Monthly Archives: May 2021

If retirement is on your mind, you may be pondering a relocation, and if so, you may be yearning for decisive information on where to go, such as weather, co-housing, activity availability and more. We asked retirees what they love about their chosen spots. Heres what they said.

The sunny days also have an uplifting effect on your attitude, as opposed to the gloomy overcast days typical of Michigan, says Vince, a retired automotive engineer who left Auburn Hills, Michigan, in 2019. We enjoy the outdoors 12 months a year. We take walks, hikes, and bike rides and enjoy outdoor dining and happy hours. Even in the heat of the summer, we can get out earlier in the day. We eliminated snow and ice concerns, which have caused slips, falls, dangerous driving, et cetera, forcing us inside for months.

Related: Make a Happy Plan: 5 American Towns That Retirees Love

ShantiNiketan is tailor-made for people of Indian origin, says Hari, a retired math professor. Before finding ShantiNiketan, a 55-plus active-adult community that focuses on Indian culture and food, in 2015, the couple split time between Northern California, where their children live, and Chennai, India. In addition to Floridas warmth and cost of living, he says, all the residents here share a mutual orientation to life.

Rather than leaving our friends and family, we decided to downsize in a way that would free up additional funds so that we could travel more often to cooler climates as a break from the Iowa summers, says Sue, a former health care worker. When their youngest child, Ella, began a job with a nonprofit, they decided to find a townhome near their former home in Ankeny with a separate space for her, so both generations could cut costs. Toms favorite (winter) part: The outdoor maintenance from the HOA [home owners association] means no running the snow blower!

Oakland is central, and has a diverse population and lots of ethnic restaurants, says Michael, a former engineer. We both grew up in the Bay Area but spent the past 37 years in L.A., where the traffic was beyond belief, adds William, a retired real estate agent. Theyre renovating a 1956 modern house that has a downstairs suite where a future caregiver could live. Itll last us til were ready to go out in boxes, Michael says.

It was Dianas idea to find a place that was on the ground floor, no stoops or steps and handicap accessible, Alan says. Theyd begun to dislike the stairs in their two-story townhouse when a small condo opened up a block away in the Silver Sage Village, one of the first senior co-housing communities in the U.S. (It has 16 units and shared spaces for meals and socializing.) I was on my deathbed in 2013 and experienced the importance of neighborliness, Alan says. Its by definition a hedge against isolation and loneliness.

Besides the amazing natural beauty, the island gives us many opportunities that wouldnt be possible in a larger area, says Martha, a former art teacher. Twenty years ago on a vacation from their Alexandria, Virginia, home, the native Wisconsinites took a day trip to the island, off the tip of Door County. At the grocery store, they saw an ad for an affordable cottage with a ceramics studioand made a $1,000 down payment on the spot. The owner wrote a receipt from her pottery sales book. Theyve since restored a small group of cottages on Lake Michigan, called West Wind Resort, where they now live. Bob, a retired physicist, has acted in a local theater group, sings in the choir and is a member of the school board. Martha has played clarinet in an island bandand she makes lots of art.

We love the beauty and peace of the jungle withina close-knit community, and its only 20 minutes from some of the most beautiful beaches in the world, says Diana of their move from Philadelphia in 2014. Being in a premier tourist destination also means incredible restaurants and great shopping. The weather is perfect, and the cost of livingthough higher here than other parts of Mexicois so much lower than in the U.S. that we have luxuries we couldnt afford there. We have the best doctors weve ever had and friends from all over the world. Life is slower here but ultimately better.

Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage [a sustainability-focused intentional community of private homes and communal spaces on 280 acres in northeast Missouri] is a place where various parts of myself have been able to reside and flourish in a more unified wholea nonviolent, sustainable approach to living on this planet. I love the intergenerational aspect and the closeness to the land. I love that fun and laughter are valued, says Dorothy, a widowed nurse who moved here from Kansas in 2016 after learning about it from the Tiny House Blog.

We spend up to two months every winter volunteering at the YMCA Snow Mountain Ranch [outside Rocky Mountain National Park near Winter Park, Colorado], a campus that includes more than 5,000 acres for activities, says Christine, who teaches yoga and water exercise while Jack works for the grounds department. We love being in the mountains enjoying cross country skiing, snowshoeing and other winter activitiesand the camaraderie weve developed with other volunteers from all over the world. In 2019, they relocated from a large home near Peoria, Illinois, to an 800-square-foot condo in downtown Fort Collins, a college town an hour outside the park. They spend the other 10 months of the year there.

We moved north from Dearborn into a home thats large for the two of us in order to accommodate family, friends and visitors, says Ron. Scenic, peaceful Oxford Lake has rave sunsets. The smaller town reminds of our youth and we love our beautiful St. Joseph Church congregation a mile away.

Next, How Does the SECURE Act Impact Saving After Age 70?

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'Why I Retired Here': Retirees Reveal What They Love About Their Locations - Parade

Every once and a while, Streetsblog USA will get a tweet like this from a reader:

Or a comment like this:

Or an email like this (yep, this ones real):

Traffic violence? SMH. You really are a ridiculous [redacted].

Of all the words in the street safety advocates vernacular, perhaps the term traffic violence provokes the most powerful emotions. For many, that emotion is simple gratitude, that the tens of thousands of preventable deaths that occur in the traffic realm every year have been recognized, in this small way, for the violence that it is. For others, its confusion about the connotation of intentional harm that creeps in when we remove the word accident from our vocabulary or even rage that it provokes in people who say we are not presuming innocence of every driver involved in all car crashes by default.

Since at least 2013, Streetsblog has been using the term traffic violence to describe the epidemic of death and serious injuries that has raged on our roadways since the advent of the automobile. (The comment above is from one of former Streetsblog USA edtior Angie Schmitts articles, which is the first instance of the term we could find, though she said she did not coin it.) But the broader street safety advocacy community didnt seize upon the phrase until around 2016, and even today, its not in widespread usage beyond a few wonky corners of Twitter. If you google what is traffic violence, the top hits will include one fantastic but locally focused article from the LAist, an advertorial from a personal injury law firm, and some guys private blog post, which questions whether the term is unnecessarily divisive:

Take this case of aSan Francisco bus driverwho had 35 years of experience and a clean toxicology report. Did he intentionally get behind the wheel that day to kill a jogger? Are we to have no empathy for the driver? This is one of the things I find so pernicious about this terminology. Under the phenomenon known as an accident, we can empathize sympathy for both sides. When we shift the language from accident to violence it makes it much more difficult to empathize with the perpetrator of such violence.

The ideas of empathy and intention are common to most criticisms of the phrase traffic violence. When we hear the story of the long-serving bus driver who unintentionally killed a jogger, virtually anyone who has ever piloted an automobile and if you live in America, you probably have does feel compelled, at least for a moment, to put themselves in that drivers seat and imagine how it would feel to realize that a human being has sprinted into your blind spot, and in a single, sickening moment, you have ended his life.

And indeed, reports of that San Francisco crash didreflect a cautious driver with a spotless safety record who felt badly shaken by what hed done. To get through the day, we have to believe that most people in our communities would react in this way after theyd killed a pedestrian or at least, that very few people in this world have it in them to intentionally murder a stranger.

No one in his right mind wakes up in the morning intending to commit traffic violence (except for those who commit premeditated vehicle ramming attacks and there are a lot more of those than you might think, and state laws are increasingly making it easier for drivers to commit these disturbing crimes without accountability). Even drivers who choose to drive recklessly, or tailgate a cyclist in a fit of rage, or who simply let their attention flag for a few moments behind the wheel and all of these are choices, even if sometimes they are thoughtlessly made usually did not put their key in the ignition that day with the intention of snuffing out another human being.

The San Francisco bus driver may well have been giving his full attention to the road when he struck and killed a jogger; considering that most riding a bus is about 60 times safer than driving a car, its likely he was.But he did so at an intersection that has six lanes for drivers in one direction and no curb bump out to shorten the crossing distance for people on foot. A confluence of roadway engineers and city planners and the broad consensus of the community as a whole made a collective choice to design this road this way, despite the fact that these sorts of design choices have proven, again and again, to invite collisions between vulnerable road users and drivers. That single engineer or planner may not face accountability for the negligence, but his or her choices did contribute to that joggers death as did the choices of the council that wrote the manual used by that engineer as he or she finalized the plans, and the leaders at all levels of government who decided to prioritize the speed of drivers over the safety of walkers, and even the person who designed the bus.

And that list is not exhaustive.

Violent systems do not come into existence by accident, and they certainly do not persist by accident. America has collectively chosen, every day, to perpetuate a violent transportation landscape that results in roughly 38,000 preventable deaths every single year.

