DEPT® Cares Croatia: A day to give back to our communities

DEPT® Cares day is an annual event that honors and celebrates our commitment to doing good. 

As a global agency, each year we pledge 1% of our total profits to support purpose-driven organisations via donations, pro bono work, and DEPT® Cares Day. Plus, we love turning off our laptops and getting our hands dirty in the process! 

2022 was a successful year for DEPT® Cares Day with 24 cities and 250+ participating Depters. Amsterdam to San Diego, teams selected projects based on their office’s preferences and community needs. This choice allowed more personal contributions from each local market. 

In Zagreb we connected with the vocational school Slava Raškaj for teenagers with impaired hearing, normal hearing with disorders of speech and language communication, communication difficulties from the spectrum of autism and pervasive developmental disorder and with multiple difficulties. 

Since the Zagreb office is sharing the building with the school, we wanted to introduce ourselves and our work to them by organizing workshops that were interactive and fun.

We showed them how to design a website with a template that they were able to adjust, we explained what a variable is with a fun example with candies in a box  and showed them everything we know about algorithms by playing games. In the end we prepared a small trivia for them and students with the best results got special prizes.

The school is trying to be a “safe haven” for all of them, so we also decided to help a bit more decorating and buying some furniture and plants for their living room, where they spend time after classes. Last but not least, we all had some delicious pizza together and we hope that our visit stays in a good memory.

Our Split office worked with young people who are staying at The center for the provision of services in the community which is a public social care institution whose professional activities are focused on children and young people with behavioral problems.

We prepared two workshops for our young adults and also a small intro on what our job is and how we are all surrounded by technology and projects that companies can build to motivate them and show that the industry is open to all people that are interested.

The workshops we prepared for them showed some basic concepts around coding. We used some online course games that were made for a young audience, and also talked about IoT and Arduino to show them how technology works in real life by using sensors and lights. Additionally, the Arduino set we’ve used during the workshop has been donated to them with some instructions so they can do some challenges themselves.

The Split office also decided to make a donation and gave 2 new laptops to the center. We are very proud that our workshop sparked some interest in the participants who asked for some guidance, more learning materials, custom document “Next steps” only for them and contacts to the young local IT community. We hope we inspired them to start exploring our industry and that some of them will become our colleagues one day.