Vale Volunteers
Created and kept by Vale and its Foundation, the Vale Volunteers Program fits into what in Brazil is known as “Corporate Volunteering”. The idea is to stimulate and support employee volunteer actions, benefitting the locations where they reside, the institutions they dedicate themselves to, the causes they are involved in, etc. Corporate Volunteering is one of the modalities of the volunteer movement that grows the most throughout the world.
But the Program did not invent volunteering in Vale. Long before it employees already dedicated themselves to social causes, especially in small communities spread throughout Brazil where the company is present.
Later the Social CCQ (Quality Control Circle) started to appear very strongly in some Brazilian states where Vale is present. They came from the original CCQs, when the participating employees understood that they could apply the same methodology, the same team spirit, to develop actions to benefit collectiveness.
In 2004, the Vale Foundation decided to permanently support in an organized manner all of these initiatives that already occurred spontaneously. This is how the Vale Volunteer Program came about, with the objective of transforming employee volunteering into a factor of internal integration and an agent for local development. The idea, which was completely successful, was to make the volunteers feel like they were a part of something bigger, more powerful that sprouted from the union of all.
It was initially organized in Brazil, by the Vale Volunteers, and after 2007 employees in other countries became engaged.
