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Volunteering with Oracle Education Foundation: Big Commitment, Big Reward

Blog: Oracle BPM

Oracle Education Foundation is a nonprofit organization funded by Oracle and staffed by Oracle employees. Its mission is to help young people develop the technical acumen, creative confidence, empathy, and grit to become outstanding designers of solutions to people’s needs and the world’s problems. In the Foundation’s program, Oracle Volunteers coach students through multiday classes at the intersection of design thinking and STEAM disciplines—science, technology, engineering, art, and math. This is a guest blog post by Bella Dosovitsky, who has served as a volunteer coach in four Oracle Education Foundation classes.

Bella Dosovitsky is a senior sales consultant for North America Cloud. Prior to coming to Oracle, she worked in technology and nonprofit business development for more than ten years. Bella is interested in mission-driven innovation and entrepreneurship, and passionate about the people who make it all possible and the systems that serve them. 

Here are the top five reasons why volunteering as a coach in the Oracle Education Foundation’s program has been, one of my proudest endeavors while working at Oracle and something I love spreading the word about.”

1. Achieving a sense of purpose

Working with young adults is incredibly inspirational and empowering. The privilege of working with impressionable teens creates a meaningful connection between my for-profit day job and my personal higher purpose, creating real impact and lasting change.

2. Being a role model

When I was in high school (more time ago than I care to admit), I had very few meaningful adult figures in my life outside of my family. Through meeting Oracle employees of all different ages, shapes, and colors, the students in Oracle Education Foundation classes get to envision themselves in our shoes and see what’s on the other side of life choices they soon have to make. I feel like the potential for the biggest impact is during small, informal conversations, often during the “in-between moments”, on a break or outside the classroom, when a serious question gets thrown out casually and you have a chance to influence real-life decisions.

3. Advancing my own learning

Storytelling with data visualizations, Arduino programming, and hardware, 3D printing, Oracle’s involvement with sustainability around the world–this is just a small list of things I have learned through volunteering with the Foundation. While the students are learning, so are the coaches, and this is an amazing way to add some new skills to my own toolkit. By participating, I have opened my own eyes and mind to designing solutions to the many challenges the world faces today, and collaborating with young people in this work is incredibly motivating. 

4. Forging connections

I came to Oracle by way of an acquisition, and I mainly work from home with a team distributed all over North America. Volunteering with Oracle Education Foundation has enabled me to meet like-minded Oracle employees who want to do good in the world. The fellow coaches I’ve met are professionals from a full spectrum of divisions, tenures, and backgrounds at Oracle. These are people who, most likely, I would never have met otherwise. I’ve met coaches who have become lunch buddies, experts to leverage in sticky work situations, mentors, and resources to approach when I need help. Working at a campus as large as HQ, some kind of personal connection, even just a familiar, friendly smile at the gym, sure goes a long way toward developing a sense of connection and community.

5. Recharging

My day job is supporting the sales reps and consultants of North America and, as such, I am often given seemingly unsolvable, high stakes, high-pressure problems to figure out. I cannot count the times when all it took to reach a great solution for a problem was disconnecting from it, sitting in the classroom with these students, and being absorbed in something completely different. I then returned to my desk recharged, refreshed, and full of ideas for solving the problems at hand.

You too can have this experience, this opportunity to connect with new colleagues, the next generation, and new ideas. Whether you realize it or not, you’ve got a lot to give, a lot to share. They say the only thing that feels better than receiving is giving. Volunteer with the Oracle Education Foundation, and you get to experience both. It doesn’t get any better than that. 

Visit www.oraclefoundation.org/volunteer or email foundation_ww@oracle.com to find out more about how you can get involved.

 

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