The Intersection of Business and Community: Business Volunteers Unlimited – C to C, The Commitment to Community Podcast

By Christina Capadona-Schmitz

“Find what feeds your soul.” That’s what Aaron Marcovy was told in his job interview with Business Volunteers Unlimited. And that’s just what he found in taking on the role of Director of Business Engagement; his first full-time role with a nonprofit after years in the corporate setting. But as Aaron shares in our podcast interview, this rewarding cycle of giving back and contributing to the community is open to anyone, and BVU exists to make as many connections as possible to fulfill these needs. Learn more about Aaron, BVU and it’s full range of services for nonprofits, businesses and individuals. Also check out the upcoming Homeless Stand Down event and how to get involved.

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WHAT IS C TO C? INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES

Transcript:

SCHMITZ: Hi, it’s Christina and we’re back again with C to C the Commitment to Community Podcast. I’m here today with Aaron Marcovy, and he’s the Director of Business Engagement with Business Volunteers Unlimited. Thanks for joining us today in this very cold, wintry day we’re having here in Northeast Ohio. How are you?

MARCOVY: I’m doing great. Thank you so much for having me.

SCHMITZ: Well, I’m so excited to talk about and learn about your path to your current role here because you have a very interesting career path into the nonprofit sector. But before we go into that, would you mind just giving the audience here a bit of information about Business Volunteers Unlimited or that we all call BVU?

MARCOVY: I’d be happy to. Thank you very much for the opportunity. Business Volunteers Unlimited has been around for about 30 years. We are a non-profit. We’re based in Northeast Ohio. We have offices in both Cleveland and Akron. We’re a small but mighty team, a few dozen people. And all day, every day, we work with organizations like Oswald and Oswald has been a member for many years. We take your people and we find opportunities in the community for them to work, to do volunteer projects, to do all sorts of things. So that’s our half of BVU and then my colleagues on the other half of BVU take a lot of the resources that we develop from the business community and they distribute them as nonprofits all over Northeast Ohio come to us for help. So if people say, hey, I got this problem, I’m an executive director and this is the thing that’s keeping me up at night. We say great, and we go when we find somebody in the business community to be able to help satisfy that need. So it’s a very unique organization. There’s another one sort of blanket in the same model that is our sort of sibling organization in Baltimore, Maryland.

So we work with them regularly and it’s a little bit of a strange thing. There’s really no other organizations besides the two of us out there that sit at the intersection of business and community.

SCHMITZ: Definitely.  What are some of the most rewarding aspects of what you do in your role of Director of Business Engagement? I know talking with company members like us all the time. In our past conversations, you’ve talked about how companies are so excited and rallying around getting back into the community, getting back on track with maybe it’s their board career or getting new talent onto boards and associate boards, talk about some of the most rewarding aspects of what you do.

MARCOVY: I think rewarding is a really good way to talk about it. We just recently saw the retirement of our longtime CEO, Brian Broadbent. He was our leader for 14 years, and our even longer ten-year President moved into the CEO role. Liz Voudouris who is a wonderful, wonderful lightning rod for community engagement and I remember very vividly about four years ago when I just come on to BVU, I was talking with Brian and he said I asked him very candidly what I was going through, the interview process. Brian, really, is this something you feel like a guy like me could sink my teeth into? Personally, emotionally, I feel like there’s a lot of people who are in their 30s, 40s, and 50s now who are day-to-day grinding, doing great work out there for their business. But they need a little something else. They need something to feed your soul. And that is the phrase that Brian used. He said, I’ll tell you, man, seriously, I worked for Accenture for about 30 years when it was his first half of his career. He said, this job feeds my soul like nothing else. And that’s not to say that Accenture won’t feed your soul. It’s not to say that corporate America won’t feed your soul. It will in so many ways. But he said that he found and this is the other key term, the observation of so many good things in this flow of energy from the business community flowing out in this new and very unique and powerful way into the community, the thing that really fed his soul. I have to say that is for me, the number one most rewarding element of it.

SCHMITZ: Well, having said that, going back to earlier career experiences, would you mind sharing the career path that you were on, maybe some of the career experiences and how those more business side lends itself to what you do today?

