Green IMPACT Week: Volunteering and Learning from Our Nonprofit Partners

Environmental sustainability has been central to our story since the beginning. Our signature impact initiative Docusign for Forests was launched in 2019 to bring the strength of Docusign's people, products, and philanthropy to bear in protecting the world's forests and creating a more sustainable future for all.

Last month, we got back to our roots by celebrating Green IMPACT Week, a week-long celebration of our commitment to help protect the world’s forests, culminating in the UN’s International Day of Forests (March 21). The week featured employee-led sessions, lunch-and-learns with Docusign’s nonprofit partners and volunteer opportunities to showcase the important work of organizations fighting for the world’s forests and provide accessible ways for Docusign’s employees to support and create a more sustainable planet.

Some highlights included:

• An informative session on our Docusign for Forests pro bono volunteer project with Rainforest Trust, where a small group of our colleagues collectively volunteered over 1,000 hours to build important capacity and better position the Trust to protect critical forests around the world.

• Guests from the Jane Goodall Institute shared the story of Jane’s Roots and Shoots program, designed to guide youth of all ages to maximize their local community impact, which is celebrating its 30th Anniversary in 2021.

• A session with the forest experts at The Wilderness Society and a call to action to help protect the Tongass - known as the Amazon of the United States, given that it is the last temperate rainforest in North America and the largest National Forest in the US.  Participants were encouraged to sign a petition to protect some of the most pristine areas of the Tongass. 

• Employees volunteered to create a more sustainable future, such as staffing wildlife hotlines, helping scientists with conservation efforts via Zooniverse, and pursuing individual community park and beach clean ups. In some cases, the clean-ups were part of ongoing efforts to address spiking use of outdoor spaces alongside staff layoffs (such as in Chicago’s Forest Preserve District of DuPage County) and in some cases, they were crisis-driven such as our Israel-based colleagues were out cleaning up from an oil spill in Tel Aviv.

• “Forest Friday”: Our employee Green IMPACT leaders organized online sessions for employees such as sessions with Trees for Cities in Dublin & London (including an end of day “pub quiz” about trees), Forterra in Seattle (where employees were encouraged to calculate their own carbon footprints), Friends of the Urban Forest in San Francisco (where participants wrote letters to their neighbors with information on how to get a free tree), and the Park People (where participants got more info on the Denver Digs Trees program and importance of the urban tree canopy).

To learn more, please visit www.docusign.com/forests. And for those interested in pursuing their own green impact initiatives, please see a recent playbook on employee engagement and the green recovery from Pledge 1% here.