Sustainability Service Project 2014

At this year's conference in Montréal the Sustainable Development Division along with West Monroe Partners, an international consulting firm with an IE oriented practice based in Montréal (http://www.westmonroepartners.com), coordinated a volunteering event for the Saturday before the conference. This volunteering event served as an opportunity to give back to the community that hosted our annual IIE conference. We hope to continue having a volunteering activity as a tradition at all subsequent IIE Annual Conferences as this is the second year now we’ve done this! This year we partnered with a local non-profit called Le Chaînon, a women’s shelter dedicated to helping women in need in Montréal.

Le Chaînon runs a store, Le Coffre aux trésors du Chaînon, that receives donations and then turns them around to either give them to the women in need, donate them to other organizations, or sell them. The revenue from the store goes back into supporting Le Chaînon’s mission (http://www.lechainon.org/en/coffre_accueil.php).

During the short afternoon the group of IEs gathered and headed off to the store where we quickly got acquainted with the store’s triaging process in the basement. We each took a different part of the process and did everything from sorting out items received to tagging the items for resale. 

On top of this we decided to take note of the inefficiencies we experienced during our volunteering process. After spending around three hours volunteering, we wrote down our final process improvement recommendations for a smoother volunteer experience and presented them to Le Chaînon.

We plan to take these recommendations a step further with West Monroe Partners to hopefully follow up and follow through with implementation of these recommendations.

We are already working on the event for next year and hope you will be able to participate. Please keep an eye out for an announcement as we approach the next IIE Annual Conference. See you in Nashville!

Kate Fisher