After four years of exams, group projects, and various tedious college assignments, a graduate's final wish is the perfect job. Unfortunately, the perfect job is often times hard to come by. Looking back on my semester with EFCO, I feel extremely lucky to have worked for and learned from the brilliant minds behind such an organization. I now know the importance of a sustainable relationship between community and company.

As I explore my own options for a career, I require companies to be involved in corporate citizenship, community involvement, and philanthropy. Colorado is lucky enough to have unique start-up inhabitants in which companies are willing to give back to the communities in which they strive to survive. EFCO is the future of sustainable philanthropy 2.0, in which company and community help each other to help themselves.

EFCO allowed me to gain insight into many different businesses and corporations in the Boulder/Denver area. Whether small or large, the member companies of EFCO all emphasize the importance of teamwork and giving back to the community at large through leveraging their skills. This passion has ultimately led to an August event in which all the member companies can work towards the common goal of corporate philanthropy.

Upon my own liquidation from EFCO, I wish to thank Ryan Martens for his outstanding teaching. I have learned many unique business lessons from him and can only hope a future boss is very similar. I would also like to thank Brad Feld for giving me the opportunity to work with EFCO and among the brilliant minds that make up the Board of Directors. Thanks!

On August 16th, the member companies of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado (EFCO) will celebrate our success by having a family picnic, volunteering and education event.

This is our first annual "Give-Back" celebration. At this event, we will be celebrating the success of our group in catalyzing corporate citizenship, community involvement and philanthropy in our communities. Strong Communities make Stronger Companies!

This event will actually be two separate events on the same day.

• Starting at 8 AM, we will be volunteering and having a participation challenge across EFCO companies to support " 1st Annual Friendship 5K Run/Walk with Intercambio de Comunidades and KGNU Community Radio."


• Starting at 10:30 AM, EFCO will host a strategic planning event with leaders from Intercambio to help them plan for national expansion. This event will require approximately 30 volunteers.

At 11:45, we will do a short overview on EFCO goals and directions. At Noon, we will sponsor beverages and desserts at a family picnic and introduce folks to a specific set of high-tech skills-based volunteering opportunities available in Boulder and Denver.

We realize that people will be involved at different levels for this event. We are looking for volunteers to the two events outlined above, as well as people to participate and run in the race. We also invite all employee families to bring a picnic and attend the 11:45 AM EFCO overview and celebration over lunch.

Please look for more details on the events and volunteering opportunities coming before July 4th. Feel free to contact me for more information.

Please forward this to all employees at your company. We plan to have a fun competition between companies on participation, volunteering and spirit.
Sincerely,

Ryan Martens
Ryan(dot)Martens(at)rallydev(dot)com

BOULDER, Colo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Symplified today announced that it has joined the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado (EFCO) to support philanthropic efforts throughout the community. EFCO allows startup companies to donate a fraction of their equity to Boulder’s Community Foundation during initial stages of liquidity.

While they may want to directly support charities, most startups are not in a financial position to do so. Through EFCO, entrepreneurs can focus on building their business while meeting their philanthropic goals.

“Philanthropy, volunteerism and community involvement are core values at Symplified,” said Eric Olden, founder and CEO of Symplified. “EFCO enables us to maintain our company’s commitment to giving back and supporting the local community, at a time when our financial resources are invested in building a company. We are grateful to EFCO for the opportunity to make this contribution.”

Donations from EFCO to the Community Foundation are channeled to various non-profit organizations throughout Colorado, allowing EFCO to focus on working with entrepreneurs to help them meet their philanthropic objectives. Contributing companies simply select a cause, and the Community Foundation takes care of the rest. EFCO is aligned with the Entrepreneurs Foundation, an organization formed in 1988 with affiliates in Silicon Valley, Austin, Southern California, New England, Dallas, Portland, Atlanta, Hawaii and Israel.

“Working with various local initiatives through the Community Foundation, EFCO allows entrepreneurs to support a range of causes from education to the environment,” said Brad Feld, Foundry Group managing director and one of the founding trustees of EFCO. “Symplified’s support helps us to achieve the critical mass of equity donations we need to truly make a difference in our community.”

About Symplified

Symplified’s vision is to enable Enterprise 2.0 to adopt cloud computing by providing the identity infrastructure for the On Demand world. Symplified was founded by the same management team that created Securant, which pioneered the market for Web access management software and was acquired for $140M by RSA Security. The company has developed revolutionary technology that addresses the complexity and cost associated with monolithic software approaches to Web identity management. Venture funding for the company was provided by Granite Ventures and Allegis Capital. Symplified is headquartered in Boulder, Colo., with offices in Palo Alto, Calif. Visit us on the web at www.symplified.com.

