September, 19, 2008  Chicago, IL Five committed employees from Salesforce.com volunteered their time and painting skills to provide a much needed facelift to a recently acquired building for The Cara Program's social enterprise, Cleanslate. 

The Cara Program is a non-profit organization assisting homeless and at-risk Chicagoans to achieve real and lasting success through full-time employment with benefits.  Cara's goal is to assist 250 people in 2008, and are closely approaching their goal with a total of 146 employed so far!

Cleanslate is a neighborhood beautification business created to provide work experience for students with little to no work history, or a conviction background that prevents immediate employment.  Because Cleanslate staff members are busy beautifying Chicago, there is not much time and little funding available in order to beautify the Cleanslate Hub itself, and that's where our volunteers stepped in. Our employees extended a helping hand to get a much needed project accomplished for the Cleanslate family. 

*Here are notes from Salesforce.com employees, Kelly Buehring and Alan Arun reflecting on their time spent with Cleanslate and the Cara Program.

As a new member of our Salesforce.com family in Chicago I would like to extend great thanks to such a wonderful opportunity to give back to our community. While many of us come from different backgrounds be it, culture, religion, race, we all share the same Salesforce.com value, community empowerment. Cleanslate is a perfect example of community empowerment and I'm proud to say that I got a chance to give back to an organization that helps so many individuals succeed in today's workforce. 

It was also really cool to see the saleforce.com team and the Cleanslate staff pitched in and worked hard without any real oversight. What was most enjoyable was everyone's attention to detail. The staff at Cleanslate was really nice. Their compliments throughout our stay there helped instill confidence in some of us newbie's and made this an enjoyable experience as well. It was fun hanging out with my team members and help out a worthy cause in the process. We should do this more often!

At the end of the day Tekorah at Cleanslate said, "The painting was great. The Salesforce.com team had one thing in mind which was to make a difference, and that is exactly what they achieved. We at Cleanslate, now have a fresh new look thanks to Salesforce.com"