AT&T Ranked #1 on CR Magazine’s 2013 List of Top 100 Corporate Citizens

By: Beth Shiroishi, vice president of sustainability and philanthropy

In my work at AT&T, we often get so focused on the future of our company and the communities where we live and work, that we sometimes don’t pause and celebrate the accomplishments of today.  AT&T is engaged in some pretty exciting projects, and the thanks for the success of those projects goes to our employees, approximately 240,000-strong, who are utilizing their unique skills and passions to derive shared value for our business and society.

Looking back at over just the past few months, I’m amazed at what we’ve already accomplished  working together with some of our partners whose knowledge and expertise we rely on each and every day: we released a study with the Carbon War Room which lays out innovative solutions to reduce the barriers of implementing Machine to Machine technologies and highlights some of the environmental and economic benefits associated with this technology.  We joined forces with the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) to launch cooling tower efficiency pilots to identify best practices for saving millions of gallons of water a year, and we are gearing up to share those practices with other companies so that they too can reduce water use.

In California, we launched Skip the Bag, a program where customers were able to generate a donation to the Nature Conservancy by opting to skip a bag at retail stores.  Building on the success of this effort, we’re launching a new campaign through AT&T’s Connect for Good community on Causes.com to raise awareness among consumers nationally about waste reduction.

In February, AT&T teamed up with America's Promise Alliance (APA) during their Building a Grad Nation Summit to help share the encouraging news that the nation's high school graduation rate is—for the first time—on pace to reach 90 percent by 2020. This great news was echoed in an op-ed penned by Charlene Lake, Senior Vice President Public Affairs and Chief Sustainability Officer at AT&T, and APA co-founder Alma J. Powell, that drove home the point that in order to continue this trend, businesses, educators and the hundreds of organizations represented at Grad Nation must continue to work together to keep all students—including those most at risk of dropping out—on track to graduate. 

When we learned that AT&T was ranked No. 1 on the annual list of the Best Corporate Citizens by CR Magazine, it inspired me to pause and reflect on this great work we’ve already done this year, and most importantly, the people who have spent years furthering AT&T’s sustainability efforts.  It also motivated me to focus on the future because while we have made great progress, there is much more work that still needs to be done.  So a huge thank you to our employees for their tireless efforts and to CR Magazine for this honor, now it’s time to get back to work!