It was not business as usual for one week at Johnson & Johnson MedTech, the second largest medical device maker in the world.
More than 700 employees at the division’s Irvine campus dedicated their time from Sept. 29 to Oct. 2 assembling hygiene kits, restocking food pantries and donating blood for local nonprofits—all part of the company’s annual volunteer initiative known as Week of Caring.
The cumulation of more than 1,500 volunteer hours over the week-long event resulted in 14,400 packed meals for people facing food insecurity, 600 hygiene kits for individuals in low-resource communities and enough donated blood to save up to 126 hospital patients.
“It is all employees,” Rosmelia Persaud, human resources leader of surgical vision at J&J MedTech, told the Business Journal. “We had someone who it was their first day at J&J to our C-suite executive residents volunteering.”
This year, employees volunteered for various nonprofits, including SEE International, Dreams for Schools, Rise Against Hunger, American Red Cross, Beyond Blindness, Second Harvest Food Bank and South County Outreach.
J&J MedTech ranks as the world’s second-largest medical device maker behind Medtronic, reporting $31.9 billion in revenue for 2024 and accounting for roughly 36% of Johnson and Johnson’s revenues (NYSE: JNJ).
Regionally, the business division is the fifth largest with 1,600 employees in Orange County, according to the Business Journal’s annual list of medical device makers.
Beyond Blindness, American Red Cross
Week of Caring, started in 2021, allows employees during paid work hours to do hands-on volunteering across Orange County once a year.
Nonprofits such as Santa Ana-based Beyond Blindness, which provides inclusive early education and family support services to children with visual impairments and other disabilities, fit in with the company’s mission, according to Persaud. Employees during Week of Caring helped create interactive felt storyboards that encourage tactile play for visually impaired children.
“J&J Vision helps visually impaired people in the community, so it aligns with our values,” she said.
On-site, a blood drive was hosted for the American Red Cross, which provides disaster relief, health and safety services, and blood donations nationwide.
Red Cross began doing blood drives at Week of Caring in 2022 and has been a longtime partner of J&J, said Becky Firey, executive director of the American Red Cross of Orange County.
“Partnerships like this are so vital because not enough people give blood,” Firey told the Business Journal.
“A lot of people think you can just over collect and it will stay there forever, but because there is a limited shelf life on blood, we have to be constantly collecting in order for us to continuously meet patient needs.”
Of the eligible population locally, less than 5% donate blood, according to Firey. Last year, Red Cross collected over 100,000 units of blood and platelets in Orange County for the 115 hospitals it serves in Southern California, she said.
Nationally, Firey said that Red Cross needs about 12,500 units of blood every day.
“Donating blood is one of the activities I always try to sign up for during Week of Caring because I know it’s such a critical need for patients,” said Richard Minevich, senior director of global strategic marketing for J&J MedTech Cardiac Imaging, Structural Heart, and Reprocessing.
Minevich is one of 46 employees who donated blood with each donation said to save up to three lives.
Assembling STEAM Kits for Underserved Youth
J&J MedTech employees also spent two days out of the week assembling more than 1,500 STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math) for Dreams for Schools.
The STEAM education nonprofit, based in Santa Ana, aims to bring more access to computer science technology and engineering to kids in underserved communities through K-12 after-school programs.
Dream for Schools started as a passion project for Nithin Jilla in 2013 when he was a computer science major at UCI.
Jilla, born in India and raised in Silicon Valley, started his first nonprofit in high school that raised nearly $75,000 toward scholarships for schools in Kenya.
“It was then I realized what I love to do, which was helping people,” Jilla told the Business Journal. “For me, my joy comes from being in the service of others.”
Going into UCI, Jilla planned to drop out of college before he even started to “create a company and sell it for millions,” so he could focus on philanthropy, similar to Bill and Melinda Gates. He said he failed in trying to launch three startups before landing on college students, such as himself, teaching kids how to code.
Jilla said that UCI introduced him to some of the school’s donors, Henry and Susan Samueli, who showed interest in supporting the idea.
With their help, Dream for Schools has grown from mentoring 43 kids in their first year to more than 4,500 students annually, according to Jilla.
The curriculum for the after-school programs includes STEAM kits with materials for a wide range of projects at different levels, such as a catapult that teaches mechanical engineering and more advanced projects, like building a robotic arm using hydraulics.
“Without volunteers, we couldn’t build all of the STEAM kits,” Jilla said.
