For our team here at Ad Victoriam Solutions (AdVic®), volunteering has always been a part of our company’s DNA. Every employee has 40 hours of annual paid time off to volunteer with their chosen organization. Some team members volunteer to chaperone school field trips, others coach youth sports teams, and many just pick community-organized volunteer events throughout the year, like cleanups and food pantry shifts. 

But for those members of our hybrid team who live near our North Atlanta headquarters – Alpharetta, GA – we have a special opportunity to serve, the AdVic Highway! No, there isn’t a highway named after us, but there is a one-mile stretch of McFarland Parkway that connects our two offices. Back in 2020, when we were looking for something that would allow us to regularly get our team together in service, we reached out to Keep Forsyth County (FoCo) Beautiful and found out the road was available for adoption. 

Driving Employee Engagement Through Volunteerism

Since our founding, volunteering has been a part of who we are. Our CEO spends a lot of his weekends with his wife and daughters volunteering with different nonprofit organizations, and our President is a Chaplain in the Georgia National Guard and a Sunday School instructor at his local church. As they talked about building a different type of company, they agreed that we should not only encourage our team to serve their communities, but we should pay them for an entire week of service every year. 

As we began to tally and track our annual volunteer hours, we noticed a correlation between our volunteerism and our employee engagement scores. Not only were the volunteer events popular, but that instilled a sense of community service and made our employees feel like they were a part of something more than just another job. Our summer tradition now includes annual cleanups led by each incoming Elevate training cohort. 

Celebrating Our Service

As a part of the program with Keep FoCo Beautiful, a national nonprofit affiliate of Keep America Beautiful, we are committed to four cleanups every year. While we’ve tried different days and times, we’ve found that weekdays work best for turnout and that a little motivational carrot on the end of the stick never hurts. So as soon as the last bag of trash has been tied and our hands have been washed, we head back to Halcyon and reward our volunteer crew with a social hour at one of the incredible restaurants right outside our office. 

Measuring Our Impact Over the Past Five Years

At AdVic, we’re firm believers in measuring what matters. And that doesn’t just stop at sales and revenue numbers but also extends to metrics we discovered as we pursued B Corp certification. Things like total volunteer hours, employee volunteer participation rate, and volunteer impact & outcomes. 

And while four roadside cleanups don’t sound like a huge impact, when you add up the numbers over the past five years, it’s pretty impressive. 

• 17 cleanups
• 204 Volunteers
• 306 volunteer hours
• 136 bags of trash collected
• 5,440 pounds of trash (almost 3 tons!!!) off of the AdVic Highway and out of our storm drains and waterways

The Win-Win of Giving Back

We’re excited to celebrate five years of the AdVic Highway and the positive impact it has had on our company. As a company that works for the triple bottom line, we’re also excited at the positive impact it has had on two of our most important stakeholders, our workers and our community. The act of giving back gives our team a unique way to come together that isn’t just happy hour drinks and appetizers. And the outcome of giving back is removing almost three tons of bottles, cans, styrofoam containers, and more from the soil and our waterways. 

If you’re interested in doing something similar with your team, we suggest using Keep America Beautiful’s affiliate search option to find your local chapter. They will be able to help identify adoptable roads and will even provide all of the bags, grabbers, and safety vests for your team’s cleanups. And if you want to ask us some follow-up questions, please feel free to reach out to us, we would be happy to help! 

Read more Social Impact blogs from Ad Victoriam Solutions.

AdVic thanks Profitable Purpose Consulting‘s Nathan Stuck for his contributions to this blog.

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