CSR

CSR: Corporate Social Responsibility

From Wikipedia: Corporate social responsibility is a form of corporate self-regulation integrated into a business model. CSR policy functions as a built-in, self-regulating mechanism whereby business monitors and ensures its active compliance with the spirit of the law, ethical standards, and international norms. The goal of CSR is to embrace responsibility for the company’s actions and encourage a positive impact through its activities on the environment, consumers, employees, communities, stakeholders and all other members of the public sphere.

Furthermore, CSR-focused businesses would proactively promote the public interest by encouraging community growth and development, and voluntarily eliminating practices that harm the public sphere, regardless of legality. CSR is the deliberate inclusion of public interest into corporate decision-making, that is the core business of the company or firm, and the honouring of a triple bottom line: people, planet, profit.



Christine Loh: Consumerism is the “Elephant in the Room” at GRI Conference

Christine Loh, CEO of Hong Kong’s Civic Exchange and a longtime politician and human rights monitor, gave one of the closing speeches at the Global Reporting Initiative’s biennial conference.  Speaking to the 1,100 NGO heads, business leaders, and politicians in attendance, Loh made three emphatic points that in her view will help move the globe [...]

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Can Small, Local Businesses Compete in a Globalized Market?

By Vale Jokisch at BALLE conference 2010 According to Michael Shuman, author of The Small-Mart Revolution, the answer to that question is a resounding yes.  Despite the growing presence of big box chain stores in the US and abroad, Shuman has witnessed a growing number of small businesses using entrepreneurial strategies to gain a competitive [...]

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Building Local Sustainable Supply Chains: TS Designs Leads by Example

By Vale Jokisch at BALLE conference 2010 The t-shirt you are wearing may have traveled up to 17,000 miles before you put it on.  From cotton grown in the US, it likely traveled to India where the cotton was spun into thread, to Pakistan where the thread was turned into cloth, and then to Sri [...]

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Measuring Sustainability for Small and Medium Businesses: Is a Single, National Standard Possible?

By Vale Jokisch at BALLE conference 2010 Product certifications are everywhere.  Walk into Whole Foods and you’ll see packages labeled Fair Trade Certified, USDA Organic, Rainforest Alliance Certified – the list goes on and on.  It can be challenging for consumers to understand exactly what these certifications mean for the products they choose to buy. [...]

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Panera Bread Experiments with “Pay What You Want” Model

Panera Bread quietly re-opens a St. Louis store as a non-profit, The St. Louis Company Cares Cafe. The store has the same look and same menu as a Panera Bread restaurant. But it has one very unique feature – no bills. After ordering your food you are asked to make a donation in any amount you choose.

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How Balanced Are CSR Reports?

By Nancy Mancilla & Alexandru Georgescu of ISOS Group As GRI’s Certified Training Partners in the U.S., we have become connoisseurs of fine reporting and somewhat critical of lavish attempts to build credibility by what we feel is blatant greenwashing. Through all the reports we have read, we have rarely found that » all the [...]

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Offering Sick Leave Benefits Has Benefits

It costs an employer 23 cents per hour per worker—on average—to provide sick time, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.   Yet, 39 percent of workers in the private sector and 26 percent of those who work part time do not have any sick days. And, about two-thirds of people who earn $10.40 an hour [...]

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8th Annual BALLE Business Conference Kicking Off in Charleston, SC

By Vale Jokisch Over the past two years we have heard countless mentions of the enormous bailouts for Wall Street and the concurrent ongoing woes on Main Street.  Just last week President Obama sent a proposal to Congress to create a $30 billion fund for small and medium banks in order to encourage lending to [...]

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Voluntary Reporting of Carbon Emissions: How and Where?

Last January, the US Securities and Exchange Commission gave a nod to the fact that climate risk is a material business issue when it voted to require companies to disclose the impact of climate change on their businesses in their public filings. This fact was not lost on the participants of the LCA Sustainable Supply [...]

