If I offer my younger self one piece of advice about giving back, it is this: treat community engagement as a strategic lens, not an extracurricular activity. In my work today, designing outreach portfolios, building coalitions, and shaping corporate responsibility strategies, I see every day how early exposure to service sharpens your understanding of how systems operate and where they fall short. Engaging in service grounds you in the realities behind the metrics. When I partner with nonprofits or map community needs, I rely on instincts that come directly from what service teaches: listen before acting, validate assumptions with lived experience, and align resources with what communities actually ask for. Those habits are not abstract values; they are operational principles that determine whether a program succeeds or simply performs well on paper. The data reinforces this. Deloitte's research shows that employees who volunteer are 2.3 times more likely to report strong leadership skills, and companies with robust community engagement programs experience higher trust and lower turnover. Studies across the ESG and CSR landscape consistently demonstrate that organizations investing in authentic community partnerships outperform peers on long term resilience and reputation. I see that dynamic play out constantly, community engagement is not a "nice to have," it is a strategic differentiator. Service also shapes the leader I am now. It trains you to see inequities clearly, to understand the interdependence between institutions and communities, and to design solutions that reflect real conditions rather than assumptions. Those are the exact muscles I use every day in corporate responsibility work: systems thinking, humility, accountability, and a commitment to measurable, community driven impact. So, in the present tense, the advice stands: giving back is not just generosity. It is professional formation. It is the foundation for becoming the kind of leader who treats community not as a stakeholder group, but as a partner in building equitable, sustainable outcomes.
I would tell my younger self to use your skills to support small local businesses early on. Helping a neighborhood beauty clinic or retail shop with marketing shows that community impact is more than hitting KPIs. When you see real customers walk through doors you helped open, the work becomes personal and keeps you motivated. That experience shapes values around empathy, accountability, and long-term relationships. It teaches you to measure success by the livelihoods you strengthen, not just the numbers on a dashboard.
I'd tell my younger self that giving back is not an extra task, it's how you build the kind of community you want to live in, especially when you work with children and families as I do now. Volunteering would have taught me earlier that trust is built in small, consistent acts, showing up for local schools, supporting new parents, and making safety education feel welcoming instead of scary
If I could talk to my younger self, I would advise him to start giving back, even in small ways, sooner. There is something about service that tends to bring you back to planet earth. It makes you look beyond yourself and your ambitions. It really puts into perspective that success is more rewarding when you pull others along with you. I think that volunteering earlier in my life would have cultivated my empathy and patience more deeply. It teaches you to genuinely listen, value diverse experiences, and measure success not by metrics but by people's lives and how you impact them. That is a philosophy essential to leadership. Deep need understanding makes better teams and makes better leaders. It makes work meaningful.
Especially as an online, SaaS business, it can be easy to forget that we are actually rooted in the community where we operate. We do all of our work through screens and we have customers all over the globe, but we wouldn't be here without genuine connections at the local level. We were struggling to gain traction and find customers when we first launched, until I had a conversation with a local coffee shop owner who was trying to bring her marketing efforts online in a more serious way. By the end of that conversation, we had our first small business customer. They became the template for our target market, as well as a source of plenty of referrals.