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Global Crossing employees around the world are engaged in various volunteer and community activities. From rebuilding homes and supporting education to assisting those affected by natural disasters, Global Crossing employees step-up and demonstrate a strong commitment to the communities where they live and work.
"Global Crossing, Global Caring is part of our employee culture," said John Legere, chief executive officer, Global Crossing. "Employees identify and lead service projects that are personally meaningful to them. Part of our success is linked to the fact that our employees care as much for their communities as they do for our customers."
Here are a few examples of the programs in which Global Crossing employees participate. For more information or questions, please contact Michael Schneider at michael.schneider@globalcrossing.com.
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Worldwide:
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Global Crossing announced its first Employee Community Day. Between November 1 and December 31, 2009, each employee was granted an extra paid day off to make a difference in a charitable pursuit of his or her choice.
"Many Global Crossing employees are dedicated volunteers making a difference all year long," said Laurinda Pang, senior vice president of Human Resources for Global Crossing. "What makes Employee Community Day so special is what can be accomplished when so many of our employees spend a day giving back."
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North America:
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 Over the past seven years, Global Crossing employees have donated more than $400,000 to the United Way of Greater Rochester, New York. Donations have been made to the United Way’s general fund, which supports nearly 100 charitable programs provided by some 60 agencies in the Rochester area. This year, the United Way has allocated extra money for emergency services while continuing to support a broad spectrum of activities that address early childhood education, child abuse and homelessness, and other areas of need.
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 Global Crossing volunteers recently prepared more than 4,800 pounds of food for immediate distribution to those in need in the greater Rochester area at Foodlink, a regional food bank that rescues and redistributes over 8.5 million pounds of food annually to a network of 550 member agencies in a 10-county area in central and western New York. Employee volunteers also donated more than 600 pounds of food to redistribute food to Foodlink-supported charity programs, soup kitchens, shelters and emergency food pantries.
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 Global Crossing was involved in a unique education program created by the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce Education Foundation, in partnership with The New Jersey Department of Education and Rutgers University - Newark called MATHNext. The program was aimed at enhancing the teaching abilities of middle-school math teachers by providing professional development via new technologies that use donated webcam-enabled laptop computers, courtesy of IBM, and in-kind videoconferencing and webinar services made possible by Global Crossing. MATHNext employed advances in communication technology, many of which represent firsts for teacher training in New Jersey and allow teachers to attend scheduled professional development sessions from the convenience of their homes or schools. Live and interactive training via videoconferencing with webinar support saved money on transportation costs and opened program access to districts located too far to make in-person training a reality. Global Crossing used its world-class IP-based network and collaboration offerings to provide the connectivity for these training sessions. For more information, visit www.mathnext.org.
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 Global Crossing employees from across the U.S. participated in Operation Homefront, a program that raised more than $32,000 in donated items and funds and packed and sorted 500 care packages destined for military personnel stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Operation Homefront provides emergency assistance to U.S. troops, their families, and to wounded soldiers upon their return home.
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 Nineteen Global Crossing walking teams raised more than $16,000 in support for the American Diabetes Association's Step Out: Walk to Fight Diabetes effort.
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 For eight years running, Global Crossing employees have annually donated hundreds of holiday gifts for underprivileged children through the Marine Toys for Tots Foundation. Also around the holidays employees adopt families in need to provide basic household items, food, wish-list gifts, and other needed donations.
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 Global Crossing coordinated a volunteer mission to New Orleans, Louisiana to participate in a Habitat for Humanity project to build homes for those left homeless from Hurricane Katrina. That spawned efforts for trips and volunteer activities at the Habitat for Humanity "Abraham House" in Newark, New Jersey.
Various employee groups have helped local school districts by providing book bags filled with school supplies for families in need and have led cell phone recycling drives for battered women's shelters and eye-glass donation drives for the needy.
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Latin America:
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 Global Crossing donated more than 6,000 art books to several organizations in Latin America, including the Centro de Jubilados y Pensionados de Ingeniero Maschwitz, the Asociación de Literatura Infantil y Juvenil de Argentina (ALIJA) and the Centro de Arte y Educación Pepe Cáceres.
In Buenos Aires, Argentina, for the past five years, Global Crossing employees have sent as much as 2,200 pounds (1,000 kilograms) of paper to a pediatric hospital which sells the paper to recyclers. Proceeds help fund pre- and post-operative care for children and accommodations for their parents.
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United Kingdom and Europe:
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Global Crossing has donated £6,000 to the international children's rights charity, Unicef, to support their work in over 190 countries.
 Employees in Basingstoke volunteer for The Shaw Trust, the largest voluntary sector provider of employment services for disabled people in the U.K. The Shaw Trust provides training and work opportunities for people who are disadvantaged in the labor market due to disability, ill health, or other social circumstances. The Trust runs horticultural projects for adults with mental health problems to build their social skills, work abilities and confidence, and to help them to eventually move into employment.
