Community Involvement at Place2Give

Guest blogger - Karine Aviv

A strong part of Place2Give’s corporate culture is to encourage community involvement.

To be part of a social enterprise means that we are expected to “give back” in some way, shape or form. 

Our role model is, of course, Gena Rotstein, our CEO.  One of the latest roles that she has taken on is as one of the judges for the 2013 Calgary Non-profit Innovation Awards presented by Calgary Chamber of Voluntary Organizations. Charities and nonprofits are often the vanguard when it comes to finding creative solutions to social problems. Now in its third year, the Awards celebrate this creative spirit and showcase local innovation in action. The panel of judges had the difficult task of choosing the winning organizations. 

Another project that Gena is involved in is WINK Calgary.  WINK is a group of professional women, from a variety of industries, who have come together with the goal of empowering women, specifically in the area of financial literacy, by helping women know more, expand their resources and their capabilities.  

Other team members are involved in a variety of projects.  Here is a sampling of just a few of those endeavours.

Ray Stockford, Director of Technology; System Administrator at Place2Give is involved with Calgary Learns.  Calgary Learns is a granting agency that supports foundational learning for adult Calgarians. They make community-based learning accessible and they promote the value of learning.  Ray volunteers for a few hours every couple of weeks.  He is helping to enhance Calgary Learns’ capacity by training the executive assistant in technology maintenance and management.  This will help them save on IT costs, and keep on top of their IT infrastructure with advice on budgeting, and IT life-cycle planning.

Connor Turner, Place2Give’s UI/UX developer is and has been involved in a number of things that keep him busy:

• He runs a site called yycApps which is an iPhone App Development community initiative in Calgary.
• He helped create the yycPhotobook project. 
• And he will be launching the Calgary ProBono Lounge in the spring.

Karine Aviv, Marketing Manager at Place2Give has been known to volunteer in her daughters’ school and appears at least twice a month in the classroom to help the teachers out.  She is also room parent for one of her daughters, managing all the volunteer activities for that classroom and assists the teacher during field trips, in-class events, and anything else that comes up.