Helping Hand: 'A different way to measure my success'

Thomas Raffa

Founder and president of Raffa P.C., a consulting, accounting and technology firm based in the District.

Charitable giving highlights: The company averages 53 hours a year of community service per employee, instituted a program that encourages employees to serve on the board of a nonprofit and gives away 10 percent of its gross revenues every year to charity.

Personal: Lives in Potomac with his wife. They have three children.

I spent the first nine years of my career doing Securities and Exchange Commission filings with one of the Big Four accounting firms. As I saw that I might be doing this for the rest of my life, I started to feel like there was a different way to measure my success. I wanted to be able to look at my work and say I was successful not because I made a lot of money but because I did something that helped someone else.

I left to start my practice in 1984. It only took a year to figure out that I wanted everything that we did to make some positive, systemic change in the community.

We would look at businesses systemically and see how they could build capacity in another organization that might have wonderful programs like feeding the homeless.

And that's what our firm got proficient at doing.

I started to see that I could leverage this with larger companies.

It was hard, though. I could convince a chief executive of a big company to set up some philanthropic program, but if it didn't make sense for the corporate image or marketing-wise, then a lot of times I couldn't get through their board or stockholders.

So I spent a lot of time aligning companies with nonprofits in a way that makes business sense, too. For example, if a company needs staffing to clean buildings and Goodwill trains handicapped people to do cleaning services, we would try to link those two up in a way where long after I'm dead, that partnership still goes on.

I believe one should give a piece of their time or dollars enough that it hurts. I have a balance in my life from doing that. If people could see the difference they make in giving $10,000 to a small nonprofit, it's really powerful.

I remember there was an after-school program that had about 25 kids in it with a backlog of about 200 kids. The program had everything -- volunteers, facility and equipment. What it couldn't do was process the insurance forms quick enough to put the kids on the playground before the semester ended.

We funded a $20,000 computer system that expedited this process. Sure enough, when I would drive home, I would see 200 kids playing in the after-school program. It was so little for so much.

-- Interview with Vanessa Mizell