Corporate sustainability is “too important to ax”
One recent Bloomberg study of 500 professionals surveyed, 85 percent of investors say environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) leads to “better returns, resilient portfolios and enhanced fundamental analysis,” while roughly the same amount of C-suite executives say ESG helps them “shape a more robust corporate strategy.” But Tufts University professor Ken Pucker notes that conflating ESG as an investment strategy with efforts to curb carbon emissions and promote planetary welfare is not helpful. “[Neither] corporate sustainability nor ESG investing will deliver #market #outperformance nor do they allocate capital to the growing gap needed to assure a climate transition.” Read the article and Pucker’s commentary.
Set 2024 social impact goals by studying 2023 data
In the past three to five years, enterprise companies' stakeholders have significantly raised their expectations for corporate social impact, and most legacy technology solutions simply haven't been keeping up. To show you’re ahead of the curve in 2024, your program and your software needs to be in harmony on several crucial points. There are five things you must consider when calculating your social impact in 2024. Read why.
How “ESG” came to mean everything and nothing
Confusion around what “ESG” does and does not refer to, from climate-driven investing to corporate purpose, has not slowed down the meteoric rise of ESG funds. From 2022 to 2026, ESG funds may manage as much as $33.9 trillion. For a thoughtful explanation of how we got here and where the social impact movement is going next, read Kristen Talman in the BBC.
A short history of GivingTuesday
It may surprise you to learn that one of the most popular social media Did you know that GivingTuesday started at the 92nd Street YMCA in New York City? “It was a deliberate choice not to have intellectual property,” Rob Reich, a Stanford political philosopher and early GivingTuesday organizer, told Vox. “We had a website with a logo but it was not copyrighted. You could use the hashtag, you could do whatever you wanted with it. Everyone could put their own content into it, with the hope it could spread.” Learn the full story.
What is a “stakeholder value statement”?
Is there a robust way to capture our companies’ relationship with the natural environment and their place in human society? Columbia Business School’s Shiva Rajgopal thinks so. From measuring natural capital—that’s “the economic value that natural assets provide to society—from fish stocks and forests to the quality of our shared air and water”—to the many ways that employees, suppliers, and consumers themselves bring value to a company, Rajgopal proposes a new way to speak to all our stakeholders. Check it out in Forbes.
Five minutes with Kyndryl's Monoswita Saha
Monoswita Saha is the Global Employee Engagement Leader for CSR at Deed's incredible partner Kyndryl. Recently, Saha sat down with social impact professional network Nation Swell to talk about the launch of the new Kyndryl Foundation. "When we were weighing the decision to launch, it really came down to our commitment to power progress," Saha said, "a kind of progress that extends out to the communities where our employees live and work, allowing us to drive meaningful and systemic impact at scale." Read the full conversation.
