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Cool Corporate Citizen
An Employee Engagement Program Empowering Workers To Reduce Carbon Emissions At Home, Work And In The Community
“Cool Corporate Citizen is extremely well thought through and I highly recommend it to any company that wants to engage employees in a meaningful and powerful way on the issue of climate change. We ran a very successful Global Warming Cafe workshop that attracted 125 employees before we had to close out enrollment. Out of this workshop we formed 15 Low Carbon Diet EcoTeams to help our employees reduce their personal carbon footprint and then transfer this knowledge back to the company. Many of these EcoTeams have taken the program out into their communities.”
– Sarah Severn, director, Corporate Responsibility Horizons, Nike
Cool Corporate Citizen is a three-part program built around a set of carbon reduction behavior change tools. Simply, the company reduces its carbon footprint (corporate social responsibility), and then empowers employees and community residents to do the same (corporate social engagement).
Overview of Program
Our civilization’s central organizing project is to transform our adverse impact on the climate system before we reach an irreversible tipping point. To accomplish this transformation requires a boldness, innovation, and speed unlike anything humanity has ever faced. To succeed in this extraordinary venture demands all hands on deck. The Cool Corporate Citizen program is an opportunity for business to make a major contribution to this planetary transformation. It moves beyond corporate social responsibility—“I minimize the harm that I do” into corporate social engagement—“I maximize the good that I do.” It invites businesses to become social innovators and change leaders in a way that benefits all of their stakeholders and the planet.
How the Program Works
The following three-part process is done in parallel with each part reinforcing the other.
Part 1: Reduce business operations and employee carbon footprint.
- In not already done, assess business operations carbon footprint and identify energy efficiency cost savings and process improvements. Develop and implement a plan to reduce business operations carbon footprint.
- If not already done, assess each employee’s direct carbon footprint and identify opportunities for improvement and cost savings. Develop and implement a plan to reduce employee’s carbon footprint.
Cool Corporate Citizen Benefits
“More than ever, people want to know about companies’ corporate citizenship efforts, and they will form opinions of a company’s brand and reputation based on those efforts. Sophisticated companies will move beyond merely writing checks and doing short-term cause-related promotions to creating deeper social commitments. These activities should be long-term, credible and integrated into companies’ overall business strategy, and they should involve consumers, employees and communities.”
– Cone Corporate Citizenship Study
The Cool Corporate Citizen program provides a substantive opportunity to meet this need. A company can benefit in the following ways.
- Attract and retain top talent because the company is recognized as socially engaged on the issue of climate change.
- Increase customer loyalty because of company leadership around the issue of climate change.
- Increase employee carbon literacy and morale through participation on EcoTeams that can then be harnessed to help drive and sustain the company carbon reduction strategy.
- Develop employee leadership skills through participating in the Cool Community Campaign.
- Build strong partnerships with local government, community organizations and other businesses.
- Strengthen community visibility and goodwill.
Become Certified as A Cool Corporate Citizen Leader
This is Empowerment Institute’s leadership certification with a focus on implementation of the Cool Corporate Citizen program. You will learn how to customize the program to the unique employee engagement and sustainability needs of the company, lead employee engagement workshops (Global Warming Café), train EcoTeam leaders in how to facilitate the Low Carbon Diet EcoTeam meetings, build internal capacity to lead EcoTeam leader trainings, and bring the program to the community, and provide on-going consultation as the program progresses. Click here for more information on the certification program. Empowerment Institute also provides the above Cool Corporate Citizen services directly to companies. To schedule an interview to learn more click here.
Purchase Low Carbon Diet Workbook
Low Carbon Diet:
A 30 Day Program to Lose 5,000 Pounds
by David Gershon
The core tool of the Cool Corporate Citizen program.
Low Carbon Diet and the Cool Community
Learn about the social change framework and research underpinning the Cool Corporate Citizen program in David Gershon’s award-winning book Social Change 2.0: A Blueprint for Reinventing Our World. Chapter 11 of the book is a case study of the Low Carbon Diet behavior change program and Cool Community empowerment model on which the Cool Corporate Citizen program is based. This chapter has been excerpted as a six-part series in the Sustainable City Network listed below:
Part One: Low Carbon Diet and the Cool Community
Part Two: An Inconvenient Truth Finds a Convenient Solution
Part Three: Instead of Cursing the Dark, Light a Candle
Part Four: The Global Warming Café
Part Five: Taking a Cool Community to Scale
Part Six: The Cool City Challenge
Environmental Leader
Cool Corporate Citizen Testimonials
“We’ve always believed that we are more successful when we work together with our stakeholders towards common goals. Cool Corporate Citizen is a great opportunity to act on that belief holistically - through our own actions as a business, our employee volunteerism program and our outreach into the local community - all in an effort to raise awareness and change behavior related to greenhouse gas emissions.”
– Mike Dupee, Vice President, Corporate Social Responsibility, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters