Do you remember your first volunteering experience?
The very first time I had volunteered was for a school clean-up effort through my high school's beautification program. This included getting rid of unsightly things on campus like trash and graffiti. I was assigned to help with de-gumming our desks. Meaning, there was gum under the classroom desks and we volunteered to remove with a scrapper. Honestly, it was gross. But it was rewarding as many of the desks was where my friends and I sat daily for years after. My high school had ~3700 students, so there were a lot of desks!
Is there a non-profit or cause that you particularly care about?
The non-profits that I tend to gravitate towards are those that address food insecurity. California produces so much food for the rest of the world, it really makes no logical sense why we have hungry families with children in the Bay Area. Homeless, I can understand…hungry or starving, makes no sense. A positive out of Covid-19 here in the Bay Area is that school lunches are free, which I think is good for the kids and helps to break the cycle associated with poor nutrition leading to poor academic performance. You may see our Team Arm events focus on helping on this front.
What has been your most positive experience with Team Arm to date?
The most positive experience to date, I am happy to say changes constantly because Team Arm keeps getting better and better in San Jose! I am constantly impressed and overwhelmed by the volunteers here that go out of their way to help the community. I see our volunteers not only do it just out of convenience, but with a real sense of purpose to make Silicon Valley a better place.
So, if it's to date, at the time of writing this then it was the last event where our volunteers came out to support over 1000 local children experience the joy of engineering and science at The Tech Challenge!
Do you have any words of advice for someone who has not volunteered before and isn’t sure where to start?
If you have not volunteered with Team Arm, I can only ask…why not give back? We are all fortunate to have Arm's support for volunteerism for 4 hours monthly and we should all take advantage of that to make our society better wherever you are located. It has a direct impact to where we live and thrive.
To me, it really is a no-brainer. Giving back to the community through Team Arm is a win-win. With Team Arm, you go out with colleagues whom we are familiar with in a safe environment to lend a helping hand together as a team. You build relationships and connections that last throughout the entirety of your career at Arm. There's nothing but kindness and respect from Team Arm volunteers which really strengthens our bond as humans helping our society.