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CSR in Europe, Middle East and Africa » Volunteering in Germany
Volunteering in Germany
Last week I had the chance to participate in the first event that HP Germany held for a local school participating in the Junior company programme. This event was part of a series of volunteering activities that HP employees are currently organising in several European countries as part of the HP Responsible Business Competition that HP launched with Junior-Achievement Young-Enterprise (JA-YE) Europe last year.

Employees of the education department at HP Germany’s headquarters in Boeblingen held the event and shared their know-how of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) with the students. The students – a group of sixth grade students from the Koenigin-Olga-Stift, a secondary school in Stuttgart – were quite interested in the topic as they already knew how to run a business! They are taking part in a student company competition called Junior hosted by the ministry of economics in Baden-Württemberg, one of Germany’s federal states. Their task is to build and run a business over a certain period of time. Their business idea was to sell T-shirts for young people in Stuttgart, so they created a modern design incorporating Stuttgart’s famous TV tower. The goal of the session at HP was to give the students insight into how they could incorporate social and environmental responsibility into their companies and to stress the importance of responsible practices in our global business world.

I’m currently working in HP EMEA’s CSR department and I’m writing my thesis about Volunteering at HP. So, naturally I had a great interest in the event. I spoke to Susanne Helmer, a coach from HP’s education department, who held the session with the students that day. I asked her what her motivation was to volunteer and she said that as she had worked in the philanthropy department before, she was interested in passing on information to others and that she liked to work with young people. When preparing for the students’ session Susanne learnt a lot on HP’s CSR activities. She added, that as she sees social security benefits constantly decreasing in Germany, she believes corporate responsibility will gain more and more importance for our society.

I’m now curious to find out what drives employees at other companies to volunteer. And I’d be very interested to learn what volunteering programmes have worked in your companies. And who knows? I might feature your company as a best practice in my final thesis.

I’m looking forward to your answers. Just post a comment below.


Philipp Jaeger
Student of Business Information Systems, Berufsakademie Stuttgart
Posted 03-26-2007 3:25 PM by BlogArchive
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