At Cedar, our mission is to enable exceptional patient experiences to improve lives, foster engagement and transform U.S. healthcare. But as natural problem-solvers and change-makers, we’ve always known that there are opportunities to create impactful change beyond our typical workdays. It’s why we’ve always been committed to giving back to our communities, and in light of Giving Tuesday, it’s also why I’m so excited to announce the official relaunch of our corporate charitable initiative: Cedar Cares.
Over the past few years with Cedar Cares, we have supported a variety of innovative nonprofit organizations in our communities to help scale their impact. We’ve spent hours volunteering at soup kitchens, worked-one-on-one with underprivileged students interested in coding, and raised tens of thousands of dollars to help the uninsured pay their medical bills. And in response to the sustained public health and social justice crises this year, we donated lunches to essential workers fighting COVID-19 at hospitals across the country and created a donation matching program for a range of organizations focused on social justice reform.
However, as we’ve grown and evolved as a company over the past four years (we even recently celebrated an important milestone: 150 full-time employees!), this felt like the right time to realign as a team and decide how we can give back in ways that align with our core values as a company.
Given our mission, improving various aspects of U.S. healthcare would clearly be a pillar of our program, but our team members care deeply about causes beyond that as well. We asked our Cedarians what causes are most important to them, and used their responses to identify our charitable pillars for the coming year. While we will plan to revisit these pillars each year to ensure that we are maximizing our impact and reflecting the ideals of Cedar employees, I’m proud to announce that in 2021, Cedar Cares will be focused on:
- Improving access to healthcare
- Tackling climate change
- Closing educational gaps
Being a responsible corporate citizen has never been more important, and that’s why we are upleveling our Cedar Cares program. To kick-start our impact, we will be setting aside a portion of our holiday party budget for charitable giving, in addition to donating a percentage of all new partnership deals signed in 2021 to the Cedar Cares fund.
If you are inspired by how we are expanding our mission, I encourage you to visit our website for more information, in addition to our new Cedar swag portal for opportunities to donate. You can also check out our recent press release announcing the relaunch.
At Cedar, we already know how to build better patient experiences, so I look forward to the impact that Cedar Cares will make on building better experiences in our communities.
Florian Otto is Co-founder and CEO of Cedar. Prior to founding Cedar, Florian was an executive at Zocdoc where he drove the commercial adoption of the platform by health systems. Previously, Florian founded a daily deal company in Brazil (ClubeUrbano) that was sold to Groupon. Florian holds an M.D., D.D.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg, Germany.
