How We’re Honoring Earth Day 2021 Remotely, but Together

Every year on April 22 we celebrate Earth Day—the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement.

For seven consecutive years, Offleash’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) arm—OffleashCARES—has honored the day by partnering with the Presidio Trust in San Francisco to help restore Mountain Lake. It became an event our entire team looked forward to every year, along with fellow Bay Area PR agencies that joined us. Our most recent event in 2019 had more than 40 volunteers from 11 companies. 

We look forward to the day when it’s safe for us all to volunteer in-person again (we chose to make a donation this year). But until then, we can take steps to be better advocates for the environment from the comfort of our own homes and within our immediate communities.

With that in mind, to celebrate Earth Day 2021, OffleashCARES took a different approach to encourage employees to make a difference in their personal lives in a fun way: Bingo!

We created a Bingo card with nine challenges, incorporating a mixture of actions that either encourage sustainability or educate on environmental topics. We introduced the Bingo challenge in early April, giving teammates a few weeks to complete as many actions as they were able to leading up to Earth Day. Participants were entered into a raffle to win a gift card to Parks Project, an online shop that makes apparel and accessories that connect consumers with national park conservancies.

After more than a year of working exclusively remotely, this challenge gave us a unique way to connect with one another and share the small things we do each day to be kinder to Mother Earth. 

The Bingo card consisted of the challenges below—and we invite you to try them, too.

1. Fight food waste by composting. Learn how you can make a difference right in your own backyard.
2. Go plogging and pick up litter on your jog or walk route.
3. Practice sustainable fashion by donating old clothes and home goods.
4. Calculate your carbon footprint, and make changes to reduce it. 
5. Participate in Offleash tree planting. Also leading up to Earth Day, we let team members purchase a tree kit from Forest Nation, an organization that matches each purchase by planting trees in developing countries. 
6. Shop organic produce, or support your local farmers through farmers markets.
7. Test your knowledge of climate and environmental literacy with a short quiz on the history of Earth Day and related events. 
8. Participate in Meatless Mondays to help reduce your foodprint.
9. Utilize reusable shopping bags for your errands.

CSR in the age of COVID can be a challenge. While there’s no shortage of worthy causes to donate money or resources to, people often miss the first-hand experience that goes along with volunteering in person. 

However, Earth Day serves as a great reminder that we can all make small efforts in our lives each day to help the environment. It’s these little actions (running errands with reusable shopping bags, donating used goods, being aware of our carbon footprint) that can make a big difference if we all do them together.