Xerox Employees Pitch in to Care for Their Communities

By Elissa Nesbitt, Director, Community Relations

View more photos from the various Day of Caring volunteer activities in our Facebook album.

Your boss gives you a day off during the week. Do you:

A) Remove invasive species from a hiking trail.

B) Help out at a Special Olympics event.

C) Spruce-up the downtown portion of a greenway trail.

D) Drink beer.

I won’t say that no one at Xerox eventually enjoyed a libation at the end of the day, but I will say they checked-off items A through C, and more.

More than 500 Xerox employees from Rochester N.Y., Norwalk Conn. and Wilsonville, Ore. volunteered their time in a nation-wide effort to bring people together, improve lives and strengthen our communities. The United Way Day of Caring is an annual tradition for nearly two decades.  This year, Xerox teams worked at nearly 40 sites to help non-profits cross off their to-do lists of indoor and outdoor chores.

Xerox and our communities
Xerox may be a large global corporation, but our people make sure we’re connected to our local communities thanks to their passion for giving back. To learn more about how Xerox cares for communities, visit this page in our 2016 Global Citizenship Report.

This was the first year that Rochester YP NeXus chapter president, Jonathan Nwagbaraocha inspired and galvanized young professionals across the nation to participate in the Day of Caring. The Wilsonville chapter spent the day removing invasive species from a hiking trail; the Norwalk chapter volunteered at the Special Olympics Southern Time Trials and the Rochester chapter volunteered with the Genesee Land Trust to spring clean the El Camino Trail in downtown Rochester.

“YP NeXus members across the U.S. were excited to participate in this first-ever nationwide event to make a difference in our communities. We’re grateful for support Xerox shows its employees to dedicate an entire day to volunteering,” said Jonathan.

Members of the Xerox Communication department chose to dedicate their Day of Caring to CDS Life Transitions, a supportive housing facility for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. With rakes, shovels, and a chainsaw in-hands, the team cleared fallen branches and surrounding brush, and landscaped the perimeter of the home with fresh mulch and outdoor plants.

“Days like these not only remind us how good it feels to support the community, but how strong our teams can be in environments completely unrelated to our day-to-day responsibilities.” said Carl Langsenkamp, Global Director of Xerox Public Relations. “By working together to achieve a new goal, we’re also opening new avenues for better communication.”

2017 marked the seventh year members of the Rochester Office of General Counsel spent the day working at YMCA Camp Cory, a YMCA-sponsored summer camp located on the eastern shore of Keuka Lake, one of Upstate New York’s beautiful Finger Lakes. Given the prowess for construction work demonstrated by the OGC team in prior years, Camp Cory assigned some challenging construction projects: digging post holes, building a wood rail fence, building two gates for a stockade storage fence, water sealing picnic tables, and splitting wood to convert a pile of logs into rows of neatly stacked campfire wood.