Helping is good.
We love helping.

Giving is good. Even better? Giving in person. So at WaMu, we encourage our employees to get personally involved. Each quarter, we provide WaMu employees with 12 hours of paid time off to volunteer with the nonprofit organizations they care about. In fact, we have a department dedicated to organizing volunteer opportunities.

We’re proud of the work our employees do in their communities. Take Sacha Stjepanovic, the 2007 recipient of our Volunteer of the Year Award. Working with the nonprofit organization Art with Heart, Sacha translated a children’s book for kids with cancer into Spanish. Now he makes regular hospital visits to give away the books and talk to kids in their native language. And he’s also helped bring books for children in crisis (homelessness, foster care, and serious illness) to countries around the world. That’s in addition to the rest of Sacha’s volunteer work, which includes teaching free money skills classes and coaching his fellow WaMulians to do the same.

And Sacha’s just one of 18 Celebration of Giving winners at WaMu—and one of thousands of WaMulians who give themselves and their time every day.

Recently in Los Angeles, 300 WaMu employees (including our chairman and other leaders) powered through a turbo-style makeover of Audubon Middle School, where 77% of the students use the free and reduced-price lunch program. We painted the inside of the school and the outside of the gym, planted bright flowers and shrubs on the grounds, and taught free money skills classes to both students and adults. When the day was over, things were looking a lot brighter at Audubon.

We’ve led similar projects at schools in Seattle, Sacramento, Oakland, Houston, Chicago, New York, Miami, Atlanta, and Newark. In total, nearly 9,300 WaMu employees around the country volunteered 165,350 hours in 2007. And in addition to our volunteer work, we have a thriving Employee Giving Campaign and Matching Gift Program.