Employees in the U.K. have also supported cell phone recycling and eye-glass donation drives for Oxfam, a registered charity dedicated people fighting poverty.
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Asia Pacific:
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 Around the Lunar New Year, Global Crossing employees donated Lai-See packets (also called Hong-Bao) to The Salvation Army in support of their youth, family, and community services program in Hong Kong and Macau. Lai-See envelopes contain money and are given to children and young adults at New Year’s time.
On May, 12, 2008, a devastating earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale struck the Sichuan province in southwestern China, killing thousands of people and displacing many more. Global Crossing employees sprung into action and matched a company donation to The Red Cross to assist those affected by this disaster.
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 "Going Green" is no longer just a slogan for global companies. It's become a strategic imperative, a sales requirement, and a moral obligation. Increasingly, information technology (IT) companies are being scrutinized over the amount of power they consume. Click on the image on the left to read our whitepaper titled "Going Green: A Business Imperative".
Helping other companies go green is not the extent of Global Crossing's commitment to green practices. The company itself is getting greener by the day. From across the U.S., U.K., Latin America and beyond, it's promoting a myriad of energy and materials conservation activities.
One of the initiatives Global Crossing has begun, for example, is to install Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) switches at its larger technical sites to reduce data center power by approximately 2,000 Amps (a measure of electrical current) and to decrease AC (alternating current) power by 40 to 50 percent. With the reduced heat load, the energy typically consumed to cool these facilities is reduced as well.
We also continue to manage the environmental impact of our data centers by supporting and deploying virtualization technologies and strategies that more effectively make use of, and reduce, our current data center resources.
For example, Global Crossing has actively reduced its data center environmental needs, such as power, placement, and cooling, with virtualization solutions that have helped consolidate more than 350 physical servers to 14 physical servers in our primary North America data centers. Virtualization technology improves availability and reduces risk of failures. It does this by seamlessly sharing the capacity load of applications among a fewer number of physical servers, all linked with virtual software. In this virtual environment, if a physical server fails, rather than the application being unavailable until it's fixed, the capacity of any applications running on it are shifted seamlessly and without interruption to another physical server in the virtual server environment.
This is just the beginning. Plans are in place to expand the approach further. This virtualization strategy and direction not only reduces the operational support and cost, but helps reduce the overall need for real estate, power and cooling. It also fully aligns our efforts with other current green initiatives happening across the IT industry.
We also are deploying more energy efficient ultrasonic humidifiers in our data centers.
Our IT organization is continuing to consider numerous initiatives worldwide. One initiative undertaken over the past 12 months includes replacing 1,800 Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) monitors with energy-efficient flat panels that will result in an energy savings of roughly 60 to 68 percent.
We also are in the process of implementing Enterprise Virtual Arrays (EVA) and consolidating storage to those. EVA integrates a dynamic smart cooling energy management system, which actively manages the environment to deliver cooling where it is needed, resulting in cost savings. Currently, the company has turned down four larger storage array systems. Although still in the early stages of this energy-saving initiative, the company already has seen approximately 30 percent savings in energy costs.
Global Crossing also is reducing its travel expenses and the contribution business travel makes to harmful emissions by implementing Global Crossing Collaboration Solutions, such as audio, video, and data sharing. Currently, approximately 30 percent of the company's employees use our Collaboration Solutions each week.
In other areas, our sales collateral now is printed on a recycled stock, which, in turn, is produced using wind-powered electricity.
The company's new office building in Rochester, New York, has incorporated numerous systems and materials designed to reduce energy consumption, such as high-efficiency heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems.
Global Crossing UK (GCUK), like many other U.K. businesses, is responding to the British government's aggressive energy conservation policies. Recently, it adopted a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) policy that provides a framework for managing our business processes to produce an overall positive effect on society, including the environment. It has proven to be a catalyst for change.
GCUK also is seeking registration to ISO 14000, which is an Environmental Management Systems Certification and internationally recognized standard that evolved to address the concern for the impact of industry on the environment.
Local green activities in the U.K. include paper recycling bins, recycling and recovery of materials from waste electrical equipment and a Car Sharer scheme in Basingstoke. In addition, we are a founding partner of the Green Technology Initiative (GTI), a consortium of several organizations with British operations.
All of our efforts support the company's belief that customers seek vendors who will not only help them become environmentally compliant, but who are conscientious themselves. Global Crossing considers this to be one of its most valuable differentiators.
For more information about our corporate commitment to go green, please contact Michael Schneider at michael.schneider@globalcrossing.com and click here to read our whitepaper on green.
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