While companies are increasingly partnering with business schools to create CSR projects for MBA students seeking to get real-world education and training to prepare them for the workforce, many find no opportunity to continue this work once they finish business school. Even though there has been a steady increase over time in VP and Director-level CSR jobs, that is not the case for social responsibility MBA grads. If you want to work in CSR, get functional experience first.
A look at the seven best practices in corporate social responsibility (CSR). They include: setting measurable goals, stakeholder engagement,sustainability issues mapping, sustainability management systems (SMS), lifecycle assessment,sustainability/CSR reporting, and sustainability branding.
The Centre for Sustainability and Excellence(CSE) is launching its 3rd North American Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Certification Workshop on June 17 – 18, in San Francisco, CA, USA. The workshop is a two-day intensive program for all professionals responsible for the management of Sustainability, who may acquire the skills and competencies required to become Qualified Sustainability (CSR) Practitioners and earn an internationally recognized business qualification.
Increasingly more companies are starting to publish sustainability reports. Sustainability reporting as a management tool for businesses can have significant benefits.
A recent survey found that the majority of corporate sustainability leaders believe that their sustainability initiatives have significant strategic value for their organizations, but also feel that measurement for these initiatives are lacking, which makes communicating the outcomes of their efforts more challenging.
The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) and Ceres, a US coalition of environmental and investor groups, today called for submissions to the ninth-annual Ceres-ACCA North American Awards for Sustainability Reporting. The purpose of the awards program is to acknowledge and publicize best practice in reporting on sustainability, environmental and social performance by corporations and organizations and to provide leadership to those companies that are publishing or intend to publish sustainability reports.
Corporate Sustainability in Context: A Pocket Guide to (Nearly) Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Corporate Sustainability provides a very thorough overview about corporate sustainability. This 55-page booket, published by Context, a corporate sustainability consultant organization, has been updated to include recent developments in this rapidly evolving area.
Claremont McKenna College’s Roberts Environmental Center recently released a detailed analysis of the social responsibility reporting efforts of the world’s top entertainment corporations that revealed that the entertainment sector lags behind most others in corporate environmental and sustainability reporting. The report scores companies based on the reporting, intent, and performance of their environmental and social sustainability efforts. The research, based entirely on material released on the firms’ Web sites, found that Bertelsmann, a German firm, and CBS, Viacom, and Walt Disney, outperformed the industry giants News Corp. and Time Warner. However, these firms scores were mediocre when compared to the scores of other industries.
The Roberts Environmental Center of Claremont McKenna College (CMC) recently released a detailed analysis of the social responsibility reporting efforts of America’s top energy and utilities corporations. The two reports contain a compilation of Pacific Sustainability Index scores evaluating the environmental and social reporting of the 48 U.S. energy and utilities companies on the 2008 Fortune 1000 list.The reports score companies based on the reporting, intent, and performance of environmental and social sustainability efforts. The research, based entirely on material released on the firms’ Web sites, found that two of the smallest firms – Mirant (energy sector) and Pinnacle West Capital (utilities sector) – did the best jobs of describing details of their socially beneficial actions and environmental management. The lowest scores were also shared by small firms – Adams Resources and Energy, Inc., and Atmos Energy Corp. – but there was a good mix of firms of all sizes throughout the range of scoring. In neither sector is size a predictor of good reporting.
