Cisco Employees Donate Their Skills and Their Time

Pro Bono is a fancy term for donating your unique skill set — as an engineer, program manager, salesperson, and more — to partner with nonprofit organizations and help take their impact to the next level. It’s an opportunity to sharpen leadership skills while also making a meaningful impact in your community or around the world. Over the past year, employees from Cisco Global Virtual Sales and Customer Success answered the call to “donate your skills, not just your time.”

The Knitting Factor: Tying It All Together in Celebration of Pro Bono Week

Last year we debuted a concept called The Knitting Factor, which helps explain how skills-based volunteering knits together the expertise from the corporate and nonprofit sectors to create sustainable solutions that don’t come undone when partners part ways. We also introduced three key ingredients to the success of The Knitting Factor: Panoramic Perspectives, Skill Sharing and Sticky Relationships. In celebration of Pro Bono Week, we wanted to share a quick review of how the Knitting Factor has worked in practice over the past year.

Learning From Real-life Examples: Collaborating to Design a Boys & Girls Club Playbook

Last week, we partnered with Stanford Social Innovation Review, Charles Schwab and Boys & Girls Club of America to host a webinar around creating long-term sustainable partnerships, or what we refer to as sticky relationships. As a follow up to our webinar, our Senior Consultant, Season Eckardt sat down to reflect on the role she played to deepen the impact of this partnership and help Boys & Girls Club chapters across the US operationalize a common strategic vision.

The Multiplier Effect

The term “capacity-building” tends to be thrown around quite a bit in the nonprofit sector. And as jargon, it has the unfortunate fate of being pretty obscure outside of our sector—not to mention losing its meaning when overused within the field. But at the heart of it, nonprofit capacity-building is one of the most exciting and inspirational ways to support an issue. Quite simply, it’s about achieving a multiplier effect—creating more change in the world by helping to strengthen the organizations that are tackling society’s greatest challenges. At Taproot, we are driven by a strong belief in the exponential impact that can come from supporting nonprofits in this way.

Pro Bono Perspectives Podcast: Episode 6 - Rachel Hutchisson, Blackbaud

We are thrilled to welcome Rachel Hutchisson, Vice President of Corporate Citizenship and Philanthropy at Blackbaud to Pro Bono Perspectives. In her day to day role, Rachel is responsible for global corporate social responsibility, leading the company’s 3,300 associates in efforts to serve and give professionally and personally. She is committed to the core philosophy that “good is for everyone,” championing positive change and inspiring individuals to integrate service into their development.

The Nonprofit Opportunity

What motivates nonprofits and volunteers to engage in skills-based volunteering? Nonprofits use skills-based volunteering to strengthen their infrastructure in ways that better equip them to solve our communities’ challenges. Many volunteers give their skills to help solve a challenge for an organization addressing an issue they care about or to feel connected to the community. In this SNCR 2020 article, Taproot Foundation and Team4Tech partnered to further the social sector’s understanding of the leadership development benefits of skills-based volunteering—focusing exclusively on the nonprofit’s outcomes of such initiatives.

The Global Engagement Forum: Live Convenes Leaders for Cross-Sector Collaboration

Last week, the 2018 Global Engagement Forum: Live convened leaders and experts from business, government, and nonprofit organizations to collaborate around solving specific problems within the context of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Hosted by PYXERA Global, the Forum convened over 300 leaders, experts, and stakeholders in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.

3 Trends Shaping Today's Top CSR Programs

eBook: The top three CSR trends that are changing the way companies engage their people in purpose-driven workplace cultures. Actionable tips you can use to engage more people and create bigger impact along with examples from companies such as Levi’s, Prudential, QVC, TripAdvisor and more who are leading the way.


VIDEO | Barclays Citizenship Awards: Sabrina Boanu-Williams Works with the Thameside Prison Initiative

Through her work with the Thameside Prison Initiative, Sabrina is successfully helping prisoners gain the skills they need to find meaningful employment after release.

Common Impact Connections: A Quarterly Newsletter

Happy Fall! Common Impact is excited to head into the last few months of 2018 (can you believe it?) with new initiatives under our belt and a wealth of inspiration. Over the past eight months, we have had the opportunity to define and launch new models for scaled impact, interview everyday leaders from all backgrounds to understand how they create a meaningful impact in their communities, build our internal capacity by hiring new rock star team members and create new partnerships that enable inclusive and sustainable social progress.

Latest Campaigns

  1. Leadership
    Cascale demonstrates industry leadership and collaboration to drive collective action, by sharing insight into key sustainability topics inside and...
  2. License to Operate
    Corporate governance, risk management, operational integrity, and regulatory compliance are demanding challenges that companies face in today’s ever...
  3. Sustainable Products and Innovation
    Ongoing research into innovative solutions enables CNH’s brands to manufacture products that respect the environment while satisfying customers’...
  4. Goals That Inspire: Positive Social Impact
    Through our Goals That Inspire we strive to make a positive difference in our communities by relying on our ability to understand their needs and then...
  5. Communities We Serve
    Albertsons Companies stores are much more than a place to buy groceries. We're part of your neighborhood, and we believe in making each of our...
  6. Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG)
    The business landscape is reorienting itself and you can almost hear priorities shifting toward change-readiness and the bigger picture. And in this...
  7. Purposeful Technology
    Keysight helps build a better planet through our sustainably developed electronic measurement solutions that accelerate innovations to change lives...
  8. Integrated Tools
    Cascale shares updates on its efforts to align the industry on a common language to describe sustainability performance to reduce duplication and...
  9. Environmental Sustainability
    As sustainability leaders, we implement our sustainability strategy across all company activities along the entire value chain, from raw materials to...
  10. License to Operate
    Corporate governance, risk management, operational integrity, and regulatory compliance are demanding challenges that companies face in today’s ever...