Much to Be Thankful For

The year 2009 has brought many hardships and challenges to the global community. Despite that fact, this week the U.S. gives its annual thanks for continued abundance and prosperity (national holiday Thanksgiving). While it may not seem so on the surface, there is much to be thankful for the world over. As we say on this side of the Big Pond, the best way to keep a positive attitude is by “counting your blessings.” The following is a progress report of some of the important initiatives enacted by the G20 nations to safeguard the global economy for the future.
The Era is Over
Several months ago, the G20 nations promised that the “era of banking secrecy is over.” Also pledged in the G20 Summit and in discussions throughout the world this year is that the era of U.S. “cowboy economics” is over as well. The world’s nations are adopting a more cautious approach to finance using the painful lessons learned over the past decade.
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New Initiatives in the Global Top 20 Economies
An angry and determined G20 met this Spring in London to discuss the ending of an era of American-style “anything goes” capitalism. The death-knell came for U.S. financial supremacy as the follow-the-leader crowd of G20 countries followed the American bulls right off the cliff to insolvency. To resolve the crisis, huge banking bailouts were drafted by Germany, France, the UK, and the U.S. as well as emergency measures throughout the European Union and G20 nations. The crisis has ushered in a new era of global fiscal responsibility. The G20 has created a template for global regulatory changes.
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Policy Changes at the International Monetary Fund
The IMF, one of the top strategists of the G20 Summit in London, agreed to increase resources for troubled economies to $750bn. The G20 will also contribute $250bn to boost trade. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the G20 will “crackdown on tax havens” and draft “stricter controls of bankers’ pay and bonuses.” 
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G20 New Initiatives: Pittsburgh Summit
The major outcome of the Pittsburgh Summit (September 2009) is that the G20 will permanently replace the G8. The financial crisis has revealed how interconnected the 20 nations are in the 21st century global economy. The new G20 policy will include developing countries like China, India, Brazil, and Indonesia.
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CSR Minute: 11/27/2009 – Timberland’s Help Haiti’s Climate Campaign; American Cancer Society Award

Corporate Social Responsibility News: Timberland’s Climate and Haiti Help Campaigns; American Cancer Society’s Corporate Impact Awards

In CSR, Dialogue and Substance Each Inform the Other

Just read an outstanding article on corporate social responsibility at Forbes.com.  C. B. Bhattacharya, a distinguished professor at the European School of Management and Technology and Boston University, really hits some important CSR insights spot on.

Despite CSR’s increasing importance in board rooms and among C-level executives, they often “don’t understand the most effective ways to design and implement sustainability programs,” Bhattacharya says.  As a result, “they can’t fully capitalize on the potential [CSR] has for creating business value, and they are achieving little with it despite all their interest,” he adds.

So far, most businesses have focused on the “low-hanging fruit” of CSR.  They have focused on easy-win strategies or activities with direct commercial benefits, such as energy-efficiency initiatives.  This misses the bigger picture.

What Bhattacharya says he is slowly starting to see is a “second wave of corporate responsibility behavior marked by a clearer focus on the total business value such policies can bring.”  “To fully benefit from corporate responsibility, businesses . . . must start by seeing where and how key stakeholders react to a firm’s corporate responsibility initiatives,” which “involves moving away from a top-down strategy determined by the board to a richer process of bottom-up co-creation with stakeholders.” [emphasis added]

Bhattacharya then talks about using focus groups and “other marketing research techniques to understand the deeper psychological needs that corporate responsibility can answer for stakeholders, such as the self-esteem and pride that a consumer can draw from affiliating with a socially responsible company.”  I’m surprised he doesn’t mention social media in this regard, which my firm now considers one of the most powerful such tools for understanding and learning from target audiences.

Bhattacharya cites research involving Procter & Gamble, General Mills and Timberland (without specifying a source) that revealed that many of their stakeholders had no idea of the companies’ corporate responsibility initiatives, or had a very limited understanding.  This is consistent with another recent study by Grail Research that we describe in our last blog post.

Now, he says, those companies have been able to build stronger connections with their stakeholders by including active participation and engagement in their initiatives. This “stakeholder-centric approach has brought them observable improvements in corporate responsibility return, such as increased customer and employee loyalty.”

This fits in precisely with an approach I’m outlining in a white paper we’ll be releasing soon, which lists the most effective ways to design and implement sustainability programs in order of priority, starting with stakeholder engagement.  We believe that the dialogue with stakeholders and the substance of the CSR program each informs the other.

The approach Bhattacharya describes in his article and our forthcoming white paper both look at CSR as a more systemic process for creating business value over time.  We believe, as does he apparently, that this process best starts by co-creating solutions with all stakeholders.  We see sustainability as so broad and complex in scope that crowd sourcing is a must in solving our most intractable problems, while remaining prosperous.

via 3blmedia.com

GoodGuide’s New iPhone App Scans for Green Products

by Jessica Knoblauch, 11/25/09

Making environmentally conscious consumer choices can be difficult when walking down supermarket aisles awash with hyper-marketed products. Enter GoodGuide, who has just released a new barcode scanning iPhone application that gives shoppers the power to seek out socially conscious products, right in the palm of their hand.

Just like the GoodGuide website, the new barcode scanner application draws from a wealth of independent, scientific information on the health, social and environmental performance of more than 50,000 consumer items and companies to provide instant product ratings to shoppers. GoodGuide licensed Occipital’s state-of-the-art RedLaser barcode scanning technology for its new application.

