Teaming up with our communities on #FridayForGood

This spring, more than 2,000 employees participated in #FridayForGood, the day when we partner with community organizations and join in with a wide range of projects and activities. Whether it’s brightening the lives of sick kids in Sydney through the Starlight program (@Starlight_star) or creating cakes for Fundacion Carmen Pardo-Valcarce (@fundacioncpv) in Spain, we had an incredible time continuing to be a force for good in our local cities across the world.

With over 100 projects worldwide, let’s take a look at five we participated in this year:

Coding for Kids at Twitter NeighborNest (San Francisco)
Coding for Kids is a program that teaches kids from local organizations how to code in Scratch on a Raspberry Pi. On Friday, we met up with eight students (ages 8-11) at the Twitter NeighborNest (@NeighborNest) located directly across the street from HQ. We did a quick introduction on the technology and then focused on an exercise that had the kids immediately doing coding exercises in Scratch. Everyone had a blast jumping into the coding — and the kids weren’t the only ones who had fun learning.

Mock interviews for Bay Area job seekers (San Francisco)
Jewish Vocational Services (@JVSBayArea) helps people build skills and find jobs to achieve self-sufficiency. The organization does this by working one-on-one with Bay Area job seekers by reviewing resumes and conducting mock interviews. We had the opportunity to work side-by-side with job seekers and provide feedback on their resumes and help improve their interviewing skills.

The Lee Ah Mooi Old Age Home (Singapore)

We volunteered at Lee Ah Mooi Old Age Home, a nursery home established in the mid-1960s in Singapore. Today it is home to 110 residents, mostly of low-income or middle-income backgrounds. Twitter volunteers joined the residents during their early afternoon tea break. We played games, sang karaoke, and made arts and crafts projects together.

Prepping high schoolers for college interviews (New York City)
PENCIL (@pencilorg) is an organization that supports New York City’s talented public high school students by helping 11th and 12th graders improve their interviewing and networking skills. On #FridayForGood, we worked directly with students and conducted mock interviews, participated in speed networking activities, and worked with the students to improve their resumes. It was a fun and inspiring day and we can’t wait to team up with PENCIL again soon.

There was also a lot of dancing going on at Girls Prep in Brooklyn celebrating receiving State Bags with school supplies provided by Twitter.

NGO training and ReachOut panel discussion (Dublin)
More than 40 NGOs attended a training session @TwitterDublin and learned about the latest product developments from Twitter, Periscope, and Vine and how these could be put to use in their campaigns. This was followed by an expert panel discussion on the relationship between young people and healthy use of social media platforms.

Be sure to check out our recaps from Brazil, France, EMEA, Mexico, and Colombia, a data visualization of Tweets from the day, and this collection of Tweets from our teammates across the globe: