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Techies give back to the community

Learn about the various programs SAP established for its Month of Service and some that are all year round.

This is a picture of my colleagues and I at our SAP Month of Service event. 

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Here's a vine video that sums up our day in 6 seconds.

October marks SAP Month of Service, and as such, the entire global company is encouraged to volunteer. 

This year I took part in PaintFest, hosted by The Foundation for Hospital Art.  The organization strives to provide each hospital patient with comfort and hope through the use of visuals.  

The Foundation hopes to someday donate one painted mural to each and every hospital on Earth, and so far, they've hit 195 countries, donated over 40,000 paintings to more than 4,000 healthcare facilities, and involved over one million people. To me, that’s pretty awesome.

This week, my colleagues and I gathered in the SAP cafeteria and painted a beautiful mural consisting of greens and yellows and oranges.  When dried and assembled, the final product showcased a calming garden scene.

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Earlier in the morning, another group of colleagues painted this oceanic mural pictured below.

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My participation in PaintFest was especially unique because some of the SAP Autism at Work colleagues were among the painters.  I had the pleasure of meeting new faces and learned a lot about this awesome program.

Patrick Viesti, one of the colleagues I had the pleasure of meeting, works as an IT Project Associate under the Cloud & Infrastructure Delivery Foundations Services Project Management Office, hired through the Autism at Work program. 

Patrick told me that he “loves working with such a great and dedicated team of people, specifically Brian Jones and Will Lin. They are very supportive of me and have helped me to learn about the ins and outs of working in project management.”

Here’s a picture of all the volunteers after we finished painting our mural.

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In addition to organized volunteer outings, SAP employees are collecting gently worn shoes for S.T.E.P’s Leave a GOOD Footprint campaign.

S.T.E.P. stands for Save the Earth Projects, an organization dedicated to organizing social change through youth social entrepreneurship. S.T.E.P was founded by 13 year old, Olivia Russo-Hood.

At the age of 11, Olivia set out to collect 100 pairs of shoes and raise money for children that could not afford to play soccer at her local YMCA.  After about a month, Olivia had collected 1500 pairs of shoes, and her “Leave a Good Footprint” campaign was launched across the USA.

Here’s a picture of Olivia (daughter to proud mom and SAP employee, Denise Russo) with some of the collected shoes.

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For each pound of shoes collected at SAP offices, $.50 is being donated to the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship.

Here’s a picture of the bin in Newtown Square last week.  

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How can you get involved?

Like the S.T.E.P. Facebook page and learn more about other Save the Earth Projects.

Find your local food bank at http://www.feedingamerica.org/ and donate food.

Go to the Foundation for Hospital Art’s website and volunteer to paint.

Check out http://www.benevity.com/ to see how you can start a social corporate responsibility program at your company.  Or check out https://www.volunteermatch.org/ to find volunteer opportunities near you.

Get active with me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

For all the facts and more detail, read the original story posted on SCN in SAP Business Trends.

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