5 ways to cultivate active corporate citizenship

MANILA, Philippines - To create a shared understanding on Active Citizenship, VSO Bahaginan recently hosted an exchange on best practices on how to most effectively harness Filipinos’ innate bayanihan or volunteerism spirit.

VSO Bahaginan Advocacy and National Volunteering Program officer Jay Neil Ancheta defined active citizens as “people engaged and active in development.”  He elaborated, “these are people aware of development issues that affect them and their communities, informed about their rights and responsibilities and, as a result, they act to exercise those rights and responsibilities and develop their individual and community potential for positive change.”

Invited as one of the expo speakers on cultivating active citizenship in a company was Thomson Reuters Manila, represented by Site Strategy, Communications and Corporate Responsibility manager Marla Alvarez.

From the company’s experience, Alvarez shared five ways to cultivate active corporate citizenship:

1. Align company values with personal values. “At Thomson Reuters, we all have a shared responsibility to do business in ways that respect, protect and benefit our customers, employees, communities, and environment. This responsibility informs everything we do, both as a company, and as individuals,” said Alvarez.

She related that social responsibility efforts are defined by and aligned with corporate values that revolve around customers’ needs; collaborating globally; empowering people to make a difference; and delivering high performance results to shareholders. “We thrive by doing the right things for the right reasons across the world,” she summed up.

2. Cultivate the desire to make a difference. “Corporate responsibility is not a nice to have but a part of the way we do business.

It draws on our collective heritage from Thomson Corp. and the Reuters Group, reaching as far back as the 1800s when both companies were first established. 

We conduct our business with integrity and responsibly, and this is key to our long term sustainability and continued business success,” explained Alvarez.

3. Clearly advocate causes. “We are clear on what we support and what we do not support to directly relate it to our business and optimize our resources,” said Alvarez.

“For example, we support education and training; humanitarian relief; community, health, care and culture; and environmental causes. We are committed to using our specialized knowledge, information, technology, and other resources to develop great programs to help individuals, families, and communities,” she added.

4. Create an enabling culture. At Thomson Reuters, community champions can win cash grants for their chosen charities; apply for matching grants that have in the past benefited kids with cancer, street kids, and typhoon survivors; avail of two days of paid volunteer leaves; join the subsidized Manila Volunteers Council which holds quarterly activities with partner-beneficiaries and fundraising drives for disaster relief,” Alvarez said.

She added that employees are encouraged to volunteer as individuals, and many of them are involved in external volunteer organizations like the Hands-on Manila Servation, an active partner for the last seven years of annual corporate volunteerism initiatives.

5. Partner with like-minded groups. “Our institutional partners include Ten Moves! where we donated close to half a million pesos last year from the company and from employees who signed up to voluntarily donate P10 everyday or P300 per payday to raise funds to help build classrooms, and Centex where we sponsored a kindergarten class in Tondo by supporting books, school supplies, uniforms and meals for 75 underprivileged but bright kids,” Alvarez said.

With A Liter of Light, we were the first company to partner with them in the mass-scale production and installation of solar light bulbs in urban poor communities.

VSO Bahaginan’s Ancheta advised harnessing active citizenship according to a company’s own context. “Integrate as well as diversify volunteerism according to what makes sense to an organization.

Identify your strengths to better identify partners and allies to extend reach. Align strategies to where it can contribute the most to national development.

Tap social media to get your messages out there. And be convinced about your theory of change.”