Here’s how Udemy gives
On June 26, all Udemy offices (San Francisco, Ankara, and Dublin) spent a day volunteering locally. At Udemy, part of our culture is to give back to our community, particularly around education and youth empowerment. We love interacting with our neighbors and helping them reach their goals, so volunteering isn’t a one-time thing for us. We plan volunteer projects regularly and encourage everyone to step away from their desks to get involved. Here’s a recap of how each Udemy office recently donated its time and energy.
San Francisco
We partnered with HandsOn Bay Area, a group that organizes service projects for innovative companies, to beautify Buena Vista Horace Mann Elementary School in San Francisco’s Mission District. Buena Vista Horace Mann is colorful and airy, with students from kindergarten to 8th grade. Our team pitched in on several projects: building a greenhouse in the playground, painting an accent wall in the teachers’ lounge, organizing classrooms, and painting the school’s values at the building entrance. Because the school is in a bilingual community that serves both Spanish and English speakers, values such as perseverance (perseverancia) were painted in both languages. The SF volunteers had a great time building, painting, and organizing the school and enjoyed a day in the sun helping the community!
Ankara
In Turkey, Udemy employees visited the “Village For Children With Leukemia,” an organization that’s building a Circle of Life facility to provide health and recreational services to families of kids with leukemia and other forms of cancer. It’s a home away from home for patients who have come to Ankara to receive treatment, complete with a guest house offering 5-star hotel service as well as K-12 school facilities, a restaurant, health center, fitness center, athletic facilities and much more. Udemy spent time with the young patients and donated much-needed items like clothes, bed linens, stationery, and toys. We also participated in some workshops that give family members a chance to learn skills like knitting, handicrafts, baking, and floriculture.
Dublin
Volunteers from Udemy’s Dublin office worked with a children’s charity called Scouting Ireland, whose aim is to support and develop the social, physical, and intellectual skills of young children. We spent our time sprucing up their urban garden space, which was very overgrown and unusable. We put a lot of elbow grease into such physical activities as weeding, stripping ivy from walls, and clearing overgrowth, so that Scouting Ireland can now use the space for the club’s activities and skills training. Luckily, the weather was on our side, and we got a lovely sunny day while doing this outdoor work. There were many aching limbs over the weekend as a result, but it was all worth it!
We value these opportunities to give back to our respective communities and look forward to more volunteer events in the future.