The first bus with about 30 SHI International Corporation volunteers arrived early at the Food Bank to start the first volunteer shift in the warehouse. An hour later, the bus would be back to drop off more volunteers.
With shuttles taking SHI employees to the Food Bank and back to the SHI office every hour, by the end of the day SHI had completed something that had never been done before at the Food Bank—six volunteer shifts in a day, that’s twice as many shifts during a normal day.
As part of SHI’s half time sales conference, the company wanted to include a volunteering aspect. With Lenovo as their sponsorship partner, Lend a Hand with Lenovo was born.
SHI sponsored our product recovery warehouse for a day for a $5,000 donation to the Food Bank. With the warehouse to themselves, they decided to customize their volunteer experience to include six, hour-long mini volunteer shifts to help accommodate as many employees as they could.
“Part of our values is giving back and we have so many reps who constantly come to us saying that they want to do volunteer events,” Taylor Tuttle, SHI corporate marketing communications specialist, said. “Not only is it a culture that we try to instill in the reps, the reps want it from us, so we try to provide as many events as we can where they can give back as part of the SHI group.”
Though our large product recovery space, which can accommodate 120 volunteers at a time, attracted SHI, their past volunteer experience brought them back. They have been volunteering with us since 2010 and have donated 682 volunteer hours. For their special day of service, SHI wanted to do even more.
With their generous donation and after helping inspect and sort thousands of carrots, potatoes and onions to make stew bags for families in need, SHI helped provide a grand total of 26,430 meals in a single day for Central Texans at risk of hunger.
“It’s important to fight hunger because … it’s important for us to give back to those who don’t have enough to get by at all, let alone more than they need,” Taylor said.
After a full day of volunteering, SHI volunteers left with smiles knowing they helped make a difference in their community. Thank you, SHI, for helping us nourish our hungry neighbors.
“We feel good…and the cherry on top is that we’re helping people out as well, so we’re having a good time bonding knowing we’re here for a good cause,” Taylor said.
