Community involvement at RWE

As one of the world’s leading energy suppliers, the RWE Group takes its social responsibilities very seriously indeed. Promoting voluntary work through RWE Companius is just one pillar of our social commitment.

The RWE Group created RWE Companius to support its employees’ community involvement and so demonstrate its commitment to sustainability. After all, one of the key criteria for the provision of funding by RWE Companius is the active involvement of at least one RWE employee. It is the employees’ personal commitment to projects they believe to be worthwhile that prepares the ground for still more activities in that area – very much in keeping with the RWE Companius motto: “People make it possible”.

RWE Companius attaches special importance to collaboration with non-profit organisations. Pooling experience and developing joint campaigns and programmes not only helps existing projects to flourish, but allows new ones to emerge. This is the approach favoured by the German government, whose “ZivilEngagement” initiative works in much the same way. With a focused offering of campaigns and projects accessible to all via the Internet, RWE Companius enables people who have never done voluntary work before to get a taste of just how rewarding it can be. In the winter of 2008/2009, for example, RWE Companius and various partners initiated a special winter programme which throughout the pre-Christmas period introduced one new project after another for which volunteers were needed. Once an RWE employee had signed up for such a project, it automatically became eligible for financial support in addition to the hands-on help being provided on the ground. Thirty different projects were seen through to completion in the course of the winter programme – many of them by people who had never done any kind of voluntary work before.

The flexibility that the RWE Group shows towards employees engaged in voluntary projects is also important to RWE Companius. Employees can apply for up to three days’ leave of absence every year. This makes voluntary work more attractive still – even to full-time employees who have very little time to spare. Since RWE Companius was first founded in 2007, some 2,200 people have become members and more than 3,000 projects have been seen through to completion – 1,200 of them alone in the months since its Group-wide roll-out at the start of 2009.

The RWE Companius offering stands out from comparable organisations on account of the importance it attaches to individual commitment. RWE Companius therefore goes out of its way to find interesting voluntary work even for those who cannot find anything appropriate among all the many different projects and campaigns on offer. Teaming up with other organisations is a good way of facilitating this. The offer of customised voluntary work is frequently taken up by entire departments wanting to combine team-building and efforts to improve social skills at work with community involvement and support for a good cause.A rapidly growing membership, an ever larger number of inquiries from charitable organisations and external project initiators as well as the keen interest taken in the initiative by RWE subsidiaries both in Germany and abroad prove not only that RWE Companius has become a positive presence within the Group, but that it is gaining in importance and stature outside the Group as well.