On July 16th, ShareFilers traveled to Durham to volunteer with Ronald McDonald House for our fifth Global Day of Impact event. Global Day of Impact is a Citrix program encouraging every employee to devote a normal workday to volunteering with a great non-profit that benefits the community. We were proud to be able to spend a day with Ronald McDonald House of Durham, which provides housing and programs for critically ill children and their families while they are receiving care at Duke Children’s Hospital and Health Center.

As you may have read in several previous blog posts, Citrix employees across the map are given the opportunity to take a paid day off work to volunteer for a community organization in need. This past week, I was able to participate in the Citrix Global Day of Impact for Relay for Life of Leesville/Brier Creek/RTP in Raleigh.

For those unfamiliar, Relay for Life is a fundraising event organized in communities across the globe by the American Cancer Society. Participants camp out around a track, while members of each team take turns walking around the track for the duration of the event. Walkers honor the people in their life who have been affected by the disease – survivors, those who are fighting the disease, and those who have already lost the battle. Relay is a family-friendly environment, catering to the entire community with an array of food, games, and activities to provide entertainment and fundraising. With cancer now a leading cause of death in the world, money raised at the event goes towards research, treatment, and awareness of the disease.

Last week, ten ShareFilers participated in our second Global Day of Impact event. As Kevin and Jennifer have written, Citrix encourages employees to spend a normal workday giving back to their community every year. ShareFile employees have come up with a variety of volunteer projects for GDI that will be taking place over the next few months.

For this event, we traveled to SEEDS community garden in Durham to spend a day helping out. SEEDS is a great organization that gives city dwellers a place to grow vegetables on their own garden plot, and they also provide low-cost educational programs for kids. Our group was able to help the SEEDS staff with upkeep of the garden and structures so that visitors and gardeners can continue to enjoy it.

When I started at ShareFile, I didn’t expect that I’d spend a workday building a road under the watchful (or was it hungry?) gaze of nearby tigers, but thanks to Citrix’s Global Day of Impact, that’s exactly how I spent last Friday. Corporate Citizenship is very important to the cultures of both ShareFile and Citrix, and to encourage community service and volunteerism, every employee is given an extra day off to volunteer in their community.

For our Global Day of Impact, we headed to Carolina Tiger Rescue, a nonprofit wildlife sanctuary whose mission is saving and protecting wild cats in captivity and in the wild. Housing 14 tigers, 3 lions, and an assortment of other wildcats from ocelots to binturongs, the Rescue takes in animals from bad situations and cares for them for life. Many of the animals were used irresponsibly by their previous owners. A lion named Sebastian was part of a Haunted House in Texas, while another lion named Tarzan was used as an attraction at a hotel in Mexico. Two of the tigers, Rajah and Kaela, were found wandering a highway near Charlotte, NC.

Did you know that it’s National Volunteer Month? In today’s business world, it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day time consuming activities that take place. However, April is dedicated specifically to volunteering in your community. Citrix has developed a corporate citizenship program, which has a vision to, “help people work better and live better, strengthening the tie between work and well being and supporting families in need.”

Here at ShareFile we’ve created a community service organization called SHARE, which consists of employee volunteers. The goal of SHARE is to involve ShareFile employees in service activities in order to give back to our community and protect our environment. Projects and events include non-profit fundraisers, environmental clean-up, volunteering with local and national charities, and helping with any other local opportunities as they arise.