Giving to Others this Holiday Season

Women’s Enterprise Centre of Manitoba (WECM) helps women in business all year long with advice, training and business loans. Our staff members are happy to help. Therefore it isn’t a surprise that when the holiday season comes along everyone wants to look to the broader community with some charitable givings. The process of giving back at this time of year always boosts morale in the office and gives us a chance to work as one big team.Here are 4 reasons why I think the Holiday Giving program is such fun at WECM:

  1.  We Make it Meaningful: In November we collect from staff their charitable giving ideas. When everyone has had a chance to voice their suggestions we narrow down the options by voting for our favourites and selecting the three most popular projects. Your charity might not be selected but chances are there is something on the list that you are interested in supporting.
  2.  We Make it Convenient: Our workplace has a fund that staff can contribute to all year long through payroll deduction.  It is optional and it is convenient. Each December we look at what has been collected and that is what we spend.  There is no need to ask people to come up with money although often additional donations arrive with a smile.
  3. We Make it a Team Effort: This year our projects required shopping for gifts, picking up gift certificates, decorating packages, writing personalized messages and delivering parcels. As the coordinator I was not surprised to receive a flood of volunteers for each and every aspect of the work. It isn’t onerous for any one of us and that way it remains in the “fun” category.
  4. We Make it Happen: You must have support from the organization itself. Even though it isn’t corporate money being spent there still is time that is needed for planning and preparing. Although we do things like shopping and wrapping on our lunch hours and in the evenings there still are things that have to be done on company time. We are lucky every year to be given time at staff meetings to talk about the ideas and to make plans and to take time during office hours to make the deliveries. Our organization has helped make it happen.

It is such fun to give back to the community. We are all looking forward to fulfilling our commitments to these charities and as soon as we do that we will most certainly be looking at what we can do NEXT year at this time.

– Cindy Ruth