In our Westwing Insights category we give you an exclusive behind the scenes look into our projects, events and our culture. Today, Carolin and Jessica from our People & Culture team are happy to give us some insights about the Social Impact Day as a new initiative at Westwing.
“Early last year, a survey about sustainability was conducted. The finding of this survey was that our team members wished to support Westwing in our Sustainability Vision and to engage actively to shape a more sustainable world. After pitching our proposal for the Social Impact Day to the Executive Team and getting it approved last summer, we waited for Covid to calm down again and were very happy to finally implement it in April.
__Team work makes the dream work __— after writing a project plan keeping all stakeholders in mind, we have collected volunteers helping to organize this big event. We have built a strong task force with team members joining from many different departments, i.e. Marketing, Supply Chain, Creative, ending up with a very diverse and super engaged team with many perspectives and ideas.
As a next step, we conducted a survey asking for our team members’ interests and the likelihood of participation. We needed to find enough organizations to cooperate with on April 29th. It turned out that due to the ongoing Covid infection numbers (and the season — there is no tree planting in April, who knew?) the different project groups were kept to a relatively small participation size. In the end, we had project groups with only 2 volunteers amongst others (with an overall participation of almost 300 volunteers)!
Examples of projects our team members engaged in were handing out food for people in need, collecting waste at the Isar, spending time with people from retirement homes, saving food from being wasted from the Community Kitchen, helping refugees with application coaching, engaging in community work for kids, and helping at the Tierschutzverein.
Due to the recent worrying events in the Ukraine, we also let every team member choose to use their day off to volunteer for Ukrainian projects on any day where help is needed.
In the end, we were very happy to see so many volunteers with smiling faces living our Westwing value of genuine care. We can proudly say that we have not solemnly supported one organization but volunteered in many projects ranging from animal welfare to environmental projects and social support.”