Jessica Flores is always dashing about. Just ask the body shop owner and she will tell you how her days are spent finishing one task and then quickly moving on to the next. That doesn’t leave much time to give back to the community, but she found a way.
  For nearly 20 years Ronny and Jessica Flores have owned and operated Paint Care and Body Inc. at 4826 E. Cesar Chavez St. in Austin, Texas. They have given to organizations such as the church and little league baseball in the past, but the husband and wife team never thought of themselves as particularly charitable — until now. That  changed when they caught wind of a program entitled “Good Community is Good Business.”
    “All small business owners want to feel like we’re contributing but who has the time,” Flores said. “Donations are easy. But time?”
 The program is designed to link up small businesses with local charities in need. Flores volunteered to be on the executive committee and also attended a preliminary meeting open to those interested in charitable giving. The crowd in attendance represented a much different demographic than at her body shop, Flores said. With 10 employees, many who live paycheck to paycheck, Paint Care and Body Inc. was a stark contrast to the many white-collar companies represented, Flores said.
 “I thought, you know I can give them a dose of reality,” Flores said. “Our side of the industry isn’t represented well.”
 But given how hard it had been for her to break away from the shop to get to the meeting in time, she understood the disparity.
 “It could very well be that when you’re small you wear so many hats you don’t have time to break away for things like that. Your priorities are what they are,” she said. In the end, she realized that she did have one thing that she could pass on and that was useful skills.
 “Big software companies can donate much more than we can,” said Flores. “But more than donating money, what stuck out at the meeting was donating time.”
 Flores toyed with one of the ideas suggested in the meeting, which was to volunteer time and skill.
 “I thought, that is so basic,” she said. So basic yet so effective, yet it had never crossed her mind. In the end, she decided she would team up with a charitable organization where she could go along with her employees and teach a class on automotive maintenance and repair.
 She suggested the idea to her employees at a regular staff meeting and their initial response was fitting.
 “At first they looked at me really surprised – but when I explained to them how they can really contribute, they started to get it,” Flores said.
 She chose to work with the local charity Safeplace, a safe house for women who have experienced abuse and are trying to restart their lives while still caring for their children.
 “The women are at a very vulnerable, sensitive point in their life, what better way to empower a human being,” Flores said. “They’re at a point where they don’t have a man in their life and they still have to support their family. They have a car. We empower them when they are able to take care of it themselves.”