On Oct. 10, 2022, nearly every employee from Chesapeake Bank, Chesapeake Payment Systems, Chesapeake Wealth Management, and Flexent, came together at the T.C. Walker building in Gloucester for a volunteer event, which we call “Great Place To Work Day.”
Instead of a regular bank holiday, our employees helped build bookcases for the hundreds of books which were donated to the school system. Our own Jill Ortiz narrated a short video made on that day:
“Great Place to Work Day” is a day where we come together as an organization. It is Columbus Day, so technically, it's a bank holiday.
But we bring all of our employees together and utilize this day for training... sharing information so that all employees are involved as well as coming together to support a community activity.
Our community activity this year was supporting literacy and helping the schools in Gloucester County, we have eight public schools. So we got together and we worked with some of the employees at T.C. Walker Elementary and Administrative Building and found that there was a need for books and bookshelves to help teachers.
So we came together, and we had commercial loan officers, lenders, mortgage officers kind of stepping out of the box of their day to day normal routine... and we got together and put together 25 bookshelves.
We had people building bookshelves in different groups, and we also held a book drive. We had all 230 employees that showed up... put these bookshelves together but then all 250 donated books and sent them through different avenues to get them to the school.
So, we built 25 bookshelves, over 400 books were collected. We also created about 150 bags for teachers to carry their school supplies daily. We painted on them decorated them wrote heartfelt messages about learning and literacy and maybe what that means to them along with pictures and create creative designs.
Towards the end of our “Great Place to Work Day” activity, a group of us that were on the committee that helped put this whole activity together for the day. We presented the teachers as well as a student with the bookshelves, the books and the bags.