“Charity Miles had enough support to help us through and take some of the work off our plates, since we all have day jobs in the company. Getting the social element of the fundraising together would have been much harder as an individual trying to manage it all.”
For Surrozen, community engagement isn’t just about bringing their team members closer together — it’s also about supporting the patients that Surrozen, a pharmaceutical company, serves.
“We’re very invested in company culture and making sure that our employees feel like they are part of a community,” says Jeff Ho, VP of Corporate Development. “And we also want our internal community to give back to the communities that we’re in and to serve the patients that our products help.”
Team Zen, the volunteer group that organizes company culture and community service initiatives, had done fitness challenges before. But they’d never done a fitness challenge combined with a fundraiser.
“We recently started working on treatments for Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis,” says Jeff. “The idea came to do another fitness challenge, and to also tie it to fundraising for the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation, which is a patient advocacy group.”
Jeff started searching for a way to organize the challenge and found Charity Miles. It already had the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation on its list and seemed like a perfect fit.
Over two and a half weeks in October, the Surrozen team raised an amazing $8,500 for the foundation.
“The challenge engaged the community and gave people an opportunity for fun with a purpose,” says Jeff. “Most people found it easy to get on the app and start right away.”
Jeff’s favorite part of the challenge was how easy it was for him and the rest of Team Zen to organize.
“It takes time to administrate a challenge, to encourage people to keep doing it and to make it social and fun. Charity Miles had enough support to help us through and take some of the work off our plates since we all have day jobs in the company. Getting the social element of the fundraising together would have been much harder as an individual trying to manage it all.”
“I found out later that employees didn’t even bother to come to me for support,” Jeff adds. “They went straight to the Charity Miles support team. It made it simple for volunteers like us to execute the challenge internally.”
We’re happy that we could help the Surrozen team raise so much for such an important cause. Great work! #EveryMileMatters