Goals and progress
Community investment | Employees: Our strongest asset
To expand our employees’ range of volunteer opportunities, in 2008 we focused on skills-based volunteerism. While many employees were already using their professional talent to benefit nonprofits around the world, we knew we could involve more of our people in this type of service.
To help our employees and nonprofit partners learn more about skills-based volunteerism, we formed a partnership with the Taproot Foundation, a leader in matching professional talent with nonprofit projects in need of experts. Taproot has helped us match our employees with projects in the community, while providing valuable guidance as we grow our knowledge base in skills-based volunteerism.
“Gap is really a leader right now in being able to provide this opportunity,” says Lindsay Firestone, Taproot’s manager of strategic partnerships. “We, as a society, really rely on nonprofit organizations for many social needs. To be able to focus skills from Gap Inc. employees on these projects means that communities will be served exponentially better.”
Today, our employees provide skills-based volunteerism that ranges from writing a competitive analysis for a women’s organization and creating a database for a workers’ rights group to providing organizational development for a family services agency. In 2008, 18 attorneys and other team members from our Legal department began working with two of our youth nonprofits, acting as their internal legal department.
“This really keeps our employees motivated and engaged, plus it adds a benefit to communities that you can’t put a price on,” says Henry Fong, an attorney in our Employment Law group who organized the Legal department’s effort to serve youth organizations.
