As the wise saying goes, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time to plant a tree is now! That holds true even during a global pandemic. As part of Winnipeg’s One Million Tree Challenge, Telpay staff, customers, and friends planted 5000 trees this spring.

While all plans for public plantings were put on hold due to COVID, we reached out to you, our customers. And the response was resounding from individuals planting in their own yards, to staff giveaways to whole community tree giveaways. In partnership with one of our customers, the Dakota Community Club, we gave away 500 trees in just two hours! We were so pleased to have so many of you interested in this project.

We’d love to help stimulate this kind of tree planting across the country. Check out Tree Canada to get involved in their national tree planting program.

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Winnipeg’s vast tree canopy is a source of great pride for many Winnipeggers, but it’s under threat.

The Emerald Ash Borer Beetle and Dutch Elm Disease alone is expected to take out two-thirds of the city’s public tree canopy over the next century. If something’s not done — and soon — all of that life that all of those trees breathe into Winnipeg’s neighbourhoods will be snuffed out.

That’s why, in September, Winnipeg Mayor Brian Bowman announced a bold vision to protect and expand the city’s tree canopy. Called the Million Tree Challenge, it asks individuals, not-for-profits, and private businesses to come together to plant one million new trees across the city over the next 20 years.

In December 2019, Telpay answered the call and made a $250,000 commitment to the Million Tree Challenge which includes public tree plantings. There were public plantings scheduled for 2020 however due to the pandemic it forced those events to be delayed, so instead we’re offering Winnipeg business affiliates free trees to plant themselves. One of those affiliates is the Dakota Community Centre, which will receive 250 trees.

“We are very excited that through this initiative, more trees will be coming to our site and into our community,” says Michele Augert, CEO of the DCC. “It is through such meaningful partnerships that we are able to continue to enhance our spaces and the places people in our community come to live, play, and gather.”

This is just one green initiative among many for the DCC, however. In 2017, for instance, the community hub opened a 60,000 square foot fieldhouse that is LEED Silver certified. And in 2018, it became a Telpay for Business customer, doing away with issuing 200 paper cheques each month to vendors, instructors, referees, timekeepers, and ice technicians.

Eliminating those cheques and going with an electronic payment solution like Telpay’s is no small environmental idea, by the way. One estimate by the PayItGreen Alliance suggests that paper cheques add 3.6 million tonnes of greenhouses gases to the environment every year. Telpay estimates that by eliminating the paper cheques of over 100,000 businesses across Canada, our electronic system has saved the equivalent of a mature 80,000 tree forest.

But like the DCC, Telpay’s electronic payment system is just one of our many green initiatives. This January we enacted a Green Action Plan that includes making office operations even more sustainable, retrofitting our historic building in downtown Winnipeg, and participating in the Million Tree Challenge.

Visit info.telpay.ca/greenactionplan for all of the details on the Green Action Plan or contact us directly at 1-800-665-0302 or sales@telpay.ca to find out how switching to Telpay can help your business reduce its environmental footprint.

As this pandemic has shown, again and again, it’s our most vulnerable populations that have been impacted the most. So when COVID-19 hit British Columbia and the province went into lockdown, some social welfare agencies worried about how it would affect their ability to get supports to those in need.

Luckily, the Secwépemc Child and Family Services Agency (SCFSA) didn’t quite have the same level of concern as some.

Based in Kamloops, B.C., the SCFSA provides a range of child protection services on behalf of the seven bands in the Secwépemc First Nation. Its mission is to protect the rights of Aboriginal children, ensure their safety, and maintain their connection to family, culture, and community.

Part of that mission involves delivering payments to clients, which would be difficult — and unsafe — if those clients had to visit the SCFSA office. As health officials have implored us, we need to stay home and keep two metres apart.

However, the SCFSA has been a Telpay customer since 2014, meaning it can easily get payments to clients quickly without having to do so in person.

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According to Stats Canada, more than 1.7 million Canadians work from home and no doubt that number has skyrocketed in recent weeks as companies try to ensure the safety of their employees.

The good news is that technology allows for a relatively smooth transition to remote work, but this sudden shift also presents some challenges.

One of the biggest hurdles for companies used to making payments via cheque is how to pay bills, employees, and the government from home. It can also be quite costly and inefficient to send those cheques, which isn’t ideal in the current economic climate.

Telpay’s all-in-one payment software for businesses, Telpay for Business, can help you solve both of these challenges. Here’s how.

Streamlined payments
Once you have Telpay for Business set up, you can pay employees, government remittances, and bills to over 150,000 businesses from an all-in-one platform. Plus, Telpay for Business works with a wide range of accounting software, including Adagio and QuickBooks, as well as payroll software like Easypay and Paymate.

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