Gen Supports Local Communities During Global Volunteer Week

Written by Kimberly Bishop Corporate Responsibility

Gen Blog | People & Impact

More than 500 Gen team members from ten countries came together in April for our first ever Global Volunteer Week, five full days of service that positively impacted people in communities around the world. This week-long volunteering campaign grew out of the success of our inaugural Global Volunteer Day, held in 2023.

This year, from April 8-12, team members at 14 sites across three continents took part in virtual and in-person opportunities that spanned a wide range of impact areas, including using skills to mentor diverse students, applying Cyber Safety knowledge to support seniors and families, delivering resources to underserved groups, protecting our environment and more.

Gen team members logged more than 1,300 service hours in just one week, giving of their skills, time and energy to the people in our communities who need them most and continuing to demonstrate the culture of giving that informs our operations year-round.

Promoting Cyber Safety for All Ages

Gen team members in Dublin, Prague and Mountain View created digital literacy educational materials for seniors, parents, children and young people, providing necessary skills for people of all ages to stay safe online. Employees also met virtually with job seekers from all over the world to offer career advice and guidance.

Giving Students the Resources They Need

Throughout Global Volunteer Week, our teams were heavily invested in helping the educators and schools in our communities continue their critical work. More than 630 kits, cards and resources were created by volunteers and distributed to support students, teachers, homeless individuals, foster youth, at-risk families and sick children all around the globe, including:

• In Tempe, employees partnered with ACCEL and Boys Hope Girls Hope of Arizona to mentor students with disabilities and assembled college care packages for young people about to enter the next phase of their academic careers.
• The Plano site partnered with Bikes for Goodness Sake and Foster Love to assemble bicycles for children in the community and birthday boxes for children in the Texas foster care system.
• Team members in Belgrade, Serbia, and Chennai, India, created school supply kits for students in care homes and schools, providing necessary tools to help further their education.

Additionally, Gen worked with Story Pirates, an organization that encourages children in under-resourced communities to express themselves creatively, to create a website where employees from all over the world could read children’s stories and give positive feedback.

Beautifying Our Communities

Environmental service opportunities were among our most popular this year, with ten events dedicated to opportunities to clean up local parks, neighborhoods, community gardens and more:

• Mountain View employees built native bee houses, learned about local pollinators and staffed a farm shift at the Veggielution community farm in San Jose.
• Team members in Prague, London, Bucharest and Tettnang, Germany, participated in neighborhood clean ups and community gardens.
• The Pune, India, and Brno, Czech Republic, sites planted trees in their communities.
• Dublin team members volunteered with OWLS, a children’s nature charity, to create an engaging woodland space for after school programming.
• Employees in Chennai worked with Bhumi to beautify a local school and increase green cover by making 2,000+ sustainable seed balls that will be planted across Chennai.

Reaching Out to People in Need

Additional projects served some of the world’s most vulnerable communities:

• In Prague and Brno, employees took part in Missing Maps, a project from the Red Cross that maps areas where humanitarian organizations can help people who live at risk of disasters and crises.
• In Toronto, volunteers packed wellness kits for people experiencing homelessness.
• In Prague, team members cleaned Palata, a nearby home for the visually impaired.
• Tokyo team members learned more about the experiences of refugees and ways to offer support with Refugee Empowerment International.

Virtually, employees worked with Africa Food for Thought to make heartfelt cards for children from under-resourced communities.

Check out the video above to see all the cities that were able to make a difference during our first Global Volunteer Week.