Community is one of our company values. We are part of the Salesforce community and seek to help others wherever possible. This may mean providing advice, extending course access, and providing free access to volunteer groups. And this time of the year is different because we have extended our community’s reach to focus on sharing joy.

Focus on Joy: What is more beautiful than a child’s smile?

The Children’s Joy is a Philippine-based non-stock, nonprofit organization that aims to put smiles on children’s faces by providing them with various residential services, medical, psychosocial, educational support, and emergency assistance. It has built shelters in some parts of the Philippines—including one in Imus, Cavite and has been reaching out to the greater masses of disadvantaged children in the country.

The Imus Children’s Joy is a decade-old shelter located in Cavite, a province in the Philippines located on the southern shores of Manila Bay and southwest of Metro Manila. The shelter compound currently houses 30 disadvantaged children along with rotating in-house staff and external volunteers.

By the end of this year, the Imus Children’s Joy shelter will be permanently closed due to a local policy that prevents more than one shelter of the same organization within a region. The shelter residents will be transferred to a bigger compound in Laguna, a nearby province. This year will be the last time that the kids will be able to spend their holidays in the home where they grew up.

Focus on Sharing

To make their remaining stay in the shelter more memorable, some of the Focus on Force team visited the Imus Children’s Joy to conduct a mini gift-giving drive for the kids and caretakers.

Due to strict Social Distancing protocols being implemented, our team was only allowed to stay within limited premises. Our brief encounter could have been better with the traditional ‘Mano Po’ Filipino greeting, hugs, and no masks on but we were still welcomed with warm smiles and waves by the kids from afar.

After dropping off our gifts, we watched the kids as they freely dash in their make-shift playground. We then left with our hearts full of hopes that we will meet the kids again soon.

Bringing Joy to the Future

Can a child’s joy brighten the world’s future? Who knows? What we know is that the smiles on the faces of the children we met that day have infected us with joy in our hearts. This is something that we will keep as we march through the new year and as we expand and strengthen our values, our community, and our future.