Violence that occurs in the traffic realm is, by definition, traffic violence. A car crash is always a car crash, even if the driver is ultimately found not guilty of criminal negligence. And when we feel a sense of unease saying these words, it is because we have been raised in a culture that has systematically and deliberately worked to shift the blame for that violence onto victims, down to the subtlest workings of the language in the news reports we read.

Families for Safe Streets has the term traffic violence in our mission statement and we selected it intentionally, said Amy Cohen, co-founder of the New York-based non-profit that is working not only to end car crash deaths in America. [Crashes] are not accidents but a preventable andviolentpublic health crisis. While we will not end this crisis with words, they do matter. The first step to putting in place the systematic solutions to end this epidemic is to recognize that we have a problem that we can fix.

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What is 'Traffic Violence' and Why Do We Need To Talk About It? - Streetsblog New York

Utility vegetation management and wildfire mitigation efforts go hand in hand. Effectively controlling woody material such as trees, shrubs and bushes helps vegetation management teams eliminate key components that aid the spread of wildfires. Employing an effective brush control strategy provides three primary benefits to utility vegetation management programs working to effectively mitigate the threat of wildfire:

1. Ignition Prevention

Trees and other tall-growing plant species are the biggest threat to electrical transmission reliability. When these forms of tall vegetation grow or fall into transmission lines, it can often result in:

Considering these unfortunate outcomes, brush control continues to be a primary goal for most utility vegetation management programs across the country. Controlling problematic trees and brush species eliminates potential sources of wildfire ignition and helps to ensure the safe, reliable delivery of electrical service to utility customers.

2. Fuel Source Management

Utility infrastructure is just one of many sources of ignition for wildfires. From automotive accidents and deserted campfires to discarded cigarettes and intentional acts of arson, multiple sources of ignition are out of a vegetation managers control. But regardless of the source that caused a wildfire to occur, woody material trimmed from various brush species represent abundant sources of fuel that can expedite their spread and the same can be said for tall grasses.

Luckily, certain brush control strategies can be used to control problematic plant species and promote the development of low-growing plant communities that enhance wildfire mitigation efforts and ensure electrical transmission reliability.

3. Offsetting the Elements

Understanding weather factors that increase the threat of wildfire can keep utility vegetation management teams prepared for the worst. Here are a few factors to consider when assessing the risk of wildfires in your respective area:

Climate change has led to warmer temperatures and extended drought-like conditions in regions across the country. As incompatible vegetation dries out, it becomes increasingly flammable. That is why it is important to control trees and tall-growing brush so that low-growing plant communities can flourish and safeguard surrounding communities from wildfires.

The Best Solution

Abiding by clearance requirements enforced by regulatory agencies is a primary goal of most utility vegetation management teams. However, different treatment strategies yield varying results. Mechanized mowing is effective but insufficient on its own. When used as a chief control method, mowing can actually stimulate regrowth and support the distribution of viable seeds. Failing to mow regularly can facilitate the growth of incompatible vegetation and increase incompatible stem densities. As stem densities increase, so do maintenance costs, lapses in utility service and the potential threat of wildfires.

While mechanized mowing provides short-term control of targeted vegetation, many Integrated Vegetation Management (IVM) programs apply selective herbicides to targeted vegetation to break the balance of biochemical processes in incompatible plant species, which effectively controls them and prevents their future development. With fewer hazards to manage, utility companies can enhance wildfire mitigation, prevent service interruptions and lower the cost of annual maintenance.

Using an IVM-based approach also helps vegetation managers convert the border zone (all land within 10 feet of a right-of-ways edge) and wire zone (all land below wires and conductors as well as 10 feet beyond their outer edge) to include low-growing grasses and forbs, which effectively prevent the development of trees and tall-growing brush that pose a threat to fall or grow into utility infrastructure. Selective herbicide applications also leave desirable native plant species unharmed unlike mowing practices.

Why is this important? As targeted species are effectively controlled, low-growing grasses and forbs develop to form a natural barrier against the future development of incompatible vegetation like trees and tall-growing brush species, providing multiple benefits to utility vegetation managers:

Vegetation management and wildfire mitigation efforts are year-round responsibilities for utility companies particularly those located in western regions of the United States. While IVM strategies are effective in controlling incompatible vegetation and reducing the risk of wildfires, delaying or terminating IVM treatments can have adverse effects for utility vegetation management programs.

