Raymond James has prioritized giving back to the community since its founding in 1962. Often, that voluntary service takes the form of physical labor to help people through catastrophes.
When Hurricane Helene struck St. Petersburg, Florida — the location of Raymond James’ headquarters — the firm’s Global Wealth Solutions team at the home office went into action, assembling and dispatching a team to give aid.
They “were literally ripping out [soaked] drywall and helping people put their homes back together,” Tash Elwyn, president of Raymond James Financial’s Private Client Group, tells ThinkAdvisor in an interview.
Elwyn, who says he grew up hoping “to make the world a better place than you found it,” was regional director of Raymond James & Associates’ Atlantic division in 2011 when he and colleagues there conceived the idea for Raymond James Cares Month.
The program started in Elwyn’s region in 2011 and went national the following year, ultimately expanding to Canada and the United Kingdom.
Since then, every May is Raymond James Cares Month. In 2024, 3,371 volunteers served 8,315 hours helping 269 charitable organizations in 120 communities.
In the interview, Elwyn talks about the firm’s year-round volunteer and philanthropic efforts — including his benefiting personally from volunteer help in the wake of Helene — and explains how his “hippie parents” instilled in him “a deep sense of responsibility … to give back to others.”
Here are highlights of our conversation:
THINKADVISOR: Anything in your early background that inspired your passion to give back to the community?
TASH ELWYN: I liken my childhood to that of Alex P. Keaton on the [1980s] TV show “Family Ties” because I was raised by two hippie parents.
Unlike Alex, I didn’t wear a bowtie and carry The Wall Street Journal to school in my briefcase — but I was pretty close to that.
You were conservative and business-minded. Did your parents pass along any of their counterculture values?
I was raised with a deep sense of responsibility to give back to others and try to make the world a better place than you found it.
My upbringing and chosen career may seem divergent, but I’m in a noble profession where we get to change the world one client, one family at a time.
And Raymond James changes the world through all our charitable endeavors in the communities we live and work in.
Did you have any other motivation to start Raymond James Cares Month?
I’ve long thought that the work so many advisors do in giving back to the community may go unnoticed at times.
For all the good we do in creating economic prosperity and freedom for people in our country, our profession hasn’t always been held in high regard historically.
I wanted to identify a single month in which we celebrate all the good that our profession does for communities.
So Raymond James Cares Month isn’t just an image-building PR initiative. Correct?
That’s right. This is real and very near and dear to my heart. It’s done purely as a gesture of good will by everyone involved.
Is the volunteer work carried out on company time?
Much of it is; some is after hours or on weekends. That’s driven more by the community organization the [employees] have chosen to support.
For example, I’m directly part of the home office volunteer [effort] at the Ronald McDonald House. We do meal preparation for the families whose children are in the [RM] hospital.
That’s typically a late afternoon or evening event or sometimes on Saturday mornings.
