Community Relation and Corporate Social Responsibility

What is on your mind? Asked Anna, a community relation supervisor of a known power company in Batangas City, during a colloquia about Corporate Social Responsibility.

I always thought that delivering basic needs to host communities around AG&P, developing sustainable livelihood programs for them and being always visible are enough to claim good community relations. I was wrong. I later discovered that programs, to be successful and appreciated, should employ participation and passion from both AG&P ComRelDept and the receiver.

Program sustainability depends on how much productive time we spent in research and careful evaluation to determine its substance. It is not how we measure the feat but how significant the program should be to the beneficiary (person or community).

It is not the number of people we assisted, cared for or served but the number of lives we improved and more importantly the number of people who remembered the program and persevered to keep it on personal reasons, regardless of whose name/s the program was affiliated.

I admit to be baffled at first, but it came to me that she was actually suggesting that I assess everything we’ve accomplished in the past years. I may be putting capital on projects unnecessary and obsolete from surveys I did a year ago. She was right.

The needs of our communities change as they mutate to more complex programs and projects. Last years medical mission, although generic, metamorphosed to a more relevant approach this year providing better health & wellness by introducing papsmeer, dental and optalmology in our free clinic. It was a product of careful studies conducted from grassroots and mass level. My team immersed with our communities on a mission to relate as well as feel the din for flux.

More than a hundred activities were set on 2010. Half of them were focused on family life, health, sanitation, education, income generating and sustaining livelihood programs. The other half was on values formation.

Every year new things develop that is why AG&P ComRel continuously make studies and develop programs tailor fitted to our barangays and municipalities. We go beyond the boundaries of community service. Social responsibility is archaic to the mission as we try to ‘be’ one with our people, programs and undertakings.

More than just tasks, CSR became a commitment to reckon with and a habit to maintain. Passion is simply putting it into words. Piousness is a better coin for it.