The SAP Social Sabbatical program is in its 13th year. Client Manager Nicholas Gioioso reflects on the impressive work SAP participants were a part of in 2024.
“Over the past year of implementation of the SAP pro bono portfolio, Pyxera Global has seen the remarkable impact that results from cross-sector collaboration – on SAP employees, on the social impact organizations they support, and on the communities that these organizations serve.
Having personally worked on the SAP portfolio for the last nine years (out of nearly 13 years of partnership between Pyxera Global and SAP), I am proud to see the ways that the company’s strategic vision has continued to adapt to changing global conditions. As philanthropic contributions to social causes decrease across the board, new solutions are needed to increase the financial sustainability of community-based organizations. Impact businesses and nonprofits that provide fee-for-good or fee-for-service activities are innovating revenue-generating models for the social sector and meeting the needs of their communities through market-based approaches. SAP’s early focus on maximizing the potential of impact businesses as the future growth engine of the social sector is prescient, and we have seen how this thought leadership has influenced other private sector partners that we work with on Corporate Social Responsibility programming.
In this Annual Report, we demonstrate the growth – in personal lives, professional abilities, and impact – that Social Sabbatical participants and partner organizations have experienced in both quantitative and qualitative measures.
This report reveals how strategy meets purpose, how business meets community, and how both sides walk away changed. This is transformation, not charity: a two-way exchange rooted in respect.
In my mind, the driving question behind the Social Sabbatical is: how can you know how to make the world run better if you haven’t seen how it runs? The Social Sabbatical provides the perspectives, experiences, and relationships that answer that question.”
