U.S. (2020)
In support of the Black Lives Matter movement, and in recognition of the urgent need to recruit and empower educators of color, together with the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), we reimagined our annual Teacher Awards program for 2020, which we began cosponsoring and administering in 2019.
This year, in lieu of distributing grants for its two competitions, the National Teacher Award for Lifelong Readers and the Maya Angelou Teacher Award for Poetry, we made a $25,000 joint donation on behalf of both award programs to the Early Career Educator of Color Leadership Award Program (EC-EOC), which supports early-career teachers of color as they build accomplished teaching careers in literacy education.
Built upon the Penguin Random House Teacher Awards for Literacy, which began in 2012 and has awarded more than $180,000 in teacher grants to date, this NCTE partnership awards two separate and distinct grant awards of $10,000 each: The National Teacher Award for Lifelong Readers honors a teacher who inspires their students to read all genres of writing, and the Maya Angelou Teacher Award for Poetry recognizes a teacher who inspires their students to love poetry.
Our partnership with the NCTE recognizes the nation’s most dynamic and resourceful teachers who creatively inspire and instill a lifelong love of reading and poetry in students. The National Teacher Award for Lifelong Readers and the Maya Angelou Teacher Award for Poetry honor teachers’ recognizes and supports educators doing innovative literacy work within their schools and local communities. The awards are open to full- and part-time teachers in public schools, and winners are awarded both cash grants and book donations. To learn more about the awards and our recent winners, click here.
NEW YORK, NY (2019)
Run by the Climate Group, Climate Week NYC is a place for the world to showcase amazing climate action and discuss how to do more. We supported the weeklong event with our Sustainability Subcommittee holding a series of events and learning opportunities for our colleagues. We had the opportunity to participate in our ongoing company-wide sustainability efforts with activities such as a PRH Green Book Club in-house author event, a mug drive to reduce single-use cups, and Green Mindful Moments, which are short themed company posts that provide tips for ways we can exercise more conscious, sustainable practices in our day-to-day work lives.
U.S. (2019)
In 2017, we joined industry leaders in signing on to the We Are Still In initiative to express our unwavering support of the Paris Agreement on climate change. In 2019, we confirmed again our support for the Paris Agreement as the U.S. government began the process of withdrawing from it. We joined other global companies to call upon the U.S. government not to withdraw from the agreement. To learn more about the We Are Still In initiative, click here.
U.S. (2020)
To celebrate Earth Day in 2019, our Sustainability Subcommittee hosted the first-ever Penguin Random House Green Week. Green Week aims to bring a greater awareness to ways colleagues can live greener, more sustainable lives. The group organized events and activities that were devoted to areas such as environmental conservation, composting and food waste, recycling, and how to get involved and take action locally, as well as programs to help reduce the use of plastic, paper, and energy.
This year, our Sustainability Subcommittee reimagined Green Week for a virtual setting to inspire colleagues to learn more about how to conserve our natural resources, take action locally and at home during this period of social distancing, and provide resources for how to live a greener life. Through an author event and daily green-living tips, our employees directly received actionable resources and information to positively impact our world and environment.
BRAZIL (2019)
On Amazon Day in Brazil, we made a joint donation with our Brazilian publishing group, Companhia das Letras, to the Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), which has worked for 25 years to defend the Amazon and Brazil’s rich socioenvironmental diversity. ISA works with Indigenous communities, quilombolas and extractivists, and historical partners to help protect Indigenous territories and develop sustainable economic alternatives to the exploitation of their lands. We believe that sustainability and environmental protection are a worldwide effort, and we are committed to our ongoing social impact efforts. To learn more about our joint donation, click here.
U.S. (2020)
Nurturing curiosity and supporting causes is a top priority for DK colleagues, and the U.S. team has made several book donations to organizations that promote literacy and serve a crucial role during the COVID-19 outbreak. We donated 2,000 books to First Book to support children affected by U.S. school closures, and gave 300 books to Bess the Book Bus, a Florida-based mobile literacy outreach, to be distributed across the country. Having recently visited the Lower East Side Girls Club, which helps girls and young women on the Lower East Side of New York City, we provided books to be included in care packages for members who may have lost their safe spaces because of the pandemic.
DK also supported two nonprofits in California. To encourage science education, we donated STEM-related titles to Community Resources for Science, which serves schools in low-income communities, and donated more than 500 books to Project Books and Blankies, which provides books to shelters, literacy and after-school programs, classrooms, libraries, and more.
Beginning in 2018, Penguin Random House U.S. started shifting to LED lighting and is now saving more than 2.75 megawatt hours annually, including:
- All floors of our New York City headquarters building (saving more than 743,000 kWh annually)
- All lighting in the Westminster office areas (saving more than 400,000 kWh annually)
- Westminster warehouse areas (saving more than 1 megawatt annually)
- In 2022, we completed installation of LED lighting throughout the Hampstead Distribution Center
- Starting in 2023, we are installing LED lighting in the Crawfordsville distribution center (saving more than 600,000 kWh annually)
We are the publishing industry’s leading supporter of PEN America, the U.S. chapter of the world’s leading international literary–human rights organization. PEN’s mission is to defend free expression, elevate marginalized voices, and foster dialogue across boundaries, a mission that mirrors our own core values. As a global community of writers, editors, designers, and free thinkers, we are passionate about upholding and protecting our right to free expression, and, through our partnership with PEN, we celebrate the courage of individuals who constructively challenge censorship and taboo, no matter the odds.
NEW YORK, NY (2018)
In celebration of our five-year anniversary as Penguin Random House and to ensure that our authors’ voices carry beyond the page and into our communities, we partnered with the MTA Metro-North Railroad and Grand Central Terminal to create a charitable-giving opportunity through an in-transit reading experience. We created an app that allowed commuters and visitors to download free Penguin Random House book excerpts from inside Grand Central Terminal, on station platforms, and in the Park Avenue Tunnel. A special 5-minute Reads section on the app triggered a donation; for every five minutes read in this section, we donated a book to our charitable partner, Save the Children, up to 25,000 books. The books were distributed through community events, family activities, and holiday celebrations at parks, schools, and libraries. This charitable component empowered New Yorkers to give back to those in need while engaging in a fun, worthwhile activity To learn more about the campaign, click here.
Globally, we have increased our efforts to reduce single-use plastic and printing in our offices. Simple solutions have helped us make significant impacts, like using branded Penguin Random House mugs instead of one-time-use paper cups, defaulting to double-sided printing to reduce paper waste, and sharing motivation and encouragement in email signatures to limit printing. In the United Kingdom, we’ve implemented reduction projects to remove single-use plastic from shipping boxes and replaced it with reused cardboard. Transitioning to e-contracts alone has reduced paper consumption in the United Kingdom by more than one million units a year. In Australia, we initiated a “Keep Cup Drive” and saved an estimated 70,800 single-use paper cups from the landfill. In India, we took a pledge to make our office plastic-free and increase our efforts toward reduced energy consumption. India replaced all packaged plastic water bottles with Penguin-branded glass bottles; uses biodegradable paper for waste, has a default setting to print double sided, and automatically deletes print commands after a few hours of no response; and introduced Green Hour every week to avoid using electricity and appliances such as laptops and printers.
