Employees of Saturna Capital, an investment adviser and administrator of more than $3.6 billion in assets, recently made significant contributes to charity after receiving their year-end bonuses.
The company’s employees continued a longstanding corporate tradition of charitable giving, which has earned Saturna a national award for its investment in community causes. It announced this year resulted in $122,500 being awarded to 48 nonprofit charitable organizations through employee-initiated donations during the 2011 holiday season.
“Our giving program not only promotes broad diversity in the charitable causes we support as a firm, but it also ensures that we give to organizations that have significance for our employees, their families and their communities,” said Jane Carten, president and CEO of Saturna. “The fact that so many of our employees voluntarily sacrifice their year-end bonus to support those in need tells me that our internal initiatives to promote philanthropy are working.”
Although many companies offer employee incentive programs of some kind and sometimes coming from year-end bonuses, they don’t always wind up as contributions to a greater cause. In 2011, Saturna’s charitable giving program transcended traditional matching contributions with all eligible employees given the choice of directing their bonus to a charitable cause. In response, half of the company’s 55 eligible employees decided to direct their bonuses to a charitable cause.
Not all incentives come in the form of end of the year bonuses, however. According to Tulsa World, elected officials and business leaders are tossing around ideas for possible incentive plans in order to keep American Airlines’ 7,000-employee maintenance base in Oklahoma as the company continues its reorganization process through bankruptcy.
“We’ve been asking everybody about what might be available from their perspective,” Tulsa Mayor Dewey Bartlett told the news source. “Whatever happens, we want to be prepared to keep American Airlines here.”
With 7,000 employees at American Airlines’ Tulsa maintenance base, there was $32.5 million of Quality Jobs Program money awarded to American Airlines in the form of payroll tax rebates between 1995 and 2006, and $22.3 million in capital improvements for the base offered through the Vision 2025 program.
