Corporate Citizenship Awards: Nationwide, CMHA, Feazel & Robert Weiler Co. lead 2022 honorees
This has been, to put it mildly, a rough couple years for our region’s nonprofits.
The pandemic has led to much greater need across a wide swath of areas served by charitable organizations, while at the same time, resources have been stretched thin by disruptions to fundraising and a job market that has been particularly troublesome for a sector not known for its high pay.
This can been seen in an annual survey by the Human Service Chamber of Franklin County, which collected responses from 89 of its members this spring. It concluded that the health and human services sector is, “holding up, but needs considerable help with old challenges persisting and new ones emerging fast.”
The survey found about half of respondents are expecting to come up short in the revenue they need this year to meet the demand they’re seeing in the community.
On the workforce side, the 89 nonprofits responding to the survey reported 1,943 open positions. That’s untenable.
“A lot of organizations have been fortunate to be supported financially over the last two years to meet the significant need that has arisen. But a lot of them are having a hard time navigating that for various reasons,” Michael Corey, executive director of the Human Service Chamber, said at a June 15 Columbus Metropolitan Club luncheon.
“We’re seeing a resurgence of client needs in many sub sectors of the health and human services sector that are even greater than the first months of the pandemic,” he said. “And there are fewer people available to do the work to meet that greater need. And folks are exhausted.”
The second significant challenge for the region’s nonprofits is “financial unpredictability,” Corey said, particularly from government sources.
Which brings us around to this year’s Corporate Citizenship Awards. We started publishing a list of the region’s most generous companies five years ago, thinking at the time that we should highlight employers giving back to their community because the needs were so great. Our hope was that it would encourage others to get on board.
We are once again heartened to see such a robust response from the business community to the list survey this year, allowing us to showcase 100 companies giving of their time and money. Their generosity needs to be copied over and over by others who are benefitting from the community’s resources but not contributing to them.
As Homeport CEO Leah Evans said at the CMC luncheon, nonprofits’ work has to matter to more than the people getting assistance.
“It has to also matter across our community,” she said. “It has to matter that there are people who are homeless, it has to matter that there are third graders who can’t read, it has to matter more broadly so that we actually can advance and have systemic change.”
2022 Columbus Corporate Citizenship Awards
Here are the region's most generous companies, ranked by category according to size:
Extra Large
- Nationwide
- Battelle
- JPMorgan Chase & Co.
- Big Lots Inc.
- Cardinal Health Inc.
- Huntington Bancshares Inc.
- Kroger Co.
- White Castle
- Safelite Group Inc.
- Encova Insurance
- CoverMyMeds
- M/I Homes Inc.
Read the full article here