At Neighborhoods.com, we believe in giving back to the communities and neighborhoods that have enriched our lives. Whether that means spending a weekend morning with a trash bag and grabber sticks or a weekday evening lending a helping hand to employees of nonprofit businesses, we place great importance on celebrating our local neighborhoods (and the world) through volunteerism. It’s part of the fabric of our company culture.

Our first volunteer event as a company took place in Chicago’s Logan Square, a neighborhood many Chicagoans (not to mention several Neighborhoods.com employees) are proud to call home. Community pride fueled us through that gray October morning as many passersby thanked us as we filled several bags with trash along the neighborhood’s main thoroughfares. Our favorite find? A discarded car door.

We followed that up with a trip to Chicago’s historic Hyde Park neighborhood, site of the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 and the future home of the Obama Presidential Library. We spent an unseasonably warm November afternoon tidying up the park, making it a more enjoyable place for the neighborhood’s residents.

For our next event, we put down the trash bags and picked up some puppies. PAWS, a local nonprofit organization that provides animal adoption services, gave us the honor of helping out for an evening at their Lincoln Park location. The team learned that running a no-kill animal shelter is more than just playing with animals — it requires immense infrastructure, planning, and, of course, the helping hands of local volunteers.

Neighborhoods.com also got into the spirit of giving over the holiday season, raising over $1,000 for a toy drive to benefit  Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital. We also collected four large boxes of food for the Greater Chicago Food Depository, one of Chicago's most impactful charity organizations.

Following the neighborhood cleanup trend, several members of our team (including CEO Bill Ness) got their hands dirty volunteering on Chicago River Day.  With our office being located right on the city’s great river, we knew how important it was to send volunteers to this special event.

As the weather warms up, we’ve taken our efforts outside, biking to support the Active Transit Alliance in Chicago’s Bike the Drive event. Not only was the ride a great workout for an even greater cause, we got to see some of the city’s unique neighborhoods along the way. This June, we participated in the Chicago Parks Foundation’s It’s Your Park Day, where we built benches and picked up litter in an attempt to make Lincoln Square’s Welles Park an even more beautiful destination for residents.

To find out more about volunteer opportunities in Chicago, check out the Chicago Cares website. Follow us on Facebook to check out our upcoming volunteer events, including a Habitat for Humanity Team Build on July 28th!