Yesterday was a very special day. Nearly the entire Storm team along with folks from five of our portfolio companies (HubPages, Rafter, Engagio, SourceClear, and Digital Shadows) along with Winning by Design spent the entire day volunteering for Juma Ventures through a program they call JumaDays @AT&T.

For those of you who don’t know, JumaDays @ AT&T are an incredible opportunity for you and your colleagues to make a difference in the lives of low income Bay Area students by becoming a ballpark vendor for a day and helping youth earn money for college. Through vending, you learn about Juma’s social enterprise business, spend the day at AT&T Park during an SF Giants game, and directly support Juma’s programs and youth by earning real revenue.

Juma Ventures

As an organization, Juma Ventures is a non-profit focused on breaking the cycle of poverty by paving the way to work, education, and financial capability for youth across America.

They break this cycle by providing concession and vendor jobs to youth. For every dollar a child makes during the job, Juma matches it 2:1. Meaning if they earn 1k the student leaves with 3k of savings towards college tuition, room and board, or text books!

Juma Ventures oversees 16 of these social enterprises across the US. Find out if they’re in your city by following the link: http://www.juma.org

What’s Storm doing? Aren’t the jobs for youth?!

Yes! The jobs are definitely for youth. But during the school year – yup it’s that time of year already – there are a handful of games during the day when class is in session. This means folks like us here at Storm get the incredible opportunity to step up and volunteer for the day. The proceeds from our day of (very hard) work go to help support the mission of Juma Ventures.

Walking away from spending the day with Juma Ventures we all here at Storm found ourselves both extremely invigorated and excited by the days activities, but also incredibly humbled by the experience. What’s truly eye opening is how hard the youth that work with Juma Ventures really work. How dedicated these children are to there future educations. It’s not easy to spend the day walking up and down stairs carrying food, looking for customers and mentally keeping track of your sales.

The youth that work with Juma represent a special and dedicated group of inspiring young men and woman.

In closing, we want to thank Juma Ventures for giving us the opportunity to get involved. We also want to urge our readers to seriously consider spending time with Juma Ventures or signing up to do a JumaDay yourself! We can promise it’s an experience you won’t quickly forget.

Thanks Juma Ventures, and if you want to learn more about what they do click here!

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