief. They need help and likely already have connections to the most vulnerable community members. They run soup kitchens, distribution and delivery services for families and the elderly, and farm pick-up and no-waste programs to fill their pantry shelves.
Volunteer management platforms have made it much easier to identify, vet and partner with the best local organizations that align with a corporation’s goals. Golden, for instance, enables companies to search for open postings with the top food relief agencies in the country. These include Feed America and the United Way, which both have local chapters nearly everywhere.
The system makes it simple for companies to align their CSR goals with organizational goals and track impact metrics while automating processes. Golden can organize and collate surveys for volunteer employees to understand their learning and engagement from their volunteering experiences. Doing so adds a new level of depth to evaluation, without the admin time.
Organizing Food Drives
Many local organizations and food pantries can use help with organizing and administering food drives. Golden helps streamline this process by syncing calendars/scheduling processes for events and automating invitations to different pools of volunteers to participate in the events.
Offering Paid Volunteer Days
One of the best ways for engaging corporate volunteers in hunger relief is offering volunteer time off policies, paying them for their volunteer work basically. These types of systems help employees feel valued and give a greater sense that they’re working for a purpose-driven company.
The corporation can offer specific work opportunities, or simply allow employees to choose their volunteer work and request time off. Either way, tools like Golden’s time-tracking via mobile application can help ease the administrative burden of logging time and impact metrics from the volunteer work.
Team-Building Activities
Corporations can utilize volunteer opportunities to improve team-building skills. Many companies are all virtual now or mostly virtual, with limited opportunity for employees to meet up and work together. Volunteering together on a mission to make a holiday dinner for a community organization’s food relief program, for example, could be a great way to remedy that isolation.
A Few Engagement Success Stories
Here are just a few illustrative examples of how leading hunger relief nonprofits and their chapters and affiliates are engaging corporate volunteers.
- Food Gatherers. A partner food bank of Feeding America in Michigan, Food Gatherers focuses on a specific engagement strategy for team building. They ask corporations to supply volunteer groups of up to 25 to help with a day of service at their warehouse, when they know that large shipments will be arriving. Groups can also sign up to work together as teams at annual special events.
- United Way and Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo works with United Way to collect 250,000 pounds of food for chapter food banks and “mobile pop-up” food banks. United Ways utilize tools like Golden to post events and help streamline invitations to networks of employee volunteers for corporations like Wells Fargo. More than half of Fortune 500 companies choose United Ways as their volunteering partners.
- Midwest Food Bank. One of the most extensive hunger relief agencies in the United States, Midwest Food Bank has taken advantage of Golden’s tools to improve their volunteer engagement capacity. Now, the organization is saving over 400 hours of administrative time per chapter. They are also able to quickly mobilize corporate and other community volunteers with automation tools and templates to different audiences to staff disaster relief shifts within 24 hours.
Fighting More Hunger with Better Engagement of Corporate Volunteer Programs
With tens of millions of people experiencing hunger in the United States alone, every day, it is safe to say that more needs to be done to alleviate the problem. Luckily, new tech tools enabled with automation and other AI tools for prediction and analysis have made volunteer engagement and management more efficient, to produce more work with less time and effort.
With the best volunteer management tools like Golden, Volunteer managers from corporate offices and nonprofits can more easily connect resources to needs. Then they spend less time on administration, from background checks to training to onboarding and scheduling, to then get automated impact results for their volunteer events.
Automation and AI are the keys to engaging corporate volunteers in hunger relief in more targeted and impactful ways. As more companies and nonprofits connect to these resources, we will begin to see stronger results in finally fighting hunger across the country.
