A TIME FOR GIVING

I understand it’s a difficult time for millions of people as jobs have been lost and many businesses have closed. I feel extremely lucky that my job is still stable and I’m able to work from home for a supportive employer. Even though I’m in this privileged position, I am not immune from feeling a bit of stress and worry about the current state of world affairs. I cannot imagine what others then are going through during this time, as they face much adversity.

I know it’s not a lot, but I made a small donation of $50 to the Greater Vancouver Food Bank a few weeks ago. It’s the least I could do. The purpose of this post, however, is not that I donated. I wrote this post to highlight that my employer, Electronic Arts, has a company-wide program that matches charitable donations made by employees. The program is great and doesn’t make you jump through hoops to get your charitable match. There’s a web site where I fill out a form and attach my donation receipt. In less than five minutes, I was able to request a match for my donation. This program is awesome on its own but during this extraordinary times, EA has decided to double the charitable match. Now, for every dollar an employee donates, EA donates two. As such, my donation of $50 to the food bank has now turned into a $150 donation, courtesy of EA. I have an additional $6,000 or so of charitable donations that EA will match for me for the rest of this fiscal year.

I will be the first one to say that EA is not a perfect company and there’s lots of stuff it gets wrong but this charitable program is a good one. I understand they benefit from some tax breaks (so do I if I may be honest) with these donations but the end result is that the food bank has an extra $!50 to spend on food for someone who really needs it.

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