Community Stakeholder
- Neil Emeigh
From our Founder, Neil
Background
In our company’s history, we’ve tried various social responsibility activities. We’ve done Sock Drives, walks for cancer, donation matching, and more. None of these things are inherently bad, but they only resonated with a small group of people. The minority, rather than the majority. Unfortunately, our views on “how do we serve our communities” was forced upon us with the start of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022.
Going back in time (2015), the first team member I hired was from Ukraine. To this day, we still work with the outsourcing agency I hired that team member from, scaling up to our current 16 full-time team members. I consider the owners of this agency close friends of mine, as I do for many of the team members.
So, when the war broke out, our company knew what to do. We immediately jumped in, and offered our help in any way possible. We:
Raised over $18,000
Paid for armored vehicles to escort our team out of Kiev and into the west
Paid for Airbnbs for our team to reside in outside the city
Continued to support them financially, and emotionally
This wasn’t something to whitewash our company. While so many companies were pulling out of Ukraine, we leaned in. It was innate and automatic for our team to help.
This became our Community we knew we needed to serve. Not only our team, but the people of Ukraine that continue to face the oppressive Russian government.
Our ethos for serving our Communities
This realization helped us connect the dots on “Who do we want to be as a member of society?”. Our Ukraine team members needed support, and that’s where Rayobyte showed up.
No matter the cause, we want to support our team members in their own, unique, individual community involvement, rather than to force everyone into a round hole by donating socks.
Our commitment to the Community:
We will support our team members’ Communities, first and foremost.
If someone’s immediate community is in need of help which impacts themselves or their family, we’re there to help and serve. We’ve had challenging debates as to where this line is drawn because there are, unfortunately, many terrible things happening in the world that we would like to help with, but at the end of the day our budget is finite in choosing where to distribute those resources. So, our current line is whether it is impacting our team members, or an immediate relationship.
We want it to be a bottoms-up responsibility, rather than top-down
With the sock drive, although it obviously has good merit, it wasn’t something that someone from Africa could relate to when the socks were being given to someone in Lincoln, NE. That’s why we now focus our resources in helping our team members support their own communities as often as we can. See our Team Stories for more stories.