Every year, our team comes together around the winter holidays to support causes near and dear to our hearts. At Sprout, our company values include championing diversity, equity and inclusion, and an important piece of this is using our resources and our privilege to support the communities where we live and work. With our global growth over the past year, we wanted to expand our usual winter initiatives to support a variety of nonprofits, engage our team and give back to a broader range of community efforts.

So this holiday season, we introduced a new tradition to our entire team: Philanthropy Week!

Philanthropy Week, a five-day event where we raised money for more than a dozen nonprofits, actually started in our Seattle office and has been a long-standing tradition for the Simply Measured team that joined Sprout in late 2017. This year, an amazing group of team members based in both our Seattle and Chicago offices re-envisioned this tradition to expand participation across our offices and remote team.

At Sprout, we love a little friendly competition—especially when it’s for a great cause (or 13 great causes, in this case). For Philanthropy Week, every team member had the option to join a team supporting one of 13 different nonprofit organizations, with causes ranging from mental health to immigration and criminal justice reform to increasing opportunities for women of color to pursue careers in STEM.

Throughout the week, we participated in a variety of fundraising activities including a food drive donation day, bake sale, a lunch buy-back, a Sprout swag day and a silent auction—which is where our team’s creativity really emerged. Silent auction items included everything from a week of on-demand LaCroix delivery at your desk, to the creation of a custom theme song for your pet (one of the most popular items!), to a soothing recording of “Good Night Moon” by one of our in-house voiceover artists.

We’re so proud of Team Sprout for investing their time, money and compassion in causes we care about—and I’m thrilled to share that in total, our team raised $21,006 for these incredible organizations!

With a surprise match from Sprout, we’re doubling those donations for a total of more than $42,000, and we’re thrilled to end our 2018 community engagement initiatives with this collaborative, all-company effort. I’d like to extend huge thanks to the team members who led the Philanthropy Week committee, served as team captains and supported our efforts this year—and a special congratulations to our top three teams:

  1. The National Center for Transgender Equality
  2. Planned Parenthood
  3. FWD.us

Read on to learn more about the organizations our team supported this year, and head on over to our careers page to learn about opportunities for you to join us for Philanthropy Week 2019.

Learn more about the organizations we championed during Philanthropy Week 2018:

Native American Rights Fund (NARF) provides nationwide legal assistance to Indian tribes, organizations and individuals nationwide who might otherwise have gone without adequate representation.

Planned Parenthood delivers vital reproductive health care, sex education and information to millions of people worldwide.

Black Girls Code is a not-for-profit organization that focuses on providing technology education for African-American girls in order to provide them the skills to occupy some of the 1.4 million computing job openings expected to be available in the U.S. by 2020, and to train 1 million girls by 2040.

Re:work training, whose founder and current CEO are both Sprout sales team alumni, works to reshape hiring trends for underserved communities by providing workforce training.

The National Center for Transgender Equality is the nation’s leading social justice advocacy organization winning life-saving change for transgender people.

The Conservation Fund is an American environmental non-profit with a dual charter to pursue environmental preservation and economic development.

Act Six provides leadership training and full scholarships for emerging urban and community leaders who want to use their college education to make a difference on campus and in their communities at home. Act Six has chapters in Seattle and Chicago.

Howard Brown Health is a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer organization that provides health and social services in several locations in the Chicago area.

The Greater Chicago Food Depository fights hunger throughout Cook County. The GCFD distributes donated and purchased food through a network of 700 food pantries, soup kitchens, shelters and community programs, serving more than 800,000 adults and children every year.

Make-A-Wish arranges experiences described as “wishes” to children diagnosed with critical illnesses.

FWD.us is focused on fixing the failed immigration and criminal justice systems that have locked too many out of the American dream for too long.

Guide Dogs for the Blind harnesses the power of partnership by connecting people and guide dogs, at no cost to students.

Thresholds is fighting to transform the lives of people struggling with mental illness. They work to break cycles of poverty and unemployment while creating employment, housing, and recovery opportunities.