One by One: West Michigan

The Alticor corporate contributions program supports organizations working to make life better for children in West Michigan, home of our corporate headquarters. We provide grants, in-kind support and volunteer hours to more than 100 local non-profit partners, including:

• Southeast Academic Center, an inner-city public school
• United Way
• Bethany Christian Services, a foster care and adoption agency
• Junior Achievement
• Equest Center for Therapeutic Riding

• While we're proud to provide funding to our inner-city partner school, Southeast Academic Center, we realize that many of the students benefit more from our time than our dollars. That's why so many Alticor employees take the company shuttle every week to Southeast to spend time tutoring and mentoring the students. The company sponsors a variety of other activities during the school year, including Penpals, which matches 3rd through 6th graders with 200 Alticor employees to exchange monthly letters; fun-filled “incentive trips” three or four times a year for 6th graders who behave, finish their work and have good attendance; Career Day for 7th graders who visit Alticor and learn about different kinds of jobs; Job Shadow day for 8th graders to get an even closer look at the working world; and Santa’s Secret Workshop, a fun holiday event enabling students to buy quality presents for their family and friends at low prices.
• As part of the Grand Rapids Student Advancement Foundation's "Need to Read" campaign, we've funded three brand new libraries for inner-city schools, including one at our partner school, Southeast Academic Center.
• Alticor is a strong supporter of our local United Way. Whether we're providing Day of Caring volunteers for clean-up projects at local camps, making corporate donations, raising funds and awareness through our annual United Way campaign or offering the skills of a loaned executive, we know that our efforts are making a difference for the children of West Michigan. In addition to funding direct service programs for our community’s basic needs, Heart of West Michigan United Way has also adopted early childhood development and literacy as areas of greater focus, which are a perfect fit for the One by One campaign.
• We are proud to provide financial support to Bethany Christian Services, an organization committed to finding safe homes for children. But we're just as proud of the sweat equity we've invested into their grounds—117 of our managers and executives have gotten their hands dirty on landscaping or building projects for the organization since January 2006.
• In 2006, through our partnership with Junior Achievement, 44 classrooms had Alticor employees serve as volunteer "teachers," sharing the fundamentals of free enterprise, business and economics.
• Teams of employees often use volunteer "days away" from the office to build camaraderie to learn to work more effectively as a team. In 2006, day away volunteer projects added up to nearly 3,000 hours of free labor for our non-profit partners.
• Alticor trains and supports more than 50 volunteers who serve on non-profit boards.
• We provide funding to International Aid and the American Red Cross so that in times of disaster, they have the resources needed to assist victims.  When disasters such as the Southeast Asia Tsunami or Hurricane Katrina wreak havoc around the world, we mobilize our resources to provide in-kind product donations, logistics assistance, employee volunteers and cash donations to those in need.

• Since January 2006, 1,039 employees have volunteered over 6,825 hours.
• Our volunteer programs and corporate contributions have impacted 70,000 children in the West Michigan community in 2006 alone.