8 Team Building Ideas With A Cause

Team building activities are very meaningful and made even more so when they are paired with a cause.

Your company can find activities that encourage social responsibility, benefiting the community or even a specific charity. Below are 8 team building ideas with a cause that can help businesses all the way from startups to corporations help their employees focus on giving back.

#1: Beach cleanup

If you are near the coast, why not arrange a beach cleanup? Beaches need help and your company can host a single event where everyone volunteers to clean up a specific Beach. The best part about something like this if you can bring the Lavit drink system with you and provide free beverages in a variety of choices to all of the volunteers. Of course, this is something you will want to clear with local authorities, and might even be something you ask employees to extend to friends and family. It is best to do it during the week, in lieu of a work day so that the crowds are not as heavy as a weekend. Moreover, you will want to arrange this type of team building activity before summer or right after summer. 

#2: Local school breakfast

You can make a local school breakfast for low-income children. It doesn't take many participants to create snacks with just basic ingredients. And these snacks can make all the difference for a single local school. This can be something that your staff does regularly, or intermittently. To encourage better participation, you can even make it competitive by dividing your employees into small teams and having a competition between them as to who can create recipes that are simple, or who can find ideas for those with allergies, or who can create snacks that can be stored and easily delivered to a local school. This type of activity, naturally, has to take place during the school year so it is good to pair it with a summer-based activity to encourage quarterly team building activities. 

#3: Help with Veterans

 If you have a veterans association in your area, see what they need help with. A disabled veterans association might need help building wheelchairs. Your Association might be looking for someone to visit and help with entertainment in which case your employees could make a company activity out of holding a trivia contest. Again, if you have a particularly talented group, they might all be able to contribute to department led forms of entertainment for an entire evening of performances at a local center. Be sure to give them dedicated office time to get together and work on creative ideas though, so that they aren’t forced to meet outside of the office. 

#4: Volunteer at a local hospital

One good way to give back to the community is to help out at a local hospital or Hospice Care. Participants can donate to a children's hospital by pooling together to buy a series of toys or by putting on some sort of entertainment for hospice care. This is something particularly useful for larger corporations where teams can be comprised of employees from all over the company, and four smaller companies where teams are made up of people from different departments. This forces people who don't necessarily know one another to get together in a very high-energy situation where they might compete with other teams to see who can come up with the best donation and no matter what everyone is giving back which makes it fun.

#5: Decorate a local library

Your team can work with local libraries to paint murals. They can even paint together in a paint class and contribute artwork to a local library is that Library doesn't have a mural on which to paint. Teams can be created and given 6 different colors with which to create and coordinate so that all of the panel's come together to tell an important story, or show off a particular theme.

#6: Help at a homeless shelter

Local homeless shelters are a great way to give back on a smaller scale for startups or people who don't necessarily have the resources of a large corporation to make big donations. Local homeless shelters allow employees to interact with residents and typically different shelters will accept various forms of help. Some shelters might ask that you prepare a meal and serve it, particularly in rural areas where they require a minimum number of volunteers to prepare the food off site and then bring it to the facility and serve it that same day. Other facilities with a larger staff and resources might accept help doing upkeep around the facility, rebuilding small wooden ramps that have fallen into disarray or helping to repaint buildings. Your business might seek out talents among your employees. If, for example, you have an employee who is very musical they might be able to work with the group to write a song and perform it..

#7: Volunteer with animal rescue

If animals are your thing, help with a local animal rescue center or animal rescue group. Have your team by different materials using company resources and then donate them to local animal rescue groups. Or, donate your time by helping out at a local animal shelter. This is something you will need to check on in advance as some animal shelters require specific training which they only offer once or twice per year.

#8: Put together disaster relief kits

Your employees can perform certain tasks around the office to accumulate points and each department can use their accumulated points to “buy” supplies that are used to put together a relief kits. You can set this up to be a long-term company event with information posted around the office as to how points can be accumulated within the office for things like on-time delivery, good performance, no mistakes in an order, etc. Just getting your company and employees engaged in the community is great.

Those were 8 team building ideas with a cause. We hope you enjoyed them! Can you think of any others? Let us know in the comments down below.