Celebrating our history... ...Embracing the future - Westminster ...

19
In Celebration of Social Accountability
Since the phrase “Social Accountability” often means different things to different people, here is a
reasonably comprehensive definition, drawn from Google and Wikipedia. Social accountability
is an organization’s mindfulness of social concerns and priorities, reflected often by a third party
verification of the commitment by its internal and external stakeholders to:
(1) Comply with employment, health, hygiene, safety and environmental laws
(2) Respect basic civil and human rights, and
(3) Better the community and its surroundings.
The mission, vision and value statements, found elsewhere in this report, make clear WCBR’s
compliance with the standards in (1) above, and respect for basic rights of the elderly in (2) above.
They are built into WCBR’s DNA. Criteria for those commitments are measured constantly by local,
state and federal authorities and, most important, by the WCBR Board of Trustees.
Yet, despite a culture of giving by staff, the
philanthropic generosity of its residents, and
numerous partnerships of trustees and management
with organizations in the Charlottesville/Albemarle
area, WCBR has never developed specific measures
of its internal and external stakeholders’ betterment
of its own and the surrounding community.
It is not only what
we do, but also
what we do not
do, for which we
To address that deficiency, WCBR’s Board of
Trustees recently added a sixth goal to its corporate
strategic plan, namely “demonstrate community are accountable.
benefit to the local Albemarle /Charlottesville
area” by developing and implementing a formal
social accountability plan and a supporting
-Moliere
communications/public relations strategy. As a first
‘
step in developing a measure of WCBR’s betterment
of the immediate surrounding community, the Resident Strategic Planning Committee (RSPC) agreed
in 2010 to conduct the first ever survey of resident volunteer service in calendar 2009.
WCBR residents gave 12,524 hours of service valued at $252,708 and 1,266 gifts to 241
different non-profit organizations in the Albemarle/Charlottesville area during 2009.
These commitments exclude the thousands of hours and hundreds of gifts residents contribute to
WCBR and its Foundation programs, as well as the unknown hours and contributions given to
charitable organizations beyond the Albemarle/Charlottesville area. The distribution of those hours
and gifts is shown in the accompanying graphs on the next page.