More than 900 Ketchum employees around the world recently participated in KSR Month, our global month of service, supporting 45 non-profit organizations. As part of the initiative, I was randomly selected to tell my personal story about my, and my office’s, volunteer experience.
The city of Atlanta is not only known for its incredible southern food, we are also know for our terrible traffic and public transportation. This is hard enough to traverse if you have a car, but can be especially challenging if you are housebound and living with an illness. Making sure you have access to the proper nutrition can become extremely challenging if you don’t live in the right areas.
Recognizing that difficulty, Ketchum saw an opportunity to effect change in the community by working with Open Hand Atlanta. Open Hand helps housebound people prevent or better manage chronic disease through Comprehensive Nutrition Care, which combines home-delivered meals and nutrition education as a means to reinforce the connection between informed food choices and improved quality of life.
Over the past several years, our Atlanta office has partnered with Open Hand during KSR month. Through this on-going relationship, we’ve been able to been able to develop a repertoire with them, which has helped us to increase office participation through word-of-mouth sharing about the volunteer experience.
This year we looked to them again as KSR month approached. An organization that’s built on a volunteer base, made for easy planning and, as we’ve done in the past, the office volunteered for a four hour shift. During this time, we learned about the struggles that come from being housebound, cooking on a large-scale and the logistics involved with this level of meal delivery. By the time we’d completed our shift we had created over 500 meals for those in need.
Our KSR events allow colleagues to get out of the office, build bonds with individuals both within and outside of Ketchum and adds a little bit of excitement to our 9-5 work day. But most of all, the opportunity to take time out of your day to give back to your community adds immeasurable value to the experience.
One of the big highlights for me personally was the request to share a time-lapse video of our time at Open Hand. It led to lots of a fun shareable moments that the whole office enjoyed viewing.
I was an excited and fulfilling experience to continue our support of Open Hand in their mission to support the nutritional needs of housebound members of the Atlanta community.
To learn more about this year’s Ketchum’s KSR Month, click here.
