Spotlight on Morgan Wilkins: promoting environmental stewardship

This year, we launched the Community Impact Award to recognize employees who make a positive impact in their world. We received hundreds of nominations and stories of employees who live our value to make a difference. Our employees voted for the story that resonated with them most. We’re pleased to introduce you to the Xandr Community Impact Award winner.

Growing up, Morgan Wilkins was always spending time outdoors. Her parents had a garden at their home in Maine and taught her about composting to turn their food scraps into usable soil for their garden. “Being environmentally conscious has always been in my life and on my radar,” Morgan said. “I’m really grateful that that’s how I was raised.”

When she joined the Xandr family 2 years ago, Morgan heard about the Xandr Sustainability Club. The club is an employee-led group focused on promoting, enhancing and facilitating environmental stewardship in and out of the office. Morgan noticed many opportunities for the Xandr office in New York City to make relatively easy changes to be more sustainable. She believed these small changes could add up to a big impact on the environment. Morgan joined the club and started working with vendors to swap office supplies for more sustainable options, like sourcing snacks from B Corp Certified companies, removing plastic straws, and swapping feminine products containing plastic for organic ones.

The impact of the changes was perhaps most visible at one of Xandr’s Friday family lunches, hosted for 400-500 employees and guests. At the event, Morgan and the catering team tested using dishware instead of disposable plates. At the end of the event, they filled 2 trash bags instead of the normal 12, resulting in an 80% reduction of waste!

In addition to sourcing more sustainable office supplies, Morgan used the Sustainability Club to help educate her colleagues on actions they could take as individuals to reduce their carbon footprint, such as not using straws and properly sorting waste into the trash, recycling, or composting bins. “I realized there are so many people in my office who are passionate about the planet and care about what’s going on in their office.” With her activism, the club’s Slack channel grew from 40 to 180 people.

Leading up to this year’s Earth Week, she worked with the Sustainability Club to organize volunteer events for her colleagues including a park clean-up and compost sorting. More than 100 people signed up. “Volunteering was a wonderful opportunity to not only connect with our communities but also to connect with each other,” said Morgan.

Through the Sustainability Club, Morgan has been able to not only help care for the planet herself, but also recruit her colleagues and make an even bigger impact. “When we all come together to impact our communities, it’s not a one man show; it takes a village.”