CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

TRUSTED COMMUNITY MEMBERS SINCE 1985

The Marker Group takes our responsibility to our community and our environment very seriously. Since our company’s founding, we have pioneered processes and implemented procedures to ensure that we are always a positive influence on those around us. Here are a few of the ways in which we strive to give back to the city and the world that supports us.

SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

The Marker Group volunteers our time and resources to assist organizations we trust aid the communities we love. We are proud to support both local and nationwide not-for-profit organizations working to conquer the most pressing challenges of our time. From homelessness to breast cancer to childhood poverty and abuse, the Marker Group is dedicated to defending those in need and working together to build a more complete society for future generations. In 2019, we began an annual tradition of holding a blood drive and health fair to help contribute to the wellbeing of our neighbors and employees.

ORGANIZATIONS WE SUPPORT

FEEDING AMERICA

2020 was a difficult year for many, and the Marker Group made a number of donations to charitable causes. The largest was a $40,000 gift to Feeding America, a nonprofit nationwide network of more than 200 food banks that feed more than 46 million people through food pantries, soup kitchens, shelters, and other community-based agencies. The gesture was a thank-you to our clients for their continued business and an effort to help create a world where no one goes hungry.

THE ENVIRONMENT

At the Marker Group, we are always thinking of ways to make our company more environmentally friendly. Over the years, we have worked hard to become a paperless company by encouraging our customers, employees, and vendors to transfer records digitally. We are committed to reducing waste and making it easy to for our clients to do so, as well.

OUR RECYCLING DATA

As the industry leader in medical records research, the Marker Group must deal with an enormous amount of paper documents every month. As a responsible corporate citizen, we recycle all of the paper products that we can and exclusively use recycled paper in our work. Beginning in 2018, we began tracking our recycling data in order to improve our efficiency. Since that time, we have recycled more than 183,000 pounds of paper, which saved more than 2,000 trees. We’ve reduced the water used in paper production by over one million gallons—all part of our responsibility to our environment and our community.

In order to minimize our water consumption, the Marker Group promotes the use of water filtration systems in our office for our employees instead of buying bottled water. The average person uses 156 plastic water bottles per year. This would save approximately 44,928 from going in landfills.

To reduce landfill waste, we supply our employees with insulated tumblers instead of using disposable cups. The average U.S. office worker uses 500 cups per year. Our tumblers save approximately 144,000 Styrofoam cups from going in a landfill per year.

The Marker Group replaced all servers with low-energy helio and solid-state drives. Each helio drive has greater power efficiency, with 27-percent-lower operating power than the air drives that we previously used. The drives consume 5.6 watts during idle operation, a 56-percent reduction in watts-per-TB compared to air-filled drives. This also lowers power and cooling costs, since they typically run four to five degrees cooler than air-filled drives. 

Marker Group also selects IT hardware with the goal to minimize our consumption of natural resources.

DISASTER RELIEF

When Hurricane Harvey hit our hometown of Houston, we experienced a storm like none that had ever been seen. For days, the entire city was deluged with flooding rains—some areas received more than 50 inches! Millions of Houstonians were affected with flooded homes and/or cars. The Marker Group had approximately 15 employees who were in dire need of assistance. Many of them had several feet of water in their homes and lost their cars. Several of them lost everything they owned. We had families with children who were rescued from their rooftops by boats. Most importantly, everybody made it through safely, but as a company, we knew we had to do something to help our co-workers.

The employees of the Marker Group immediately started fundraisers as well as donated their time. Marker sold custom-made “Marker Cares/Houston Strong” t-shirts with all proceeds going to help our affected employees. The Marker Group also purchased Houston Strong” RTIC cups for all employees, for which all proceeds went to the highly publicized JJ Watt Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund. Overall, the Marker Group, Marlene Marker, and our employees donated over $18,000, which was distributed among our employees and others affected by Hurricane Harvey.

We also had a group of employees and their families who assisted several affected coworkers in their homes with tearing out sheetrock and trying to salvage what they could of their belongings. In Houston’s darkest days, the Marker Group came together to help one another in a very desperate time.

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