Helping Our Community: It's the Ellie Mae Way

We know that work is about more than just the bottom line. It’s about coming together as a team and making great things happen—about doing our part to help when and where help is needed and about empowering all of our employees to make a difference in their community.

Whether sorting food for our area food bank, raising funds for disaster relief or putting siding on a new house, Ellie Mae employees are committed to giving back.

This giving spirit is channeled through EllieCares, a program conceived and run by Ellie Mae employees. Employee volunteers identify areas of need in our community, collaborate with community non-profits and mobilize groups of co-workers to help via out-of-office workdays and in-office fundraisers and events. To encourage participation, all employees are given paid volunteer days (which do not count against vacation time) and the company matches employee contributions to certain company-sponsored fundraising events.

Our mantra? Everyone can make a difference.

How We’ve Helped:

• Created a new annual event—the Ellie Mae Marketplace—to raise money for the Alameda County Community Food Bank, raising over $11,000 in our first three years, from 2009 through 2011
• Supported the Alameda County Community Food Bank via food drives and volunteer workdays to sort food and bag produce, bagging 25,000 pounds of produce in one visit alone
• Built affordable housing in Oakland with Habitat for Humanity East Bay
• Painted transitional housing for families for the Family Emergency Shelter Coalition
• Helped staff the Walk for Wishes fundraiser for the Make-A-Wish Greater Bay Area Chapter
• Created and sold earthquake preparedness kits to raise more than $4,000 for the American Red Cross Haiti Relief and Development Fund
• Prepared and served meals to homeless and needy members of the community with City Team Oakland
• Given life-saving blood donations for the The American Red Cross Bay Area Chapter
• Fulfilled the holiday wishes of needy children for the Family Giving Tree

Community Response

The real reward is giving but it is also great to hear how our efforts have impacted the community. In 2009, Ellie Mae employees were asked to share the success of the first annual Ellie Mae Marketplace on CBS5 in San Francisco and following our Family Giving Tree efforts, we were rewarded with letters the Family Giving Tree shared with us from gift recipients. Some excerpts:

• “Thank you for the soccer shoes you got me. It was my favorite Christmas present this year.” Love, Calvin
  
  
• “Family Giving Tree Angels, We all want to thank you so much for bringing our little granddaughter Nicole so much joy and happiness this Christmas.” Mom, Dad, Nana & Popa
  
  
• “We would like to extend our sincerest thanks to you for making this holiday season so special for our children and families.” Sincerely, Carlos

Beyond our Community: Helping to Create a Greener Mortgage Industry

Ellie Mae also makes an effort to help the global community by supporting environmentally-friendly business practices that favor paperless technology over the traditional paper-laden processes that drain our natural resources. By offering our clients the ability to electronically originate mortgages and “move” data and documents without the need for paper, we help eliminate, on average, more than 5.6 million pages of paper—the equivalent of approximately one acre of trees— from the mortgage process every month.

More Information

For more information about EllieCares and our community outreach efforts, please contact us at communityservice@elliemae.com.