Blog
Helping Businesses Succeed will Help Joplin Succeed
BCLC’s recent business delegation trip to Joplin Mo. brought together business leaders, government officials and nonprofit organizations to assess the community recovery efforts post-tornado. As part of the trip, Gerald McSwiggan, the senior manager of BCLC's Disaster Assistance and Recovery Program, spoke with regional media on the role of businesses in post-disaster recovery efforts. The Joplin Tri-State Business Journal covered the trip and published its coverage “Officials with U.S. Chamber, national corporations tour Joplin”, via the Joplin Tri-State Business Journal:
"Disaster recovery is complicated," he said. "It's not easy. It takes a lot of perseverance. And business recovery is complicated.
"You can't will businesses to come back. What you do is you set up opportunities for them. ... And those opportunities come in things like making sure there's a good school system, making sure you have an educated work force, making sure that there's good housing. (If you make) sure all those pieces of the community puzzle are coming together, businesses will come out of that.
"That's what's great about the American dream," McSwiggan said. "When you give people opportunity,...
2012: The Best Year yet for Corporate Health and Wellness
By Sara Scheller, BCLC
January tends to inspire the best in people. The ringing in of the New Year coupled with the toll December took on our belt loops and wallets seems to motivate people to embrace this time as a new beginning. For me, January often results in my recommitment to eating healthy, getting my finances back under control, and dusting off my running shoes. Just making a few changes in my daily life can have huge impacts on my overall health and wellness—making 2012 my best year yet.
But individuals aren’t the only ones who embrace January as a time of renewal. The business community, along with non-profits and government, all engage in some form of reassessment at this time of the year. They evaluate and take lessons away from 2011 and try to apply what they’ve learned to their strategies for 2012.
On January 18, BCLC hosted the quarterly meeting on Health and Wellness and heard about what different organizations and companies are working on for their New Year’s resolutions. While the discussion varied, here are a few of the things that these organizations wanted to work on for 2012:
Listen to the Needs
Across the board, all of the organizations and companies we spoke with on January 18 discussed how they want to work to better listen to the needs of their key stakeholders when it comes to the area of health and wellness. For example, organizations have found from listening to their employees and their...
How IBM “Has Gone From Spare Change To Real Change”
Last week, Huffington Post published an interview with Stanley Litow, President of the IBM Foundation. The piece, “IBM: Tapping Top Talent, For Good,“ showcases how the employees at IBM have established a culture of service and volunteerism, something IBM institutionalized through their Corporate Service Corps.
Stanley also shared his advice to other companies seeking to expand their corporate service initiatives:
Talk to your employees. There has been, as part of our core values in the past 100 years, to connect with the community. We're a large company, 425,000 employees. And thousands of our employees have commitments to organizations of many stripes. So start out with the expertise you have in house. People know a lot about their communities. Build on that expertise, learn what the skills of your employees are.
I come back to this phrase from Rosabeth Kanter at Harvard: IBM has gone from spare change to real change. When companies give what is least valuable it's giving spare change, out of generosity. When you give what differentiates you in the marketplace, you produce not only significant benefit in the community but also for yourself.
The full interview is available...
New Research Surfaces the Many Benefits of Corporations Donating Inventory
Guest Post by Ellie Hollander, Good360 Chief Strategy Officer
Earlier today, Indiana University’s School of Public and Environmental Affairs released research on the Business Case for Product Giving. This research is the first-of-its-kind analyzing donation versus liquidation and disposal and clearly demonstrates that companies can improve their bottom lines while doing social good. The report provides new information to help corporations make good inventory management decisions year-round, and is especially timely for those retailers with January 31 fiscal year-ends. Highlights of the findings follow:
- Product philanthropy has substantial benefits due to the significant financial, environmental and social ROI.
- Based on financial impact alone, product donation is largely superior to disposal and is more beneficial than liquidation.
- Ancillary benefits include impact on brand image, customer loyalty, employee recruitment and engagement and environmental stewardship.
- Donating product is an attractive alternative to cash; and has a considerable socio-economic impact.
- A research paper that provides a comprehensive analysis of product philanthropy in business is downloadable...
BCLC Leads Business Delegation to Joplin Mo.
The Chamber’s Business Civic Leadership Center (BCLC) is leading a business delegation to Joplin, MO to examine long-term tornado recovery needs on January 18 through 19. Businesses interested in continuing to support the tornado-ravaged community through long-term business investments will tour the city and hold meetings with local government and nonprofit officials.
BCLC staff and director of communications, Kitty Taylor Keller, will cover the trip live on Twitter (hashtag #JoplinBCLC) and the BCLCblog.
Deficit-Driven Developments
[Editor's Note: This is the first in a three-part guest series.]