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2021 Trees & Utilities Conference Moved to October - Transmission & Distribution World

Desegregate Connecticut

The Zoning Atlas developed by Desegregate Connecticut identifies the extent to which communities limit housing choices.

President Barack Obama once said, a childs course in life should be determined not by the zip code shes born in, but by the strength of her work ethic and the scope of her dreams. Yet we know where a child is born, and grows up, affects their future education, finances, and health. However, changing ones zip code is not always easy. From the availability of affordable housing to systemic policies hindering mobility, there are a myriad of factors limiting families mobility. Now is the time to urge state lawmakers to support legislation to dismantle discriminatory practices and advance fair housing in Connecticut.

The U.S. is facing an affordable housing crisis. The National Low Income Housing Coalition estimates a shortage of 6.8 million affordable and available rental homes for low- income renters. Nationally, only 37 out of every 100 extremely low-income families have access to available affordable housing. In Connecticut, only 11.6% of rental units are affordable for low-income families. The majority of these properties are located in areas with limited access to high performing schools and employment.

In Connecticut, 85% of government-subsidized units are located in moderate, low, or very low opportunity areas. This shortage disproportionately affects people of color: 73% of Black and Latino families live in low opportunity areas compared to 26% of white families, according to the Open Communities Alliance Out of Balance report. This limited availability of affordable, quality rental properties is compounded by historic and systemic policies hindering mobility in Connecticut.

Redlining began in the 1930s and its resultant disinvestment in minority neighborhoods continues to have effects today. While overt discriminatory practices were outlawed following the Fair Housing Act of 1968, more subtle, and often deliberate, policies and practices were enacted that continued to disadvantage inner city neighborhoods. Out of the 11.6% of rental units in Connecticut that are affordable to low income families statewide, 39.3% of those units are in the city of Hartford compared to 7.9% in the bordering town of West Hartford and 4.1% in the nearby suburb of Avon. We must work together to provide opportunity for all families and diversify housing options in our communities.

There are many benefits to housing diversity. From economics to education to health, we understand diverse communities are important, particularly for children. This is something Ive experience firsthand. I was deeply embarrassed by where I lived as a child. I can still vividly recall the feeling of dread when called upon to recite my address in middle school Spanish class. It was not the vocabulary that left me hesitant; rather, it was telling my peers that I lived in a low-income apartment complex funded by Section 8 that left me ashamed. I was embarrassed that my family needed government assistance to meet our basic needs, from housing to food to even clothing.

Only in hindsight did I realize these resources allowed my single mother to save money, obtain a better job, and ultimately build a better life for us. I was afforded the opportunity to attend high achieving schools, which ultimately allowed me to pursue a career as a physician. Now in my work, I often see myself reflected in the patients and families I work with. Many struggle with providing basic needs but all hope to build a better life for their children. With all of the inequalities they already face, how can they also strive against the systemic policies and practices in place?

Fortunately, when intentional inequalities and deliberate discriminatory policies are in place, they can be consciously dismantled. There are a variety of recommendations to improve this problem, from investing in segregated communities to increasing homeownership opportunities for minority families to advocating for housing diversity.

Desegregate Connecticut, a coalition of community members and nonprofit organizations that educates and advocates for housing reform, recommends a variety of interventions through zoning reform. Diversifying housing stock through multifamily homes, accessory dwelling units, and encouraging Connecticut cities and towns to incorporate more affordable housing units will increase the availability of affordable housing and diversify our communities.

These recommendations are laid out in Connecticut Senate Bill 1024, which I urge you to support. This issue is complex, but the facts remain that children growing up in poverty-stricken areas are far more disadvantaged and moving to better neighborhoods changes lives. Please visit Desegregate Connecticut to learn more about why and how you can help. Then ask your state legislators to vote in favor of Senate Bill 1024 to bring about a more equitable and diverse Connecticut.

Jing Marrero is a pediatric resident from South Windsor.

CTViewpoints welcomes rebuttal or opposing views to this and all its commentaries. Read our guidelines andsubmit your commentary here.

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Opinion It's time to truly embrace fair housing in Connecticut - The CT Mirror

By now many Americans have read a glowing news article about the latest celebrity to have a child via surrogacy or watched a human-interest piece about a woman carrying a child for a loved one. From New York, which just quietlylegalized commercial surrogacy,to California, which remains a hotspot for individuals and couples from across the country and around the world seeking such services, surrogacy is often positioned only as a positive good. No equivocation or mention of the harms it poses to women and children is even mentioned.

