This is the most recent article in our series "Education for a Sustainable Future". For more articles, go to http://www.csrwire.com/blog/series/86-education-for-a-sustainable-future/posts

At Starwood, a global hospitality company with more than 1,200 hotels in 100 countries, 10 brands and 180,000 employees around the world, social responsibility is part of who we are and how we do business.

My role is to maximize the benefit that my company brings to the communities where we operate, while minimizing any harm from our operations. One way we have done this is through our focus on skills development. Starwood has a long history of taking talented, entry-level associates and cultivating them into larger roles within the company. During the last few years, Starwood’s Social Responsibility team has had the privilege of bringing this idea of skills cultivation from inside the company, out into our communities.

We’ve done this through our Workplace Readiness program, where we provide underserved or underemployed individuals with the skills training and opportunities they need to get and keep good jobs. We know that skills training is vital for our business and for the communities where we operate. We also know that we can’t do it alone.

When we moved our corporate headquarters to Stamford, Conn., four years ago, we entered a community in transition, with high unemployment rates and a significant education gap, and yet there was enormous growth and development occurring all around us. It was through the course of engaging with our new community that we started discussions with Sacred Heart University (SHU) about addressing our mutual needs.

Starwood had significant hiring needs in our growing digital marketing and IT departments, and was unable to find enough local candidates with the right skill set.  SHU was launching its Masters in Digital Marketing program and opening a new graduate center in downtown Stamford. They needed to attract students to their program and employers for their graduates.  The partnership could have stopped there – a university graduating students with the skills needed for hire by local companies – but both entities recognized the challenges for youth in Stamford, and saw the opportunity for something bigger.

We wanted to take our strengths and match them with the needs of our local community, and out of that collaboration, Project Opportunity was born. We knew we needed assistance with identifying high school students to participate, and our relationship with the Mayor’s Youth Employment Program (MYEP), created by the Stamford Mayor’s office and run by the Youth Services Bureau, was crucial to our success. The MYEP provided access to a formal application and selection process to identify youth participants and management of their progression throughout the internship.  

In the summer of 2013, Starwood employed 20 high school interns through the MYEP, and held a ‘digital marketing boot camp’ with SHU professors teaching classes on the subject and Starwood employees providing mentorship, project support and shadowing engagements. At the end of that first summer, our student teams each presented the digital marketing campaign they had created to our senior leadership team, including our CEO.  Our senior leadership team was extremely impressed, not only by the poise and professionalism of these teenagers who were presenting to the senior executives of a Fortune 500 company, but also with how much they had learned about digital marketing and hospitality in five short weeks.

Running the summer internship program was a great step in providing local students with exposure to a real-world corporate environment, but to truly drive change we needed to reach more students.  After that first summer, we met with the Stamford Public Schools (SPS) and created a task force that included Starwood, SHU, MYEP, and SPS teachers. The task force set to work on developing a curriculum that combined existing marketing and technology classes in a pathway that would support the pursuit of higher education and/or careers in digital marketing and IT.  Ultimately, we created an E-Marketing course that incorporates current technologies and business cases into the curriculum. 

We launched the course this September in all 3 public schools in Stamford.  SHU is pursuing college credit for the course.

We continue to learn as this program grows. The most important lesson has been the value of creating a mutually beneficial public-private partnership.  Without the commitment and dedication of all involved parties, representing business, higher education, local government and local schools, this program would never have achieved success.  Project Opportunity has helped more than 50 students to-date and has received external recognition.  We look forward to growing that number not only in Stamford, but hopefully in other locations by transferring this model.

United Nations, September 28 – There is now a rising global tide for private sector-NGO-government partnerships and collaboration to address major social issues.

It was manifest during the UN Private Sector Forum 2015 on Saturday, and its spirit carried over to the major addresses by national leaders there today.

More than 300 CEOs, heads of state and civic society leaders and UN officials attended the Private Sector Forum to discuss the future role of business in implementing the UN’s 17 new Sustainable Development Goals. They heard an array of support for that mission from opinion leaders including:

High level support

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon – On implementing the SDGs: “Today we begin tomorrow”.  On a stronger commitment to such partnerships: …“mobilize the global business sector as never before.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel – reflecting on the success of the past 15 years (mainly the UN Millennium Development Goals) and her optimism for the success of the SDGs: “companies are critical to this.”

