posted by Suzanne Fallender on October 26, 2009
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the annual SRI in the Rockies conference - the leading annual gathering of socially responsible investors and research firms. The conference itself was born in the Rockies with a small group of SRI groups, but has since grown to +500 participants and now has expanded to lower altitude locations. The conference kicked off Sunday in Tucson, AZ.
It’s actually my seventh time at this conference - and this year is a little bittersweet for me (and I’m sure for many of the other long-time participants). The last time they held the conference in Tucson was September 11th, 2001. I lived in Washington, DC at the time, and ended up on a 54-hour bus ride back with about 30 other east-coast participants. Living less than a mile from the Pentagon at the time and with many family and friends in NY, being stranded so far away only added to the anxiety and sadness - and let’s just say I felt at the time that if I never set foot in Arizona again, well - that would be just fine.
Well, fast forwarding eight years, I keep finding myself thinking about how much has changed - in my own life (I now call Arizona home), in the world, and in the fields of socially responsible investing and corporate responsibility. On this last point, we have more companies than ever publicly reporting on the environmental, social and governance data, more companies are discussing climate change risk in their 10-K filings, and we’re even talking about how to use social media in CSR communications and stakeholder engagement. In 2001, social media wasn’t even a term.
But this return of SRIITR to Tucson, also serves as a reminder of how much still hasn’t changed. On the “hasn’t” front, I’m generally an optimistic, glass half full kind of person. But we still have significant challenges in more deeply integrating CSR into corporate strategy and culture, into financial evaluations of companies, and more effectively building public-private partnerships to address societal challenges.
Intel’s come a long way since 2001 - but we continue to look for areas where we can improve and for opportunities to engage to address key issues - from climate change - to water conservation - to bridging the digital divide. So, for the next two days, I’ll be meeting with some of the best thinkers in this space about how to continue to gather their input and feedback and what innovative things they’d like to see Intel do in the coming year.
You can also help provide input to our CSR strategy and next year’s CSR report - check out our new contest module on Justmeans.com - submit your recommendation and as thanks for your time and input, we’ll enter you for a chance to win a Flip Mino HD camera.
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tagged: #csr, #justmeans, #srir09, Intel
posted by Lucy Kuria on October 26, 2009
Our journey started on Saturday morning US time, arriving in Kenya on Sunday night Kenya time, after 3 plane transfers, missed connections and lost baggage. Flew to Kisumu on Monday morning to be received by Alphonce Okuku, Director of Kageno Trust, at the Kisumu airport and arrived at Rusinga Island, on Lake Victoria, on Monday afternoon (after a car and ferry ride).
Kageno Trust has a solar equipped vehicle that’s used to charge up to 14 classmate PCs (they only have 7), a teacher’s PC and also powers a wireless router which connects the teacher’s computer to the Classmate PCs. Rusinga Island has no electricity or running water, so the Computer Program facilitators, Nguka and Justus, drive the vehicle to schools around the island to give students an opportunity to have hands on computer training.
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tagged: classmate PC, Education, IESC, Intel Education Service Corps, Kageno Trust, Kenya
posted by Bibhuti Banerjee on October 20, 2009
On Wednesday, Oct. 14th., the four members of the Intel Education Service Corps met for the very first time over breakfast in a Dhaka hotel, after travelling halfway around the world from Arizona (Bob), Mumbai (Surya), California (Noor), and Oregon (Taslema).
Afterwards, we met with Save the Children USA officials at their Bangladesh headquarters in Dhaka. Security and Human Resource briefings were followed by a review of STC’s programs in Bangladesh, focusing on Early Childhood Development and Basic Education in their chosen impact area of Meherpur. This is the district in Bangladesh with least access to education and very high dropout rates in primary school. Margarita Clark, the Deputy Country Director for Save the Children USA’s Bangladesh program, emphasized the need to develop evidence-based, replicable solutions to enable all children to be successful learners. This is where the 60 Classmate PCs donated by Intel’s World Ahead program to Save The Children USA in Bangladesh will allow a pilot education initiative to take shape, deploying English language and mathematics learning software being developed by Save The Children.
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tagged: Bangladesh, Education, IESC, Intel Education Service Corps, primary schools, Save the Children
posted by Suzanne Fallender on October 15, 2009
Addressing climate change is not something new for us. But how we are now looking at the issue is.
As a company, Intel has taken steps to measure and reduce the carbon footprint of our operations for many years now. We’ve been publicly reporting our greenhouse gas emissions, both in our annual CSR report and through the Carbon Disclosure Project, which recently recognized us in their 2009 Carbon Disclosure Leadership Index. We’ve invested millions of dollars in energy efficiency and resource conservation projects throughout our global operations and we took the step in 2008 to become the largest purchaser of green power in the U.S. according to the EPA, with the goal of hopefully stimulating the market for renewable energy over the long-term.
But today, we are spending more time looking at our products as well. Over the past few years, we’ve focused on also continuing to reduce the carbon footprint of our products, committing ourselves to being the leader in energy efficient performance. We’re already seeing results of this shift - we estimate that between 2006 and 2008, products based on the Intel® Core™ microarchitecture-including desktop, notebook, and server computers-used 20 terawatt hours less electricity than products powered by our previous-generation architecture would have. What’s 20 terawatts? Roughly equivalent to the energy savings associated with averting 15 million tons of energy-related CO2 emissions or removing 3 million cars from the road.
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tagged: #BAD09, #csr, #sustainability, Carbon Disclosure Project, carbon footprint, climate change, DESC, eco-technology, energy efficient performance, environment, Intel, smart2020
posted by Paige Johnson on October 15, 2009
Recently, at a conference on education reform, I heard a state superintendent from one of the country’s highest performing states share a comment I found concerning. He said he believed there would be a tension between meeting more rigorous common core standards and personalizing learning for students to make schools relevant and engaging to learners.
