Argos Giving Back Initiatives

Argos Multilingual has been helping out charities for some time now. So far they have helped organizations such as Siemacha Spot, Gift of Hope Foundation, Szlachetna Paczka and many others. Today Kimon Fountoukidis, Argos’ Founder and President will answer some questions about the charity events Argos employees organize to give others a helping hand.

How do you decide which charities you want to help out?

Primarily we used to decide which charity we wanted to help out by voting and whichever charity won the most votes would receive a donation from us. However we didn’t find that very fulfilling. So we came up with the idea, that the best thing we could give was our time. We had a group of people at Argos called Argos Unplugged and we started to think about what we could do to invest our time as well as our money into this. We ended up contacting several orphanages in Cracow and we started to work with them.

Why does Argos, as a company, do charity work?

Well, when we started spending time with the kids after school and in the evenings and did various cool activities with them, what was really nice about it was that it wasn’t only that we were actually hanging out with the kids but it also turned into a sort of integration for people in the company. Normally (at least in our history) we would have parties that would be connected with going out and doing stuff typical for a party, but it was a different type of integration than we had when we got to hang out with people and were trying to do something good at the same time.

What do the employees that take part in these events receive?

You don’t get any material benefits as a result of participation. Like in every charity, you don’t really get anything other than a warm-fuzzy feeling and the satisfaction that you’re doing something good.

Do these actions bring any benefit for the company?

Again, charity is meant to be selfless, we’re not doing it for any kind of goal, any reason to get something for ourselves or for the company but as I mentioned before, one interesting benefit that we got from the events was that we had a certain level of integration. The people that participated got to spend time with each other and get to know each other better. I also think people who don’t participate in the events, but know about these initiatives think to themselves that they work in a pretty cool company, and that it’s nice to work someplace where some of the money that gets created and the effort that is made goes towards good things.

What initiatives do these actions give back?

It depends on what we are doing. In these cases we’re trying to spend time with kids that have had very rough upbringings and generally just be there and hang out with them, so that they see that adults and older people do care. Ultimately you’re just getting to know them over time. We helped some of these kids out with concrete, specific things. We paid for their driving courses, I remember we paid for some language classes for some of these kids as we got to know them, but the overall goal here is just to expose them to people like us, and by us I mean people who are working professionals, so that we can maybe open their eyes to possibilities of work in the future. I think that’s the main benefit.