Lodestar UM strives for a clean & better world with its Impact Day

Lodestar UM celebrated Impact Day on July 19, 2018, where the agency identified some relevant themes city wise and built an ‘Impact Plan’ around it. Lodestar UM’s Impact Day is about logging off from daily work and coming together to help the surrounding communities. 

With plastic being a huge point of discussion in the country, this year, Lodestar UM adopted the theme of ‘Say No to Plastic’ across all offices except Mumbai. As part of this drive, the agency roped in its client, Borosil, who makes glass water bottles costing roughly Rs 300. The created a vibrant ‘Save marine life’ series of glass water bottles that could be customised for individuals with their names. The creative and art was done by FCB Interface.

We celebrated Impact Day on the 19^th of July. We identified some relevant themes city wise and built an ‘Impact Plan’ around it.

Lodestar UM employees approached their client partners to participate in this initiative by replacing plastic water bottles on their tables with the specially designed glass ones. Large corporates across two cities, Delhi and Bangalore, participated in this program, which included Whirlpool, IndusInd, Viacom18, BMW, The Times of India, SAIL, IOCL, McCann, Cheil, FCB, Wipro, Exide Life Insurance, Air Asia, Duroflex, and Amante.

Lodestar UM undertook separate activity for Mumbai. The agency turned its focus on Saki Naka in Andheri, an industrial area housing several commercial buildings, offices, restaurants, hospitals, housing societies, etc. Given the high density of people, the area generates a lot of garbage that end up clogging the streets. Lodestar UM moved into the area to its new office premises about a year back and since then has been striving to clear the area of the garbage. This was proving to be an uphill task given the multiple stakeholders that were involved, permissions required and the sheer staff that would be needed to take on an activity of this scale. 

The agency decided to make it the cleaning up of Saki Naka area its UM Impact Day theme and execute the whole project from start to finish on its own. Since it is a public area, the efforts required more than just a clean-up operation. It involved changing the behaviour of the people from all the offices, restaurants, hospitals, housing societies, etc., in the locality to sustain the clean-up. It meant that the whole community had to think different and act differently. 

The agency distributed dustbins to individual organisations and worked with the authorities on method, timings, and location on how the garbage will get collected. All this took months of effort and July 19 was the culmination of all the hard work. While the initiative was being driven by Lodestar UM, all the other offices in the building, including FCB Ulka, FCB Interface, Initiative, and Rapport, too, became part of it. On Impact Day, over 200 employees of Lodestar UM and all the other companies come together, on the street, to transform the area. The agency’s client Nerolac Paints came on board as the beautification partner, providing paint for the walls. The volunteers even turned some of the walls into an open classroom, with the Marathi alphabets painted in bold vibrant colours on the one end, while on the other end a large blackboard was created where people could doodle to learn and play. 

They swept the roads, scraped the walls of fungus and painted them with paint provided by our client Nerolac Paints who also became our beautification partner. And we didn’t just paint the walls, we made it a learning opportunity. An open classroom! While at one end of the wall we had the Marathi alphabets painted in bold vibrant colours on the other end we created a large blackboard where people could doodle to learn and play. The final brushstroke was green – 120 plants in colourful pots. The creative and art was done by FCB Ulka. 

The highpoint of the day was a pledge that Lodestar UM’s employees took individually and collectively by passing a sapling in a recycled Nerolac paint can to keep the environment clean and plant more trees.