Some 2,200 projects alone in 2009!

The year 2009 was a great success for RWE Companius, an initiative of the RWE Group to promote community involvement on the part of its employees. Around 2,200 volunteer projects were submitted in the course of the year, some by RWE employees and some by volunteers outside the Group, andRWE Companius now boasts 2,800 members.

The initiative was launched in 2007 with the aim of lending financial and organisational support to regional projects. Two years down the line, however, RWE employees are helping improve people’s lives in more than 4,000 projects all over the world. They have organised computers for a school in Egypt, have flown to Ghana to help build a kitchen and a well for a village school and are supporting a camp for victims of the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka. Some of these projects were presented at the RWE Companius Forum held at the RWE office tower in Essen on 15 October. This event, modelled on the social marketplace concept, brought together enthusiastic employees, not-for-profit organisations and numerous volunteers. Several new projects were presented and the 75 attendees were so excited that many of them spontaneously signed up as helpers there and then. The supervisor model was among the concepts to be showcased. This allows volunteers who are not employed in the RWE Group to seek support for projects that matter to them. All they have to do is to appoint an RWE employee as a project supervisor.

Following Group-wide rollout, RWE’s foreign subsidiaries are now following suit and seizing the opportunities offered them by RWE Companius. RWE employees in the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and England have all seen projects through to completion. And that’s just the beginning…