by Yvonne Siu Turner, Points of Light Corporate Institute
December 8, 2014
~1@BODYURL[id=114jbcurl1202]@ Claude Debussy once said, “Music is the space between the notes.” Just as music exists between the notes, citizenship and community exist between people. Outside of voting and the formal ways that citizens engage with their government, what are the other, more informal, ways that people interact to build healthy and vibrant communities? I was honored to have the opportunity to organize two Learning Summits at the National Conference on Citizenship’s (NCoC) Annual Conference this year to engage in a unique cross-sector dialogue about how corporate community engagement inspires active citizenship. At a time when corporate citizenship professionals are focusing on designing their employee volunteer programs so they can have the biggest impact on business and society, it was refreshing and eye-opening to examine how corporate citizenship could also inspire broader elements of civic health. We defined “civic health” using indicators NCoC measures in the annual “Volunteering and Civic Life in America” assessment, namely volunteering, community involvement and social or political advocacy. So how can companies inspire volunteerism? Julia Chicoskie, Program Advisor for Global Citizenship at FedEx, shared how her company was able to inspire nearly 10,000 team members in 2013 to contribute more than 46,000 hours to more than 500 nonprofits around the world during FedEx Cares Week. FedEx has also played a leadership role in advancing a social issue into which it has keen insight—pedestrian safety. In honor of 15-year-old Christina Morris-Ward who was killed on Halloween morning in 2012 after crossing an intersection while distracted with headphones and her cell phone, FedEx launched its Moment of Silence Campaign in 2013. The public service campaign honors Christina and teens who are injured and killed each year while crossing the street by bringing nationwide attention to the issue of pedestrian safety. It encourages teens and parents to pledge a “Moment of Silence” to put down their devices while crossing the street. This message has reached 241 cities, 907 schools, 580,000 students around the world and has engaged 12,000 parents, teachers and FedEx volunteers. GE has also encouraged its professionals to give back their skills and talents to the community through its Developing Health Program. The goal of Developing Health is to improve access to care in underserved communities. By pairing grant funding with GE volunteers, GE has reached 66 community health centers in 22 cities with 420,000 volunteer hours. Skills-based volunteering support in operational management and process improvement at health centers has helped reduce patient wait times by 70%–helping community health centers expand their reach and serve a greater number of people in need. Just as FedEx is supporting pedestrian safety, GE is getting behind another critical issue—building a stronger Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) pipeline. It has partnered with MC2 STEM High School in Cleveland and has contributed more than 2,450 hours of mentoring to students. The high school—the first of its kind in the country—is located on the GE Lighting corporate campus, making it the perfect place for students to interact with and learn from GE mentors. GE’s partnership with the school even features a STEM Sophomore Project, in which students develop mock companies and learn how to develop business plans, and to design and market a product. “STEM education is critical to closing the skills-gap in the U.S. workforce, so GE is focusing on community programs that will help to encourage students to see the possibilities of careers in STEM fields,” said Janine Rouson, Director of Global Engagement for GE Corporation. How do we measure corporate community engagement? After exploring how companies are inspiring active citizenship through their leadership in corporate volunteerism and social advocacy, we took an even deeper dive on how companies measure the impact of their community engagement. Jenny Lawson, Vice President of Corporate Strategy at Points of Light, explained the four dimensions that The Civic 50 uses to evaluate this. The Civic 50 an initiative of Points of Light and Bloomberg to measure the 50 most community-minded companies in the nation each year, is a roadmap that shows companies how they can use their time, skills and other resources to improve the quality of life in the communities where they do business. The four dimensions The Civic 50 uses to evaluate community-mindedness puts forward a unique point of view about modern corporate citizenship—that to be a best practice corporate citizen today, you’ve got to do more than just write a check. As such, The Civic 50 measures how much a company invests, how it integrates its community engagement work into business functions, how it institutionalizes community engagement, and how it measures social and business impact. Let’s look first at how much a company invests in communities. For The Civic 50, this can be in the form of cash, volunteers or in-kind contributions. It also considers public leadership on social issues, like FedEx’s Moments of Silence Campaign and GE’s partnership with MC2 High School. The Civic 50 also measures how well a company integrates its community work into its business functions, or how companies “do well by doing good.” For example, companies are evaluated in a positive light for adopting strategic approaches that use community engagement to support HR, marketing, sales, wellness and diversity goals. Recognizing that sustainable community programs need to have a supportive internal infrastructure to thrive, The Civic 50 also evaluates how a company institutionalizes its community work through policies, systems and incentives. These include things like offering paid time off to volunteer, offering training and toolkits for volunteer leaders, and making volunteers eligible to earn grants for their nonprofit partners through Dollars-for-Doers programs. Finally, The Civic 50 measures how well a company measures and demonstrates the social and business impact of its philanthropic work. As impact measurement in corporate citizenship is still an emerging field, The Civic 50 encourages companies to focus on measuring the tangible outputs and outcomes it has on community partners, and how its community work impacts business and employee goals. Results of the 2014 Civic 50 were announced today, and honorees are listed online at www.civic50.org. Discussions from our Learning Summits at NCoC’s Annual Conference this year were enlightening and informative. Students, nonprofit and civic engagement professionals, along with companies, all appreciated the positive role businesses can play in society. They also understood how measurement and demonstrating the impact of corporate community engagement can help companies sustain and scale their good work. In doing so, they are helping to strengthen our communities and inspire active citizenship—our version of Debussy’s “space between the notes.”