Earlier this year, the VMLY&R Foundation celebrated a wonderful milestone, surpassing the $3 million mark in collective charitable contributions since its inception in 2005. This achievement was made possible thanks to the abundant generosity of VMLY&R employees who participate in the U.S. employee giving program through payroll giving.
VMLY&R Foundation participants have exclusive access to two primary charitable financial benefits:
The opportunity to request an unrestricted financial grant for a nonprofit organization that holds a personal connection for the employee.
A $2 to $1 matching gift benefit, effectively tripling the impact of Foundation members personal philanthropic efforts.
Each year, employees direct hundreds of charitable donations in the form of unrestricted grants and matching gifts. Every organization receiving a donation is recommended by a Foundation member, and the list of causes continues to grow each year.
In addition to our ongoing support for employee-directed giving, the VMLY&R Foundation proudly partners with VMLY&Rs equality, inclusion and belonging (EI&B) imperative. Additionally, there are special matching gift programs that address timely matters such as natural disasters, humanitarian aid and employee resource group (ERG) initiatives.
Most recently, the Foundation launched two global special matching campaigns:
Together for Ukraine, aglobal crowdfunding drive for our colleagues based in Ukraine.
Support for Maui, a fundraising partnership with the B.EAST ERG providing aid to the Hawaii wildfire relief efforts.
Together, these efforts raised tens of thousands of dollars and exemplify our commitment to making a positive impact on the world around us through the power of peer-to-peer giving.
The VMLY&R Foundation also guides year-round programming. Every full-time VMLY&R employee has 16 hours of paid community service time to use each year, in addition to our agencys global day of service, VMLY&R Worldwide Foundation Day. Each office also donates time and talent to support pro bono initiatives big and small.
E.J. Wade grew up in South Florida and found an escape through reading “Goosebumps,, a series by R.L. Stine. He used to also take English literature books and Zane books on military deployments to have reading material. But it was a lecture he heard from Professor Stephen Engle of Florida Atlantic University that inspired “Where Jim’s Crows go to Die,” a story of The Great Betrayal, with a protagonist who was erased from history, Ida B. Wells-Barnett.
The idea is for people who are incarcerated to be able to take a mental break from being in prison. He hopes to inspire people to write a story of their own or dream beyond those 4 walls. When they are released, maybe they can chase their dreams. “Where Jim’s Crows go to Die” is growing in popularity for its ability to speak to American history and stay away from partisan politics.
E.J. Wade plans on starting with the Sunshine State and including other states eventually. There are mountains of books currently being pulled from the Florida school system but books offer a chance to learn from people with different viewpoints. History books in particular are important because we can learn from that history, good and bad.
“If I can change one life, it will be worth the effort. My life is not about making a fortune but about telling the best stories I can tell.” -E.J. Wade
Ocean Partnership for Children’s youth groups are busy spending the holiday season giving back to their fellow youth in Ocean County.
OPC’s Game Changers collects toys for families.
TOMS RIVER, N.J. – Dec. 21, 2022 – PRLog — This holiday season, the youth groups of Ocean Partnership for Children (OPC) are doing whatever they can to make a difference in the lives of their fellow youth in and around Ocean County. From OPC’s YAS (Your Authentic Self) teen group creating a panel for the National AIDS Memorial Quilt in honor of AIDS Awareness Month to OPC’s Game Changers collecting toys for Ocean County families in need, OPC is making a huge impact in the community.
“As a nonprofit that provides care management services to Ocean County youth up to 21 years old with mental health, substance use, intellectual, and developmental needs and their families, it is so incredible to watch our own youth go out and make such a huge impact in the community around us,” said Mary Jo Buchanan, Executive Director of OPC. “
AIDS Awareness Month
AIDS Awareness Month and World Aids Day (remembered each year on December 1st) are dedicated to raising awareness of the AIDS pandemic caused by the spread of HIV infection and mourning those who have died from the disease. The AIDS pandemic has historically impacted the LGBTQ+ community at a higher rate, according to Kaitlin Lord, Community Resource/Social Media Specialist at OPC.
“In collaboration with the OPC Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Committee and Nicole Young, one of OPC’s Administrative Assistants, we decided to have our YAS teen members create a panel for the National AIDS Memorial Quilt,” Lord said. “The Quilt is an ever-growing memorial for those that are living with and have died due to AIDS related complications. The Quilt travels for many national displays and is housed in San Francisco, California. To date, the Quilt has over 50,000 panels and is dedicated to more than 110,000 individuals.”
“The YAS facilitators (Liz Menges, Assistant Director of Clinical Operations; Tara Boyle, Case Manager Supervisor; Justin Montefusco, Care Manager and myself) are truly so proud of the dedication and hard work that all of the youth showed in creating this quilt and honoring our community and all victims of the AIDS pandemic,” said Lord. “It is so important for us to continue to discuss the importance of LGBTQ+ history with our YAS members.”
