CSR SOLUTIONS OF COLORADO

  • Home
  • Services
    • Services Overview
    • Blog
    • COVID-19 Resources
  • Webinars
  • Our Team
    • Contact
  • The Civic 50 Colorado
    • About The Civic 50 Colorado
    • Promotional Toolkits
    • Honorees & Reports
    • Denver Business Journal Articles
  • Home
  • Services
    • Services Overview
    • Blog
    • COVID-19 Resources
  • Webinars
  • Our Team
    • Contact
  • The Civic 50 Colorado
    • About The Civic 50 Colorado
    • Promotional Toolkits
    • Honorees & Reports
    • Denver Business Journal Articles

CSR Solutions of Colorado Blog

An Unexpected Upside To Employee Volunteering and Giving

11/16/2020

0 Comments

 
Picture
Colorado Key Bank employee volunteers.
​Researchers randomly divided 73 older individuals suffering from high blood pressure into two groups. One group was given $120 and instructed to spend $40 on themselves every week for three weeks. Members of the other group were also given $120 but asked to spend $40 on others every week. At the completion of the experiment, the self-oriented spenders had no change in blood pressure. The group that donated their funds to others or societal causes, or the social-purpose spenders, experienced a blood pressure drop as large as medication or exercise would have generated. In another study, researchers randomly divided a group of adolescents into two groups, one volunteered for charitable causes and the other did not. Four months later, those who volunteered had lower cholesterol than those who hadn't. Social purpose appears to improve other aspects of health as well. There are studies linking acts of social purpose to reductions in inflammation, infectious disease and obesity, for example.

In cases when acts of social purpose don’t spare us from physical ailments, they might still reduce the associated pain. Academics have scanned the brains of individuals whose hands received a mild electric shock. Individuals who had just done an act of social purpose showed a lower pain response in the brain than those who hadn’t. In another study, the same researchers asked cancer patients living with chronic pain to cook and clean for either themselves or for others at their treatment center. When they were helping others, their pain levels were lower than when they were helping themselves.

Cardiologist Alan Rozanski from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City summarizes the evidence on charitable acts and health with, “The need for meaning and purpose is…the deepest driver of wellbeing there is.”

It’s expected that involving employees in charitable activities strengthens societal causes. After all, this is why we organize such activities. Many of us might be surprised, however, to learn that employee social-purpose acts also support the health and wellbeing of the involved employees. In other words, employee volunteering and giving is a true win-win.

This post is an excerpt from “Do Good At Work: How Simple Acts of Social Purpose Drive Success and Wellbeing” (Morgan James Publishing, November 24, 2020) by Bea Boccalandro, contextualized for this venue.
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Authors

    Spark the Change Colorado, Community Shares of Colorado, B:CIVIC

    Archives

    January 2023
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    April 2019
    November 2018

    Categories

    All

    LINKS
    • Community for Employee Civic Engagement (CECE) by Points of Light

    RSS Feed

Home

Civic 50 Co

Services

Contact

Copyright © 2021