Charity team building activities are a fantastic choice if you want your team to enjoy their event and want them to remember the activity in a positive way. The Build-A-Bike® team building event was the first nationally offered philanthropic team building event, and it is still one of the most popular programs in the world. The reason why these programs are so popular is that they are fun, they build teamwork, and at the end, the items that are created during the events are donated to charity. So, businesses who organize these meetings get the benefit of the camaraderie created in the activity and also the fantastic PR that comes from philanthropic donations to worth charities. One a the added side-benefits of charity team building activities is that meeting planners can sometimes pull from the philanthropy budget of the company to help offset his/her costs of the meeting as a whole.
Not to just toot our own horn (well, maybe a little bit), one of the things that makes The Leader’s Institute® one of the largest and most requested team building event company in the world is that we specialize in making ordinary, day-to-day activities fun and entertaining. For instance, when was the last time you were sitting in your living room on Christmas Eve saying to yourself, “Man, I can’t wait to put that box of bike parts together.” The charity donation at the end of the event is critical, but it is a crescendo to the rest of the event. The activities that take play prior to the donation are what make philanthropic team building so popular.
For instance, in the Build-A-Bike ® activity, each team must work together to solve brainy challenges to earn each bike part. As the event unfolds, participants assume that the purpose of the challenges is to compete with other teams, but along the way, they figure out that the easiest way to complete the challenges is by working together with other teams. So, while the group is having fun, they are also learning about the “silo effect” that occurs in large businesses and how to combat it. Because of this since of accomplishment, when the team delivers their completed bike to a kid from one of the local after school programs, participants feel a real since of accomplishment. They had to earn the bike and work together to finish it, so the donation means that much more to them.
You can make just about any activity a philanthropic team event, but some activities seem to work better than others. One of the events that we do that is very popular is called Rescue Bear ® where participants create stuffed animals like the ones you see at boutique stores in the mall, and the stuffed animals are donated to local firefighters or police departments to give to children who have been involved in a traumatic experience. Again, the stuffing of the animals isn’t all that fun in and of itself, but our instructors create a high-energy interactive session where participants actually learn about personality temperaments and learn why their coworkers do the things that they do.
In the Ace Race, participants build a mini-golf course out of non-perishable food items that are later donated to food banks in the area. We also have scavenger hunts where participants create gift baskets for soldiers. Basically, when you have a good facilitator and a good charity, you can create an excellent philanthropic team building event for any group!