OPC runs its YAS Too (8-12 years old) and YAS Teen (13+) meetings (open social support groups for LGBTQ+ youth and their allies) on the first Wednesday of every month. Please visit www.oceanpartnership.org to learn more.
OPC’s Game Changers collects toys
In collaboration with the Ocean County Youth Center, who partnered with PBA 258 (Corrections) and Juvenile Services, OPC’s Game Changers collected new and unwrapped toys for the Ocean County Board of Commissioners to distribute to Ocean County families in need.
Randy Orlowsky and Sean Giarratana, OPC Care Manager Supervisors and facilitators for the Game Changers are leading the charge. “It has been a great experience allowing us to strengthen our bonds with other community supports/partners, as well as give back to the community directly,” said Orlowsky. “We also came up with creative prizes for staff engagement.”
Game Changers is a boys’ social emotional learning group for ages 11-14 years old. The group is free and confidential. To register, click here: https://bit.ly/3hDTZep.
About Ocean Partnership for Children Inc.
Founded in 2005, Ocean Partnership for Children (OPC) is Ocean County’s Care Management Organization (CMO). Its mission is to enhance the well-being of youth and their families through natural and community supports. OPC provides care management services for Ocean County youth up to the age of 21 years who have mental health, substance use, intellectual and developmental challenges. OPC strives to keep children and adolescents at home, in school, and in the community by connecting them to resources that meet their unique needs and help them achieve their goals.
Ocean Partnership for Children is a non-profit organization available at no cost to all youth and families in Ocean County who meet the eligibility criteria of the New Jersey Children’s System of Care. To learn more, visit www.oceanpartnership.org or https://www.oceanresourcenet.org.
Buoyed by large donors, as well as donors who were acquired by an organization in 2020 and continued their support in 2021, overall charitable giving increased by 2.7 in 2021, according to the Fundraising Effectiveness Project’s (FEP) Fourth Quarter Fundraising Report.
The Fundraising Effectiveness Project (FEP) is a collaboration among fundraising data providers, researchers, analysts, associations, and consultants to empower the sector to track and evaluate trends in giving. The project offers one of the only views of the current year’s fundraising data in aggregate to provide the most recent trends for guiding nonprofit fundraising and donor engagement. The FEP releases quarterly findings on those giving trends, released both via downloadable reports at www.afpfep.org and in a free online dashboard available at http://data.givingtuesday.org/fep-report.
While giving increased in 2021, the number of donors declined by 5.7%, primarily due to charities having challenges in finding new donors and inspiring “lapsed” donors—those who have given in one year but haven’t given since—to give again.
On the other hand, new donors who gave to a charity for the first time in 2020 and gave again to the same charity in 2021, increased by an extraordinary 26%.
“We saw such incredible growth in 2020 in overall giving and the number of donors—10.6% and 7.3% – because of the pandemic that 2021 was never going to approach,” said Mike Geiger, MBA, CPA, president and CEO of the Association of Fundraising Professionals. “Nevertheless, that giving continued to grow in 2021 reflects well on the generosity of the American people. What we’re seeing is a large increase in new retained donors – those who gave to a particular organization for the first time in 2020 and then continued giving to that organization in 2021 – which might indicate that donors who supported pandemic-related causes in 2020 kept doing that in 2021. At the same time, the overall number of donors dropped in 2021, especially newly acquired donors, which may be a sign that many people were uneasy about their economic situation with the ongoing pandemic.”
Geiger and other FEP leaders counseled that since 2020 was such an outlier, comparing results between 2019 and 2021 would be more helpful to charities looking for trends and strategies. Such a comparison shows that overall giving increased by 11% from 2019 to 2021, while the overall number of donors dropped by less than 1%.
“These last two years have been particularly volatile in the philanthropic sector, and we can be grateful that fundraising dollars continued to rise throughout that volatility,” said Woodrow Rosenbaum, chief data officer of GivingTuesday. “Of course, maintaining a healthy philanthropic environment requires participation at all levels. We’re concerned that donors, especially smaller-gift donors, decreased in 2021. But at the same time, GivingTuesday saw a 6% increase in donors in 2021, which demonstrates that even in this environment, it is still possible to motivate people to give, but we have to invest in engaging donors to keep them involved.”
As nonprofits enter Q2 of 2022 and plan their fundraising strategies for this year, the FEP Fourth Quarter Fundraising Report shows opportunities that charities can leverage to inspire more giving in 2022 while mitigating risk in a continued period of uncertainty. One example is that donors who participate more frequently are sticking around but giving less money, whereas one-time donors are not sticking with a charity but are still driving revenue growth. This trend presents an opportunity to leverage the dependability and good will of committed donors and grow their capacity to contribute moving forward.
