This year's intern-led Community Social Responsibility (CSR) project has had countless ups and downs, but with the hard work and dedication of the 10 interns, it's finally coming to realization.
The CSR project is a long-standing tradition in which every year over the summer, the current student interns must come up with a project in which we give back to the community in some way. Past projects have included a weekend learn to code program for elementary-school kids, and a shop-local initiative. This summer, we had the extra challenge of coming up with an idea that was pandemic-friendly.
Our initial idea was to create a custom Arcurve beer and sell it as a fundraiser to support a local charity. However, after some minor issues with the legality of selling alcohol, and some protest from the HR department, we settled on creating a custom labeled kombucha with the help of Wild Tea Kombucha.
Our product name is The Burnt Orange Bucha. The name is inspired by a meeting from our orientation week where we were told about Arcurve’s official colour “burnt orange” According to Arcurve founder Jay Gohill, the Arcurve colour is not red due to a superstition his mother holds that red it bad luck. So the colour is very specifically a dark shade of burnt orange. This sparked our idea for the burnt orange Bucha, which has no “burnt” flavor but is an orange pop flavored Kombucha.
As we were working on the branding for this project, we also created Pip, our sunglasses-wearing orange project mascot.
Our CSR project hasn’t just been about creating an Arcurve-branded kombucha. The most important part of the project is how we want to give back to the community. As a group, we wanted to decide on a charity that was helping people who had been affected by the pandemic. During the COVID –19 pandemic, domestic abuse has risen, and our group decided we wanted to support a charity that helps victims of domestic abuse. The Calgary Women's Emergency Shelter is a local charity aimed at ending family violence. Though the Emergency Shelter is the cornerstone of the organization, it is more than just a shelter, and serves approximately 15,000 clients each year through a number of innovative safety, healing and prevention programs.
Now that we’ve finalized our project details and picked our charity, we have finally started production of the Burnt Orange 'Bucha with Wild Tea, and we are taking pre-orders! You can pre-order your 6-pack of Burnt Orange ‘Bucha here, and all the proceeds will be going to support the amazing work that the CWES is doing.
