An increasing number of businesses are using employee engagement to directly involve staff in their partnerships with WeForest. By running campaigns with their employees and encouraging active participation, businesses are raising their WeForest sponsorship money in a way that makes everyone’s contribution – small or large – count towards forest restoration.
Among WeForest’s partners, more and more companies are funding forest restoration using this model. For example, 311 Zalando employees ran for WeForest in 2021, reaching 53 000 km that Zalando then turned into the restoration of 8.7 hectares of forest – more than 10 football fields – in Brazil. This year, logistics company DB Schenker’s employees covered over 30 million km to celebrate their 150th anniversary, raising funding for the restoration of more than 150 hectares of forest in Ethiopia and Brazil. For Earth Day, Nike has launched a running community challenge on the Nike Run Club App (NRC) as part of their Move to Zero journey and funded a tree for the first 150 thousand participants who ran at least 1km. This was spearheaded by their athlete Eliud Kipchoge and resulted in the restoration of more than 110 hectares of forest in Ethiopia and Brazil.
These companies run their own employee engagement campaigns, but often smaller businesses use the services of a provider, such as our partners Active Giving and atlasGO. At one end of the scale, Active Giving has developed a sport app to convert calories burned or kilometres covered into trees that can be part of a community engagement campaign focused on fitness and health. At the other end of the scale, atlasGO’s entire business is devoted to providing different types of employee engagement campaigns for companies and converting these community activities into positive impact such as protecting forests and growing trees.
When a business signs up for one of their 300+ employee engagement activities on the atlasGO app, the money they raise goes towards restoration in one of our projects, and the business can appear on WeForest’s website with a partner page.
“The idea for atlasGO came to me when I was running the 20 km in Brussels in 2014 and was inspired by the power of community, sports and impact. What if there was a way to organize a race like this every day? And have people from around the world support one another and our beautiful planet while taking care of themselves?” says Tommy Roch Querton, Co-Founder and CEO of atlasGO.
With this, he created a platform that enabled companies to support the health and well-being of their employees while also taking care of the planet. “We are proud to see that by adding an impactful component to our employee campaigns, we see much higher engagement because making a difference in the world is good for your own health,” he says. “Working with partners like Weforest is impactful on every level, as people are proud to be part of something greater than themselves and are more excited to be part of a company that shares their values.” So far, WeForest and atlasGO have worked together on employee engagement campaigns with three client companies – Avertim, Ngage and D’Ieteren Auto.
“I hope that we can continue to plant many impactful seeds together!” adds Tommy. “I hope we can contribute to the well-being of our clients as well as of our planet together by growing more than 1 million trees in the next three years. I hope that together we can convince companies around Europe and beyond to make their people and the planet a priority.”
If you’re interested in running an employee engagement campaign in your company and raising money for WeForest, please contact sponsorship@weforest.org.
