A Cisco Systems marketing team kicked off their multi-day onsite meeting in Milpitas, California with a charity bike build. Eleven participants competed through team challenges and built four bicycles. All four went to Joshua’s Gift, a nonprofit supporting families with children diagnosed with autism. The connection was personal: Joshua’s Gift is run by a Cisco employee on the same campus.
Cisco Systems is one of the world’s leading technology companies, specializing in networking, cybersecurity, and collaboration technology. Headquartered in San Jose, California, Cisco operates one of its major campuses in Milpitas, where this event took place.
Cisco Marketing Team Builds 4 Bikes for Joshua’s Gift as a Family Joins Virtually to Share in the Moment at Charity Bike Build in Milpitas
The group was small. Eleven people, a few days together, and a charity connection that made the afternoon deeply personal.
Mizpah Brown-Rich works at Cisco. She also runs Joshua’s Gift, a nonprofit she founded to support families raising children with neurodivergent conditions, including autism. When her colleagues decided to dedicate their bikes to Joshua’s Gift, the afternoon became something more than a team building exercise.
Four bikes came together over the course of the event. Each team brought humor and heart into the build. When the bikes were finished, a family connected virtually to share what receiving one of them meant — their six-year-old was the recipient. The room understood then what the afternoon had actually been about.
Kicking off a multi-day meeting with that kind of moment is hard to replicate in a breakout session or an icebreaker. The team left day one with something they would still be talking about at the end of the week.
We’d like to thank Cisco Systems and the team for building this into their onsite schedule.
Looking to launch a multi-day meeting or team offsite in the San Jose or Milpitas area? A Build-A-Bike® team building event in San Jose gives any group a meaningful way to start working together, and the bikes always go somewhere that matters.