Blue Signal held the 2nd Annual Blue Signal Gives Back Initiative earlier this month. In keeping up with tradition, we gathered together to celebrate the team’s accomplishments and give back to the community. For an entire month, employees stepped up their game in a friendly competition where their work was rewarded with a donation to a charity of their choosing.
All recruiters choose a nonprofit organization that’s important to them, and team up with members of the support staff. Each team is able to earn money through Send-Outs, Placements, various metric benchmarks, and company trivia. Trivia questions consist of surprising facts, photos and stories about employees - allowing everyone else to guess who fit the facts, and learn a little about each other along the way! Points are added up and converted to dollar amounts, awarding a dollar for each metric to the chosen charity. The team with the most “dollars” is awarded the dollars earned by all teams to donate to the charity of the winner’s choice.
A quick recap of the competition: This year’s program ran from November 25th through December 25th. With the competition taking place around such a giving time of year, Blue Signalers were excited and eager to start earning points for their chosen organizations. This year, a huge part of the fun was getting to guess answers to the trivia questions! Some of our favorites were “Who on our team once hiked 35 miles in 24 hours, some of which occurred overnight during a full moon?”, “Who on our team has hitchhiked from Scotland to Italy?” and “Who on our team was supposed to bring lettuce to a taco party, and accidentally brought a cabbage head instead of a lettuce head?”. These questions provided a lot of comedic relief during the workday and brought everyone closer together as a team.
At the 2020 Blue Signal Summit, Recruiting Manager, Ryan Walsh, was announced as the winner of the competition for the second year in a row! This year, the organization Ryan chose to partner with was the Smith-Kingsmore Syndrome (SKS) Foundation: a non-profit foundation dedicated to providing support and medical research toward children with SKS. With the combined efforts of the team, Blue Signal was able to donate a total of $2,052.50!
The SKS Foundation is very near and dear to Blue Signal’s hearts. 3 year old Jameson “JJ” Walsh, the youngest son of CEO, Matt Walsh, was diagnosed with Smith-Kingsmore Syndrome in early 2019. SKS is a rare genetic condition that can cause a wide range of medical, intellectual, and behavioral challenges. Early on, JJ had hearing loss and has undergone two cochlear implant surgeries to allow him to hear, which were a triumphant success! Despite his diagnosis, JJ is a happy and healthy boy and is making great progress with the help of the amazing medical support he receives.
The Smith-Kingsmore Foundation strives to provide this kind of support to other families and contribute to educating others on the condition. Researchers are continuing to learn more about SKS and are working to help special needs families gain more understanding/earlier diagnosis. The goal is to better understand the characteristics and the differences of MTOR conditions like Smith-Kingsmore syndrome to be able to design well-informed treatment plans.
More about the Smith-Kingsmore Syndrome Foundation: The SKS Foundation was established in 2019 as a non-profit foundation for children and families affected by Smith-Kingsmore Syndrome. The foundation is working to improve their quality of life by supporting cutting-edge research, collaborating with medical professionals, and strengthening community through worldwide awareness.
