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| Marcy Weinbeck (right), with friends at the West Plains Sustainability Festival |
While studying in Germany, I lived in the southern part of the country where lots of holidays were celebrated. It seemed like nearly every week there was some official reason to take a day off. I was often confused by exactly what was being celebrated, but I still thought the custom was great.
Many years later, when I began working at FundRaiser, I was happy to learn that part of the company policy was to give us all one three-day weekend every month. One of the most popular holidays we have at FundRaiser is Happiness Happens Day, which comes at the beginning of August. There is no doubt that having a non-traditional day-off does create happiness.
Marcy Weinbeck, a founder of FundRaiser, is the one who established the FundRaiser holiday custom. She says it came about this way:
“When we started having employees, someone asked, ‘are we going to have Labor Day off?’ That had never come up because Gene just worked. So, I thought we needed a policy. I looked at a year and saw what the federal holidays were, because my background was with the federal government, and I charted the year up. Then I realized that several months had no holidays, so there were long spaces between three-day weekends. I knew from personal experience that taking time off was important for overall work productivity, and I was in a position to be able to help our employees by having at least one three-day weekend a month. Additionally, it was a way we could show our appreciation for the hard work our staff does. We are a very small business and we couldn't afford to offer perks like health insurance, so one day off a month seemed like the least we could do. As it turned out, it was really good for moral.
“For several of the months that didn’t have a federal holiday, it was easy to find a holiday to add so that the month would have a three-day weekend, like the first day of Summer, for June. The one that was the hardest was August. Then I saw on another calendar that Australia celebrates Picnic Day. For several years we borrowed that. Then a few years ago, the Happiness Happens movement came to our attention and we chose that. We really liked the idea of happiness as a movement and as a holiday in August. In the long hot summer days of August a reminder to be happy is a good thing.”