While I have a lot of personal respect for this man, I think his comment reflects a common misperception that our country has to overcome in order for school improvement to succeed. As I sat in the conference room, looking around at a sizeable crowd of over-40-somethings, it occurred to me that educational, corporate and government leaders need to be promoting exactly the opposite message. I think the only way we will have all students meet rigorous standards is to make the learning completely personal, relevant and engaging.
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tagged: 21st century skills, CSR, education reform, inspire, Intel education, Policy, student engagement
posted by Suzanne LeGette on October 14, 2009
Remember the age of Web 1.0? Back when it took all night to download one song on a 57k dial-up? Today we have broadband and iTunes and dial-up is a distant memory in the era of Web 2.0. According to Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle, organizers of the upcoming Web 2.0 Summit, “To understand where the Web is going, it helps to return to one of the fundamental ideas underlying Web 2.0, namely that successful network applications are systems for harnessing collective intelligence, meaning that a large group of people can create a collective work whose value far exceeds that provided by any of the individual participants.” Like for example, the Web 2.0 intersection of volunteer computing and social media that is Progress Thru Process (PTP). I wrote about the PTP Facebook application six days ago when it had just over 127,000 fans. Today it has 129,596 fans. All the fans who have downloaded the PTP application are donating their spare CPU cycles to power humanitarian research. Their collective CPU power ranks in the top 250 of the world’s supercomputers. PTP is a demonstration of how Web 2.0 provides people like you and me, one by one, the collective power to do something, amazing.
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tagged: Progress Thru Processors, social media, volunteer computing, Web 2.0
posted by Suzanne Fallender on October 13, 2009
Here’s a great example of what I mean when I talk about successes in Intel’s ongoing strategy to “embed CSR more deeply into the business.” Over the past year, Intel’s IT departmentr has embraced and taken ownership of driving sustainability into their organization and identifying ways that their group can help Intel achieve our corporate-wide sustainability goals.
They’ve just launched the first of a series of videos - Making IT Real - which features Intel employee Mike Breton who’s been working (at home and in his role at Intel) to identify ways to reduce energy use through the application of IT. Mike’s been blogging about his work as well on the IT@Intel site.
Our IT group has posted some recent whitepapers as well, “Building a long-term strategy for IT sustainability” and “Establishing baseline measurements and a roadmap for IT sustainability” - which share our experiences in measuring the impact of our initiatives, and hopefully help our customers and other companies looking to reduce their energy use and drive change through their IT organizations as well.
For more background, see video of Diane Bryant, VP and CIO - on the tie between the sustainability initiatives of her organization and the connection to business value.
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tagged: #csr, #sustainability, embedding CSR, intel_it, it_sustainability, mike breton
posted by Suzanne LeGette on October 08, 2009
In August, Intel launched a project through Facebook - Progress thru Processors (PTP) and since then 127,000 people have become fans of the application which allows a user's computer to supply CPU power for humanitarian research. These users have demonstrated that the power of Social Media can make a difference. To date PTP users are collectively producing about 70 Gigaflops years worth of processing power every day. A Gigaflop by the way, is about a billion "floating point operations per second."
Volunteer computing used to be a concept familiar only to those who could instantly rattle off the definition of a Gigaflop. But thanks to Intel's collaboration with GridRepublic and UC Berkeley's BOINC computing labs, the power of volunteer computing is being introduced to millions of Facebook account holders. Measured all together the computing power of PTP would rank in the top 250 of the world's super computers.
That power is going to help research projects like Rosetta@home, ClimatePrediction.net and Africa@home, provide solutions for a variety of issues affecting our planet, from AIDS and malaria to helping combat global warming.
This intersection of volunteer computing with social media provides a very easy way for computer users to be actively engaged in helping solve some of the world's complex problems...one byte at a time. Join us on the PTP Facebook fan page - where you too can find the power to make a difference.
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tagged: facebook, Progress Thru Processors, social media, volunteer computing
posted by Suzanne Fallender on October 07, 2009
Dr. Sharon Nunes from IBM, opened her remarks on her panel at yesterday’s annual summit of the Women’s Network for a Sustainable Future (WNSF) in NYC, noting that in her career as an engineer, she rarely finds herself in a room full of women or with a long line at the bathroom. But at this event, she was in the majority.
A group of around 200 women (and yes a handful of men) working in corporate responsibility and sustainability gathered to share best practices and discuss ways to personally drive change in their companies, including panelists from Walmart, DuPont, IBM, Pfizer, TIAA-CREF, and the White House. The White House? Yes, today even the federal government’s challenging itself with new sustainability goals. The women who presented talked about how they are each applying the specific strengths and capabilities of their industry and organization to specific global challenges - from using technology to conserve water to public-private partnerships in healthcare to leveraging purchasing power to drive chain in the supply chain.
My main takeaway from the event was that a lot of the large companies that have been at this sustainability thing for a long time are facing similar challenges - moving to the next level of maturity along the CSR curve. We’re moved past some of the biggest hurdles of making the business case internally, we’re tracking and reporting on performance metrics, and we’re engaging directly with environmental groups who we used to shy away from. We’re working to engage our employee bases to embed these concepts into the culture and uncover new innovative ideas in the process. I wouldn’t say that we’ve quite reached “adulthood” yet - there’s still a ways for all of us to go - but perhaps we can say we’ve made it squarely into the “teenage” years.
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tagged: #csr, #sustainability, #wnsfny09, DuPoint, IBM, Intel, Pfizer, Suzanne Fallender, TIAA-CREF, Walmart, WNSF
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