A World Without Honeybees

Haagen-Dazs ice cream has launched a new campaign to help honey bees. Appealing to our selfish instincts, they point out that bees are essential to many of the wonderful foods we eat, including ice cream. When people eat flavors like Vanilla Honey Bee Ice Cream, Haagen-Dazs is donating money to support honey bee and sustainable pollination research.

Of course, advertisements like the one I saw today are helping raise awareness of the honey bee crisis. They are also landscaping their headquarter with bee-friendly plants like jasmine and rosemary. In addition, they've created a "bee board" of experts and providing educational materials to schools.

Related to this blog and my dissertation, the company is giving employees flower seeds to plant bee-friendly gardens in their yards as well as sponsoring volunteer days where employees can help create bee-friendly gardens in their communities. They're also sending employees on public education speaking engagements--along with free ice cream samples.

Help the Honey Bees Website

Microfinancing

CNN.com has published an article on microfinancing, a form of loan in which as little as $25 can be invested to help entrepreneurs in impoverished countries.

Interested lenders can visit Kiva.org to find projects they would like to finance.

A blog entry from someone who gives to Kiva: http://missfire-simplegreen.blogspot.com/2008/04/green-saturday-microfinance.html.

Social Entrepreneurship

Of course, social entrepreneurship is a special form of social action at work. I will discuss this more in the future. Until then, check out the following links:

• Ashoka
• The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship
• Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE)
• How to Change the World

What is social action anyway?

The best definition I've uncovered so far comes from Horvath (1999: 221):

Social action is participation in social issues to influence their outcome for the benefit of people and the community. Social action can, under favourable circumstances, produce actual empowerment, impact, or social change.

A legitimate question is: does social action at work differ from social action in one's home life, family life, or church life? Engaging in social issues at work is undeniably different--and perhaps risky when viewed as a type of disclosure. Multilevel theory implies that individuals clustered, whether by work group, function, or organization are apt to behave differently than individuals clustered in different ways.

REFERENCE
Horvath, P. (1999). The organization of social action. Canadian Psychology-Psychologie Canadienne, 40(3), 221-231.

Kingdom Assignment

Last winter, Lezli showed me an article about a church who gave seed money to congregants and asked them to use their talents to triple the money for the congregation. Even individuals who felt they had no intrinsic talent were challenged to find something to offer. Some members sold crafts and some sold services. One man provided rides on his motorcycle for a fee. (I wish I could find a link to the article, but I've been unsuccessful.) When we read the article, we were very struck by the sweetness of it and the self-discovery that accompanied the congregants' generosity.

In searching for the article, I came upon the website Kingdom Assignment. About this program, I am more cynical. Based on Matthew's Parable of Talents, Kingdom Assignments, a nonprofit organization, encourages congregations to implement their 90-day program which is structured around three pillars: Talent, Treasure, and Time.

On the homepage, I was interested to see a banner for On Assignment, "multiplying corporate generosity through empowered employees." Instead of using the three pillars to build money for a congregation, On Assignment aims to increase seed money provided by the organization (less a management fee) for the benefit of the organization's chosen charity or cause. Besides the philanthropic motive, On Assignment promises to reinforce company values, build morale, and improve teamwork.

This is a program I should love--it allows employees to engage in social action presumably in a very personal and self-directed manner. At the same time, this particular program makes me uncomfortable. It feels a little too mega-church.