“As we move into the second quarter of 2022, the big takeaway from this report is that we have a huge opportunity with donors acquired during 2020 who are continuing support and are ready to give,” said Doug Schoenberg, CEO for DonorPerfect Fundraising Software. “Nonprofits need to harness that energy, communicate effectively with those donors, and invite them to be part of the community. At the same time, we’ll need to double-down on donors who may have drifted away and give them compelling reasons to come back and participate in giving.”
About the Report
The FEP 2021 Fourth Quarter Fundraising Report is available for free at www.afpfep.org, with a free online dashboard available at http://data.givingtuesday.org/fep-report.
The data analysis includes giving details from 9,618 nonprofit organizations based in the U.S. as a subset of the Fundraising Effectiveness Project. The FEP’s database of organizations is made up of organizations that raise between $5,000 and $25 million.
In 2021, the FEP implemented a number of methodology changes to provide a better representation of the “typical” experience of organizations and granular trends in donation patterns.
The Fundraising Effectiveness Project
The Fundraising Effectiveness Project publishes quarterly and annual reports that examine key fundraising metrics, serving as a benchmark for nonprofit executives, development staff and researchers. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project and the Growth in Giving database are both administered by the Association of Fundraising Professionals Foundation for Philanthropy and The GivingTuesday Data Commons.
The Growth in Giving database is the world’s largest public record of donation activity, with more than 204 million donation transactions, and is continuously updated by leading fundraising software thought leaders (in alphabetical order) Bloomerang, DonorPerfect, Keela, and NeonCRM. Additional partners include the 7th Day Adventists, The Biedermann Group, DataLake Nonprofit Research, and DonorTrends (a division of EveryAction). For more information and how you or your fundraising software provider can participate, please visit www.afpfep.org.
TORONTO, ON, Jan 18, 2022 – (ACN Newswire) – Great Canadian Beaver Club [GCBC], an original and private club with a collection of over 10,420 NFTs, has announced its decision to offer holders of these rare NFT memberships a seat at the owner’s table. Tagged the first community structured NFT platform, GCBC is allowing these holders to sit and speak for the community.
The first Canadian club with no borders, GCBC has a clear roadmap first of which includes the launch of its decentralized finance [DeFi] app which will be a free-to-use platform for all GCBC holders. In addition to this, this private club seeks to incentivize token holders by offering them an opportunity to stake GCBC NFT memberships to earn $PELT tokens. A 30-day pre-stake or burn period has been integrated into the contract. Members must stake for 30 days before rewards are issued. $PELT Tokens that would be rewarded if staked will be sent to a burn address if not staked, creating a deflationary supply of $PELT.
$PELT tokens, furthermore, will have in-app usage—allowing owners to execute transactions and undertake tasks on the network.
An impressive feature of this exclusive Canadian club is its firm resolve to foster proper compensation of token holders and community members alike. As part of its plans to deliver this, a community bank has been initiated. To fund this bank, GCBC has partnered with one of the leading Bitcoin ATM providers, and according to the details of the agreement, 100% of the revenue generated will be sent to the bank. That’s not all, 50% of aftermarket sales, starting from day 1, will be sent to the bank as well as 20% of the total supply of $PELT.
Yet another impressive feature of GCBC is the Most Valuable Beaver [MVB] facet. Aimed at rewarding beavers for their extensive work towards the growth of the club, this feature will aid in the promotion of a role-based colony where constant support is appreciated and rewarded.
GCBC Lodges – Giving NFT Holders a Seat at the Owner’s Table
Giving holders private access and input in the overall decision-making process, GCBC has instituted an array of lodges. First of these lodges is the Political Lodge which will give these NFT holders exclusive access to govern the colony based on a set of evolving guidelines.
The Beavers Den, on the other hand, will give GCBC NFT owners access to make input on blockchain investments to diversify their portfolios. The Celebrity, Technology, and Party Lodges will give holders of these rare NFTs access to make input on advertising campaigns, technological developments for the colony, and planning of exclusive annual parties, respectively.
About GCBC
The Great Canadian Beaver Club otherwise referred to as GCBC is an exclusive club with a collection of 10,420 rare and unique NFTs which exist on an ERC-721 contract on the premier DApp network, Ethereum. Comprising 250+ hand-drawn traits from talented artist Dino Tomic, each of these NFTs is one of a kind. Aimed at giving these membership holders access to a plethora of lodges and incentives, GCBC is offering these owners seats at the decision-making table.
Social Contact Twitter: https://twitter.com/GCBClub Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gcbclub/ Discord: https://discord.gg/bwStYB42zT
Media Contact Mark, CEO, Great Canadian Beaver Club [GCBC]Email: markburg@gcbnft.io Website: https://gcbnft.io
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