MARCOVY: Sure, absolutely. I think I first got sort of bit by the community engagement bug, working in the middle of America in the heartland of Oklahoma for a large oil and gas producer.  I was in their community engagement department, and they were a very large natural gas producer, the largest in the US at the time. They knew that they needed to be able to serve more than just their shareholders and lease holders. They really needed to try to serve the community. So part of my job was in a very kind of not a whitewashy kind of way, but in a very nuts and bolts kind of way, really assessing what the need in the community was and helping to figure out how as a company, the company would be able to leverage its employee base, its purchasing power, its loan executives from time to time, of which I was one for a couple of years through their sustainability initiatives to make sure that even beyond just where the drilling was, that there were other sustainability things going on to make sure that the economy wouldn’t be a boom and bust. So all of those things really kind of opened my eyes from the Fortune 100 perspective into a larger thing.

Then I’m a Cleveland native myself. When I came home to Cleveland about 12 or 13 years ago, I found sort of a series of marketing communications roles that eventually kind of lent themselves towards the nonprofit space.

SCHMITZ: Definitely. What are maybe some other life experiences that have defined or changed your perspective in addition to what you’ve shared from the career side? I’m certain you get to work with a very wide range of companies, but within those companies, it’s the people and the stories and how companies rally together to help internally, but then into their community.

MARCOVY: Yeah, absolutely. It’s one of those things where the thing sort of feeds on itself. I have had these truly moving experiences via volunteerism and whether that’s sort of in an intimate sense of really getting to know people that are on a team that I might be coaching. I was very involved in the sport of rowing in Cleveland and throughout my personal life and being there to coach folks who are part of a visually impaired crew, I’ve had the privilege of doing that with folks who are not  sighted or veterans who are differently abled.  I had the privilege of doing that once or twice. In addition, being able to serve at the food bank. So we actually BVU just a couple of months ago, before the weather turned, we manned one of the food distribution activities down at the municipal lot in downtown Cleveland. My God like being able to see the need there. Talking with people doesn’t matter where you come from. We are here for you. That’s what the food bank is all about.  I’m so privileged and inspired to be allowed to work with those kinds of things. You really get bitten by the bug.

You do one of these things, you think that’s the one time this year I’m going to do it, it’s going to be 2 hours. I might get my hands dirty a little bit and there we go. Then all of a sudden you find yourself doing that more and more. We had a group of folks for summer service program a couple of summers ago where we worked with the Cleveland Rowing Foundation. Actually, I had some connections there. We got a group of volunteers and we managed about 15 small motorboats with an outboard engine and two or three volunteers.  We went all the way up to Cuyahoga. We spent about an hour and a half, maybe two hours at most. We pulled out more than 400 pounds of plastic. We weighed everything afterwards, 400 pounds after just two hours of work. So you see this kind of thing, you get bit by the bug and it’s really sort of an inspirational, self-satisfying cycle.

SCHMITZ: Great. Thanks for sharing that. When it comes to BVU you’re in so many different areas, you host events, you have member benefits and different programs that you work through your members. Anyone that wants to volunteer can go to your website and look at opportunities. There are endless opportunities to take part. We just learned recently about your software tracking for companies ready to take that next step in measuring their impact, measuring their volunteers. What are some of the ways that companies can get started? It’s just to figure out where are we starting in the process? Where does BVU fit in?

MARCOVY: That’s a great question. We have worked with companies large and small. If you look at our roster, companies that are our members. We were founded by Eaton Corporation, Jones, Day, Key Bank, and they’re no longer in Cleveland, but TRW and BP. So 30 years ago, those five companies were the five founding companies that lent an initial investment to get us going, as well as employees and board members to be able to help run the organization. We have companies that are that big. I think Eaton has about 90,000 employees or something worldwide. And then even I think our smallest consultancy is only one or two people and everything in between. Again, Oswald has just been a fabulous partner, a member that attends all of these things. And you participate in our program. So we greatly appreciate the culture that you guys have as far as getting started go, I would say for the individual person, go to the website, check out some of the things there’s absolutely wonderful and very different opportunities. You can do it with your family before work, after work, weekends, even during work. And I know that Oswald is kind enough to be able to help facilitate these things.

