Research In Motion: Building Panda awareness @ Work

By Kim Geiger
Research In Motion
As a member of Research In Motion’s (RIM) Corporate Responsibility team, I’ve had the chance to lead and contribute to a number of exciting initiatives to help the company reach its corporate responsibility priorities.
One of our newest initiatives has been to join WWF-Canada’s Living Planet @ Work program in joint efforts to help build a culture of conservation in the workplace.  As with any new corporate initiative, it takes time to build interest as well as to plan and execute activities that are fun and engaging for employees to participate in.
So to help kick things off, we got creative!
How did we do this, and what does tomato and pizza sauce have anything to do with it?   Well, we decided to piggyback on an existing corporate initiative, CanBuild, RIM’s annual employee food donation program and canned structure competition.  For the competition, our Corporate Responsibility team constructed the “CanPanda” out of 328 food cans. And after tallying thousands of employee votes, our WWF “CanPanda” was crowned the winner of a RIM People’s Choice Award for North America.

(c) RIM
In addition to bragging rights (which is priceless!), our team won a corporate donation from RIM to a food bank in our honour.  Not only was our “CanPanda” structure an innovative way to highlight WWF-Canada’s Living Planet @ Work program to employees and to encourage them to think about their environmental footprint,  it was also a fun way to give back to communities in need.
I know that this is one of many creative activities that we will be celebrating looking ahead and I can’t wait to work with and collaborate with both the internal teams at RIM as well as external partners like WWF to come up with creative, meaningful and successful events like this!