Building Impact Blog

This Volunteer Appreciation Week we want to shoutout and thank our community partners for opening their doors to our volunteers and providing essential services to our community every day. By partnering with us to co-design volunteer projects, sharing their needs with us, encouraging us to join in on learning conversations, and welcoming our volunteers on-site, our partners make our work possible! We are constantly learning from our nonprofit partners, who are experts in the needs and lived realities of the community members they serve. Their input gives us the foundation necessary for designing programming that is accurate, equitable, and impactful.

Happy Volunteer Appreciation Week! We’re embracing this week as the perfect opportunity to thank YOU and to reflect on the impact our BI Volunteer Network has helped us generate in 2022 and beyond! Your participation and contributions of have helped to further the mission of the social impact organizations we proudly partner with. In just one year, our BI Volunteer Network’s generosity in time, energy, talents and resources, helped us achieve:

As National Volunteer Month comes to a close, we continue to reflect on how fortunate we are to have our incredible network of volunteers! With your support and encouragement, we’ve successfully pivoted our model several times in ways that best serve the community. Our network’s embrace of both virtual and hybrid volunteering has played a huge role in helping us to grow our impact to unprecedented levels - over 300,000 lives impacted and $4M in contributions since Covid began! Visit this page to see the full Annual Impact Report and learn more about our volunteer’s contributions in 2021. 

We were inspired by all of you who came out individually, with your families, colleagues and friends in support of the City of Boston’s Love Your Block/MLK Day of Service, in partnership with Building Impact. Dr. King’s message of providing service to all and volunteering within our communities was on full display at the Lilla Frederick Pilot Middle School.

--A note from our CEO, Bridget Akinc

As part of our COVID-19 response we created Virtual Volunteer opportunities and launched our Gift Cards for Groceries program in partnership with FamilyAid Boston, a nonprofit working to end child and family homelessness. Since the beginning of the pandemic, the staff at FamilyAid have been working around the clock to distribute emergency supplies of basic necessities and food to ~300 local families living in shelters. To help ease the burden on FamilyAid staff and empower these families to have the opportunity to make their own choices on what they need we asked our network to help us purchase gift cards. Our network responded in a HUGE way and has been very generous in already providing $10,000+ in donations for gift cards.

During these unprecedented days of Social Distancing, our need for social connection is great. As individuals and families, we look for opportunities to maintain a connection to our community - but amidst all of the challenges that we feel, our hearts and thoughts are with our neighbors who are struggling right now just to get enough food on the table, or enough diapers or detergent for their families, or even just enough soap to keep hands clean. So what can we do? How can we help?

Team-building with a purpose! A huge thank you to the People Ops HR team at HubSpot for taking time out of your summit to create 14 fleece blankets and 30 bark bags last Tuesday! These donations will go to Greater Dog Rescue New England, a rescue-group that supports homeless or abandoned dogs by placing them with loving foster families until they find their forever home.