Congratulations to the Chamber's BCLC Corporate Citizenship Award winners

Photo by US Chamber

Last night was a big night for corporate citizenship, as the US Chamber of Commerce Business Civic Leadership Center awarded their annual Corporate Citizenship Awards to businesses that have exemplified ethical leadership and corporate stewardship. It was a great gathering and celebration of businesses from all different industries, such as Intel, UPS, Goldman Sachs, Estee Lauder, and CVS, that all clearly see the value in giving back to the community.

The winners of the night were:

• Wegmans won the Corporate Stewardship Award for its commitment to social responsibility; in 2008, in the company and its employees donated 16 million pounds of food for hunger relief, awarded over $67 million in scholarships, and facilitated more than $2 million in customer donations to food banks at their markets;
• Abbott won the International Community Service Award for its public-private partnership with the government of Tanzania to improve its health system, including expanding access for HIV testing and treatment;
• UPS won the US Community Service Award for its Road Code program that teaches safe driving nationally; and
• Chevron and Discovery Global Education won the Partnership Award for their Learning Center Initiative which has established 65 Learning Centers in underserved schools in Africa and South America.

All of the winners and runners up are doing amazing work in their communities nationally and internationally. It was terrific to hear the heartening stories of how these companies care. As they are getting more innovative with how they engage with their communities and nonprofits to create change, BCLC is applying innovative ways to communicate the good work they're doing! It was really fun for me to see how they integrated the use of social media into this year’s awards and event. For the first time ever, the Partnership Award winner was actually selected via a live public online vote via Just Means, a social media platform focused on CSR. More than 20,000 people visited the site and participated! And, at the event, there was live blogging and tweeting using the hashtag #bclcawards.