Reflections on a Decade of CSR/ESG & Technology
Cosmo Cafe on Thambu Chetty Street at Perry’s Corner, with the Madras High Court in the distance. Our CSR/ESG consultancy HQ neighborhood in 2011.
Our big take-away from 2011? Invest in people. Nothing has changed. Our 2023 end of year long-read wrap up.
I’m currently writing my second book called Work Your Values: How Professionals Find Purpose. It is a guide of sorts for corporate professionals who are trying to focus on purpose in their professional life that can add value to their brand and their personal spirit. One of the techniques I recommend in the book is to research your own milestones through the years to illuminate clues on how far you’ve come in the development of your own purpose.
This year, I’ve taken my own advice and am looking back at the years I worked as an international Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)/ Environment, Society, Governance (ESG) advisor for business and government. As always, I was pretty amazed by my findings… the core values from then shaped and informed the eventual founding of HeroBridge by Deborah and I in 2018.
“Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.” - Bill Gates
Bill Gates is right…our nascent ideas in 2011 about how technology and mentorship could drive lasting sustainability are now in 2024 the core value system of our business. In 2011, we knew we needed to take an evidentiary approach to sustainable business practices to verify progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s). From 160 bit SMS tech to our own mentor app and LLM GPT in 2023, the ride has been amazing, but our focus was always been on designing and proving better outcomes.
In 2011, as well as now through SIE Society, we have been members of the UN Global Compact for sustainable business.
I’m a reporter/auditor by nature (due to my legal background in risk management and corporate communications) so finding our ‘purpose’ breadcrumbs that went back to 2011 wasn’t difficult. One of the reporting platforms I’ve always thought was great for any business is the UN Global Compact, which acts as a sustainability design guideline that requires members to report their progress on SDG’s annually through a written, public Communication on Progress (COP). I thought I’d share some of the highlights of our 2011 COP report to 1) show how long we’ve been puzzling the tech-mentorship connection to create better predictable outcomes for ESG; and 2) illuminate the foundations of HeroBridge’s value system as it relates to developing sustainability plans that were good for business (on three bottom lines) and produced accounting feedback that provided actual impact valuation across three bottom lines.
The summary I provide below may be valuable for anyone interested in CSR and a glimpse into the dawn of the conscious consumer era we all now take for granted. For me they are nostalgic of the scar tissue Deborah and I earned that planted the foundational seeds of wisdom for HeroBridge and my role as head of CSR at the Social Impact Entertainment Society. If you want to make change, get ready for pain. Pain is in fact excellence entering the body. Good luck in 2024 and please enjoy this trip into our own Way Back Machine:
Recap: UN Global Compact COP 2011
Theni, India: CSR TECHNOLOGY + ILLY ORGANIC COFFEE
No matter how many roads are paved and rails laid will the supply line issue be resolved. The weakest link in the supply chain, and the link that bears the greatest stress is the farmer. The problem rests with the lack of farmer empowerment. Our recent trials of farmer networks and 'knowledge centers' have put key business data like weather, harvest scheduling and market rates in the hands of farmers through the humble cell phone. 'E farming' is key to empowering and modernizing the business side of farming and assuring the farmer’s coop is equipped with the basic data sets needed to be a competitive and successful player and self sufficient professional. This new but welcome technology is changing the lives of many farmers. The key supply line issue is one of networks.
Delhi & Arunachal Pradesh, India: THREE BOTTOM LINE (3BL) PLANNING + DEPT SCI & TECH: SUSTAINABLE FARMING
The project was to design a best of breed vertically integrated enterprise that included everything from propagation to harvest and even the adoption of villages where workers and their families reside. Audits of soil preservation, carbon credits and micro-climate considerations are other factors that can be included in the input/output cost as a value addition that farmers appreciate and in sum, become empowered. The farmer families know what they are getting at market, the processor has the peace of mind of secure raw material at a fixed cost, and a sustainable supply line is established.
Delhi, India & Samlot, Cambodia: CSR + DEI + GENDER EQUALITY
CSR (/DEI) is the solution as opposed to … legislation and reliance on the regulatory mandates of an already stressed judiciary. Only through the consumer demand that corporations abide by a standard of equality, will the atrocities of female injustice be curbed and eventually reversed. Corporations that establish a CSR regime that actively monitors its upstream and downstream equality policies can expect brand equity returns and workforce improvements that come with community relations and social development. This integrated returns paradigm (corporate and community) if adopted by 10 companies, 100 companies, 1000 and so on would have the desired effect of geometry and lasting revolution and equitable socio-economic change. Next year we are launching our commercial scale 3BL pro-woman initiative.
Chennai, India + NY, USA: CSR Design + Sutherland Group
We are the project manager and third party verifier that the client-company respects human rights as planned in the feasibility study/ plan of action. These factors are observed and measured using technology in real time throughout the project management and routinely clients require us to monitor metrics. In a word, the solution is integration. More accurately, a CSR plan that has auditable criteria, is de-compartmentalized and adopts an approach to development that measures commercial, human and ecological returns. It’s a model that works anywhere, whether India, U.S.A. or Burma.
COP Report Conclusion:
ACCOUNTABLE EVIDENCE OF IMPACT
’In many ways we were steered by gravity from our beginnings as workforce attrition and business energy auditors, toward designing more sustainable ESG, CSR and 3BL plans. The transformation has been intuitive and directed by our mission-culture. Our advancement on SDG’s is that we’ve better learned how to grow sustainable workforce in challenging background environments. There is simply no better joy than to create and facilitate the networks for replicable integrated systems that connect and empower the historically oppressed, marginalized and insecure. To not merely throw charitable funds at a problem or at a people as a means of development or advancement on SDGs.
Further, our economist arm has been keen to relate the benefit and efficiency of 3BL planning and calculation for the value of natural resource services. Groups such as The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB (now the Natural Capital Coalition & A4S)) have been an invaluable source of advice, resources, inspiration and information to this end.
Genuine CSR demonstrates how properly managed internal and external processes can create parallel profit streams to their workers, their families, their environment and their nation. And if that is not enough to convince the ‘board’, CSR case studies use auditable data to show conclusively that those parallel social and eco profits create ‘real’ corporate profit in the form of increased revenues, goodwill brand equity, lower overheads, reduced taxation and a healthier loyal workforce with lower attrition. This forensic, tech-enabled and evidence driven approach makes CSR a concept boards can accept, because they understand it in the terms they are accustomed to dealing.
(The highlight of this year is that) we’ve proven that a cheap and ubiquitous mobile technology can be used to effectively connect rural farmers to meteorologists, market updates and their own cooperatives’ collective bargaining and resources. The power of technology has delivered to people a tool for change.