Avoiding the other side of the conversation does a disservice to us all, however. Its time to talk about the dangers of surrogacy.

Just ask some of the children themselves. There are a lot of days where I feel adrift, kind of like a tumbleweed... Its days like today where my heart hurts a bit more over a surrogacy agency, doctors, lawyers, and the rest of the adults involved not successfully making sure that this product they were creating would be o.k.,writesjkiam83 an anonymous surrogate-born woman on her blog. Where are the resources and communities for us products of surrogacy? [I]s this really what is in the best interest of a child? From the perspective of Brian, a surrogate-born man, its not; hewrites, It looks to me like I was bought and sold.

What is surrogacy?

In a surrogacy arrangement, a woman carries a child for an individual or couple who is unable to do so themselves. Sometimes the child is genetically related to the commissioning parents, but often donor gametes are used, and the child is related to only one, or in some cases neither, of the commissioning parents. Sometimes the surrogate mother is genetically related to the child she carries, but often she is not. Some surrogacy arrangements are domestic, but many commissioning parents pursue international surrogacy arrangements, which adds an additional layer of logistical and legal difficulties.

Surrogacy is fraught with ethical and moral considerations. It is a process that can exploit vulnerable women. It carries significant health and psychological risks for the women whose wombs have been rented, the women whose eggs have been harvested to create an embryo, and the children who are born from these arrangements. All too often, the desires of adultsnamely, the commissioning parent(s)supersede the interests of children. Unfortunately, discussions of surrogacy in mediaand culture more broadlyrarely focus on the latter.

Commodifying human life, risking health and safety

At the recent United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, The Heritage Foundation and the Center for Family and Human Rights drew attention to surrogacy and the dangers it poses to women at aneventthat highlighted several instances of women who had been trafficked, rendered infertile, or even died as a result of surrogacy.Michelle Reaveswas one such surrogate mother from California. She lost her life last year while delivering a baby for someone else, leaving her own son and daughter motherless and her husband a widower.

By its very nature, surrogacy commodifies both a womans body as well as that of the child. The women targeted to become a surrogate by the multi-billion-dollar fertility industry are often wooed by the opportunity to make tens of thousands of dollars in exchange for renting their body. In some cases, a surrogate arrangement is altruisticperhaps the surrogate mother may want to help a friend or family member who desperately wants a baby, and she does not profit financially from the exchange. Nevertheless, regardless of the circumstances or motivation, in a surrogacy arrangement a womans body is used as a conduit for a transaction that provides a baby for someone elseand the risks for both her, and the baby, are significant.

Whether a surrogate mother is compensated or not, serious concerns involvinghealth risks to mothersand babies remain, and the rights of children must not be ignored.

Children who are born as theresultof a surrogacy arrangement aremore likelyto have low birth weights and are at an increased risk for stillbirth. When a woman carries a child conceived from an egg that is not her owna traditional gestational surrogate arrangementshe is at athree-foldrisk of developing hypertension and pre-eclampsia. Egg donors havespokenup about experiencing conditions such as loss of fertility, blood clots, kidney disease, premature menopause, and cancer, and the lack of data and studies on both short and long term health outcomes for egg donors makes true informed consent unattainable. While scientists do not fully understand the scope of these health considerations, it is clear that for both short and long-term outcomes, surrogacy is a frontier of unknowns; children, egg donors, and surrogate mothers may pay a physical or psychological price nobody yet fully knows or understands.

Childrens rights matter

Surrogacy gives little consideration to the rights of a resulting child, who in many cases will beintentionally separatedfrom at least one biological parent, as well as potential half-siblings in cases where the commissioning parents are using egg or sperm donors in conjunction with the surrogacy arrangement. In cases of anonymous egg and/or sperm donation, children have been denied part, or in some cases all, of the details of their biological origins. Genealogical bewilderment and adjustment difficulties among surrogate-born children are welldocumented.

Even in cases where a child is raised by his or her biological parents, childrens rights advocate Katy Faustnotesthat many surrogate-born children in these circumstances experience theprimal woundof losing their birth mother, an experience well-documented among adopted children. She argues that surrogacy is, by its very nature, an injustice to the child. Birth is intended to be a continuation of the mother/child bond, not the moment at which the child suffers an intentional, primal wound. Its the day when a baby should see the mother she already loves for the first time not the last.