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg - illustrating the win-win for companies applying core competencies to global social problems, he announced Facebook’s commitment, with the global Connectivity Declaration coalition, to make universal internet access a reality in the next decade:  “For every ten people who get connected to the internet, one gets lifted out of poverty.”

Paul Polman, Unilever CEO – citing the need for companies to improve their transparency and earn increased  trust, and then reporting on the rapid growth of corporate carbon pricing (the latter a Global Compact priority): “The cost of [companies] not acting is greater than acting”.

Early 2030 SDGs advances – fast out of the gate

The UN Private Sector Forum was also the venue for announcement of several substantive early advances related to the SDGs:

. The just-launched Business Action Pledge in Response to the Refugee Crisis which has already generated several new commitments and partnerships for educational opportunities, job training and healthcare for refugees -- as well as funding for refugee aid organizations  in war-torn countries.

. Some 35 corporate commitments to benchmark new sustainable development action programs such as combatting corruption, gender equality in the workplace and strengthening healthcare services in Least Developed Countries.

. The launch of the “SDG Compass” – developed jointly by the Global Reporting Initiative, the UN Global Compact and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development – a guide for private sector development of SDGs strategies, especially through their core business activities.

This momentum for collaboration carried through to today’s General Session as embodied in President Barack Obama’s commitment and entreaties: “I am committing the United States to achieving the sustainable development goals … [we must] galvanize collective action … together we can erase extreme poverty [and] we can roll back the pollution that clouds our skies.”

United Nations, September 25 - The 70th annual United Nations General Assembly today launched a historic global blueprint for addressing the world's most challenging social problems.  

Across the world there are an estimated 8 million children in institutional care, or orphanages. As individuals, and as businesses, we often react emotionally to what we see as the plight of these children. We want to help. We want to do something for them. We want to donate our money and time to them.

However, what if we were actually harming those children further by our well-meaning actions? ‘How on earth can this be?’, you may ask.

Let’s look at the facts. Of those 8 million children in orphanages, research has shown 80% are not orphans. They have one or more living parents. They have families. They could be with their families. They should be with their families. 60 years of research in the west has also proved the harmful effects of institutional care upon children. It is not just physically damaging, it is mentally damaging, stunting development and causing long term emotional harm.

Let’s look at the orphanages themselves. Recently the media focus has turned onto something known as the orphanage business. Take Cambodia, historically a troubled nation but now a stable, developing country, no natural disasters, no conflict, yet a huge increase in the number of orphanages over the last ten years. Where are these orphans coming from? The answer – primarily families. 72% of children in the growing number of institutions there have living parents. Pressure is put onto families by the orphanages to give up their children into institutional care, with the promise of a better life for them. However, most of these institutions are run as businesses, pure and simple, lacking any child protection policies or acceptable standards of care and with the children being the vital ingredient that brings in not only sympathy, but also millions of dollars from overseas donors. The orphanage industry is literally tearing families apart.

If you currently support an orphanage, do you know exactly where your money goes? Do you know exactly what positive impact it has? If not, then find out. Ask questions. How many of the children are true orphans? Is anything being done to reunite children with their families, or to reintegrate them through family based care options? Or better still, stop and think. Is there a better way I can help these children?

The answer is yes. You can redirect you or your company’s efforts away from supporting a fatally flawed industry, the orphanage business, and toward supporting initiatives which help families stay together. It not only makes perfect sense in human terms, it also makes absolute sense in fiscal terms. In Cambodia it’s estimated it costs nine times more to keep a child in institutional care than it would be to support it to be cared for within its family.

The organization Friends-International has 21 years of experience in child welfare and development. It powers the global ChildSafe Movement, which is behind the campaigns ‘Children Are Not Tourist Attractions’ and ‘Don’t Create More Orphans’. Both of these campaigns seek to raise awareness of the crucial issues surrounding the very real harm that institutional care causes to children. To date 35 million people have been exposed to the ChildSafe messages, and the ChildSafe Movement is growing worldwide.

If you or company are currently supporting, or are thinking of supporting institutional or orphanage care options, ChildSafe urges you to think again. Visit the website http://www.thinkchildsafe.org/thinkbeforedonating/  for information and advice on how you can play your part in the global movement to protect children.

Think ChildSafe.

#JoinTheMovement