The MERIT of Volunteering

November 2006

MERIT members with items donated to the Peninsula Food Bank from its Thousand Can Campaign. Back Row from left: Mary Ann Malloy, Gretchyn Melde, Michael Coirin, April Dunn, Helen Holland Harris, Kathleen McDermott (organizer), Laura Sakos. Front Row from left: Jeff Cook, Brenda Roston, Deb Sandiford, Jay Vittori.

MERIT prepares to deliver the gifts it collected during its Angel Tree drive. Left front: Helen Holland Harris, Brenda Roston, Gary Brady. Right front: Jeff Cook, Jay Vittori, Kathleen McDermott, Frank Smith.

When it comes to volunteering, the more really is the merrier—and it makes for a bigger impact.

Jay Vittori, a lead operations analyst, had this idea in mind in January 2005 when he set out to found a volunteer club with his coworkers at MITRE's Langley site in Hampton, Va. His plan was to increase camaraderie at the site while providing what he describes as a "painless and rewarding" way to give back to the community. The result is MERIT, a group that organizes regular volunteer activities for employees at MITRE's Hampton and Norfolk, Va., sites.

An anagram of MITRE, MERIT stands for "Members Endowing Resources, Ideas, and Time." True to its name, MERIT is structured to allow each individual to decide what to contribute—whether an event idea, organizational and planning skills, time spent volunteering, funds, or goods. This creates a low pressure environment where people can pitch in more time and energy for events or causes that are important to them, and lend support to other events by donating funds or supplies.

Kathleen McDermott, an office support staff member at Langley and an especially active MERIT Club member, says, "It works out to about an hour a month. Sometimes I may spend five hours at a time on one project, other months, it's less."

While the average monthly time commitment for members may be small, MERIT's results are not. The group's first activity raised over $1,000 to support the American Cancer Society. MERIT members donated their funds to the luminaries campaign at the society's Relay For Life fundraiser in memory of their coworker, John Ricci. Luminaries bearing honored persons' names are placed around the track at the annual all-night event to light the way for walkers. "It was really moving to be able to tell John's wife that we would have 100 luminaries in his name," says Vittori.

In addition, MERIT members head up campaigns for a variety of causes. The group puts the "fun" in fundraisers with activities like a March Madness contest to raise money for cancer research. MERIT's support to the "Write Stuff" drive collects school supplies for local children, and its ongoing collection of toiletries for area shelters, organized by Mary Ann Malloy, has netted more than 600 items to date. Headed by McDermott, Gretchyn Melde, and Lisa Neathery, the group's first "Thousand Can Campaign" provided a local food bank with over 1,000 items in August 2005.

"Food banks get a lot of donations around the holidays, so we purposely didn't do the drive then. We waited until summer, the time of year when many food banks experience serious shortages," McDermott explains. The group's second Thousand Can Campaign is currently underway.

McDermott also helped organize MERIT's outing to make lunch for families at an area Ronald McDonald House, which provides a place to stay for the families of seriously ill children receiving treatment at nearby hospitals. MERIT members donated the food and used civic time to spend a weekday afternoon cooking at the house. "Many of the parents staying there spend almost all of their time at the hospital and only leave long enough to shower. They were grateful to have a meal prepared for them and the rest of their family," says McDermott.

All of these efforts contributed to MERIT's first year goal of donating a total of 5,000 units in dollars, goods, and hours. "We got pretty close," says Vittori. "We were definitely in the 4,000 range. Since we tried to piggyback on some of the existing charity work that MITRE does, like its United Way campaign, we didn't count our contribution to those efforts toward our goal." When MERIT kicked off its 2006 activities by organizing a Relay For Life team in honor of two coworkers' spouses who are battling cancer, the plan was to aim for another 5,000 year. However, thanks to the hard work of MERIT's members, the campaign brought in $5,685. "Now we'll set our sights even higher," says Vittori.

Vittori encourages other MITRE sites and departments to think about forming volunteer groups. "It really doesn't require that much time and effort, and it's a great way to help the community," he says.

Solutions That Make a Difference.®
Copyright © 1997-2013, The MITRE Corporation. All rights reserved.
MITRE is a registered trademark of The MITRE Corporation.
Material on this site may be copied and distributed with permission only.

Privacy Policy | Contact Us