Sometimes parallels are drawn between adoption and surrogacy. But this is a false comparison. In many cases surrogacy intentionally creates a situation in which a child will be denied his or her biological parent-child relationship. In every circumstance, the children of surrogacy arrangements are deliberately separated from the only mother they have ever known the moment they are born. Adoption, in contrast, responds to this separation rather than creates it.

Surrogacy knows no borders

International surrogacy arrangements can be even more complicated than domestic surrogacy arrangements because issues of citizenship and nation-specific determinations of legal parentage come into play. While there are no exact numbers available of how many children have been born from surrogacy worldwide, it is currently a global industry that isprojected togrowto over $20 billion within the next few years.

As Professor David Smolin, a leading legal expert on surrogacy and author ofThe One Hundred Thousand Dollar Baby: The Ideological Roots of a New American Export, explains, the United States is attractive to foreigners seeking surrogacy services because it is one of the few nations that offers stable legal systems explicitly supportive of commercial surrogacy. While America is a popular destination for surrogacy for those who can afford it, some commissioning parents engage in international surrogacy arrangements in countries with even less regulation such as Ukraine and Russia, which raises additionalconcernsabout maternal and postpartum health care for surrogate mothers and babies.

Heartbreaking stories at the height of the coronavirus pandemic exposed the uglier side of international surrogacy as travel restrictionsseparated surrogates and babiesfrom commissioning parents across the globe.

With such international variation in the legal status of surrogacy, as well as the establishment of parentage and citizenship, commissioning parents and surrogate mothers can find themselves navigating aminefieldof unanticipated practical and legal issues.

Internationally, womens rights groups are split on the issue of surrogacymuch as they are in the debates over prostitution or sex workabout whether it exemplifies a womans autonomy and choice over what to do with her body or whether it constitutes commodification of a womans reproductive and life-giving capabilities.

Sadly, the international surrogacy market appears to have significant and growing overlap with human trafficking. Given the amount of money involved, traffickers stand to profit substantially from selling women and girls into surrogacy arrangements. AsDr. Sheela Saravanan, author ofA Transnational Feminist View of Surrogacy Biomarkets in India,wrotein asubmission to the UN Special Rapporteuron the sale and sexual exploitation of children, The surrogacy trafficking trade used the same network that was used for domestic work and sex trade from the poor regions of India into urban areas. These unmarried girls [were] impregnated with embryos without their consent. Others were confined in homes and when some girls tried to run away, they [were] caught, brought back and beaten.

How are governments responding?

The international community is currently debating a new protocol on international surrogacy arrangements. A group of expertsincluding onerepresenting the U.S. Government, convened by theHague Conference on Private International Law(HCCH)is discussing how to address legal parentage, jurisdictional, and ethical questions about surrogacy, particularly from the perspective of protecting children.

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How Surrogacy Harms Women and Children - The National Interest

When focused on community needs first, new research finds workplace volunteering can also double a customers loyalty to a company

Chief Executives for Corporate Purpose (CECP), in collaboration with Credit Suisse, New York Cares, New York Life, Philanthropy New York, USAA, Vanguard, and ViacomCBS, has released a new report, Value Volunteering, designed to uncover the true dynamics of corporate volunteering, pinpointing where and in what order the impact takes place. This research will allow companies to better utilize volunteering to address societal needs first, unleashing the power of people within corporations and sending benefits back to the company.

Workplace volunteering has been a staple of corporate community engagement for decades but is often designed first as an employee engagement tool, said Kari Niedfeldt-Thomas, Managing Director, CECP. Value Volunteering flips that notion on its head, saying to companies, Root your programs in the community, first. The business benefits will follow, and they will be significant.

Key findings from the report include:

The most successful workplace volunteering programs are intentional, thoughtfully designed, and authentic. Volunteer program design must be rooted in the needs of nonprofit organizations and community stakeholders.

Social impact and meeting community needs are the main results and value produced through workplace volunteering program, but successful programs can have ripple effects on business results.

Value Volunteering has proven that people reward companies for high-quality workplace volunteering in terms of reputation, trust, and customer loyalty. Even more, the effect on trust and customer loyalty approximately double when people believe that workplace volunteering truly makes a difference.

