Ashton Smith
I am Ashton Smith, and I currently work at Citrix. I’m on our marketing and sponsorship team now, but I’ve been there about seven years and spent a lot of time and still spend a lot of my time in our community engagement space and in the corporate citizenship space.
I grew up in a family that was involved in the community and in the neighborhood and things like that. And so it never seemed unusual to me to make that kind of evolution to be a part of the community, and I think once you know the scope of a need in the community in all areas, it’s really hard not to want to be involved and not to want to try to effect change wherever you can.
The question that I think a person has to ask themselves is “am I the best person to do this on my own,” because a lot of times, with the nonprofit, you’re starting at square one by yourself with probably not very much experience in the nonprofit space.
There’s probably a 95% chance there’s an organization out there that at least has some of that skill set that’s already functioning and already operating that the person would be better aligned to give their time and talent to. And sometimes I think it would be better if people took a second to look at that and see what else is in the landscape and maybe it’s not in that exact specific problem, but what’s adjacent to it.
How can I work inside those organizations to either expand the work that they’re doing and add benefit to the work that they’re doing or to connect them with other organizations?
