Staff across Europe get involved in some great projects for the Holiday Season

By James Leigh, Int’l Marketing & Communications Coordinator

Throughout December salesforce.com staff from our offices across Europe have, with the support of Salesforce.org, taken part in a huge range of volunteering and fundraising events bringing support and happiness to where it was needed most in our local communities.

Here is a run down of some of the work done by our employees over the last month, but first a note on the announcement of our first ever Healthy Community Grant given in Europe.

In December Salesforce.org presented its first Heathy Community Grant in Europe.  The recipient is Citywise Education.

which is a youth education nonprofit operating in West Dublin. salesforce.com have had a relationship with Citywise for almost ten years and this grant represents a €100,000 commitment to  help them develop their programs to educate more youth. You can read more about the grant and what it will mean at this link.

We also continued a Christmas tradition in our Dublin office of taking around 100 children from Citywise Ice skating. This event is always loads of fun for staff and children alike and is a great way to build relationships between our two organisations.

In the UK we held a volunteering event with local charity, Bag Books. The charity creates very inspiring sensory books that help children and adults with profound learning difficulties communicate and enjoy stories using all the human senses. A team of 10 salesforce.com employees spent the day crafting items for the books and taking on all manner of tasks to help create more sensory books for distribution

At the Heathrow Special Needs Farm in the UK, around 60 staff put on a Christmas Party for the children there, they set up stalls, marquees and arranged for Santa to come by to provide everyone with an unforgettable day, check out the video here and see what we got up to. Heathrow Special Needs Farm is a small nonprofit community farm that provides an environment in which people with special needs and disabilities of all ages can develop and grow in confidence, by working and being in contact with animals. You can find out more about their great work at their website.

A team of 15 employees from London, spent a day with KidsCo where they wrapped presents and packed hampers for their Christmas lunch that was attended by 3,500 children and a similar number of carers.  The hampers were given out to local families not able to pay for more that the essential food items.  The mission of KidsCo is to provide practical, emotional and educational support to vunerable inner city children. You can find out more about the work they do and programs at their website.

In Germany, our local Engagement Council organised a Charity Bowling night which 20 members of the team took part in. This was in aid of Sternstunde, which is an organisation committed to the care of sick and disabled children in Bavaria. The salesforce.com team in Germany has a long standing relationship with this organisation and this event raised a further €450 for the cause. All of the money will go in to supporting their efforts and help them care for even more children suffering from long term illness and disability.

The German council then also organised a raffle during their Christmas party which raised €1,500 for Smile Cambodia, a German charity set up to support projects at the Center for Children’s Happiness orphanage, in Cambodia.