Today, over 50 highly talented Citi employees are spending the day using their expertise to help ten nonprofit organizations address critical capacity building projects. It is the first, of hopefully many, Citi Skills Marathons. We have been working with the Citi Foundation and Citi Women for the last few months to orchestrate the event and are excited to see it come to life.
Community impact
The Citi Skills Marathon is using a relatively new model for doing nonprofit capacity building – the marathon . The idea is to find bite-size opportunities to impact nonprofits – pairing nonprofits with teams of Citi employees with specific subject matter expertise in areas like HR, marketing, strategic planning, etc. to spend one day together focused on addressing one discrete element of organizational need. We carefully designed the projects to be specifically scoped to add value in a one-day setting, which can sometimes be easier for the nonprofits and the employee volunteers. In addition, having all of these different projects with other nonprofits and employees happening together on the same day sends a powerful message about collective power in fostering positive community impact.
This pilot is a great step forward for Citi Foundation’s ‘More than Philanthropy’ approach, which puts “the strength of Citi’s business resources and people to work to help improve communities”, and is also a tremendous learning opportunity for Citi and for other companies looking to harness the professional talents of their staff to make a difference.
The collaboration between the Citi Foundation and one of their leading internal affinity groups, Citi Women, also makes this project worth noting. Citi Women is Citi’s company-wide effort to foster the ongoing development and advancement of women leaders from recruitment to senior management and this opportunity to contribute to some of Citi’s New York City community partners is a great demonstration of the depth of that partnership.
It is wonderful to see a company take on not only making an impact but also trying something new in the hope that it will inform their long term work in the community and also and inform other companies. It is no surprise that when Citi offered peer companies the opportunity to observe the day, ten signed up and are attending the Citi Skills Marathon today.
Congratulations to all of today’s Citi Skills Marathon participants! We look forward to hearing more about the outcomes of the great work.
