Goldman Sachs’ Community TeamWorks mobilizes 23,000 volunteers worldwide

Goldman Sachs said 23,000 volunteers took part in Community TeamWorks projects in 2024, completing more than 100,000 hours of service and supporting 660 nonprofit partners worldwide. For a Wall Street firm built on long hours and intense internal competition, the numbers show something unusual: a volunteer program that is not an occasional perk but a recurring part of the employee experience.

The initiative dates to 1997, when senior partner Jon S. Corzine authorized its creation. Goldman’s own history says the program was designed to encourage employees to take a day off from work for team-based volunteer projects that promote commitment, initiative, teamwork and service. The firm still frames it that way today, encouraging employees to take a paid day off to focus on community work and to apply their skills and ideas alongside nonprofit partners.

That structure matters inside Goldman because it makes volunteering feel like part of the job, not an extracurricular add-on. Employees do not just donate time on their own; they work in groups, often with colleagues they might otherwise only see in deal teams, coverage groups or internal meetings. For younger bankers, that can mean meeting people across levels in a setting that rewards collaboration over hierarchy. For managers, it creates a low-pressure way to see how people lead, organize and communicate outside the normal deal cycle.

The program also gives Goldman a local footprint in the places where its people work. In India, the firm says it partners with more than 40 nonprofit organizations and conducts nearly 220 Community TeamWorks projects each year. Public examples from nonprofit partners point to a hands-on model: DonorsChoose said Goldman gives employees one day off each year to volunteer in team-based projects, and New Eyes for the Needy described Community TeamWorks as a signature volunteer program that lets each employee spend one day away from work on nonprofit projects.

Community TeamWorks has also shown staying power. A 2008 report in The Telegraph said the program had already involved 143,605 volunteers and 9,427 projects worldwide since launch, suggesting that Goldman has been using this format for years rather than treating it as a short-lived morale exercise. That durability helps explain why the program still matters internally: in a business where culture is often discussed in terms of bonus cycles, prestige and burnout, a paid day of service has become one of the clearest ways Goldman turns a corporate value into a repeatable ritual.