Nashville Corporate Event Photography | Husch Blackwell & Vanderbilt Backpack Drive for Pencil
FILLING BACKPACKS, BUILDING COMMUNITY — HUSCH BLACKWELL & VANDERBILT PARTNER WITH PENCIL
As a Nashville corporate event photographer, most of what I shoot is polished — keynote stages, branded backdrops, executives in front of step-and-repeats. Husch Blackwell's Education practice group joined their client, Vanderbilt University, in Nashville to fill backpacks with school supplies for local students before the new school year. Husch Blackwell is a national law firm with a Nashville office. When I was asked to photograph this one, I said yes right away — supporting local education is something I care about being part of, the same way I felt photographing a fundraiser for the Save the Music Foundation earlier this year.
THE PARTNER — PENCIL
This event was done in partnership with Pencil, a Nashville-based nonprofit built around one idea: businesses and schools do better when they work together. Pencil connects local companies directly with Metro Nashville Public Schools, pairing volunteers, mentors, and resources with the classrooms and students who need them most. Their model isn't about one-off donations — it's about ongoing partnerships between the business community and local schools, whether that's supply drives like this one, mentorship programs, or professional development support for teachers.
The team didn't stop at filling backpacks, either. They personalized pencil bags by hand-decorating them, then wrote individual notes to tuck inside each one. Small details, but the kind that turn a donation into something a kid actually feels was made for them.
WHY EVENTS LIKE THIS MATTER — AND WHY YOU NEED PHOTOS OF THEM
Volunteer events like this one do real work for a company beyond the good they do in the community. They build camaraderie between colleagues who might not otherwise spend an afternoon together outside a conference room. They give clients and firms a shared project to point to — something concrete, not just a line item in a CSR report. And for recruiting, retention, and marketing, they're proof of the kind of company culture that's hard to describe in a sentence but easy to show in a photo: people gathered around a table, decorating pencil bags and writing notes for local students.
That's the value of a documented set of images from a day like this — the supplies being sorted, the notes being written, the finished backpacks lined up. They tell people what it felt like to be there, and give marketing and HR teams something they can actually use across a LinkedIn post, an internal newsletter, or next year's recruiting deck.
PLANNING A CORPORATE GIVE-BACK EVENT IN NASHVILLE?
If your team has a volunteer day, community partnership, or CSR event coming up in Nashville, I'd love to hear about it. These are some of my favorite days to photograph.