When I was a student at Texas A&M, The Big Event was one of my favorite traditions to participate in. It’s recognized as the largest student-run, one-day community service project in the nation! On one day each spring, the Aggies go out into the Bryan-College Station community and perform various jobs for the residents as a way to give thanks for their support of the University. Last year, over 20,000 students participated and completed 2,500 jobs! In the years I participated, we helped weed and plant gardens, clean up brush from back yards, paint eves, landscape, and spread gravel.

This event embodies A&M’s core value of selfless service and, if you don’t know much about Aggies, they take their core values and traditions very seriously. When I started working for Monsanto, I found they supported employees getting out and giving back to their communities by volunteering. In fact, a portion of my New Hire Orientation in St. Louis was spent with dozens of other new hires volunteering at a nearby food pantry and getting a taste of Monsanto’s culture of giving. They even have a volunteer program called Monsanto Together, which allows employees to track their volunteer hours and request service grants for the organizations they work with and care about.

Monsanto Gives Back is born

I saw an opportunity to bring a part of A&M with me to the company, so I reached out to organizers of The Big Event at A&M for advice on how to get something similar started at Monsanto. They were more than happy to provide me with awesome materials and I learned that The Big Event had spread to over 70 other universities! Thanks to the support from some great coworkers and leaders in the organization, Monsanto Gives Back was born! The idea is for Monsanto employees to pause together on one day each year to give back to the communities where they live and work.

This past summer, the event debuted with 948 employees from 33 North American manufacturing sites (including Hawaii and Puerto Rico) donating a total of 3,663 hours of service. The manufacturing sites were given the flexibility to choose their own community service project which allowed them to identify specific needs in their individual communities. Projects included cleaning up parks and schools, hosting bingo at a local retirement home, and even building with Habitat for Humanity.

At my site, we decided to volunteer at the nearby state natural area. It had been expressed to us that there was a lot of work to be done on the 600+ acre property and not a lot of hands to do it. We chose this as our project because we knew it would reach and benefit many members of the community who visit the natural area every day. We hiked and pruned miles worth of trails and tended to young trees which had been planted as part of a reforestation project that required some maintenance. It was such a great experience to get to come together as a site and make a real difference to our community.

Some people might think this event was created as some sort of a PR push to help reshape the company’s image in the public eye, but in reality it began because the voice of a brand new, low-level employee was heard. The way Monsanto empowers its employees and encourages thinking outside of the box is one of the things I have come to love most about working for them. I couldn’t have been more proud of the success of this event in its first year and I look forward to the number of lives we can touch in the future!

**Update: The second annual Monsanto Gives back was a huge success in 2016. Almost 1,400 employees across the US and Puerto Rico volunteered a total of 5,700 hours!