When seven year-olds at Belle Haven Elementary in San Mateo County dreamt up their perfect new playground, they had no idea that San Francisco 49ers and hundreds of other corporate volunteers would help make their dream into a reality.

During United Way’s 18th annual Week of Caring, volunteers, including San Francisco 49er wide receivers Josh Morgan, Jason Hill and Dominique Zeigler, rolled up their sleeves and finished installing the new equipment that the school’s second graders had hand selected. “Things like this, I didn’t have growing up. I didn’t have a playground to play on,” Jason Morgan said. “All we had was concrete and the streets. So, giving kids an opportunity to do something better with their lives – that’s always important to me.”

The Week of Caring project capped off an effort to improve academic performance that involved parents, teachers, administrators, other nonprofits and students to attack the root causes of the school’s lagging test scores.

“This new approach has paid off,” said Lorne Needle, VP, Community Impact at United Way. “We are seeing results with test scores and reading scores showing a marked improvement. In many ways this playground was a reward for all of the hard work.”

This year, Week of Caring provided more than 200 Bay Area nonprofits with access to 7,000 corporate volunteers. Many of the nonprofits have been United Way partners for years. Thanks to the volunteers, nonprofits crossed hundreds of critical projects off their ever- growing to-do lists.

Week of Caring is a partnership with the Volunteer Centers of the Bay Area. With generous support from Chevron Corporation, now in their ninth year of sponsorship, it has grown to be the largest corporate volunteer events in the country. This year we partnered with Hands On Bay Area’s Be the Change Day which allowed us to extend even further into the community.