Stellar takes an innovative approach to community support through employee-driven local community engagement. Just three years after the company was established, the Stellar Foundation was formed in 1998 as a vehicle to empower employees to give back to their communities. As part of their benefits package, every employee is allocated funds from the Foundation to contribute to a charitable organization of their choice every year.
Beyond the financial support of the Foundation, employees are encouraged to donate their time to local community activities. Community involvement is written into every employee’s incentive plan, and Stellar employees have engaged in a wide variety of activities which include leading Scout troops, coaching youth sports, volunteering with Habitat for Humanity, youth mentoring, and judging for science and technology contests, to name just a few.
Stellar’s Annual Business Planning Meeting is another opportunity for company-wide team building activities that also support the community. At recent meetings, employees worked together to build robot kits for STEM educational programs and wheelchairs for a local Veterans Association.
Thanks to the Stellar Foundation and those employees who generously contributed their Stellar Foundation donation to support my Honduras trip to drill a water well for a needy community.
Five sets of dads/sons and a couple participated in the Living Water International mission trip where we spent three days drilling and developing the well. It was hot and humid, there were torrential downpours in the evenings, food primarily consisted of rice/plantains, and mosquitos were in abundance. But those are all after-thoughts to the fact that hundreds of villagers now have a clean water source instead of spending hours each day manually carrying water to their homes. And five young men relished the opportunity to make an impact far outside their comfort zones.
I was fortunate to just complete a week-long mission trip with the Give Hope Global Foundation serving in Ghana, Africa. I wanted to give a huge shout out and thank you to the Stellar Solutions Foundation for not only my yearly foundation donation, but for the very impactful extra donation and support that was granted to me without hesitation.
In preparation for the trip, I didn’t really know where I would fit since a portion of the team was helping in the medical clinics/hospitals and the other half was teaching the children and training the teachers. Funny enough, I was the person on the team with the most IT experience, so I ended up setting up an Information Communication Technology (ICT) lab and teaching the children as well as the teachers how to use computers, etc.
This trip was truly rewarding, humbling, educational, and all of the other cliché things I could say, but are so completely true. Thank you again to the Stellar Solutions Foundation for their extra support to the Give Hope Foundation.