Global Citizenship: Community Involvement - Volunteerism - Employees in the Community

For the second year in a row, Farnborough employees supported the “Get With” program by hosting 14 students age 14-16 for a day. “Get With” is a community-based project held during the school summer holiday to provide activity days for young people. These activity days provide a diversion for the students who are predominantly from social housing or challenging backgrounds. The aim is to encourage social behavior.

The students enjoyed lunch and some games in the office, and practiced their soldering skills by each building a “Resistor Man” – a photo holder with an LED “head” that lit up. They then built their own FM radios to take home.

Recognizing the importance of exercising one’s right to vote, on April 15 (the eve of India’s elections), Hyderabad employees conducted a “walk to work” campaign while carrying banners encouraging citizens to vote.

With signs in both English and Telugu, and slogans such as, “Just do it!” and “Vote is our fundamental duty,” the group was cheered and encouraged by drivers and passersby as they walked. Students asked them for translations of their Telugu slogans and one driver took a sign to display in her car.

“It wasn’t just the participation that was extremely commendable, but also the fact that passersby constantly encouraged us all along the route was evidence enough of the desire of many people to participate in the election,” says Sudhir Kumar Sunkara, Senior Engineer. “Voting might not be the be-all and end-all of our social obligation, but it sure is a responsibility that we have to carry out.”

Eighty employees led by Bud Nelson, Senior Vice President and Corporate Controller, volunteered an afternoon in June to help feed the hungry at Feeding America San Diego.

Assigned to different locations throughout the large warehouse, teams helped in distributing food, preparing pallets, cleaning and sorting food bank items, including over-the-counter medication, repacking hundreds of pounds of breakfast cereal into one-pound bags, and assembling backpacks for the Children's BackPack program, a Qualcomm-funded program that provides San Diego children in need with bags of food to take home for the weekend. The Qualcomm team packed enough backpacks to feed 1,400 students and their families.

Harish Balijepalli, Programmer Analyst and one of the team leaders, was surprised to learn there was such a high need for food in the United States. "Being from a developing country [India], I was under the impression that there is abundance in the United States as it is a developed country and the world's leading economy,” he says. “I was especially moved by the 'BackPack' program that serves food not only for the kids but their families during the weekend."

In June, QCT Korea employees volunteered at a Habitat for Humanity construction site. Habitat for Humanity houses are constructed and sold on long-term mortgages for no profit and with no interest. Homeowners and their families invest their own labor -- "sweat equity" -- into building their own homes and the homes of others. Volunteers provide much of the labor and their efforts make the houses affordable to low-income families.

Seven employees left the office at 7 a.m. to get to the construction site, which is two hours away from Seoul. They were assigned to haul away construction materials and remove nails from construction wood.

“It was challenging to keep working outside under the sizzling hot sun,” says Chan-Jin Park, HR Representative. “But our employees were more than happy to be part of the construction for a needy family.”

ualcomm has partnered with the Sikshana Foundation to adopt, empower and improve 25 government schools, which serve more than 3,200 underprivileged children. This quarter, employees hosted top-ranking students from those schools at the Qualcomm Bagalore office to give students a taste of working in the field of science in order to encourage ambition toward an education in science and math.

The students enjoyed lunch and a tour of the Qualcomm facilities, during which they got an understanding of the work done by Qualcomm engineers in the labs, the significance of the data center, and the basics of layout design activity.

Students were also presented with scholarships from the management of Qualcomm Bangalore, while a group of parents and employees cheered them on. The scholarship presentation was interspersed with talent presentations by some of the children.