Monthly Archives: April 2008

Vancity is carbon neutral.

Vancity is carbon neutral
There are so many reasons why I love working at Vancity, and now I have another really big one.

We announced today, after having it externally audited and verified, that as of December 31, 2007 Vancity is offically carbon neutral. In fact, we are the first North American financial institution to become carbon neutral.

So what does that mean?

It means we’ve tracked our footprint to assess the amount of carbon we emit.

Then we focused on reducing our emissions as much as we possibly could.

And finally, whatever carbon emissions we could not reduce, we purchased high quality local offsets to bring us to carbon neutrality.

This is a huge accomplishment and has been a major focus of the company for quite some time. In fact, we achieved our goal a full two years ahead of schedule by getting our employees across the organization involved and engaged in the issue.

A truly great announcement, and I imagine we’ll garner quite a bit of press coverage about it.

Vancity is carbon neutralI especially love our new limited-time carbon neutral logo on the website.

ChangeEverything.ca is nominated for a Webby Award.

Webby Awards
I am so pleased and excited to announce that ChangeEverything.ca was nominated for a Webby Award.

This is such an incredible honour, and follows on the heels of being an Official Honoree last year. Please vote for ChangeEverything.ca for the Webby People’s Voice Award.

It is worth noting that the four other sites nominated in the category of Social Networking are:

  • Bebo
  • Facebook
  • Flock The Social Web Browser
  • Ning

Perhaps you’ve heard of some of them. It is mind-boggling to be nominated against some of the biggest developments in social networking of the last year or two. Amazing also to be the only company-created social network, up against a bevy of startups.

Equally impressive is the lineup of judges who selected the nominees and will select an ultimate winner.

The Academy is an intellectually diverse organization that includes members such as musicians Beck and David Bowie, Internet inventor Vint Cerf, political columnist Arianna Huffington, Real Networks CEO Rob Glaser, “The Simpsons” creator Matt Groening, R/GA Founder and Chairman Robert Greenberg, Virgin Atlantic Chairman and Founder Richard Branson, Crispin Porter + Bogusky Partner and Chief Creative Officer Alex Bogusky, and The Weinstein Company Co-Founder Harvey Weinstein. Members also include writers and editors from publications such as The New York Times, Wired, Details, Fast Company, Elle, The Los Angeles Times, Vibe, and WallPaper. The 11th Annual Webby Awards received over 8,000 entries from over 60 countries and all 50 states and generated over 750 million media impressions worldwide.

It is pretty much exactly two years since we started developing the site from a concept, and so rewarding to see where Kate has nurtured and engaged the community of over 3,000 registered users. I am also heartened that we are the only socially responsible community in the running. Proves you can do well by doing good.

UPDATE: I added a link to where you can vote for ChangeEverything.ca for the People’s Voice Award.

What does Vancity do in the community anyway?

A major project I’ve been working on for the past few months is spearheading the re-architecting and rewriting of all the content in the community area of vancity.com. It’s been a massive project because, well, frankly we never expained the myriad ways we do good things in our community everyday. A little gap I think.

In other words, the very reason I wanted to work at Vancity, and the main thing that keeps me excited to come to work everyday was almost entirely absent from our website. It’s a long story.

So, I’m so extraordinarily pleased to share with you our new MyCommunity area.

vancity.com/MyCommunity

Inside you’ll find out about our four pillars of community leadership (Acting on Climate Change, Facing Poverty, Growing the Social Economy and Being Accountable), what we do in our communities, why we do what we do, what financial products we have that help create positive change, how we help the not-for-profit sector in our local economy, what grants we give out and whole lot more. This project has been absolutely amazing, and I’m really excited about sharing it with you.

I’d love to hear what you all think, especially other CU folks.