Flywire has always had an active role in giving back to our communities and supporting employees with social, charitable, and volunteering programs. In the past, we have even organized and funded many charitable events including our annual trip with School the World.
With that being said, if we truly want to “do better” in the world, we must take real action in our communities. At Flywire, we encourage all FlyMates (Flywire employees) to truly evaluate their own desire to have impact in the world, how they lead their day-to-day life, how they treat others, and whether there are ways that they can contribute to improving their country, community and themselves.
In an effort to encourage FlyMates to take even more action, in June 2020 our leadership team decided to provide FlyMates with two paid days of time off per year to dedicate their time to a social cause they care about. We asked FlyMates to share their experiences with us. In our new series we’ll spotlight how our FlyMates around the world used their days off.
“I volunteered through an online platform called Ethical Angels to create a digital fundraising campaign for a nonprofit called the Butterfly Tree. It is an organization based in the UK that supports orphans and rural communities in Zambia. The project helped raise funds during the holiday season to provide communities with food and mosquito nets for Malaria prevention. Leading a social media campaign titled 12 Stories of Hope, we shared an impactful story each day leading up to Christmas to drive traffic to their platforms. We were able to raise £1,700 all of which went directly to the cause. It was great to use my FlyBetter Day to create the strategy and create the images. You can check out an example post here. I really loved being able to take a day to focus on giving! I feel proud to be part of a company that recognizes the value of giving back to communities.” -Victoria Stephens, Customer and Payment Experience Manager, Working from Rhode Island
“I used my FlyBetter Day to perform activities for kids with Dasyc Summer School. We were participating by helping the kids with games during the first hours and then outdoors with them for the rest of the day. This is a fantastic initiative! I look forward to having more options and associations to participate in and use my FlyBetter days again in the future.” -Juan Manuel Lopez Castilla, IT Helpdesk Support, Working from Valencia
“For my FlyBetter days I helped collect food donations (large amounts of mango chutney and macaroni cheese!) for the East Brighton Food Cooperative. This organization cooks 200 meals a day and delivers them all over Brighton and Hove (in Sussex, UK) to those who need them but especially to the older population! These people care about food and they care about the poor. It’s run entirely by volunteers, their daily deliveries, check in and conversation with some very isolated people really is an amazing service. Thank you Flywire for giving me the time to help them!” -Germaine Broadbent, Senior Sales Manager, Working from the United Kingdom
“When I thought about how I would like to use my FlyBetter day, I wanted to use both of my expertises and also help people who are having difficulty finding a job during COVID-19.
So I chose to do a GitHub workshop for graduated Orthodox women in tech, a workshop that would teach them a very useful tool for developers in their daily work. Also, it will help them publish their personal projects and help them build a good resume so they can impress potential interviewers.
GitHub is a code hosting platform for version control and collaboration. It lets you and others work together on projects from anywhere. I did the workshop through 'Temech' - a leading organisation that is opening career paths and enabling self-sufficiency for Orthodox women in Israel.
To our great surprise, more than 200 women signed up for the workshop! So we decided to conduct it twice. The workshop was great. I created an online project which they could play with and try using GitHub by themselves after the workshop. I received got a lot of positive feedback after the workshop. So I'm glad that all my preparation and the actual workshop was useful for many women.
I'm very thankful to Flywire that gave us the opportunity and the time to contribute to others.” -Hadasa Vengrover, Full Stack Engineer, Working from Tel Aviv
