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Social Responsibility in Business

This month’s Capital Ideas topic is social responsibility. I am delighted to share that my comments were featured in Thursday’s Calgary Herald. I thought it would be nice to expand on them a bit as well

Starting Out

I have been living in Calgary for awhile now. Most of my time has been spent at university. While studying, I was amazed at the number of opportunities there were for students to get involved in the community. Even more amazing is how much the students choose to give back.

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to participate in community oriented events throughout my university career. I also organized a few. Both were hugely rewarding. From the beginning, I wanted YYC Beeswax to give something relevant back to the community. With this in mind, I built lip balm pricing around how I wanted to give back.

Giving Back

We currently donate $0.25 from every lip balm sold to Apiaries and Bees for Communities (A.B.C.) in support of their educational programs. We choose to support them because they are a local initiative, which means the funds will remain in and benefit the community. The educational programs include school outreach, and I believe A.B.C. imparts valuable knowledge to the next generation making them a worthwhile cause to support.

Moving Forward

In the future, I am looking forward to developing more programs to support other worthwhile local initiatives. A few ideas are in the works, so keep an eye out for them!

Here’s the Capital Ideas page from Thursday’s Calgary Herald (click the picture for the full article):

Capital Ideas Calgary Herald July 28, 2016

How do you give back to your community? How do you think businesses can be better at giving back to the community? I’d love to hear your thoughts!