Well-th Blog

Hightower Helping Hands Holiday Food Drive Raises $100,000 for National Food Pantries

By Hightower Advisors / December 24, 2020

Hightower Helping Hands Holiday Food Drive Raises $100,000 for National Food Pantries

To give back during an especially difficult holiday season, the Hightower Philanthropy and Community Service Committee organized ‘Hightower Helping Hands,” a seasonal food drive which encouraged Hightower employees and advisor teams to join forces and raise as much money as possible for those experiencing food insecurity this winter.

The competition was fierce, but together, the firm raised $100,000 and collected more than 3,000 perishable items, an incredible haul that was split across more than 20 food pantries and charities for the hungry across the nation.

We spoke with Sarah Musante, Hightower’s Chief Human Resources Officer who spearheaded this initiative, to learn more about how Hightower Helping Hands came about, and what’s next for the philanthropy team.

Tell me a little bit about Hightower Helping Hands. Why did you decide to create a charitable holiday competition?

This has been a really tough year for everyone, and we knew a lot of families out there are currently struggling to make ends meet. While we would normally do this kind of thing in person, we decided to take the opportunity to involve the entire organization in a friendly, online competition to raise money to help those in our communities across the country who have fallen on hard times.

We broke off into teams by department and advisory practice and went to work reaching out to our networks. Everyone really put in 100% effort, and I have to say I was blown away to learn we’d raised $100,000 ($70,000 from donations and $30,000 from Hightower corporate). It was amazing to watch our entire community come together to make a difference.

Do you think making it into a game inspired more people to donate?

Absolutely. Hightower loves a good competition; we are very competitive group of people. Every week we would send out a leaderboard showing which teams were in the lead in terms of donations. There was a lot of friendly smack talk, it was so fun! Last week my team was in second place, so I started reaching out to my network of former Hightower employees to try and get us back in the lead. To my surprise, I got a lot of donations from former Hightower team members. It was so amazing to see so many people still wanted to be involved even though they no longer work here.

I love that! The Hightower community transcends time and space.

Exactly! Another thing that was so cool to see was that the two advisory teams who raised the most money were new teams – they’ve only been with us for a few months and already they are such an integral part of our culture.

What’s coming up for the Philanthropy and Community Service Committee?

This has empowered us to know that we have it in us to really make a difference when we all work together. Our goal is to continue doing charitable events like this at least once every quarter. Stay tuned!

To learn more about Hightower’s charitable initiatives, email us at advisorsuccess@hightoweradvisors.com

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