Gary Sievewright
Managing director
Raymond James & Associates
Nonprofit served: Hunger Task Force
Service: Executive council member
When Gary Sievewright moved to Milwaukee from Detroit in 2007, he immediately looked for ways to get involved in his new community.
His first thought was to find a cause that addressed one of everyone’s most basic needs: food. By the end of the year, Sievewright, who worked for Wells Fargo at the time, found his way to West Milwaukee-based Hunger Task Force.
Sievewright, managing director at Raymond James & Associates in Waukesha, is a member of the executive council at Hunger Task Force. In 2016, he helped to launch Hunger Task Force’s Home 4 the Holidays campaign and continues to support the effort.
Hunger Task Force partners with Raymond James & Associates and TMJ4 to provide families with meals during the holidays. Since its establishment, the Home 4 the Holidays campaign – which runs from Dec. 1 to Dec. 31 each year – has raised nearly $300,000 for those holiday meals.
The Home 4 the Holiday campaign came from the idea that every family in need should be able to have a holiday meal, Sievewright said. He recognizes that people in need often miss this experience because they cannot afford to have “a proper holiday meal.”
“I guess I always assumed that if you lived in that apartment, or this home over here, that you’d go to Pick ‘n Save or Festival and buy what you need and take care of your family, and that’s not really the case at all,” Sievewright said. “And that’s when I realized how deep this need really is.”
Sievewright said it’s his responsibility to serve his community, and that there is also a “corporate responsibility.”
“I was kind of taught that you have an obligation to be involved in your community charitably not just with a checkbook, but also with your hands,” Sievewright said. “And it was just kind of part of my DNA that, not only personally but corporately, we need to be involved in the community.”
He said he has used his leadership roles throughout his career to make sure his employees are visible and active in their community. Under Sievewright’s leadership, Raymond James & Associates employees are on the ground each year handing out holiday food items to people in the community.
Sievewright is involved with four nonprofit boards, so balancing his professional, personal and volunteer lives is important, he said.
“That for me requires planning into my professional life to make sure that I have the capacity and that I don’t overextend myself,” he said. “Yet at the same time, I’m doing everything I can in the community to have any little impact I can.”