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CSR Reporting—and Interest in What It Shows—Is Gaining Steam

Bernie Madoff. Sir Allen Stanford. Raj Rajaratnam. Jerome Kerviel. Mitchel Guttenberg. Sam Israel III. Unfortunately, the list could go on. Once you’ve been hit in the wallet (OK, maybe it takes two or three times), you get a bit skittish before handing over your money. You begin to do better due diligence. CSR reporting and [...]

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Record Fine Bookends Four Years of Environmental Change at Walmart

This week Walmart agreed to pay $27.6 million to settle allegations that it improperly disposed of hazardous waste at stores across California. The settlement stems from an investigation started five years ago after an off-duty San Diego County Department of Environmental Health employee noticed a Walmart employee pouring bleach down an open drain. Further investigation uncovered [...]

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Five Attributes That Make a Sustainability Report Great

EcoStrategy Group’s new report, Trends in Sustainability Reporting:  A Close-Up Look at Bay Area Companies, provides a helpful overview of the business value for reporting on environmental sustainability and a solid checklist of issues to take into consideration if you are about to embark on a sustainability report. The study analyzes how the top Bay [...]

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Is it Possible to Measure Sustainability Within the Retail Industry?

At a fundamental level, there’s really nothing sustainable about the retail industry as we know it today.  In the United States and abroad, as the economic engine evolved from one of production to one of consumption, retailers and their suppliers have become the dominant companies.  Take a look at the Dow Jones Industrial Average:  the [...]

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Cadbury at LCA Summit: Communicating CSR Goals to Suppliers

One especially prevalent theme at the LCA Sustainable Supply Chain Summit in Chicago this past week was the need for companies to communicate corporate responsibility goals to suppliers. While requiring suppliers to report on environmental metrics was uncommon, most presenters said their companies did request that suppliers fill out an environmental or social performance scorecard. [...]

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Measuring the Business Impact of Community Involvement

Glenn Gutterman You can’t manage what you don’t measure, or so the aphorism goes. This summer, the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship (BCCCC) will launch a framework to assess the business impact of community involvement (CI) programs. The framework will empower corporate citizenship practitioners to make a compelling internal case for their programs. After [...]

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Seventh Generation’s Jeffrey Hollender on Holistic CSR

Corporate Social Responsibly is more than just about selling sustainable products, issuing annual reports, and reducing carbon and water footprints: it’s also about how businesses treat employees and the corporate culture that’s promoted within company walls. Jeffrey Hollender, Seventh Generation’s Co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Inspired Protagonist, spoke about this holistic approach to CSR during his visit to the Presidio Graduate School earlier today.

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Intuit Gives a Voice to Local Businesses That Make a Difference

Since the B Corporation movement’s inception a few years ago, policy makers are closer to giving businesses the option to create an organization that can be profitable and do good:  currently the stark choice is to be solely a corporation or a non-profit.  The work and advocacy by B Lab, the organization behind B Corporations, [...]

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Greenwash? Time’s Up! How “Single Factor Sustainability” Will Cost You

Do you consider yourself a green company? A company trying to go green? Or trying to do as much as you need to be perceived as green? You’d better watch out. Consumers aren’t stupid. And thanks to books like Ecoholic: Your Guide to the Most Environmentally Friendly Information, Products & Services, they’re going to keep [...]

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Johnson Controls’ Global Reporting Initiative Report Should Be a Model

Want to get wowed?  Check out Johnson Controls’ Global Reporting Initiative report – and its more than 500 supporting documents.  Talk about information overload! Eight years ago, the Global Reporting Initiative was launched as an independent global institution at the United Nations. The goal? “To make sustainability reporting as routine as financial reporting,” as reported [...]

