Rationale
The communities served by our stores have always been the target beneficiaries of Philippine Seven Corporation (PSC) Social Responsibility activities. CSR became part of the PSC corporate culture once the company achieved accounting profitability in 1989. Our initial beneficiaries were barangays in which stores were located; the tenth store opened in that year.
In our CSR’s first years, the company was responding mainly to requests from the Barangay Chairperson – e.g. extending the stores outside lighting to cover dark spots where drug addicts would congregate, or a barangay tanod outpost. We would donate brooms, garbage bags, waste cans, to our stores’ host Barangays to promote Barangay Malinis, solicit suppliers for medications used at medical missions, and similar initiatives to improve environment and health in host barangays.
In the 1990’s CSR was extended to utilize stores’ locations for charitable purposes. We accepted donation cans on our sales counters for customers to deposit coins for soliciting charities: Red Cross, ABS-CBN Bantay Bata, Pondong Pinoy, Caritas, others. During calamities, our stores in the more accessible Metro Manila locations served as drop-off points for individual donations of relief goods responding to appeals on TV. Eventually the company itself donated, stored and transported relief goods for victims of natural disasters. Employees were encouraged to join in groups for their volunteer work – such as for Gawad Kalinga, and tree planting.
In October 2007, the 25th anniversary of its founding, the Board of Directors decided to establish PhilSeven Foundation, Inc. (PFI). The occasion was appropriate, and corporate financial capability was improving. One percent of pre-tax net income in that year was close enough to the one million pesos annual contribution felt to be the minimum required for an in-house corporate foundation. PFI would consolidate and organize PSC’s CSR activities. PFI could also partner with supplier companies on projects they may be interested in, to augment available resources for selected PFI projects. But PFI must operate for two years before it could be accredited as a Donee Foundation, and exempt its donors from tax on their donations.
Those two years of initial operations have been completed. PFI activities in that time were enumerated in the Chairman’s message of July 2011 to PSC shareholders. PFI staff also helped in organization and coordination with Local Government Units for the corporation’s major relief efforts during two big typhoons in 2009.
