Building Impact Blog

Planning volunteering initiatives with a hybrid workforce can be challenging, especially considering that many nonprofit organizations still don't have the capacity to host large groups of volunteers on site. These challenges raise an important question: how can your organization generate meaningful impact in the community AND bring your whole team together? You can plan a Day of Service!

But what does it really mean to plan or participate in a Day of Service? We’ve put together this comprehensive guide on everything there is to know about coordinating a successful Day of Service with your team.

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:

For youth who rely on school-provided lunch and snacks, summer can make accessing nutritious foods challenging. When you couple this with the fact that physical activity among children ages 6-9 drops an average of 53% during the summer, it’s evident that youth can experience a “summer slump” in terms of their health. Building Impact is partnering with two local organizations, Youth Enrichment Services (YES) and Daily Table, to create a unique project for our volunteers to help address this issue.

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. 

With the days getting warmer, more and more organizations are rolling out their spring return-to-office plans. Many employees are questioning what their organization's culture will feel like, how their teams will operate, and how they’ll stay connected with their remote coworkers. Particularly at a time when reentry to the office can present new challenges, service and volunteering are ways that we see teams reasserting their organization’s inclusive culture and values.

As Black History Month comes to a close, we are celebrating the Employee Resource Group (ERG) leaders who partner with us to build community throughout the year. ERGs play a critical role in creating brave, inclusive spaces for community building, networking, and professional development throughout the year. Volunteering together strengthens the community within teams and companies, and strengthens ties to the communities where we live and work. 

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

Building Impact Stands In Solidarity

Building Impact stands with our Black team members, our Black families, our Black partners, our Black volunteers, our Black leaders and our Black neighbors who have felt the burden of injustice and marginalization in their daily lives for far too long. As a team, we stand in solidarity as our Black communities experience grief and rage over the senseless loss of Black lives, including George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks and Ahmaud Arbery. We understand that their deaths came at the hands of those who failed to see a common humanity - who failed to see them as people- a father, a son, a daughter, brothers and sisters.