8. Giving Back >
8.4 Community Action
Rolling Up Our Sleeves
Participation in community action projects is one of the most enjoyable ways for Ben & Jerry’s employees to give back to the community. Over the years, we’ve made a tradition of many of these projects.
CAT Team Community Service Day
In our own backyard, we commit one day a year to a Company service project, organized by the Community Action Teams (CATs) at each of our three Company sites. Learn more about the CAT projects we completed in 2005.
Franchise Community Service Project
Our annual Franchise Community Gathering meeting, held in a different location every year, includes a service project with Ben & Jerry’s corporate employees and Scoop Shop owners in the city where we gather. Learn more about our 2005 project in the Bahamas.
Project Joy
Ben & Jerry’s organizes this project each year around the holidays to reach out to communities in Vermont facing economic hardship. In 2005, our Central Support Office worked with Northeast Kingdom Community Action in Canaan, Vermont. We sent presents to nineteen children from families in crisis, collected several boxes of non-perishable food to supply the Canaan Food Shelf, and raised $1,000 in employee donations to fund critical needs in Canaan.
Camp Ta-Kum-Ta
For many years, we’ve sent a handful of employees to help staff activities at Camp Ta-Kum-Ta, a one week camp in Colchester, Vermont, for children living with cancer. Although the weather rained on our Beach Day (twice!), the kids didn’t mind eating ice cream in the dining hall.
Community Volunteering
Our Central Support Office in South Burlington also extends a community service benefit to every employee, allowing them to take 40 hours of paid time off to volunteer with a nonprofit organization. In 2005, this benefit was supported by a travel budget to allow employees to volunteer in disaster areas or other locations where the need was urgent.
In 2005, in response to the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, Ben & Jerry’s sent a team of eight employees to the Gulf Coast for a week in early November to assist with 
clean-up efforts. With crowbars, respirators, and strong backs, this crew worked alongside several needy families to remove damaged furnishings, floors, and walls from homes that had been flooded — and to affirm the basic truth that we’re all in this together.
While we don’t have data on how many other employees used the community 
service benefit in 2005, we will have a system in place to collect this information for 2006.