Nigeria’s leading financial service provider, First Bank of Nigeria has concluded activities marking its 2021 Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability Week (CR&S Week). Activities for this year’s CR&S Week took place from 26th – 30th July 2021. It featured Kind Comments Days, visits to orphanages, webinars focused on the kindness theme, SPARK school engagement among other activities – lined up for each of the days.
With the theme “Kindness…a Way of Life”, which First Bank has chosen for the commemoration of its 2021 CR&S Week, The bank is calling on everyone to adopt kindness as a way of life.
Activities were not limited to Nigeria as the bank’s global community was involved in various acts of kindness. From Guinea where the bank’s executive visited the SOS village to Ghana where the MD of First Bank Ghana, Victor Asante presented cash and gifts to the country’s ministry of youth and sports, it was a beehive of kind actions.
In Abuja, Abdullahi Ibrahim, Executive Director- Public Service led other team members to present some bumper packages at Daughters of Charity at Kubwa, Abuja. The Pacelli School of the Blind and Partially Sighted also had its fair share of the First Bank special touch of kindness when Abimbola Moshinoye, Head Sponsorship and Partnership (Events and Collaboration) led a team to pay a courtesy call on the school.
The yearly CR&S Week is a dedicated week designed to offer First Bank staff, customers, and the public opportunities to demonstrate the milk of human kindness that flows in them and give their time and resources to defined causes. It seeks to amplify First Bank’s innate culture of giving and volunteering as embodied in its Employee Giving and Volunteering programme.
The Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability Week was introduced in 2017 as part of the bank’s longstanding Employee Giving and Volunteering programme created to enable and encourage staff to give back to society through donations and volunteering. Specially designed to reignite acts of random kindness in the society with events that are tailored to reorient people towards the right values, it provides a veritable platform for encouraging the citizenry to intentionally create positive impact in their immediate environment.
One of the main highlights of the first CR&S Week was the SPARK Initiative. S.P.A.R.K stands for Start Performing Acts of Random Kindness. But originally the “S” stood for “Staff”. It was changed to “Start” to broaden the initiative beyond just staff and encourage everyone else to be part of the kindness brigade. Also, “P” originally stood for “Promoting” but was changed to “Performing” to convey the sense that participants are equally involved in actually doing kind acts and not only promoting kindness.
Held on 25 – 29 September 2017, “Promoting Kindness: Putting You First” was the theme of the maiden CR&S Week was the first of its kind in Nigeria’s financial services industry. It highlighted the role First Bank’s corporate citizenship interventions were playing in driving positive impact across various communities – all within one compact week.
It was aimed at encouraging people everywhere to step out of their comfort zones, shift attention from themselves and their personal needs to others in society who have not been as fortunate as they have and perform a random act of kindness towards them.
This first edition of the CR&S Week provided the opportunity for First Bank staff to give their time and resources to promote acts of random kindness within their communities and contribute to the welfare and well-being of others through giving and visits to orphanages/homes of the less fortunate and internally displaced people (IDPs). Within the same Week, the bank held career counseling sessions with secondary school students across the six geo-political regions in Nigeria with First Bank staff coordinating the impactful sessions that inculcated the values of financial literacy and inclusion in young students
The second edition of the CR&S Week took place from 19 – 23 June 2018. Themed “Touching Lives: You First”, the 2018 Week was intended to demonstrate First Bank’s brand promise to always put stakeholders first. It focused mainly on five key initiatives/activities. First was the launch of a partnership with Vision Spring to advance social impact by providing vision screening and affordable eyeglasses for 10,000 low-income earners.
In 2019, the third CR&S Week was held from 1 – 6 July 2019 with the theme “Ripples of Kindness: Putting You First”. The theme was informed by the bank’s belief that every act of kindness (regardless of how little or in whatever form) ignites a ripple effect that goes on without end. The year’s CR&S Week focused mainly on the SPARK initiative, which had gained so much traction since its humble beginnings in 2017. A Kindness Manifesto for both internal stakeholders and external stakeholders was introduced. There were other new activities or initiatives. A Nice Comments Day was introduced and scheduled to hold on the first day of the CR&S Week. The basis for it, according to the bank’s committee that oversaw the planning and implementation of the 2019 CRS Week, is the important place of words in the “kindness ecosystem”.
No CR&S Week could take place in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated restrictions on public gatherings and visits. But First Bank did not just fold its hand and sit idly. The bank did something absolutely amazing, demonstrating uncommon solidarity with a vulnerable segment of society – children. Realising that the harsh effects of the COVID-19 crisis were borne disproportionally by children, whose education and thus future were being endangered due to the lockdown and prolonged closure of schools, First Bank embarked on a mission to do something about it. Working with partners, such as IBM, UNESCO, Robert & John, Curious Learning, and the Lagos State Government, it launched the bold and ambitious e-Learning Initiative designed to move one million children onto safe online learning platforms.
