fbpx

Donate, Elevate: First Steps to Improve How we Better Our Community

Where Are We Now?

Donate Elevate Corporate Match Program
“When you learn, teach. When you get, give.” Maya Angelou

June has been a month of learning, giving, and through this, growing. We have created several new policies to encourage our team to further their education in systemic oppression and racism. We began an employee book club that is currently reading So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo. Our entire team will be attending a mandatory three day UndoingRacism workshop over the course of the next few months; this will become an annual occurrence.

As we continue to set new policies in motion, we are rolling out a new donation matching policy to put our money where our mouth is. We have named this policy Donate, Elevate.

Our Donation Matching Program: Donate, Elevate.

“The best way to not feel hopeless is to get up and do something. Don’t wait for good things to happen to you. If you go out and make some good things happen, you will fill the world with hope, you will fill yourself with hope.” Barack Obama

We aim for this new program to improve how we as a business better our community while encouraging our employees to get involved individually, too. According to FrontStream, “businesses with a corporate philanthropy program consistently have happier, more engaged, and productive employees than those that do not.” 

With Donate, Elevate, as employees donate to their favorite non-profits, Online Optimism will 100% match this donation to the same non-profit. We are excited to see how this motivates our employees to donate and become further engaged in the community.

Since beginning of this program, we have donated $403.59 back to our team’s chosen non-profits.

Better Our Community Long-Term

“No one has ever become poor by giving.” Anne Frank

This long-term program has an added twist that we are particularly excited about: 

Each year our team will review local non-profits and choose one to donate to throughout the year. This chosen non-profit will receive the same amount as that being matched for an employee’s personal donation. So in the end, we will be giving 200% of what our employees choose to donate personally. 

For 2020, Online Optimism has decided to donate to Innocent Project New Orleans. This non-profit law office provides investigation and representation to exonerate innocent prisoners serving life sentences in Louisiana, the state with the highest incarceration rate and one of the highest rates of proven wrongful conviction in the country. You can read more about the wonderful work they do here.

Since beginning this program, we have donated $403.59 to Innocence Project New Orleans. We encourage you to donate to this worthy cause as you are able.

November, 2020 Update:

Our agency expanded to a second office in Atlanta, Georgia in November, 2020. To bring our Donate, Elevate program to a new state, we decided that any Georgia-based employees would have their donations elevated to the Georgia Innocence Project.

Our Goals

We look forward to seeing this program unfold long-term. There are two major goals we strive to achieve by rolling out this program. First, to motivate our team members to actively engage in helping our community; both on and off the clock. Secondly, to make Online Optimism an ally of the New Orleans community so that we can Build On Trust and embody the sense of community that makes New Orleans so unique.