Page 24 - BusinessWest January 6, 2025

Matt Garrity says Florence Savings Bank prioritizes community needs including affordable housing, food insecurity,
financial literacy, education, health and human services, and community redevelopment.
we all move forward” as its philanthropic tagline.
“We are a community bank, and we’ve been doing that for over
150 years now. As we continue to grow and expand our market footprint, we expect to help with more needs in the community.” Matt Bannister, vice president of Marketing and Corporate
Responsibility for PeoplesBank, has said many times that his bank’s guiding philosophy is to give a little to a lot of groups.
“Some organizations will give a lot to a few groups. If a hospital is building a new cancer wing or an emergency room or something like that, those tend to be very large donations because they are
very large projects. We take the opposite approach. We want to be in as many places as we possibly can.”
As a result, PeoplesBank gave away $1.6 million last year to 550 different nonprofits, Bannister noted. “You do the math, and it’s about $2,500 or $3,000 per grant, which doesn’t mean much to a large corporation that’s building a hospital ... but it does mean a lot to a small nonprofit with a shoestring budget. So the ability to impact many organiza- tions as possible is the route that we choose.”
Making the World Better
That said, corporate responsibility goes well beyond writ- ing checks, Bannister explained.
“Corporate responsibility, to me, means standing for something that benefits the public at large. It’s a way to tele- graph the values that a company has, and a consumer can use that information to make decisions. One of the factors when they’re purchasing a product or a service is, ‘who am I buying this from, and what do they do that makes the world a better place,’ as opposed to ‘what are they not doing, or what are they doing that makes the world a worse place?’”
So, that extends not only to philanthropy, but to what ven- dors and suppliers a bank partners with, and whether they share similar values.
“You might say a certain percentage of the vendors of a company should be minority-led organizations or women-led organizations. So it’s not only how you telegraph your values, but how you put them into action; are you, as a company, spending money to encour- age what we think are beneficial programs for society?”
That approach extends to volunteerism as well — an area of community support that virtually every bank based in this region emphasizes.
“When employees of a company volunteer in the community, that’s another way the company adds value to the community,” Ban- nister said, which is why PeoplesBank — and the other institutions that spoke with BusinessWest — pays employees to take volunteer days.
“Obviously, a bank can’t solve all the area’s problems, but when we do things along with other good corporate citizens, we
feel we make
a difference in people’s lives.”
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24 JANUARY 6, 2025 << BANKING & FINANCE >>
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