Life at Yahoo!
Yahoo! employees help make music students’ dream come true
Posted: 30th of April, 2013
The Yahoo! Employee Foundation (YEF) is a grassroots, philanthropic organization that brings together the talents, time, and financial resources of Yahoo! employees to serve the needs of communities around the globe. Yahoos can not only volunteer their time, but they can work with YEF to champion grants for causes they are passionate about.
Jill Sewill, a Sunnyvale-based Yahoo, wanted to help 200 music students achieve their dream of seeing a live symphony, so YEF - thanks to donations from Yahoos all over the world - made it happen!
Check out this wonderful Thank You Video from the Washington Manor Middle School Music Boosters, who received a YEF grant to take a field trip to see the San Francisco Symphony.The kids had a great time, and it’s amazing to see the impact that grants can have when they are targeted through engaged Yahoo! Employee Champions!
Yahoo! UK Festival Fundraiser – Bring Hope to MPS Children
Posted: 30th of January, 2013By Ed Johnson
Yahoo! UK finished 2012 with a day that saw the biggest single fundraising day in UK history! Every year, the UK Yahoo! Employee Foundation (YEF) team holds a fundraising event to support a charity voted upon by the people of Yahoo! UK. This year, we chose one that was pretty close to our hearts. One of our clients has a son by the name of Bobby who is suffering from Sanfilippo syndrome. Our client knew about our fundraiser from his sales executive and wrote the following:
Life-Saving Treatment For Bobby & MPS Children
"Our son Bobby is 7 years old and was diagnosed with Sanfilippo in December 2008…Sanfilippo is a heart-breaking condition that gradually breaks down children's physical and mental abilities, which means Bobby's development will slowly deteriorate until his body is unable to support itself and he will die in childhood. As you can imagine, it's an absolutely heart-breaking prospect for a parent. However, there is hope. There is a treatment known to dramatically improve the lives of Sanfilippo sufferers but it hasn't been clinically tested. We need to raise £600,000 to fund a clinical trial, so that Bobby and hundreds of children like him can receive this treatment that could save their lives. There are 130 families in the UK who have children with Sanfilippo disease. We are getting together with the help of the MPS Society to create Gift Pages for our children to try to help raise the funds any way we can."
With
this email, came a flurry of ideas to create a day that would help out Bobby
any way we could! So after a lot of planning and internal marketing we
were off!
We held our annual charity silent auction where folks bring in all kinds of items that go up for the auction and some of those included holiday packages, vouchers for local stores and restaurants as well as some big ticket items donated by our clients. The most unique donation was donated from Josh Stead where he offered to be a “tea boy” for a month. He just finished his service where he had to fetch and serve tea to James Wildman for a month and it was a giggle for everyone in the office.
We extended our auction to include the first ever Yahoo! bake off and we had our own celebrity chef, Martha Swift, founder of Primrose Bakery give her expert judging skills for the heated competition! Adele Young took the coveted prize for her red velvet masterpiece and folks are still asking her for a repeat performance!
We
usually raise around £2500 for our charity but this year folks dug deep and we
raised an unprecedented £4000! Everyone dug deep and it really paid off.
Tom, Bobby’s dad was over the moon.
The “Planned giving” page is still accepting donations through the year so if you would like to help, anything would be greatly appreciated.
A big shout out to the UK YEF team again as their tireless efforts helped to raise a lot of money for a very worthy cause. As the head of UK YEF, I couldn’t be more proud.
In My Own Words: YEF Egypt is Crossing Boundaries to Do Good
Posted: 14th of November, 2011My name is Mohamed Sabe and I am the Arabic Editor in Chief for Yahoo! Middle East. I was chosen to be the representative for YEF in Egypt in January 2011, only two months after joining the company.Despite starting the year with less than forty employees in the Cairo office, new Yahoos were determined to do good as soon as they found out that Yahoo! encourages its people to make positive contributions to their community.
However, YEF initiatives had to be halted due to the Egyptian revolution, and the office had to be shut down for several weeks for security reasons. In spite of this setback, as soon as things were back to normal, we were again focused on planning for our first initiative and working with local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to decide on what would be the best way to contribute to development in Egypt. Little did we know that our first initiative would cross boundaries and reach beyond Egypt.
In mid-July 2011, a severe drought hit the entire ‘Horn of Africa’ region on the Eastern side of the continent, resulting to this day in over 29,000 deaths among children under 5 in Somalia.
Given the magnitude of this tragedy, local initiatives took a back seat and YEF Egypt members decided that contributing to the well being of Somali families was crucial, and in mid August we approached the Union of Arab Doctors who were collecting money to buy food supplies and send them to Somalia.
Four hundred Egyptian Pounds (67 US dollars) was all that was needed to support a Somali family for a month, so we started a collection campaign that lasted for two weeks.
Around thirty Yahoo! employees (out of sixty in the Cairo office) contributed their money to this cause and we ended up collecting 6,550 Egyptian Pounds (around 1,100 US dollars). While the amount may not seem like much, it meant that we ended up helping over 16 Somali families overcome this crisis for a month.
I remember walking through our small office in Cairo collecting donations and seeing the spirit that Yahoo!’s employees in Cairo displayed in competing with each other to give more money and encouraging each other to contribute. It was really breathtaking!
I personally believe that the beautiful and collective spirit of this small startup office had a strong impact on us. This great start for YEF initiatives in Egypt only increased the appetite of Yahoo’s employees to contribute more and encouraged new Yahoos to take part in upcoming projects.
YEF Egypt will next be teaming up with local NGOs who work on supporting orphans and developing education.
From where I stand, I can proudly say that the culture of doing good and contributing positively to the community is alive and growing in Cairo’s Yahoo! office.
To learn more about YEF or find out how you can make a difference, check out http://howgoodgrows.yahoo.com/.
Best Regards,Mohamed SabeArabic Editor-in-Chief Yahoo! Middle East