In terms of time and information our volunteer center is second to none. We have full-time employees. That all they do all day is they speak with the nonprofits, they get an idea of what those needs are, and they populate the volunteer center. And then it’s up to guys like me to push those links out to professionals at Oswald and our other member companies; make sure that they know those things are coming in hot. They’re coming in every day. I think we populate close to a dozen of them every day at least. And that’s if you and your team are interested in doing it, maybe you got ten people on your team. You have an afternoon. We make it a team building exercise. BVU has resources to help guide what conversations might be had that would be beneficial to workflow and team cohesion that can accompany that. So it’s really a fantastic investment in the community, as well as a great investment in your team and your team building. So I would say go to the website and just sort of include some of these things as a next agenda item. Whenever you have the team sync up or whenever you have the departmental call at the very end, five minutes be like, hey, BVU, we’re a member.

We have all these advantages of education and resources. Anybody interested? Let’s talk about it. It’s a good thing to do. So just talking about it is a great first step.

SCHMITZ:  Thanks, Aaron. Before we close today, we’ve learned about the event that’s actually coming up in April, the Homeless Stand Down. And I hope I got that right. But there’s so many elements that we’re learning about and how our company is going to get involved. Can you just give a little bit of information before we close today on this very unique event?

MARCOVY: I’m so glad that you brought it up. The Homeless Stand Down has been going on for many years. BVU has actually merged with another organization that was heading it up. And we are very, very happy about really accelerating it. The need has never been greater. If you’ve never heard of a homeless stand down before, it’s a one day event where you have this resource surge around people who are currently active in the homeless community or they are at risk. It’s very sad to say there’s been in 2020, we got the numbers in 21, about 19 to 20,000 people in Cuyahoga County alone who experienced some form of homelessness. Over 2,200 students in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District are classified as homeless. It’s terrible. It’s something that we really wanted to try to make a dent in that. So the home was standing down this year, Saturday, April 23. It’s going to be held at First Energy Stadium. We’re taking over the Stadium. We have a ton of people who are going to be there. And we would love to see some Oswald folks there. It is a one day surge, and we’re talking medical care, dental checkup, fitness, haircuts.

We’re going to have people from the Veterans Administration, Cuyahoga County job placement folks are there, not just a warm meal. We know we’re not going to solve homelessness overnight for anybody. But if we can try to disrupt the cycle and if we can arm people to be a little bit better prepared with a new weatherized coat or boots, that kind of a thing to give people a chance to be able to break the cycle of homelessness. That’s what we’re in it to do. So I know that Oswald has a lot of that information, and we would love to see some of your folks there to volunteer. We need people to pack bags ahead of time, and we need people there. It’s everything under the sun. We’re being very COVID conscious as well. So it’ll be outside and open air, but we’re still going to need people to direct traffic. We’re going to need people to be able to guide people where the restrooms are. It’s everything under the sun. Not just physicians, they’re given physicals. If you feel like you can help out, we need your help.

SCHMITZ:  That’s incredible. And it sounds like it could be just that spark needed to help someone change their course and take a different path.

MARCOVY: Absolutely.

SCHMITZ: In essence, bringing awareness through such a big event to everything that you shared. So thank you for doing that and thank you for taking the time today to share. We look forward to sharing your website and staying in touch. We won’t be far away this year.

MARCOVY: Absolutely. We’re looking forward to it and hopefully next time we’ll do this in person.

SCHMITZ: Yes. Absolutely. Thanks again.

MARCOVY: Thank you. Bye.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and web formatting.

Introducing the C to C podcast, an oscast by Oswald production

Commitment to Community is a core value of Oswald; it’s the foundation of who we are and the purpose behind all we do. The C to C podcast provides a platform for nonprofit partners to share their stories and discuss the critical issues facing their clients. Our goal: create a halo effect of service and support, inspiring our audiences to align with causes that speak to them and take action in their companies and communities.

Hosted by Christina Capadona-Schmitz, VP and director of marketing communications and leader for community engagement, this podcast series features in-depth interviews and highlights the good works happening throughout our communities.