Area businesses find ways to support charities

That’s the day the grant program manager for St. John’s Regional Medical Center has to have her preliminary budget ready.

But unlike many other businessmen and women in the tri-state area, Micklethwaite doesn’t mind the budget-building process all that much. That’s because her budget is built off of charitable donations from businesses and residents in the community.

“Every year, every business sets a budget,” Micklethwaite said. “Unlike most businesses, however, St. John’s sets a community benefits budget. That budget and the financial budget go hand-in-hand because of St. John’s mission, and by department we go through and determine what percentage of revenues we will use to give back to the community. There are 300 services that qualify as community benefit services.”

According to Micklethwaite, St. John’s community benefits budget exceeded $21.7 million in fiscal year 2007 (July 1, 2006 to June 30, 2007).

That is 7 percent of the $300 million-plus budget that St. John’s works with on an annual basis.

Many businesses in the tri-state area, whether small businesses that are locally based or large corporations with local branches, also dedicate a percentage of their annual budget to charitable giving.

According to Patsy Kruse, human resource director for the Carthage Wal-Mart Supercenter, each Wal-Mart branch is allotted a certain amount of money each year from the corporate headquarters to put back into the community.

Kruse said that can be used for anything from organizations to community causes.

“Pretty much anything that’s going right back into the community,” she said. “It comes from the Wal-Mart foundation and each branch is provided matching grants and community grants. It goes store-by-store but it’s decided at the home office.”

Kruse said some of the things that the Carthage branch has donated to include anything with a 501C3 listing — which includes schools and organizations. She said car washes and bake sales aren’t uncommon and will often be matched by Wal-Mart.

She said community grants include research and support for cures for cancer and diabetes, and donations to the Carthage Library and the VFW.

“We don’t have very many times when the home office will say no to a request,” Kruse said. “If it’s not a 501C3 they will deny it, but as long as it’s going back into the community they try to do what they can to contribute.”

That’s not unusual for tri-state businesses, either.

In fact, it’s more like the norm. According to Valerie Searcy, director of marketing for the United Way of Southwest Missouri, there are more than 400 businesses in the region who contribute on an annual basis to the charitable organization. She said this comes from a combination of pledges from businesses each year, special gifts, and especially from employee giving.

“If you look at United Way across the country you’ll see that employee giving is decreasing,” Searcy said. “That’s not true here. It’s increasing in our region. We’re pretty lucky because we’re still mostly supported by employee giving.”

Searcy said much of that employee giving is driven by the involvement of upper management within the respective companies.

She said many businesses have funds set aside in their annual budgets for charitable giving, but that it’s the attitude of giving back to the community exhibited by the leaders of those businesses that shows the true measure of a company.

“I think it starts with the CEO,” Searcy said. “If he or she is pushing for giving, then the employees seem to follow their lead.”

Usually businesses have specific employees in charge of allocating those funds, Searcy said.

Some businesses, however, simply take those opportunities to help in the community on a case-by-case basis.

“We don’t really have anything budgeted, we just periodically through the year pick what we’ll do,” said Mike Landis of Landis Construction Co. “We do a lot of things in partnership with other companies in the area, like the extreme home makeover.”

Paul Baldassarre, manager of Meek’s which was one of the businesses that helped with the extreme home makeover, said he, too, takes charitable giving on a case-by-case basis and usually finds funds for those things from the advertising budget.

“We donate to high schools and churches, and to baseball teams every once in awhile,” Baldassarre said. “It all comes out of our miscellaneous advertising account, which is set in the budget based on sales. That account gets spread out between newspaper, radio and flyer advertising, but it’s set up so that if someone comes in and requests help for something, we can tap into that account.”

Baldassarre said there are 30 stores in the Meek’s franchise and that each individual store works much like Wal-Mart in that it has autonomy in making charitable giving decisions.

He said the corporate office encourages giving back to the community.

“We have a lot of leeway to donate to what we want to donate to,” Baldassarre said. “Sometimes we give so much that by October most of that money is gone.”[[In-content Ad]]