Community and Education

Strategic Direction

In determining how we could best focus our community outreach efforts within our U.S. Operations, we weighed three primary considerations: how we could ensure that our efforts in the community achieve a real and lasting impact, where we could focus our efforts on unaddressed needs, and what was in the best long-term interest of our company and our shareholders.

We determined that education and, more specifically, assistance to K-12 public school teachers, was the best way for OfficeMax to engage with the communities in which we operate, and with society at large. Teachers are a great conduit to the community, and they touch many young lives over the course of their careers. Education enriches individual lives, the community and, ultimately, the economy.

Many U.S. public school teachers use their own money to purchase classroom supplies in under-funded schools and economically challenged areas. Collectively, they spend about $4 billion out-of-pocket annually, according to the National Education Association. That’s roughly equivalent to the revenues needed to make the Fortune 500^® list of largest U.S. companies.

Since OfficeMax sells many of the supplies teachers require, we are in a position to help provide teachers with what they need to deliver the quality education their students deserve.

Impact Areas and Outcomes

In the summer of 2007, the OfficeMax Community Affairs function began a strategic analysis of the impacts of charitable giving programs and the ways in which we might track and report this information.

The analysis identified five impact areas and 17 measurable outcomes affected by OfficeMax’s U.S. Operations community programs. These are summarized below.