Volunteering that matters to your company, and the World

This guest blog is by Nancy McGaw, Deputy Director, Business and Society Program at The Aspen Institute. It is part of a series published to LinkedIn Pulse.

I have already recommended you start to answer this question by looking at the impacts of the products and services your company offers to the market and reflect on your role in designing, producing, selling or distributing these products and services. Yesterday, I suggested you consider how you can contribute to measuring the progress your company is making toward achieving the SDG goals.

Today, I have another recommendation for you: volunteer.

In the old days, corporate volunteer programs tended to be more about team building than about impact. You’d join your colleagues at a school and paint a classroom or you’d walk for a cause. All good. But these efforts weren’t designed to make a dent in achieving global development goals.

Now companies offer different kinds of corporate volunteering experiences, ones that tackle global challenges and are closely related to the business itself.

Consider what volunteering means at Amcor, for example. Amcor is a global company that develops and produces packaging for all sorts of products – from resealable packages that reduce food waste to blister packaging for pharmaceuticals that protect the product and extend the product shelf life.

Amcor partners with the Ocean Conservancy to participate in International Coastal Cleanup days. This year, on September 16, more than 1500 employees from over 60 different sites headed to the shorelines to pick up trash. You may be thinking that this effort sounds like the team-building from days of yore. Not quite. These employees are contributing to a global effort to understand and reduce the ocean damage that occurs as a result of this trash. They keep track of the trash they collect and report into a global database maintained by Ocean Conservancy. (Over 2.4 million cigarette butts in 2017 alone.)

Also, as David Clark, Vice President of Sustainability at Amcor, explained to me: “When our employees participate in these Cleanups, they gain a deeper understanding of where products come from and where they end up. This information makes them better able to contribute to our business by designing and producing more sustainable packaging. Also, it gives them a deeper appreciation for the public policies that are needed to address waste issues. These insights are shared widely within the company via the internal network hubs.”

What do the SDGs have to do with this effort, I asked? The commitments Amcor has made to three SDG goals align directly with their business. They have set targets related to SDG 1 – Zero hunger, SDG 12 – Responsible consumption and production and SDG 14 – Life below water. The volunteering efforts at Amcor to clean up the oceans relate directly to SDGs 12 and 14. “The SDGs are important to us,” Dave said. “If you create awareness and alignment around specific goals and get people working on the same things, you get much more leverage and impact.”

Johnson & Johnson, the global healthcare company, also sees employee volunteering as a critical factor in being able to achieve its SDG related commitments.

The company offers diverse volunteering opportunities, including ones in which employees can use their specific skills to work on challenging health problems around the world – like providing HIV testing to hard-to- reach populations, providing safe and affordable surgical care to repair cleft palates, and training healthcare workers who are treating patients affected by the Zika virus.

In “The Power of Using Talent for Good”, Michael Bzdak, Executive Director, Global Community Impact at Johnson & Johnson, describes these efforts and emphasizes that Johnson & Johnson’s “employees will play an increasing role in meeting the targets in our own commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals, and making a difference on the front lines of care.”

Amcor and Johnson & Johnson are two of many companies that offer opportunities to use your skills and commitments to make headway on the SDG goals.

If you are looking for a way to get involved in your own company and work toward achieving one or more of the SDGs, do some research to find out if there are volunteer opportunities that relate to these goals. If so, raise your hand! If not, ask colleagues what it would take to get something started.

You may find that designing and piloting a new volunteer program that makes headway on one of the SDGs becomes your next volunteering gig.

Also, realize that if you take this route, you may not only contribute to an impactful effort, you may actually become better at doing your job.

Nancy McGaw directs the Aspen Leaders Forum, an invitation-only, cross-industry community of senior CSR and sustainability strategists working at the leading edge of practice. She also founded the Aspen First Movers Fellowship Program, an innovation lab launched in 2009 by the Aspen Institute Business & Society Program. Leaders in both of these communities are creating products, services, business models and management practices and policies that deliver financial value for their companies and make the world a better place. Learn more about Nancy on LinkedIn. Follow her on Twitter @nancymcgaw.