“CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AT THE COCA-COLA FOUNDATION”
SPEAKER: JUAN JOSÉ LITRÁN MELUL
Mr. Juan José Litrán Melul is director of Corporate Relations for Coca-Cola Iberia and also manager of the Juan Manuel Sáinz de Vicuña Coca-Cola Foundation. He is part of the European Sustainability Committee and is a member of the different work teams in the areas of the environment and Corporate Social Responsibility. He is a very dear person for our Association of Fulbright alumni, and for the Fulbright Commission, since he is the main promoter of the Foundation's sponsorship of our Fulbright Scholarships.
He joined Coca Cola in 1988, from an audit in London. He started working in the Recruitment and Selection department -today Human Resources-, in his own words “trying to ensure that the scholarship holders were the best to promote excellence and that there were more women in favor of gender equality”. At that time and among other things, he was responsible for recruiting and training the members of what would be the new commercial structure of the bottler. He would later make the leap to Marketing. Together with Marcos de Quinto, he was in charge of the internal coordination of the Barcelona Olympic Games and the Seville Expo of 92. And from there he moved on to Public Relations. In this department he was responsible for the sponsorship programs and launched the Customer Service - forerunner of the Consumer Interaction Center - and the environmental policy for Spain and Portugal. Currently, he is very focused on Public Affairs issues, which he began to deal with in 2006, three years before Coca-Cola in Spain moved to the most modern and sustainable headquarters in Ribera del Loira, and in this time he had in his hands the management of the crisis for almost 19 years.
In our gathering, he will explain to us what his work in the Foundation and Corporate Social Responsibility consists of, betting on diverse projects such as collaboration with many local, national and international institutions, governments and NGOs in awareness programs that range from a donation campaign of blood with Metro de Madrid and the Red Cross, to the development of educational and water-saving programs, or projects to promote active living and healthy habits with town halls or schools. Under his hand and great capacity and knowledge of society, projects evolve towards raising awareness of the efficient use of water, the efficient use and saving of energy, as well as the protection of biodiversity and social welfare, a task that has required the active participation of employees, suppliers, bottlers and NGOs, among others.
In the Foundation, moreover, JJ Litrán has opted for an area more focused on promoting culture and education with risky projects that touch on different disciplines such as theater, literature or contemporary art. He works with NGOs such as the Rais Foundation in the insertion of homeless people, with Positive Support helping people with HIV, and with the Tomillo Foundation developing educational programs for the labor insertion of young people. Other examples of this involvement is the 'Live Positive Week', a European initiative of Coca-Cola whose objective is to promote sustainability and environmental awareness among its employees. Juan José Litrán was responsible for coordinating more than 3.000 employees from 38 countries to work for a week cleaning European rivers, lakes, beaches and streets. In Spain, and for the second consecutive year, the company's employees and directors worked hand in hand with WWF in cleaning up waste and rubbish in more than 3 kilometers of the banks of the Henares River as part of this 'Positive Week'. Likewise, he is responsible for the fact that in recent years, employees have participated in reforestation programs, managing to recover around 30 hectares of the Alto Tajo Natural Park in the last decade, planting close to 30.000 trees. And from the current flagship project, "Circular Seas", which stems from the commitment to recycle 100% of packaging to tackle the problem of marine waste in a transversal way, based on the circular economy and with all the actors involved, with great results for now.
In his work, he promotes co-creation, flexible hours, the well-being of employees, their professional development and diversity understood in its broadest sense. For Juan José, who is happy with Coca-Cola when things go well and hurts when they don't or is judged unfairly, in his own words "no professional should do without incorporating their citizen's gaze into their company so that it continues to evolve".
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