Gallery

Giving back — the social business component of a company

A couple of weekends ago, I got to do something that I truly believe in. I leveraged my passion for photography to help a non-profit capture the moments of a unique event they were hosting.

The non-profit is the Mentor Connector, a Rutland-based organization that empowers youth through mentoring. They connect at-risk youth, those who have no one to turn to for support, with highly qualified mentors.

Their event was a minigolf outing @Otter Creek Fun Center for both mentors and mentees, as well as for the staff from the Mentor Connector.

It was a fun-filled morning for everyone, as you can see from the photos.

I strongly believe that any company should have a social business component to it. Besides giving you the feeling that you accomplished something good, it also helps you reinforce values within the company, create a great culture, and much more.

When you are a company like Local Captures, working with partners and customers who also share that same passion for photography and for capturing the beauty that surrounds us -- how do you create a platform where everyone can participate in your social activities?

We can do one of two things.

First, we can create causes that shine a light on a particular group of under-served people through photography, such as homelessness and deep poverty, discrimination of minorities, etc. We could then solicit photographic contributions, visual stories, and documentary short movies from our tour guides and guests who have an affinity for those causes.

In another scenario, we could team up with organizations that focus on specific causes such as environmental issues and nature preservation, endangered species, animal abuse, and others. We could then create social-impact photo tours where we donate all the photos taken during the tour for the organization's promotional purposes, and where we donate a part of the tour proceeds to the non-profit as well.

We are slowly starting to support both models, and you will see more of that from us soon.

Are there any other models that you can think of that would let us involve not just our employees, but our whole ecosystem in our social activities?

We'd love to hear it!