Simply by scanning the barcode with an iPhone, consumers can find out the nitty-gritty details of their favorite personal care, household chemical, toy and food products. Wondering whether that household cleaner you’re eyeing is toxic? Just scan it! Shoppers even help pick the products to be rated next based on which ones they scan most frequently. Best of all, GoodGuide’s newest application is available for free from Apple’s iTunes App Store.

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Violence against women: the world’s most widespread and unpunished crime

It has been estimated that at least one in every three women around the globe “has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime.” This violence occurs with impunity and transcends geography, race, class or religious orientation. United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) states in their publication Not A Minute More: Ending Violence Against Women (NY, 2003) that violence against women “may constitute one of the most universal and unpunished crimes of all.” 

In 1993, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the watershed Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women, in which violence was defined as “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion, or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or private life” (Office of the United Nations High Commission on Human Rights, OHCHR).
 
The pervasive and widespread pandemic of violence against females requires greater consideration than ever as tens of millions of women and girls are being abused daily. Take a closer look at some of the issues facing women today:
 
Sex-selective abortions, the killing of babies born female – female infanticide – and fetal neglect have caused clear and shocking disproportions between the sexes. It is estimated that there are between 50 million to 100 million less females on the planet due to sex-selected discrimination and infanticide.
 
Of the 2 million children being indentured into sexual servitude, it is estimated that 80 to 90% of them are girls (International Labor Organization, 2000).
 
The majority of all incest victims are girls and it is estimated that up to three times more girls are likely to experience sexual abuse than boys during their childhood.
 
It is estimated that between 100 million to 140 million girls have undergone some form of genital mutilation.
 
The United Nations estimated that an average of five women are killed per day in India by “accidental” fires set by husbands or in-laws whose demands for full payment of the wife’s dowry have not been met.
 
“Honor Killings,” executions of women by family members who feel she has in some way dishonored them. These killings oftentimes occur with little or no consequence.
 
War rape, used as a systematic weapon, has shattered the lives of millions of women.
 
 
Women form the majority of the world’s poor. Seventy percent of people living in poverty – those surviving on less than $1.00 a day – are women (Center for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces).
 
Two-thirds of the world’s illiterate people are women.
 
Women own a mere one percent of the world’s land.
 
It is important to understand that violence against women does not just happen in other parts of the world. The United States Surgeon General has stated that violence against women by their intimate partner “poses the single greatest threat to all American women” (UNDP).
 
In the USA alone, there were 700,000 women raped in 2008. You would think there was a war against women based on these statistics alone.
 
In the United States, 24% of women who marry will experience physical abuse by their intimate partner.
 
On the most basic and fundamental level, in the United States, women get paid 25% less for the very same work done by a man.
 
Women only account for 17% of congressional seats, and only 8 of the 50 state governorships.
 
The preamble of the Declaration states that “violence against women is one of the crucial social mechanisms by which women are forced into a subordinate position compared to men” (OHCHR). In exploring why this is, it states that “violence against women is a manifestation of historically unequal power relations between men and women, which have led to domination over and discrimination against women by men and to the prevention of the full advancement of women” (OHCHR).
 
The conclusion of the World Economic Forum’s study on the global gender gap states the problem clearly: “The reality is that no country in the world, no matter how advanced has achieved true gender equality, as measured by comparable decision making power, equal opportunity for education and advancement, and equal participation and status in all walks of human endeavor” (Lopez-Claros and Zahidi, 2005).
 
In conclusion, the World Health Organization has stated that “something that greatly encourages violence – and is a formidable obstacle in responding to it – is complacency.” In the Greater Mekong region, where treaties have been signed between governments to end human trafficking, relatively little is done to enforce these laws because human trafficking is viewed as a “soft crime” as no one is killed. It is this type of complacency that does, and continues to, reinforce violent attitudes towards women.
 
PeaceKeeper Cause-Metics wants to share this information with you to continue a dialogue on how to rewrite history in a way that eliminates the dominance of any one group of individuals. Founder Jody R. Weiss describes this new paradigm as neither a patriarchy nor a matriarchy where gender is a determining ruling factor, but rather a system formed by a “collaborative interconnectivity.”
 
Until Collaborative Interconnection can truly be realized between men and women, the way to raise a woman out of poverty and abuse is to give her an economic option and a sustainable trade. This is why PeaceKeeper buys raw ingredients from third-world women’s cooperatives and offers micro-credit loans to women farmers (who produce between 60 and 80% of food supplies in developing countries). When a woman can sustain herself, she is opening up options that will enable her to beat the odds. Additionally, PeaceKeeper has made mini-sized make-up samples for women to sell as an economic option in their village, setting them free to direct their own future.
 
Finally, it has never been more evident that women of privilege have a unique opportunity to speak on behalf of women and children who have no voice for themselves. PeaceKeeper is inviting women of means to use a greater consciousness when buying consumables. How was the product manufactured? Is a woman being exploited in labor servitude in order for us to have that product? Women of wealth can use their buying power to either endorse products that sustain the planet or boycott products that don’t. This small act could actually have a monumental impact on the lives of women. As an example, if women of privilege stopped traveling to countries that signed a treaty to stop human trafficking but meanwhile refuse to enforce it, those countries might start to think differently about how they uphold this law in the face of losing tourism dollars.
 
In closing, the pandemic of violence against women and girls cannot and must not be ignored. it is a moral imperative that will define the future of our planet for generations to come. Many of the facts listed in this article were from a book by the United Nation’s OCHA called Broken Bodies, Broken Dreams – Violence Against Women Exposed. To learn more about this and other OCHA publications visit www.ocha.org. To make a donation to PeaceKeeper Fund which gives micro-credit loans to support women in a sustainable trade visit their website at www.iamapeacekeeper.com.

via 3blmedia.com