COVID-19 Gives Rise to the Dynamic Corporate Community Program
By Sabrina El-Chibini, Founding CEO, The Collaboration Vector Inc.
How is COVID-19 changing corporate community programs?
The Collaboration Vector Inc. is working more closely than ever with agile non-profit partners that are enabling our corporate clients to efficiently reach community members at a time of greatest need.
Well poised to deliver products and services in “the last mile” of the supply chain, non-profit partners have existing infrastructures, hold databases of
needs, and an established track record in reaching most vulnerable community members. With this efficiency in mind, we have been collaborating on what is possible relative to what is needed to facilitate immediate and pragmatic solutions. Every action during COVID-19, is having a huge impact.
Over the past two weeks, by adapting plans that were in place pre-COVID-19, one corporate client was able to offer relief to a non-profit partner whose important mission was at immediate risk and a second whose members' safety was severely compromised by the current situation. The company quickly repatriated funds recently provided to a third partner so that the non-profit can deliver food to community members who may not have been able to afford it otherwise.
Below are examples of creative non-profit partners who have quickly adapted their product and service delivery models in order to pursue important missions and/or temporarily adjusted their focus to fill basic needs in the community. In every case, they had pre-existing long-term partnerships with corporate clients. This helped them keep their own teams fully or partially employed, albeit working from a largely virtual environment like most of us. In certain cases, employees raised more money to assist the non-profits in meeting very specific needs, such as feed one family for 2 weeks.
Ensuring youth with cancer aren’t neglected during COVID-19
In Montreal, non-profit VOBOC is collaborating with in-hospital teams to provide essential support to adolescents and young adults just diagnosed with cancer. VOBOC is delivering free backpacks to oncology units to give to their new cancer patients on their first day of treatment. Each of these contains practical items, tools and resources to help patients navigate through the cancer treatment experience.
Providing a welcoming home for 16 girls
Sor Dominga Bocca in Ecuador is providing food and shelter to 16 girls who had been forced to leave their homes for a variety of reasons, pre-COVID-19. The girls are being cared for by a volunteer who stays with them day and night. They are sharing meals, exercising, learning to plant home gardens and attending mass on TV. Volunteer family and change management educators are providing virtual live motivational programming, including a special program to strengthen emotional skills and help the girls overcome difficult times. Members of Sor Dominga’s Board of Directors are in touch with the girls by phone and corporate volunteers are checking in on them regularly. One of the girls is graduating from high school this semester.
Pursuing environmental awareness and education
Dream in Green’s mission is to empower individuals, especially youth, to lead in the response to climate change and other environmental challenges facing South Florida. With a focus on environmental education, the organization is curating lessons, resources, websites, and videos for teachers’, students’, and parents’ distance learning needs during COVID-19. Dream in Green has made proprietary environmental education resources available to all employees of a major corporate client, so that parents who wish to do so, can engage with their children in distance learning about the environment and ways to care for it.
We are in gratitude to business and non-profit partners who are rising to this challenge with inspiring stories of agility, creativity, unity and unprecedented levels of collaboration.
