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PwC’s Shannon Schuyler on Service
PwC’s CR head, Shannon Schuyler, whom I had the pleasure to interview last month at our Corporate Community Investment Conference, contributed a post this week to Chris Jarvis’ blog, Realizing Your Worth. Schuyler shared her experiences and delights from attending the National Conference on Volunteering and Service, the HUGE event hosted this week by the Points of Light Institute and the Corporation for National and Community Service.
Says Schuyler:
Monday’s pre-plenary session opened up with back-to-back star-studded speakers and performers. You could feel the electricity and excitement in the 5,000 people that were in the audience. I was fortunate enough to speak about how now is the time to create a new era of service in America and debut a live video from New Orleans where more than 150 PwC employees are working as part of the firm’s Summer of Community Service program on four different service projects to help rebuild the community.
To watch the video, click here.
I should mention, there is a lot of Twitter activity this week...
Smarter, Faster, Stronger (and Sometimes Even More Fun): Tech for CSR
By Andrew Mack, Principal of AMGlobal Consulting. "CSR+Tech" is AMGlobal's monthly column on BCLCblog.
If someone asks you “what’s next” in CSR around the world, there are many potential answers, but nearly all of them have one thing in common – an increased focus on technology.
Companies that want to have a truly powerful (and sustainable) impact are increasingly using technology as a multiplier and a way to address traditional CSR bottlenecks, such as cost and skilled personnel.
Where in the past, distance and cost truly limited firms’ ability to build sustainable programs – especially in smaller markets – today companies can bring “best practice” and specialized expertise to projects anywhere. Basic technologies like Skype and Facebook make it possible for specialist staff to mentor and support on-the-ground teams, as the AMGlobal team has done for years on a joint Chevron-World Bank-Government Road Safety initiative in Nigeria.
Using templates generated in the field, technology also permits expert teams to quickly replicate successful models throughout a corporate network, as with Chevron’s global Arrive Alive program.
At the same time, the new focus on technology enables firms to quickly establish supporters’ networks with huge potential...
Building Community – National Launch and Local Impact
5th post in a series (posts one, two, three, four) on our journey to create ARAMARK Building Community, the company’s signature community initiative to strength the capacity of the country’s local community centers.
As word spread throughout the company about the ARAMARMK Building Community pilots locations, employees, from executives to hourly workers, became eager to participate. Momentum was on our side.
However, before rolling out the initiative nationally, we needed to identify a few national partners with a local reach that could help us execute on a larger scale. We needed partners with core competencies and experience in our social impact areas; the knowledge and access to the various independent community centers across the country; and a turnkey approach to conducting large-scale volunteerism events. We selected the following national partners:
- To help identify and...
Award-Winning Corporate Citizenship Campaign Continues in 2009
By Joanna Augustynski, Allstate Insurance Company
Allstate Insurance Company, with The Allstate Foundation, is mobilizing national, state and local resources in a comprehensive Teen Safe Driving Program to save young lives and make the roads safer in all communities.
Car crashes are the number-one killer of U.S. teens. Each year, nearly 5,000 teens are killed (Insurance Institute for Highway safety) and another 300,000 injured (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) in largely preventable collisions. The tragic emotional toll of crashes on families and communities is devastating. According to a recent study by Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, teen crashes cost more than $34 billion in medical expenses, property damage, lost work, quality of life loss and other related costs in 2006 alone.
Through research, advocacy advertising, teen empowerment, parent education and partnerships with schools, community organizations, government agencies and health care providers, Allstate and The Allstate Foundation have invested significant resources since 2005 to help save young lives, preserve families and build safer communities. For this, Allstate and the Allstate Foundation received the 2008 Corporate Citizenship Award in the category of U.S. Community Service. (Watch a video of the...
The Pilot – Learning by Doing
4th post in a series (posts one, two, three) on our journey to create ARAMARK Building Community, the company’s signature community initiative to strength the capacity of the country’s local community centers.
With the “green light” to move forward, it was time to pilot ARAMARK Building Community, our new, branded signature initiative focused on strengthening the capacity of local community centers. We chose several of our most important business markets – Houston, Chicago and Philadelphia – to demonstrate the power of the concept and to test different program models.
Holly Montalbano, ARAMARK Vice President of External Affairs in Houston, quickly identified a local community center partner for the first local pilot partnership. “From our first meeting with Neighborhood Centers, Inc. (NCI), we were hopeful that we had found the perfect partner,” says Montalbano.
A network of 59 community centers serving more than 200,000 people of all ages, NCI provided the types of services that ARAMARK could contribute to, but...
