Dear Agnes,
It’s great when companies talk about supporting important causes, but it can be disheartening when they don’t follow through. That’s what’s happening at my workplace. They “talk the talk” but rarely do they “walk the walk”.
With November being the season of giving back, I thought it’d be the perfect time to pitch the idea of making a donation to a homeless cause that’s really close to my heart. I’ve been dedicating my free time to volunteering for this organization because it’s a big crisis in my city. My commitment to this cause is no secret – most everyone at work knows how much it means to me. The donation didn’t have to be a large amount; even a small contribution would have made a difference.
However, to my surprise and disappointment, I was met with the response that there’s “no room in the budget” for such a donation.
What?! I couldn’t help but be taken aback by this, especially when I see significant money going towards non-charitable things, like my boss’s participation in golf tournaments with CEOs. And look, I totally get that networking is important, but it makes me wonder about our priorities and how resources are distributed.
I’m a firm believer that corporate responsibility should go beyond mere words in an email or on paper. It’s about real action that makes a positive impact.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this and if you have any ideas on how I can nudge my company into being more committed to bettering the world through charitable causes.
Sincerely,
Does My Company Really Care?
Dear MCFC,
May I call you Disheartened for short? It really does seem to capture the impact of this experience – and what a beautiful heart you have to be living your values of caring and sharing, and encouraging others to do the same.
On a practical level, you might try to pitch this more from an employee engagement angle next time, because it definitely appears that your experience has left you feeling less engaged with your company. It may even have you questioning whether or not you want to continue working for an organization that doesn’t align with your values around contributing to the community at large.
Disengaged employees are expensive to an organization, and you are no doubt not the only one who would feel this way about the refusal. So my second suggestion is that you band together with like minded folks in your workplace next time you make the ask. Perhaps you could start up some kind of community engagement group at work that both networks and finds ways to give back? The Rotary Club is a great example of people doing both. Could something like that be scaled to your industry?
On a psychological level, Disheartened, I’d encourage you to consider a few things. It’s always a disappointment when we have an expectation that isn’t met, and it seems to me that in this case that disappointment was heightened for you by the fact that people at work knew how important the cause is to you. Work is so central to our lives these days that it can feel downright invalidating when colleagues don’t affirm what’s important to us outside of work.
Sometimes though, the upset we feel at a lack of validation can also have very deep roots. A little inquiry into when else you may have had the feelings that accompany a “they knew how important this was to me but they still wouldn’t support me damn it” may prevent you from assigning any unresolved feelings from the past to this present situation, and can often take a good deal of the charge out of the current feelings.
You might also consider that harbouring expectations about how others “should” behave sets us up for disappointment at best, and resentment at worst. And you might choose to look at how realistic your expectations are here. There will tend to be an element of window dressing to any corporation’s commitment to social causes, unless by some miraculous alignment of the stars, donating also happens to increase the bottom line. Your priority is addressing homelessness, and perhaps by extension advocating for a more equitable distribution of resources in society writ large. A company’s priority – any company’s priority – is profit. Hence the golf tournaments with CEOs. If you’re going to succeed in getting your company onboard with a cause that is close to your heart, I think you’ll have better success framing it in terms of their primary priority, rather than yours.
So perhaps also look into why you are surprised, Disheartened. You may be encountering an important, albeit uncomfortable, disillusionment that your company does not share your priorities or values, and you may have limited success with the nudging. And that may lead you to other questions further down the road.
In loving support,
Agnes