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Community

Commerce Architects aims to use what resources it has to make a positive impact on our employees, our community, and our planet.

We continually work to improve the lives of our employees by creating an atmosphere of professional growth and personal fulfillment.

For most of our employees, writing code is a necessary, though mentally exhausting, skill. This is especially true in this day and age when so much of our lives are wrapped in digital consumption. To provide a support system for our employees, we provide touchpoints that focus on establishing the best work/life balance possible.

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  • Development of 3-year career plans, quarterly professional development goals, and overall personal and professional support by their manager.

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  • In-person and virtual happy hours, company parties, wellness tips, and other fun challenges throughout the year, allowing us to step away from our keyboards and connect as humans.

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  • A regular feedback loop exploring how leadership can best support employees.

We are an active participant in strengthening our community in Spokane and we support our employees' efforts to engage with their local communities.

Commerce Architects is no stranger to community engagement.  We are committed to providing all employees with four (4) hours of paid time twice a year, equivalent to eight (8) hours annually, to participate in company-sponsored volunteer events. 

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In the past, we have participated in various community activities such as:

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Additionally, Commerce Architects is committed to supporting and encouraging our employees contributions to charitable organizations. We match 100% of eligible gifts made by employees to any qualified organization, up to a maximum of $200 per person, per year.

We are eagerly working to achieve carbon neutrality and be a zero-impact business

Commerce Architects is making a concerted effort to measure, communicate, and financially account for its environmental impact as a business.  We recognize that our pollution of the atmosphere and our usage of water resources is one that future generations will primarily feel the consequences of. 

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This reality has led us to pre-emptively lessen this burden by investing additional financial resources into renewable energy, water restoration, and forest conservation.  To determine the amount of financial resources which are appropriate for us to invest in this cause, we have built a custom in-house application which we have labeled the Dashboard for Energy and Water, or DEW. 

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We built DEW with two goals in mind: 

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  • Get a rough estimate of the amount of energy and water Commerce Architects consumes and flight emissions we contribute to atmospheric pollution. 

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  • Make it easy for employees to understand Commerce Architects' and their personal environmental impact.

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The application is a simple portal for our employees to log into, enter their data, and compare their usage with their fellow employees and Commerce Architects as an organization.

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With this data available, we are able to obtain a rough estimate of our company environmental footprint, and can begin purchasing carbon, renewable energy, and water restoration credits. In fact, we already have!  As you can see in the table below, we are already collecting numbers on our resource utilization and are purchasing credits to account for it. 

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These certificates support environmental protection projects such as a wind farm in Breckinridge, Oklahoma, improving water quality in the Middle Deschutes River, and refrigerant management ODS destruction in Canada.

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Welcome to DEW

Dashboard for Energy & Water Usage

Contributions toward our effort to become a carbon-neutral organization

*Resource utilization is calculated via the DEW application and is estimated. 

 

Let's be clear about the intention of these certificates.  We recognize that an offset does not truly accomplish what its name implies.  The actual cost of air pollution or water overuse is impossible to measure and is certainly not covered by the typical price of offsets. That said, we believe they are a tool for assigning a cost to environmental pollution by putting an additional price on those activities, and are thus a net good for society to adopt and normalize the use of. 

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