Ingram's December 2022

service, as volunteers and key assets with fund-raising. “This is the generation that grew up with kids with autism and Down syndrome in schools,” she said. “It’s more natural for them, and they are eventually going to be employers who create opportu nities for the people we serve.” Young professionals, she said, want to stay with an organization or cause, as evi denced by a survey of nearly 50 employees who, to her surprise, said that paid time off to support an organization was rated as highly as better wages. To Terry Dunn’s question about whether the corporate community was maintaining its engagement, Chris Rosson said many people who are inclined to support organizations are doing so, but outside the construct of their employment. Companies, he said, “may have a hard time determining what are the two or three causes people care about,” but in terms of sheer engagement, that continues to grow on an individual basis, particularly with the younger generation, he said. Jeff Simon, office managing partner at Husch Blackwell, noted that when it comes to engagement, younger members of the law firm staff were more eager to be in the office. They want to be around the men toring, the engagement, and get to know others they’re working with. “Our young people want to be engaged. If they want to be a part of something bigger than them selves and do more than just filling out a time sheet at the end of the day, we encour age that,” he said. “We will support you.” If the only way to keep someone in the organization is by throwing money at them, you’re fighting a losing battle because someone down the street will be willing to pay them more, Simon said. The firm does provide funding for employees’ favored causes, with a caveat: the employee must be actively engaged with that cause. Ballard, who retired after 35 years at Sprint leading the telecom’s philanthropic

programming, said she was surprised to see that only 2-3 percent of employees there—even when it was the region’s largest employer—would take advantage of the company’s offer to provide financial support for their interests. Bill Maloney, of the Catholic Foun dation of Northeast Kansas, found that engagement can be bolstered through things like simple group discussions of people with shared interests. When the foundation conducted a gathering of CPAs to talk about Catholic philanthropy, “we had no idea if two people were going to show up, or 50, and we got 50,” he said. “What we found is that people in most professions were hungry to engage.” At Basys Processing, CEO Brad Oddo said the credit-card processing firm had taken three steps to elevate employee engagement: Inviting non-profit leader ship to visit the office for face-to-face discussion and events, providing $500 to each employee to steer toward favored causes, and coming up, he said, would be a paid day for employees to go work with the charity of their choice. “We’re looking forward to seeing how that third works out,” he said. The last few years have been such a fluke, said Janet Baker, that it’s hard to see what broader trends might be emerging in philanthropy. Individual donations need to be increased, she said, and at smaller orga nizations, a higher proportion of revenue comes from grants, foundation revenue and donor-advised funds. Lisa Gioia, a CPA honored as a Local Hero this year, said a lot of her non-profit clients were receiving more corporate donors than in the past. “There aren’t a lot they’re receiving from in terms of numbers of corporations, but a lot more from individual corporations and founda tions,” she said. To Peggy Dunn’s question about the rate of governmental support, Dana Chatlin

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1. Chris Rosson said United Way is fielding 100 phone calls every day from people who are having trouble paying basic living expenses and coming up with the rent. | 2. Remote functions, said Gloria Jackson-Leathers , actually helped some organizations increase fund-raising during the pandemic. | 3. At The Farmer’s House, Amy Allison has had to sharply increase wages to keep employees competitive with their private-sector potentia l . | 4. Brad Oddo listed the ways Basys Processing was moving to foster a culture of employee engagement.

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