Can sustainability, green or CSR survive a recession? Take 2
posted by Manisha P Shah on March 26, 2009
The bad news…since Dave Stangis, former Director of CSR at Intel, posed this question almost a year ago, the economic environment has become much worse.
The good news… Dave’s premise then was that CSR, Sustainability and Green aren’t supplements to business success; they are the key ingredients for success in the 21st century seems to be proving true. CSR seems not only to be surviving but thriving during the recession. The New York Times recently ran a blog on Companies Adding Chief Sustainability Officers which said “Amid mounting job woes, at least one position seems to be gaining currency: chief sustainability officer.”
At Intel, we’ve seen a similar trend. While we’ve certainly tightened CSR belts in line with the rest of the corporation, we’ve continued to invest in CSR as an integral part of our business. In the past year, we added a Vice President of Sustainability, incorporated environmental goals into each employee’s bonus structure, made significant investments to extend the reach our educational efforts in math and science, and exceeded our goal of 1M employee volunteer hours for our communities.
Are sustainability, green and CSR just surviving or thriving during the recession at your company? I’m looking forward to hearing what others think at next week at the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship Conference and via this blog.
Comments (1)
tagged: CSR, Green, Recession, Sustainability
Comments
Mar 26 | Carrie said:
Sabre Holdings is about to have it’s annual employee volunteer week, and before we started in with promoting activities, we surveyed employees on their plans for participating to see if the economic changes had impacted their interest.
We were pleasantly surprised to hear greater than 80% plan to participate the same or more than last year. And at 28% global participation we are thrilled to have such an encouraging response.