Community Involvement Helps Your Business!

Dr. D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Presbyterian told me this funny story. Yes, Presbyterian’s have a sense of humor, a heavenly humor!

One day a very successful business man who had made it a point over the years to donate 10% of his profits back to the community, came to Dr. K with this dilemma. “Dr. Kennedy” he said. “I am in a situation where my 10% donations have come to a very large amount of money. I am thinking that I need to cut back. What do you think?” Dr. Kennedy replied: “Sir, I think we need to pray about this.” The successful business man agreed. “Yes, let’s do that.” So Dr. K began to pray. “Dear Lord please lower this man’s income to a place where he can comfortably donate 10% again.”

OOPS! Some of you don’t get this joke! Because some of you have never thought about donating back to the community, shoot, that’s what our overburden tax payments are for, right. Sure it is. But giving back to the community has far greater returns. Stop! Don’t think I’m going all religious on you.

There are tangible benefits to giving back to the community. For one thing, if you give enough, you'll be able to use the charitable deduction on your income tax. For another, giving back to the community can raise your business' profile and even bring you more customers or clients.

Many businesses even include their charitable work in their advertisements, potential customers like the sense of being able to combine their pleasure in patronizing a business with the pleasurable sense of helping others.

But lastly, community service is about building a stronger community and a stronger community means better customers!

Let me tell you about a business in the city I live in, Flint, Michigan. Teton Business Solutions. Teton is a company that helps other companies in a multiple of areas; Hiring, tax consulting, payroll, employee training and bunches more. But along with their drive to create quality business solutions they also have a community heart.

I can’t at this time talk about the details of what their doing here in our community because a lot of it is still in the making and I don’t think they need or want to be praised for what they think of as a “natural thing to do”, but let me tell you that they’ve taken what there good at and used it to start up a community workforce program with Carriage Town Ministries, a place where the “Homeless” or “Jobless” can go to find work. WOW! Do you understand what that means to a community? Those folks that are out walking our streets, panhandling for money, filling the shelters, now have the opportunity to get back into mainstream sociality.


Learn more about Carriage Town Ministries at:
http://www.carriagetown.org/