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10. GIVING BACK & COMMUNITY
These thoughts have inspired us over the years to think carefully about the many communities where we have a presence — and the meaningful ways we can make a contribution to their quality of life. Involvement in the support of local projects and programs — big and small — is not only good business, it’s an indispensable component in our three-part mission to make a superior product, prosper economically in sustainable ways and recognize the role that business can play in building a better world. In that spirit, here are some of our community-based program highlights for 2009:
Ben & Jerry’s Community Action Teams (CATs) are employee-directed groups at each of our Vermont sites that make small grants to local community organizations, and organize annual community service projects. CAT grants are in the $100-$1,000 range, and support schools and after-school programs, community recreational programs, arts groups, local conservation projects, and more. 2009 CAT Projects:
Individual Service — Our employees are also encouraged and supported in taking on individual service projects. South Burlington employees have a paid community service benefit that totals 40 hours per year. Salaried workers in our manufacturing plants who do community service on their personal time are given up to three days of additional community service time off on a day-for-day matching basis. Here are the totals of individual volunteer hours contributed under these programs:
Do the World a Flavor project — Seven employees participated in a day-long service project building a playground in the village of Yabon in the Dominican Republic. We brought fifteen contest winners from all over the world with us to visit and to share some joy and ice cream with one of the communities that produces Fair Trade cocoa for Ben & Jerry’s. Global Franchise Community Gathering — In line with a longstanding Ben & Jerry’s tradition, we kicked off this annual event with a community service project cleaning, painting, and landscaping in the Harlem Heights area of Fort Myers, Florida. More than 200 Ben & Jerry’s employees, franchisees, and guests participated in the half-day project.
Both in our Vermont home and globally, Ben & Jerry’s sponsors all kinds of charitable activities in local communities. Here’s a sampling: At Home: Our corporate office sponsored over two-dozen community events in Vermont, ranging from the South End Art Hop in Burlington to the Strolling of the Heifers in Brattleboro. At many of these events, our Scoop Truck doled out free ice cream just for the fun of it. All together, we donated hundreds of gallons of ice cream, hundreds of hours of staff time, and more than $95,000 to these community events. We gave away ice cream worth $142,289 to various organizations throughout the U.S. and Canada. We also gave away almost 10,000 free Ben & Jerry’s pint coupons to support the work of over 1,500 nonprofits outside the state of Vermont. Closer to home, we donated hundreds of gallons of ice cream to Vermont nonprofits through both our manufacturing plants and Vermont’s Finest (our in-state distributor). On top of the Company’s donations, our scoop shop owners gave away thousands of gallons of ice cream to support the work of nonprofit organizations in their local markets. To spur themselves on to even greater heights of generosity and community involvement, our franchisees decided to set aside $40,000 out of their system-wide marketing budget to fund a unique Matching Bulk Program that reimburses individual scoop shops for half of the cost of ice cream donated to nonprofit organizations. Around the World (a few snippets): Our manufacturing plant in Hellendoorn, the Netherlands is very involved in the local community. In 2009, we gave away nearly 9,000 ‘shorties’ of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream to various community partners, including retirement homes, schools, and sporting events. We also hosted a Summer Market with elderly people in Nijverdal to give them a ‘holiday feeling’ even if they couldn’t afford to actually go on holiday. We took a ‘Sweet Spot Summer Tour’ to seven events across Denmark, starting at the Roskilde festival that drew more than 100,000 visitors. With a solar-powered ice cream cart and several solar-paneled golf buggies, we sampled Ben & Jerry’s to about 15,000 people and collected more than €26,000 in donations for environmental charities. We put on our annual Sundae on the Common Festival in London, U.K., to the delight of tens of thousands of people who enjoyed live music, free ice cream, and all sorts of wacky events, including Toe Wrestling. We also purchased carbon offsets through MyClimate for all emissions associated with the event. These offsets supported the development of renewable wind energy in Madagascar.
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Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen once asked:
Why can’t business seek to make positive contributions to society — even if a particular decision isn’t based on the least-cost solution? Why can’t companies contribute to the health of the communities where they do business?
— from Values-Driven Business: How to Change the World, Make Money, and Have Fun by Ben & Jerry’s cofounder Ben Cohen and Mal Warwick (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2006)
Jerry Greenfield, our other co-founder, put it even more succinctly:
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. As you give, you receive. Or, to put it in a more “businesslike” way: one hand washes the other.
— from Ben & Jerry’s Double-Dip: How to Run a Values-Led Business and Make Money, Too (Simon & Schuster, 1998)