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CSR Reporting: When is Enough, Enough? Views from Intel and Merck

This is the third column in a three-part series on CSR Reporting. Producing CSR reports requires a substantial investment of time and money. Is all the work worth it? I was surprised by some of the answers I heard during a panel on CSR reporting at the recent Financial Times Conference “Investing in a Sustainable Future.” [...]

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Can We Trust CSR Checklists? Where is the Transparency?

Lists that tout companies that engage in corporate social responsibility are “advantageous” says Dal LaMagna, who founded Tweezerman, a Long Island, N.Y.-based beauty products company formed 21 years ago.  “Lists let companies market to their customers and help consumers pay attention.  They show those customers that the company doesn’t exploit.” But he notes that there [...]

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Weight Watchers, Abercrombie and Fitch Top Least Transparent Companies

I really don’t know what to make of Corporate Responsibility Magazine’s lists. Earlier this year, the magazine released the eleventh edition of its 100 Best Corporate Citizens. The list has become the industry standard for corporate social responsibility measurement, closely watched by corporate PR departments. But it’s also been criticized for whitewashing corporate behemoths’ bad [...]

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BCCCC Conference: How to Kickstart a CSR Career

By Glenn Gutterman Where will tomorrow’s corporate responsibility leaders come from? That was the question before a breakout session panel Monday at the BCCCC Conference. According to Maggie McArthur, deputy director of Net Impact, about 50 percent of CSR positions are filled internally while another 25 percent are filled quietly, via word of mouth or [...]

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Corporate Citizenship Conference: Winning a Seat at the Table

By Glenn Gutterman How do you convince your CEO to serve double duty as Chief Sustainability Officer? Winning a Seat at the Table – the theme for the 2010 Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship Conference – underscores the importance of having visible buy-in from the C-suite. The BCCCC Conference convenes high-level CSR professionals and [...]

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How to Write Mission Statements That Keep You Out of Court

Mission statements can be painful exercises for entrepreneurs that have yet to truly define their business–or for people who just hate writing. But they are an important part of your planning, and writing a meaningful one can be a cathartic step in business development. Besides, getting it wrong can land you in court. Infuse mission [...]

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Jeffrey Hollender on His New Book, CSR 2.0, and Blowing Your Lawyer’s Mind

Yesterday, Jen Boynton published a review of Jeffrey Hollender and Bill Breen’s new book, The Responsibility Revolution. Be sure to check out the review and grab a copy when you can–it really is as good as Jen says. The only thing more captivating than reading Hollender’s latest writing is talking to him personally, which I [...]

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The Branding Case for Offset-Inclusive Carbon Management

By Neil Braun, CEO, The CarbonNeutral Company As US companies transition to a low carbon economy, carbon management represents a new and fundamental challenge for business. How companies respond to this challenge has become a strategic issue that can build or destroy brands and reputations. If companies take on this challenge, carbon management presents an [...]

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Rape, Pillage and … Philanthropy: How Siloed CSR Misses the Point

The bi-partisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has been studying no less than 22 contributing causes of the financial crisis. At the risk of oversimplifying matters, Jed Emerson of Blended Value Proposition, believes he knows the root cause.  It all boils down to values, Emerson told participants at the Economist’s recent 2010 Corporate Citizenship Conference “Doing Well [...]

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Follow the CSR Leaders

During the Economist’s Corporate Citizenship Conference earlier this week, I heard nearly three dozen global leaders discuss the challenges, successes and failures of corporate citizenship.  From their comments, I gleaned a collection of best practices for developing corporate citizenship programs that generate tangible results.  Here’s what these leaders recommend. Collaborate with competitors. It’s not easy [...]

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Reputation as Growth Driver: Disney and “Generation Green”

With kids as one of its core demographics, The Walt Disney Company is obviously quite interested in what kids care about. Speaking at the Wall Street Journal’s ECO:nomics conference, Disney President and CEO Robert Iger discussed how kids as young as five are becoming increasingly concerned about environmental issues. It doesn’t stop with this “generation [...]

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