2022 was a year of helping refugees from war-torn Ukraine, supporting underprivileged children and adults, as well as charity organizations. We helped numerous individuals, because helping is what counts.
Our charity initiative, CF4GOOD, is already three years old. It launched at the beginning of the pandemic, when many people strongly felt they wanted to help the less fortunate. This in turn helped us at C&F cope with this difficult time together.
The key thing about CF4GOOD is that it is a grassroots initiative. It is our personnel who find, shortlist, and ultimately decide on which individuals and institutions receive our support, and in what proportions.
Who we help and why
When we started in 2020, over the first 5 editions of CF4GOOD we supported 24 charity programs with a total of PLN 50 thousand. This amount doubled in 2021, and seeing how involved everyone was, we assigned an additional PLN 40 thousand for scholarships.
The apportioning of the original PLN 100k of 2021 was as follows:
- 48% to help children,
- 27% – adults,
- 12% – animal welfare,
- 13% – other initiatives.
Once the originally planned amount had been distributed, we assigned additional funds of PLN 40k to create scholarships for talented schoolchildren from underprivileged backgrounds. We firmly believe good education is key in building a better future and gives individuals a real chance to leave difficult social circumstances behind.
The funds went to kids expressing a keen interest in developing their IT-related skills: 14- year-olds and highschoolers under the care of the Saint Nicholas Foundation. On top of direct funding, we also provided them with vouchers for programming courses.
2022 – record year
Last year saw 4 editions of CF4GOOD, with 27 initiatives receiving a total of PLN 100 thousand. Personnel involvement was high, with as many as 429 votes cast. We helped:
- children,
- adults,
- refugees from Ukraine,
- green initiatives,
- local community initiatives,
- animal welfare organizations.
Throughout the year we were supporting the Aleppo Children’s University, with PLN 100k in total, as well as PLN 30k for the Iskierka Foundation. And our 2022 WOŚP collection box provided a whopping PLN 5561.
In addition, in the school year 2022/2023, in cooperation with the Saint Nicholas Foundation, we sponsored another round of scholarships worth a total of PLN 30k for underprivileged children interested in IT, and a further PLN 30k went towards psychological support for children. On top of this we provided PLN 50k worth of aid for Ukrainian children.
Helping helps the helpers
– 2022 was the third consecutive year in which the grassroots charity program CF4GOOD was in operation. This is becoming a new tradition in our company, seeping into our DNA. We can clearly see how important this initiative is for our personnel, how involved they are in helping others, and how rewarding it is to them. This also goes to show how well we mesh in together, as a team drawn to the same set of values – says C&F’s Tomasz Bogusławski. – The initiative will certainly be continued – he adds. Helping others helps you too, reveals psychnewsdaily.com, drawing on the results of a 2022 meta analysis in “Psychological Bulletin”. Researchers analyzed more than 200 existing studies with a combined nearly 200 000 participants, and confirmed that by helping other people you boost your own health and happiness.
Bryant P.H. Hui of the University of Cambridge and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the lead author of the study, says prosocial behaviors (altruism, cooperation, trust, compassion) are among the “necessary ingredients of a harmonious and well-functioning society”. He adds that “[Helping others] is part of the shared culture of humankind, and our analysis shows that it also contributes to mental and physical health.”
The article: https://www.psychnewsdaily.com/new-study-shows-that-helping-others-also-helps-yourself/
The meta analysis: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/bul-bul0000298.pdf