In planning for our summer event, we visited with the following member companies to survey and validate understanding and interest in EFCO. In general, we found that most employees did not know much about EFCO, but our lunch meetings drew 10 to 20 employees. These meetings provided a good platform for sharing about existing efforts and sparking other interests. Everyone sounded very interested in learning more and doing skills based volunteering, if it was well packaged.

Here is a quick summary from each of the brown bag lunches:

At GoldSystems, it was apparent their company wanted to give back. However, it was questioned whether this was an individual's or company's responsibility. The employees present decided to create a library for specific items that are needed in the community. They now have a centralized place for people to bring things, and every month captures a new need/item.

During the Brown Bag at ClickCaster, Keenan (CEO) shared his own involvement in the local community and beyond. Keenan helped start Bicycles for Humanity, through this non-profit 400 bikes have been sent to Africa to help aid workers navigate to various communities. The other employees at ClickCaster agreed that community involvement is a good idea and that working together as a team could also help them inside the office.

The folks at Lijit came up with an innovative idea to send email blasts to employees about upcoming events in the community. They also agreed that an online site/blog could be helpful if non-profits were to post what kind of help they needed in the tech department. This sort of website would help because all EFCO member companies could view who needs help with what and also leverage their skill sets. Finally, the question of quality vs. quantity was brought up. It is clear that there are many employees that make up EFCO member companies. It is important that the skills volunteered are actually helping to make a difference.

The employees at Solidware Technologies had previously tried to get involved with the community around Christmas. However, by the time they had everyone on board, all the volunteer activities they were interested in were full. They agreed that it is a struggle to find a volunteer opportunity for a large number of people in the Boulder Community. This was especially frustrating given that their time is relatively precious. This can be said for most all of the member EFCO companies and is thus an important issue to consider.

At our double show with TechStars and SocialThing, it was agreed that there needs to be a central location for what needs to be done in the community and for whom it needs to be done. It was important to the employees that a volunteer activity at the mid-year event be locally helpful and engaging. They believe it is important for a proper education of what is going on in the Boulder Community so that member companies/employees can really understand the problems and needs in order to help make a difference. The employees seemed eager to come together to do something that can make a difference.

Finally at Newsgator, we were able to rope in Phil Nash from the Rose Foundation at the first pitch in Denver. We discovered through the Rose team a much more elaborate non-profit network built up in Denver to support skills-based volunteering and community engagement. Karyn German and the Newsgator team were highly interested in applying their widget and social networking technology for use in this space.

If your firm did not do one, but you would still like to do one, please contact Ryan.

Ryan and I have taken all the feedback that has been generated from the various Brown Bag lunches we have attended and used it to help shape the mid-year event. The event is still in the preliminary planning stage, but more information will be available soon.

Following is a repost of the blog titled Foundry Group Joins the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado that was originally posted on the Foundry Group blog.

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All of us at Foundry Group try hard to be substantive members of our community. We have all chosen to live in Boulder, Colorado and we share the belief that giving back to the community in which we live is an important part of supporting this goal. In addition, we strongly believe in the cliché of "putting our money where our mouths are." As a result, we are proud to announce that we have recently become members of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado.

In early 2007, Brad was one of the founding members of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado (EFCO). EFCO was created to encourage the various constituencies of entrepreneurial companies in Colorado (including founders, employees, and investors) to incorporate philanthropy early in the creation of their companies and contribute to the long-term health and sustainability of our community. To date, eighteen entrepreneurial companies in Colorado have joined EFCO - Foundry Group makes nineteen.

The mechanics of EFCO are straightforward - companies contribute 1% of their post-Series A equity to EFCO. This is done in the form of a warrant that is only exercisable in a change of control so that there is no administrative overhead on the company. At the time of the grant, the company also allocates the future gift to a community foundation, a specific charity, or some combination. When the company has an exit event, the cash generated from this gift is distributed to the designated organizations.

The Entrepreneurs Foundation has chapters in eight other major cities around the country and one in Israel. To date there are approximately 700 member companies (representing over 20,000 employees) who have contributed over $15 million to support various charities. In Foundry Group's case, we are contributing 1% of our carried interest (the functional equivalent of 1% of our equity) to the Community Trust Endowed Fund of the Community Foundation Serving Boulder County.

In addition to the financial contribution, EFCO serves to engage all employees of an EFCO Member Company in the process of philanthropy - to the extent that they want to. In August EFCO will have its first major Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado Members event where it will gather as many members and their families together for a half day to learn more about local philanthropy, engage in a specific family friendly project that benefits our community, and have some fun together.