Workplace volunteering has built-in and built-for results, both of which are key for success:a) Built-in results include positive contributions to employee engagement, reputation, trust, and team building.b) Built-for results include positive contributions to recruitment, leadership skills, customer insights, employee retention, and client relationships.

Corporate community service serves community first, but also builds the company: 78% of the time, volunteers say that understanding the impact they are making motivates them to stay engaged.

Over half (55%) of nonprofits surveyed say that including corporate volunteers in an organizations strategy and program management helps deliver on mission achievement and builds relationships at the same time.

Workplace volunteering has greatly expanded over the last 10 years: 40% growth in both aggregate and average corporate volunteer hours is driven by efficiencies from technology/software, employee interest and demand, and the expansion of skills-based opportunities.

The report is the product of the Service for Impact working group, led by CECP and Philanthropy New York. Service for Impact was founded in 2009 to help corporate philanthropic leaders support their nonprofit partners in implementing the principles of Reimagining Service The group consists of corporate grantmakers and corporate volunteer leaders, fostering a peer network to share successes and challenges, brainstorm solutions, and explore new opportunities to make a difference in society while supporting business objectives through volunteerism. Talmetrix, an employee feedback and analytics company, executed the survey in the Variations in Value section, and served as an important thought partner on research design and interpretation of insights.

Credit Suisse is pleased to co-sponsor this research which digs deeper into the social and business value of corporate volunteering. We expect it will spark further dialogue among nonprofits and corporate practitioners, resulting in programming that has an even greater impact in the community, said Lalita Badinehal, Vice President, Credit Suisse.

Addressing pressing community needs requires a multi-faceted approach both in partnership and programming. When Covid-19 shut down our city, New York Cares stayed open thanks to the versatility of resources provided by our corporate partners, said Gary Bagley, Executive Director, New York Cares. From volunteer relief programming focused on emergency food assistance for families to virtual education for students and wellness checks for isolated individuals, our corporate stakeholders partnered with us to ensure an immediate and innovative response to community needs.

The findings from The Value Volunteering research shows how volunteering is an imperative for business, while driving social impact, said Matthew Nelson, Corporate Vice President, New York Life.

The Value Volunteering research affirms that focusing volunteer engagement on true community needs is critical to the design and implementation of workplace volunteering programs, said Kathryn ONeal-Dunham, Chief Executive Officer, Philanthropy New York. Deep partnership with nonprofit organizations and community stakeholders creates opportunities for companies to support meaningful social change.

USAA employees are passionate about serving the military and local communities through volunteerism, said Harriet Dominique, Chief Diversity, Inclusion, and Corporate Responsibility Officer, USAA. Throughout the pandemic, theyve continued to serve through many virtual volunteer events such as reading to military children and mentoring at-risk students, demonstrating that volunteering makes a significant impact for those in need in our community.

Vanguard has long been dedicated to supporting inclusive, resilient communities in which our crew live and work by donating our time, talent, and treasure, said Carra Cote-Ackah, President, Vanguard Group Foundation and Executive Director of Community Stewardship, Vanguard. This research emphasizes the power of effective partnerships and the potential of having a shared purpose.

Rooting workplace volunteer programs in the community can have ripple effects on both ends of the engagement spectrum not only driving community impact, but business results that prove the importance of these programs, said Adam Robinson, Vice President, Social Responsibility, ViacomCBS. As a content company with global reach and influence, this is essential to our mission of positively and powerfully impacting the audiences and communities we serve.

Value Volunteering engaged both nonprofit and corporate partners. A landscape analysis of the research was done to assure that this work would be additive for nonprofits and companies. Focus groups and surveys helped fill in gaps in existing research, all with intention of understanding nonprofit and corporate perspectives toward greater impact.

CECP is a CEO-led coalition that believes that a companys social strategy how it engages with key stakeholders including employees, communities, investors, and customers determines company success. Founded in 1999 by actor and philanthropist Paul Newman and other business leaders to create a better world through business, CECP has grown to a movement of more than 200 of the worlds largest companies that represent $11.2 trillion in revenues, $23 billion in societal investment, 14 million employees, and $21 trillion in assets under management. CECP helps companies transform their social strategy by providing customized connections and networking, counsel and support, benchmarking and trends, and awareness building and recognition. For more information, visit cecp.co.

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Volunteering is an Engine of Social and Business Value Creation - Los Angeles Business Journal