The recession started a renaissance in how companies, NGOs, & governments collaborate. Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention. With governments and non-profits facing yawning budget deficits and business facing one of its biggest trust-deficits in history, organizations are coming together in unprecedented ways to tackle some of society's greatest challenges. In fact, a distinct set of collaborative practices used by the “best corporate citizens”and their partners have emerged that others could adopt.
Even as movements like Occupy Wall Street show how dramatically trust in business has declined and even in the depths of the recession, most companies continued investing in corporate responsibility programs (according to a recent survey by CR Magazine). At the same time, countries face mounting budget shortfalls especially in foreign aid, and many NGOs face declining giving, leaving vital programs in the lurch. As a result, what began as small experiments in public-private partnerships have...
Georgia-Pacific's Bill Frerking on Sustainable Product Innovations
With the judging period for the Siemens Sustainability Community awards currently underway, sustinability is on our minds at BCLC. It's the perfect time to look into how companies, not just communities, are creating a more sustainable world.
Bill Frerking was named Georgia-Pacific’s first chief sustainability officer in 2007. Since that time he has helped Georgia-Pacific become more socially, environmentally and economically sustainable. Georgia-Pacific's updated corporate sustainability website shows that it doesn’t take magic to have sustainable products and operations. Instead, it takes a complete approach based on understanding the social, environmental and economic impacts of the company’s decisions and actions on the communities where it has operations, on the environment and the company’s business, and through the entire life cycle of its products. Below is our interview with Bill, let us know what you think of Georgia-Pacific's sustainability efforts in the comments!
BCLC: Georgia-Pacific has worked to achieve economic, environmental, and social sustainability even before the term “sustainability” became a household phrase. What are some milestones you’re most proud of?
Bill Frerking: Our use of a renewable resource – fiber from trees – has provided us with some great opportunities to be a more sustainable company over time. In the 1960s, we...
Employee Ownership and Engagement Critical to Successful CSR
On a January morning, 90 groups of mothers and children gathered at the Fe y Alegria primary school in a neighborhood north of Lima, Peru. They were there at the invitation of the Peruvian distribution firm Comercia for a hot meal, classes on nutrition education, and for the presentation of Comercia food baskets. An initiative from a relatively small firm in a country not famous for a history of CSR, the initiative was especially 
impressive, since it was – and remains – an effort largely developed and run by company employees.
While some sort of community engagement or CSR programming has become common for multinationals operating in the OECD, sustainable CSR programming is still far from common in most parts of the world. Even in the “global north,” most CSR programs still arrive at the shop floor as a C-level initiative – something hatched by senior executives or by a corporate foundation.
However, this pattern overlooks a crucial asset: the excitement, commitment and advice of company employees. This employee engagement – not just in implementation, but in the design of effective CSR – is perhaps the missing piece for the next phase of sustainable community engagement around the world.
...
Spirit of Volunteerism Shines in Business Community
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, "Life's most persistent and urgent question is: 'What are you doing for others?'" That is why BCLC is pleased to partner with the Corporation for National and Community Service to convey the different ways service to others will be unfolding in American communities this weekend and on Monday, the MLK Day of Service.
BCLC’s Business for Good Map indicates that volunteerism is the number-one category of business engagement. Companies engage their employees in two types of volunteerism activities: skills-based/pro bono projects and traditional volunteer projects, both of equal importance. The key with corporate employee volunteerism is to make the program flexible enough to meet the needs and aspirations of the employees.
For specific examples, check out the array of volunteer projects that Chrysler offers to its employees, and read about the importance of skills-based volunteer projects at AMD.
When you read these articles you will understand both the intrinsic value that employees gain through volunteer projects – immediate gratification through community service projects, as well as professional gains – project...
Haiti: A Bright Business Horizon
If you have ever traveled to Haiti, you know as well as I do there is one defining characteristic that you can’t miss: the entrepreneurial spirit that the Haitian people possess everywhere you go. In fact, business classes and managers around the world could learn a thing or two from entrepreneurs on the streets of Port au Prince, particularly around market adaptation.
In the last two years Haiti has forced companies to think more strategically about how to run a successful business in a country that not only requires market adaptation but also social investment. These two elements are equally as important. Working in Haiti has forced CSR and business units to fuse their respective tenets to find opportunity for market success and social improvement.
Many say nothing has changed in Haiti since 2010. Well, I find that argument invalid and inaccurate. As of 2012, the country has a democratically elected a president and a functioning parliament. According to the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, the Haitian economy is projected to grow by 8 percent in 2012 (while the region as a whole will grow by 3.7 percent). Angel Aloma, executive director of Food for the Poor, has said he sees signs that the Haitian government is coming through on promises. In addition, according to the...
Pages