We are proud of how quickly the Colorado entrepreneurial community has embraced the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado. Given that many well known venture capital firms participate in the Entrepreneurs Foundation program on a national basis, we hope others follow our lead and up the ante by participating financially.

At the Entrepreneur Foundation's Corporate Citizenship conference, Mark Kramer gave the keynote address to room full of Entrepreneur Foundation affiliates and corporate philanthropy folks. I was fortunate to personally met and chat with Mark at the CEO breakfast put on by Bill Campbell of Intuit and Justin Kitch of Homestead.com/Intuit at the Synopsys headquarters.

As I mentioned before, this was a great event with tons of practical advise for folks working to integrate philanthropy into their company and corporate culture. In addition, the conference could not have started at a more strategic level with Mark's talk. Mark is a co-founder of FSG with Michale Porter. Their first paper from 12/06 in HBR on the link between competitive advantage and corporate social responsibility sent me back in time to my MBA classes. It is strong paper for folks schooled in Porter competitive differentiation framework. His lecture leverage work from 2006 with his newest paper. "Changing the Game," can be found at Standford as part of their Social Innovation Review. This paper continues the discussion about the use of strategic Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) to help companies differentiate. The discussion of offensive and defensive efforts was a great model for me. I am really interested in getting EFCO companies to take a offensive approach to CSR even when they are small. What is more interesting is the implications this approach has on integrating social responsibility into the business and on mental models of non-profits who work should work with these corporations. I was floored by the BP example in the paper.

I have recommend this paper to no less than 10 people, since I returned from the conference.

As one of the board of adviser members at EFColorado, I was invited to attend the EFBay Area's Corporate Citizenship conference. I have to thank the great staff at EFBay Area for putting such a great conference.

There is so much to share from this conference. As a first document, I have attached the Boston College 2007 Survey of Corporate Citizenship below.

StateofCorporateCitizenship2007Final.pdf

This document is very easy to consume and uses some great visual cues of rhetoric versus reality. I highly recommend scanning this document.

"You think your job is to make boots and shoes and that my job is to save the world. If you are willing to invest half a day- four hours- I'll show you how the two can be one."
-Alan Khazei, cofounder of City Year

Jeff Swartz, CEO and President of Timberland, was not a social justice person but thought that the idea presented to him was intellectually too wild to pass up.

"We painted the living room of the house. It was the cheesiest kind of stuff you can do... but at the time, I thought I was Mother Theresa."

City Year opened a door for Jeff Swartz. He met a man that was much more than a title, he met a guy that could make a difference, one that could do something to be seen with his hands and feel with one's heart... "And it had nothing to do with me!" - Jeff Swartz

From: The Business of Changing the World, Marc Benioff

There are now some great You Tube Video about Timberland and City Year:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trBukCR2WrI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3WedqG78f8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR9vl2pc2oA

Save the Date: Saturday, April 19th is the 5th Annual I Volunteer! Day

Are you ready to make a difference in Boulder County?

Join Volunteer Connections every April for I Volunteer! Day, Volunteer Connection's annual county-wide day of service. I Volunteer! Day epitomizes what Volunteer Connection has been doing for nearly 40 years - connecting volunteers with volunteer opportunities. The first I Volunteer! Day was held on September 11, 2004 as a way for Boulder County residents to commemorate the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks by giving back to the community. 350 volunteers completed 19 different county-wide projects. Since then, the event has been held every April in celebration of National Volunteer Week.

Service projects vary from year to year, but past projects include:
- House building with Habitat for Humanity
- Garden prep with Growing Gardens
- Building tortoise habitat with the Colorado Reptile Humane Society
- Ecosystem restoration with Boulder County Parks and Open Space
- Making blankets with Project Linus
- Spring clean-up with Boulder County Aids Project

Last year's event was a tremendous success involving 600 volunteers, 2,400 volunteer hours and the completion of 41 agency projects. That's $45,000 in service hours!

Are you a business interested in sponsoring I Volunteer! Day? Please contact vista@volunteerconnection.net for more information. Or, visit the website- http://www.volunteerconnection.net/IVolunteer/index.html

My name is Heidi Lauterbach and I will be posting information, feedback, and main points from the presentation/interviews that the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado will be giving to member companies. I am a senior at the University of Colorado, Boulder. I am working with EFCO to enhance my studies and earn a Certificate of Excellence in Entrepreneurial Studies. The Brown Bag lunches will provide member companies with a synopsis of EFCO and propose ways that each company can integrate philanthropy into their start-up culture. In addition, I will be posting tidbits from The Business of Changing the World by Marc Benioff and Carlye Adler. This is to inspire member companies to read the stories and understand the need for corporate philanthropy.