Measuring What Matters: City Works Toward Sustainability Goals
Measuring what matters. That’s the goal behind a new initiative here at City of Issaquah, which is a 2009 Siemens Sustainable Community program honoree.
Called the “Sustainability Sounding Board,” a group of community leaders appointed by Issaquah’s mayor, recently unveiled its long-term vision for a sustainable Issaquah, as well as recommendations for how the community can begin to measure its progress toward that goal.
In late 2008, Mayor Ava Frisinger created the board, which includes 16 citizens and representatives from social service organizations, businesses and the environmental community. The board members met four times to develop its final report for the mayor.
The report describes a long-term vision, eight sustainability themes and 30 sustainability indicators to help measure the community’s progress, including this set of 13 “keystone” indicators:
- Carbon footprint
- Community health
- Diversity of business
- Education
- Food bank use
- Participation in the arts
- Population density
- Preserved natural and open space
- Revenue base diversity
- Transportation by type
- Walkability
- Waste generation
- Volunteerism
The City’s...
Developing a Signature Program
2nd post in a series (post one) on our journey to create ARAMARK Building Community, the company’s signature community initiative to strength the capacity of the country’s local community centers.
Armed with our research on our existing community activities and our decision to create a signature community initiative for ARAMARK, our team began to formulate the program development strategy.
We started by defining the business goals that our community involvement initiative would need to address. We summarized them as:
- Strengthen relationships with and actively engage ARAMARK employees. Due to ARAMARK’s structure, this was certainly easier to say than accomplish. With nearly 260,000 employees worldwide, the majority of whom work inside their clients’ locations and feel more closely aligned with their client name and purpose, it is not surprising many employees only felt loosely affiliated with ARAMARK. It was important for the signature program to help instill a sense of unified purpose and pride in our company.
- Increase awareness and enhance reputation among opinion leaders in local communities. By design, ARAMARK’s services are often “invisible” to the outside world. When enjoying the carefully maintained grounds of a national park...
Getting Started: ARAMARK Building Community
1st post in a series on our journey to create ARAMARK Building Community, the company’s signature community initiative to strength the capacity of the country’s local community centers.
For over 75 years, community involvement activities at ARAMARK were initiated largely at the grassroots level by service-minded employees who wanted to get involved and support their communities. While ARAMARK is a global company, it is deeply embedded into the communities in which it operates. Community involvement efforts were left to local managers to develop and implement.
Without specific direction or infrastructure support around community involvement, activities revolved around suggestions from clients or passionate employees who encouraged support of organizations important to them. With each region and business having its own small, individual community relations projects, over time ARAMARK came to support a myriad of different philanthropic and employee volunteerism activities, touching every type of cause and issue.
This meant there was little awareness of the extent of the community support being committed by ARAMARK overall; and there...
Stephen Jordan on Economic Recovery – USA Weekend
Today’s USA Weekend “Who’s News” blog featured Executive Director Stephen Jordan discussing Together for Recovery, the U.S. Chamber and BCLC’s economic recovery initiative.
Writer Lorrie Lynch sat down with Stephen earlier this week in San Francisco. Here’s her post:
Steve Jordan, the executive director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Business Civic Leadership Center, begins our interview here in San Francisco by turning the tables on me. “What would you do if you lost your job?” he asks. “What about if you didn’t have health insurance? What if you couldn’t afford to pay your mortgage?” I mumble some ideas about looking for a new job but the reality is I wouldn’t know where to turn. Which is exactly what Jordan expected to hear because it is what he hears from people around the country. So the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has a new web site. It’s a site that puts together in one place alot of information that would be helpful to people who lose jobs, housing, health care and other basic needs.
Check out the full post on USA Weekend’s site, and also check out Stephen in this video, explaining what Together for Recovery is all about.
Mile High Green
With a long and proud history of environmental innovation that includes the nation’s 9th most nationally recognized municipal “Green Fleet” and one of the country’s first ISO 14001-certified Environmental Management Systems that covers each municipal agency, Denver’s commitment to becoming one of the greenest cities in the country is well underway. Mayor John Hickenlooper institutionalized the city’s green commitment with the creation of Greenprint Denver in 2006.
Greenprint Denver is a community-wide sustainability plan demonstrating that local government can be an effective force for innovation and leadership to improve the environment. The Greenprint Denver plan, currently in its second year of implementation, covers programs in energy and water conservation, waste reduction, alternative transit development, renewable energy installations, green building and green economic development opportunities for the municipal government’s operations and the broader community. ...
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