Taproot Foundation Convenes Corporate Social Responsibility Leaders and Pro Bono Providers for the 5th Annual U.S. Pro Bono Summit, April 13th & 14th, Los Angeles
April 12, 2016 /3BL Media/ - This week the Taproot Foundation is convening the 5th annual U.S. Pro Bono Summit in Los Angeles, a two-day convening of cross-sector leaders who are committed to connecting business professionals who volunteer their time and expertise (pro bono) to nonprofit organizations who benefit from this support to achieve their missions. These skilled volunteers are filling gaps in areas like marketing, finance, IT, and HR for under-resourced social change organizations across the country. The Summit is a forum to share best practices and challenges to ensure delivery of high-quality pro bono service and is generously supported by pro bono enthusiasts and advocates KPMG LLP, Prudential Financial, Inc., Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Warner Bros. Entertainment.
Corporate Day: This invitation-only gathering includes social responsibility leaders from corporations who are actively managing or beginning to explore programs that connect their employees with nonprofit organizations in their communities to deliver critical resources like marketing, finance, IT, and HR—pro bono. Attendees include representatives from Airbnb, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, JPMorgan Chase, NetSuite, and the Walt Disney Company. “At NetSuite, we strive to continually improve and innovate on our pro bono program so that we can give more employees the opportunity to purposefully use their skills to build capacity in the nonprofit sector,” said Erin Dieterich, Director Corporate Citizenship, NetSuite. “Each year, we look forward to Taproot’s U.S. Pro Bono Summit to surround ourselves with like-minded individuals pursuing similar goals, sharing ideas and challenges, and brainstorming ways to identify bigger and bolder ways to build the global pro bono movement together.” The Summit is a highly participatory conference with group discussion at its core. The agenda is driven by participant request and this year will cover: how pro bono service develops employee talent; inside tips on how even small teams can deliver programs at scale; and how the marketplace is going to demonstrate impact by evaluating corporate pro bono programs.
For the past two years, corporate respondents of the Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy’s (CECP) annual survey have reported that pro bono service is the fastest-growing corporate volunteer engagement program, growing from 32% in 2008 to 51% in 2014. (Source: CECP Giving in Numbers 2014, 2015).
“The Summit is a chance for corporate social responsibility leaders to connect with peers about what’s happening inside their companies as they blaze the trail to make these innovative pro bono employee engagement programs part of their corporate cultures,” said Liz Hamburg, Taproot Foundation President & CEO, “Open conversation about how pro bono impacts both the community and their own corporate goals around recruitment, retention, and talent development really make these sessions invaluable.”
Intermediary Day: What if pro bono service was as clear and prevalent as food drives and charity runs? What if business professionals and nonprofit professionals knew exactly how to go about giving and receiving high-impact pro bono service? This year, leading pro bono intermediaries (organizations that connect skilled business professionals to social change organizations) who are members of the Pro Bono Collaborative will receive pro bono resources, as marketing and communications professionals help them set the strategy to develop a campaign to build awareness of pro bono service.
The session will be led, pro bono, by leaders of CreateAthon, a pro bono intermediary organization that brings marketing professionals and students into skills-based service via a 24-hour marathon model. Facilitators include representatives from CreateAthon founding agency Riggs Partners, CreateAthon partner agency verynice, and CreateAthon headquarters in Richmond, VA.
About the Pro Bono Summit
Since its inception five years ago, the U.S. and Global Pro Bono Summits have been hosted from New York to San Francisco, to Berlin, and most recently, in Singapore last month where corporate social responsibility leaders from Fortune 500 companies, pro bono service providers, and other social entrepreneurs gathered from 27 nations and six continents to talk about pro bono service—connecting more business professionals in areas like marketing, finance, HR, and IT to social change organizations who need those critical skills to support their missions. These convenings were jointly founded by the Taproot Foundation and the BMW Foundation.
More about the Global Pro Bono Summit here.
About the Taproot Foundation
Taproot Foundation, a national nonprofit, connects nonprofits and social change organizations with skilled volunteers who provide their expertise pro bono. Taproot is creating a world where organizations dedicated to social change have full access—through pro bono service—to the marketing, strategy, HR, and IT resources they need to be most effective. Since 2001, Taproot’s skilled volunteers have served 4,000 social change organizations providing 1.4 million hours of work worth over $150 million in value. Taproot is located in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. and is leading a network of global pro bono providers in over 23 countries around the world. www.taprootfoundation.org
