In every facet of our personal lives, we are reminded of the overwhelming importance of habits in becoming the person we want to be. It is time we applied this same importance to habits in the corporate world; specifically, the role of habits for a sustainable corporate responsibility initiative. 

Too often, corporate responsibility is governed by grand gestures, developed at the top, pushed down onto employees, and devoid of nuance. While important, and not without significant impact, there is a simpler, more sustainable, and more cost-effective way to pioneer corporate social impact and that is by flipping the script and taking a bottom-up approach.

Consider this, approximately 1/3rd of adult Americans volunteer at least once a year. On top of that, people in the states spend an average of 52 hours a year volunteering. Your youth soccer coaches, food distributors, and after school tutors are rarely hired help. No, they are hard-working Americans spending their afternoons giving back to the communities within which they reside. Sustainable impact is grassroots, it’s local, and it's happening without your knowledge.

Instead of developing top-down initiatives to showcase corporate impact, why not just empower your employees to do what they already are doing, or want to do, but don't know how? When given the opportunity, humans are generally good. They care for others, with empathy being socially and biologically ingrained into them. As a business, you can capitalize on this fact and give your employees an outlet for giving back.

At SchooLinks, we work with thousands of districts and millions of students across the nation. Thousands of high-school internships, career events and job shadowing opportunities are facilitated on our platform through local employees volunteering with their local district, for no reason other than they want to. You probably have someone at your company doing exactly that. Further, I bet if you took a poll of how many of your employees wanted to mentor kids in their community you would be shocked by the result. So let them. Join SchooLinks as a corporate partner and give your employees the opportunity to impact their communities, because sometimes corporate responsibility is as simple as letting good people do good things.