Commitment to Communities

Commitment to Communities

At ALBAIK we are firmly committed to being a responsible member of the society we serve and the neighborhoods we operate in. Since 1996, CSR has been part of our culture and mindset where our focus from day one has been on three main pillars, namely, educational youth skills development, community development and environmental awareness. We always ensure that our partners, the stakeholders – customers and neighbors, team members, concerned government agencies and non-profit organizations – have a say in the direction of our CSR programs, and we continuously measure results and receive feedback in order to continuously improve

Environmental Awareness Campaign:

Launched in 2005 under the slogan “Littering is a Mistake…That puts our City in Trouble We Can’t Escape!”, we decided the best way we could help tackle Jeddah’s growing garbage and litter problem was to use someone special to reach out directly to the city’s most impressionable and active audience –young kids – and through them, to their family members.

The spokespersons we found turned out to be truly special – and very persuasive. Two cartoon characters – Nazeeh, a clean teen, and Wartan, a sweet but lazy boy in need of a little direction –together helped spread the word far and wide, urging kids to get creative with recycled materials, corporations to help clean up the shores and the waters of the Red Sea and customers to sign a pledge to stoplittering and spend the summer sprucing up the city.

All through the summer, we helped get people excited and motivated by handing out free gloves, t-shirts and caps to clean-up volunteers, placing pledge sheets in all our outlets and even getting HRH Prince Sultan bin Salman and HRH Prince Misha’al bin Majed to support the cause by taking the pledge themselves. We handed out stickers and booklets to kids with instructions on how to make artistic projectsfrom recycled materials and hosted a huge end-of-summer event on the Jeddah Corniche, complete with a live installation artist and prizes for the people who made the biggest difference in cleaning up the city.

Since then, our annual summer anti-littering message has only grown louder and spread wider through TV ads and online updates, with our clean-up champions Nazeeh and Wartan continuing toinspire people across the Kingdom and beyond to keep their cities clean.

My School, My Responsibility

In 2010 ALBAIK joined forces with the Ministry of Education and Khawater to launch the Feena Khair – ‘My School, My Responsibility’ program encouraging elementary grade students to take pride in maintaining a healthy and clean school environment by spending the last 15 minutes of their school day cleaning their classrooms.

The Feena Khair program seemed to be the perfect way to take Nazeeh & Wartan’s anti-littering message from the city streets into the classrooms. With direction from the Saudi Minister of Education, HH Prince Faisal bin Abdullah Al Saud, the Nazeeh & Wartan campaign team at ALBAIK in cooperation with Khawater’s Ahmed Shuqairy developed a pilot program for two schools in Jeddah during the first phase of the Feena Khair My School, My Responsibility program. 

The pilot program held in cooperation with Al Noor Educational Complex and Dar Al Fikr schools proved to be a huge success and was in turn extended to 52 more schools in 2011.

Feena Khair … My School My Responsibility program was further developed for the participating schools in the Makkah Al Mukarramah Region with the involvement of teachers and principals, who were trained to deliver the campaign message to students – to Sort, Straighten, Shine, Standardize and Sustain their classrooms at the end of each day, as part of their school curriculum. Standards and guidelines were also developed to help assess participating schools and classrooms with selected schools being audited every month and the winning classrooms were recognized accordingly. At the end of the year the top 3 schools were recognized by the Ministry and partners. 

Over 1280 schools in Saudi Arabia have participated in the 2013 – 2014 school year campaign with the participation of over a million students and 30,000 teachers.

__________________________________________