2012 Thomson Reuters Volunteer for the Community Day

It is the time of the year again for the Thomson Reuters Volunteer for the Community Day. This has been happening annually since 2009 and today is its 4th year celebration.

Employees across all the business units of Thomson Reuters sign-up for the event and choose their beneficiary activity they would join in. The choices were Childhaus, Virlanie, Isang Litrong Liwanag, UP-PAUW, and Kythe Foundation among others.

This is the third time that I have joined the event. Ever since I have become part of the Thomson Reuters family, I immediately grabbed the very first opportunity for me in 2010 to join this celebration. Since then, I have committed myself to engage in the activity every year. In 2010, I joined the Quezon City Circle clean-up of its grounds. In 2011, I helped with the repainting of the school buildings by the UP-PAUW located within the UP Campus.

This year, I chose to be part of the Gawad Kalinga Enchanted Farm house-building and landscaping activities in Angat, Bulacan. As usual, me and my office friends always are together in the same activity.

Named after the place of its origin, Bulacan’s Barangay Encanto—which connotes images of the supernatural and magical in Filipino—the Enchanted Farm is the canvas for Gawad Kalinga’s second phase of the 2024 road map to end poverty in the Philippines. Once idle and unproductive, the area is being transformed into a landscape of vast potential that will sustain communities for generations to come. The first of 24 CSI sites around the Philippines, The Enchanted Farm in Bulacan follows a template that fuses three different concepts. (GK Enchanted Farm website)

The schedule of our voluntary work involved house building, compost pit digging, football field leveling, and garden landscaping. Just with words, we already knew that it wold not be easy tasks especially in the middle of summer with the country burning and scorching in heat.

We left the meeting place in Makati at 6:00 a.m. and we arrived in the farm at 8:00 a.m. We were first oriented and briefed about the GK Enchanted Farm. It was not only the group of Thomson Reuters employees who came there. There were also a lot of other volunteers and support groups scheduled to be in the farm that day.

Our first stop was house building. This was not new to me since I have already volunteered for Habitat for Humanity some years ago to build houses. I helped with the shoveling of sand and gravel to be used for the house's flooring. My other friends helped too with the shoveling while the others helped in leveling the soil to where the cement mix would be poured.

The other members of the group at the same time as us helped with the flattening of the grounds that would be converted to a small football field while the others went to the compost pit site.

The next activity I joined in was the landscaping of the land around GK Enchanted Farm's "palace" which would be a place and reception for future weddings and other functions. We scraped and pulled of the grass around. It was fun even though the heat of the sun burned us and we were soaked in sweat.

The activities ended in midday and we went back to Quezon City to have our culminating activity and recognize all the volunteers who participated. It was another successful day for Thomson Reuters.

Volunteerism at its best

Thomson Reuters, the world's leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals, is celebrating its Manila Global Center's 3rd anniversary this April. To commemorate the occasion, employees from different divisions of the company rendered man-hours as part of its annual Volunteer for the Community Day.

I have been part of the company for a year now and I am very fortunate to be one of the employees who share skills and resources with the communities wherein we live, which is a key element of our corporate responsibility.

Last year, there were over 400 employees who volunteered to do different community services in different parts of Manila. I chose to be with the Quezon City Memorial Circle clean-up project. For two hours, we picked up litters and dried leaves which were scattered in the area. The garbage were segregated to biodegradable and non-biodegrable, while the dried leaves were placed in a sack for composting.

2010 Volunteer for the Community Day

QCMC Clean-up

This year, I volunteered to help with the repainting of the ceilings and walls of a building in UP-PAUW (Philippine Association of University Women - UP Chapter) Child Care Center. The institution was put up to provide care and education to UP employees' children. Non-UP employee parents may also enroll their children in the said school.

UP-PAUW welcome tarpaulin

Preparation

The volunteers were warmly welcomed by the teachers and officers of the school. According to them, the buildings really need repainting before the school year starts in June and it was timely that Thomson Reuters came in to volunteer to do the works. The materials like paint brushes, paint trays and hardiflex plywoods were provided and donated by Thomson Reuters.

From old and dirty blue color of the building, we repainted it to become sunny yellow. We did the base coat up to the finishing coat. It took us only three hours to finish painting the whole building.

Primer

Second coating

Because of my experience last year at the QCMC clean-up, I decided to join the volunteer activities of Thomson Reuters every year. It was really a fun and rewarding experience knowing that the little help that each of one of us contributed, when combined, was a great help for the institutions that would last for years.

I am now looking forward to the upcoming volunteer activities that Thomson Reuters has already lined up for us this year. May many more employees be inspired (like me) to become volunteers for the community.

Thomson Reuters volunteers for UP-PAUW CCC