A group from the Enterprise Innovation Institute recently volunteered at Open Hand Atlanta
On a recent Friday, a contingent of Enterprise Innovation Institute employees explored the idea of well-being at Open Hand Atlanta, a nonprofit organization that provides food for people with disabilities and chronic disease. Its mission: We cook. We deliver. We teach. We care.
The event was organized by the well-being committee, which has taken on the challenge of trying to bring people in the various programs in the Enterprise Innovation Institute together with events that strengthen the organization while improving the well-being of employees.
“Well-being is at the heart of what we as an economic development organization do every day,” said Caley Landau, a marketing strategist with the Georgia Manufacturing Extension Partnership (GaMEP), who is on the well-being committee. “Our goal in our jobs is to make lives better and improve the human condition. Well-being improves employee engagement and experience, sparks creativity and collaboration, and helps us make the greatest impact possible through our programs. It’s also a philosophy that’s personally important to us as members of the community.”
Paul Todd, group manager for operational excellence with GaMEP, worked with Caley to find a team-strengthening activity.
“As part of our focus on well-being, Caley asked me to find a volunteer activity that would bring together employees from across EI² in the service of others,” Todd said. “I was familiar with Open Hand from a series of process improvement projects the GaMEP worked on there in years past, so I knew they had a great mission and a group volunteer program that would fit us well.”
Open Hand has been serving Atlantans for more than three decades. With a full commercial kitchen, staff and volunteers cook, pack, and deliver nutritious meals every day to medically fragile, underserved people, often seniors who live below the poverty line, and rely on the meals and the companionship of the people who deliver them.
In 2022, Open Hand cooked, packed, and delivered 5,000 meals per day, a total of nearly 1.5 million meals across the state, with more than 13,000 volunteer hours. Inflation and a growing need saw a 28% increase in food costs over the past two years. Open Hand’s monthly grocery bill last year was $327,525.
The approximately 30 volunteers from the Enterprise Innovation Institute put together almost 2,000 meals in an assembly line as organized and efficient as any in the for-profit world. It was a wonderful opportunity to work with new people for an important cause.