Bringing Holiday Cheer to our Local Communities

With the concept of "Community" at the core of eBay's philosophy, it's not surprising that eBay employees also play active roles in the real-life communities in the neighborhood of our various offices. Well-known programs like eBay Giving Works and the eBay Foundation show how eBay cares and gives back to our communities. But our individual employees' efforts are not so well-known. During the holidays, many eBay teams contributed their time to support various volunteering efforts. I thought I'd share a few examples here.

Our own Community Development team (including some Chatter bloggers) volunteered at a local Family Giving Tree event to sort and gift-wrap toys and holiday gifts for children in need:

The Family Giving Tree was also a volunteering destination for some of our teams from Engineering, Product Management, and QA. They went to the Family Giving Tree's warehouse in Milpitas, CA and spent three hours helping Santa's elves. They checked children's wish lists against the presents that had been donated, and when a wish hadn't been fulfilled they tried to find a matching replacement from a large store of toys, clothing and other items.   

At eBay's offices in Vancouver, British Columbia, 20 Teams adopted a total of 29 families through the Salvation Army's Adopt-A-Family program. Cumulatively these employees spent over $8000 to purchase clothes, toys, food and Christmas Dinners for these families in need. The eBay Foundation also plans to match part of this amount! eBay Vancouver's efforts are helping the greatest number of families amongst all participating companies in the Greater Vancouver area. Vancouver's Community Watch team held a food drive called "Community Watch does the Can Can!". Roughly 100 employees collected 2500 individual food items totaling 1600 pounds of food in just one week alone!

16 people from eBay Canada volunteered at the local Food Bank, sorting 20 skids of food that will feed 1600 people! And 7 members of another Canadian team spent a day volunteering at a local shelter where they put together winter packages of blankets, coats and mitts for the homeless.

For the past several years, eBay in Salt Lake City, Utah, has partnered with the Salvation Army/Angel Tree program. This program brings Christmas to children and seniors who otherwise wouldn't have a Christmas. In 2006, eBay employees in Salt Lake City helped sponsor a total of 115 "angels," but in 2007 they did even better. Thanks to the compassion and willingness of our employees, we were able to sponsor 155 Angels, both both children and seniors. They showed that they believe in eBay's Values, by treating others the way they themselves would want to be treated.

I'm sure many Chatter Blog readers also participated in their own volunteering events during the holidays. If you care to share your stories on this Chatter Blog discussion thread, we (and the rest of the eBay Community) would love to hear from you!

Happy New Year, Everyone!