CAPACITY BUILDING

BELONGING

DEFINED
IMPACT

SUSTAINABILITY IN ANY INDUSTRY (LUXURY TRAVEL)

January 26, 2021

Virgin Voyages’ Director of Social Impact and Sustainability, Jill Stoneberg, talked about the social and environmental responsibility initiatives she leads and gave us an example of how “good choices” can be made in any industry. One of the things that we learned from her work is that regardless of the industry you impact, the brand you work for, or the product you sell, there are always decisions that can drive positive impact, offering a company a way to align social or environmental impact with the company’s ethos.

Making the traveler, client, or consumer contribute to the positive impact is a great strategy. In the practices that Jill outlined, we saw how each Virgin Voyages traveler may not have chosen that travel option solely for sustainability. Still, throughout the customer experience, they are faced with many alternatives personal decisions to make "the good choice", an experience that differentiates Virgin Voyages from their competitors.

IMPACT METRICS & EVALUATION

July 28, 2021

Gestión Social’s Chief Consultants and Partners Paula Garcia de Los Rios and Elisa Giesen, shared with us how they work with companies to customize their process of measuring impact and identify transformational outcomes and KPIs.

We learned how essential evaluating metrics is to know if our initiatives achieve the results we seek and if our strategies and methods are the best way to achieve our goals. But Paula and Elisa made it very clear that we need to emphasize WHAT we’re measuring because rankings or indicators don’t always reflect our strategies within our companies.

The distinction between checkers (or inputs) and what we are working to transform (outputs), and the impact of that work (outcomes/KPIs) is critical.

MIAMI’S INITIATIVES IN CLIMATE RESILIENCE & SUSTAINABILITY

May 26, 2021

There are many companies in Miami that have a department, an action plan, and a series of initiatives with a focus on sustainability. Still, it is important to identify areas in which the private and public sectors may intersect, so we set out to learn about our local government’s agenda regarding climate resilience and sustainability. We invite Nichole Hefty, Deputy Resilience Officer of Miami-Dade County and Alissa Farina, Resilience Programs Manager at the City of Miami to share about Miami’s initiatives when it comes to climate gentrification, sea level rise, and more critical issues locals experience.

In this meeting we learned about our region’s plans to:

Mitigate - reduce sources of climate change and work towards carbon neutrality
Adapt - address specific climate change impacts, with their Stormwater Master Plan, for example
Communicate - engage and connect with locals and partner with key stakeholders
Focus on Biscayne Bay - protecting and restoring natural habitats
Tackle Heat - accelerate efforts to reduce negative effects on communities

CR PROFESSIONALS AND NON-PROFITS
SPEED DATING

Nov 15, 2018

CIC Miami carried out different activations within the organization's space during their second anniversary, one of them being a collaborative experience between non-profits and CR professionals. CIC invited five renowned CR professionals from relevant companies in Miami including Microsoft, VISA, Target, Social Impact Movement, and Danone to meet with 20 non-profit leaders in a speed dating format; quick, half-hour meetings.

It was an impactful opportunity the non-profit leaders and CR professionals just the same. Each learned to cultivate meaningful relationships with one another, came to understand more about their priorities, and identified common threads to share projects or causes that would be beneficial to each other's goals.

ETHICAL BANKING WITH FOUNDER OF MONEY AND AWARENESS NON PROFIT

March 16, 2018

Joan Mele, from Banca Ética, joined as a speaker to reflect with us about how we relate to money as a society. Through his presentation, he made it clear that many of us are often focused solely on leveraging funds to build more wealth when discussing investments. Ultimately, if every investor led with the mindset that their money could be used towards social or environmental good, their funds could solve serious issues such as environmental decline, famine, and poverty.

Mele spoke of the lack of consistency that we fear as a society when investing our money, reflecting how though we are morally against war and certain political decisions, many of our savings and investments fall in the hands of those who make the very decisions we disagree with. Most banks are associated with state and government measures, findings, and issues.

We were invited to make responsible and conscious use of our earned money, and seek an economy that claims the maximum return on cash to create a more equitable and just world, rather than investing our money for the sake of generating more of it.

LANDMARK REPORT by IO SUSTAINABILITY AND THE BABSON INNOVATION LAB

Feb 8, 2018

Maryanne Fiala of Project ROI shared about this bold initiative, which empirically and unequivocally demonstrates the positive impact that CSR can have on a company's results: i) increasing market value by up to 6%; ii) the opportunity of increasing shareholder value by $1.28 billion over 15 years; iii) increasing revenue by up to 20%; iv) reducing the company's staff turnover rate by up to 50%, and v) increasing employee productivity by up to 13%.

We discussed the historic letter written by Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the world's largest investment firm, to the CEOs of the firms in his vast portfolio. Maryann has shared ACCP's response to the letter entitled: "The Letter We've Been Waiting For," in which the ACCP CEO states that this is a defining moment for the CSR profession. She claims "if the world's largest investment firm is creating an imperative for sustainability and social investment, we as CSR professionals must seize this moment."