Ponderosa Pediatrics CareCorps: Working for a better community
The employees of Ponderosa Pediatrics have always been active in our community as volunteers, board members, parents, and donors. Most staff members contribute to our Friday Jeans fund which gathers donations from employees to support local charities or volunteer work of staff members. In return, Fridays are casual days and staff members wear jeans to work.
In 2010, to encourage and facilitate employee participation in worthy community projects, the Ponderosa Pediatrics CareCorps was established. Their goal is to identify local activities and charitable events where our staff, families, and patients can actively participate together. They support approved projects with fund raising, matching gifts from the Friday Jeans Fund, help organize, and provide support for those directly involved. Staff members have organized yard sales, a “round up” where patients are given the opportunity to donate $1 to have their names displayed in the waiting room, help with websites, and other support.
The first three CareCorps projects have been the Yavapai Diaper Drive, Prescott Relay for Life and the Susan G.
Komen 3-Day for the Cure events. We will post photos on our Facebook page and blog as projects are selected and results come in. If you have a project (remember, we are a small employer and cannot directly support many projects), please let us know. At a minimum, projects that meet our criteria will be shared with staff to allow them to determine if they want to help.
Here are the criteria:
- Have a local presence (Quad-Cities) or be based here.
- Have an impact on families and children. They don’t have to be directly targeted to children, but must have a potential positive impact on them. (For instance, mommies may have breast cancer, multiple sclerosis or other diseases. Projects helping research a cure for these diseases can have a positive impact on families.)
- Have avenues for our employees to participate. We like active fund raising events like walks, bike rides, fairs, bowl-a-thons, etc. that also promote activity and exercise for children and families. We prefer events that require some prior organization and allow time for us to build fund raising activities to support it.
- We like “branding opportunities” but that is not a requirement for our CareCorps. We do want to let folks know who we are when we support a cause or event.
- We also prefer to support things initiated by our staff or brought to us by our patients (parents).
We will always post our activities on our Facebook page and news posts on our blog. Please consider joining us!
