Page 24 – Sustainability Academy

The Centre for Sustainability and Excellence (CSE) marks a decade in providing high caliber certified training in sustainability for C-Suite executives & CSR Managers worldwide. In Europe in these ten years, Executives from leading organizations, including Unilever, Heineken, Toyota, EBRD, Shell, Exxon Mobil, Atos, Ikea, Lidl, Janssen, Pfizer, Word Bank, United Nations and many more were certified as sustainability professionals.

CSE successfully delivered on the 1^st and 2^nd of March in London the Advanced Version 2018 of Certified Sustainability Practitioner Program. This high level professional training was fully booked and once again CSE managed to bring together professionals from different countries and continents (Europe, Asia and Australia), fields and companies who joined this two day workshop, eager in further developing and enhancing their business strategies through CSR frameworks.

CSE is now holding the next Global Advanced Certified Sustainability (CSR) Practitioner Program (CMI Approved) in Europe. In Bucharest on the 21^st and 22^nd of June the advanced training will on focus on UN SDG’s, GRI Standards, recent sustainability reporting trends according to CSE research findings, legislation and other key challenges on sustainability.

Additionally, CSE has already announced new dates for the Certified Sustainability Practitioner Program in London and made the promise to be back in the city for another successful event on the 6^th and 7^th of December 2018.

We will continuously strive to offer you more knowledge and expertise, to support and coach you through specialized trainings, modern tools and innovative methods. Together we can increase the momentum for the sustainability movement globally.

Stay tuned for the promising event in Bucharest this June and in London this December!

The Centre for Sustainability and Excellence celebrates 10 years of trust from global FT 500 corporations and executives to provide Sustainability Education in the US and Canada.

Over the past 10 years, more than 6,000 executives from leading organizations including NASA, Coca-Cola, Walmart, Timberland, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Microsoft, L’Oréal, Chevron, Cigna, PWC, T–Mobile, Procter & Gamble, and Macy’s were certified as sustainability professionals.

CSE successfully delivered on the 8^th and 9^th of March in Atlanta and on 26^th and 27^th in Toronto the Advanced Version 2018 of the Certified Sustainability Practitioner Program. These high level professional trainings were fully booked, and once again CSE brought together professionals from different countries, fields and companies who joined this two-day workshop, eager to further develop and enhance their business strategies through CSR frameworks.

“The workshop was delivered by dynamic and knowledgeable instructors. It was a very comprehensive and practical training, attended by participants from all sectors of the economy,” says Prof. Stephan Vachon, who attended the Toronto training. Vachon is chair of the Masters of Environment and Sustainability program at the Ivey Business School, the #1MBA program in Canada, and top-ranked globally. “I recommend it to anyone who wants a thorough and up-to-date overview of sustainability aspects in businesses.”

Additionally, professionals from 3 continents, North America, Europe and the Middle East, are participating in the quickly approaching global event in NYC this June 11-12, in order to become certified and recognized as Sustainability CSR-P Practitioners by CSE and the Chartered Management Institute (CMI).

CSE is in preparations for this third in a row Global Advanced Certified Sustainability (CSR) Practitioner Program (CMI Approved) in North America. For its fourth training in Houston on the 27^th and 28^th of September, the advanced training will focus on the UN SDGs, GRI Standards, sustainability reporting trends according to CSE research, national and international legislation and other key challenges in sustainability. Stay tuned for the promising event in Houston!

CSE training in New York City builds on Earth Day lessons and NYC’s sustainability issues as an international hub.

Chicago, date ~ With Earth Day in mind, CSE is preparing for the New York City Certified Sustainability Practitioner Program (2018 Advanced Edition), June 11-12, 2018.

Earth Day – April 21 – in NYC will include the usual festivals, park hikes, and fundraisers. Many will focus on plastics – the UN theme for the day. For a port city, plastics in the water is an important issue. This year’s focus will include upcycle demonstrations – integral to supply chains.

Also key to urban centers – transportation. From 9:00 am to 3:00 pm on Earth Day, Broadway between 26th and 47th Street will be car-free. At least one Broadway theater is going green.

Every kind of business imaginable will be participating, assessing their own impact. Do you know how to assess yours?

In Atlanta, CSE focused on Supply Chain. Atlanta is a hub to many local and global companies. The Atlanta international airport is the busiest in the world. EarthShare of GA, whose Earth Day festivities are region wide, joined participants from Macy’s, PWC and even the Latino network Univision in CSE’s training.

Tailoring the training to highlight Supply Chain issues made sense. A company’s supply chain makes a significant impact and yet can be its biggest challenge in promoting human rights, fair labor practices, environmental progress and anti-corruption policies.

Earth Day is about more than the ground we stand on – it’s about the people who eat Mother Earth’s food, drink her waters and care for each other. CSE designed our Toronto training to highlight SROI – Social Return on Investment. SROI measures Earth Day values beyond financial statements. It is the next evolution in sustainability accounting.

Both Supply Chain management and SROI are important tools in the CSE Certified Sustainability Practitioner training which will be presented in NYC in June. We will also be in Houston, Sept.27, and by popular demand, back to Toronto, Oct. 25, 2018.

Led by award-winning CSE founder, Nikos Avlonas, CSE’s trainings provide the foundation trusted by Fortune Global 500 executives and needed to help corporations make every day an Earth Day. What tools do you need? Register now and let us know.

Social entrepreneurship is considered to be “the use of startup companies and other entrepreneurs to develop, fund and implement solutions to social, cultural, or environmental issues.”

Social entrepreneurs bring innovation and deliver change in various areas, such as the environment and society. They go beyond the traditional routes and they do that through an invention or a different application or approach of an existing technology or practice. Their priority is to create social value above all, the financial value comes second. Ultimately, entrepreneurs innovate by finding a new service, product or new approach as a solution to a social problem.

Social entrepreneurship is used as a term both as for non-profit organizations and organizations which blend for-profit goals with generating a positive “return to society”

Perhaps the most well known example of social entrepreneurship is the one of Tom’s shoes: the innovative use of the “ One for One” business model, in which for each purchase of a pair of shoes by a consumer, a gift of a free pair of shoes is given to a poor child in a developing country.

A social entrepreneur believes that everyone potentially can contribute to a social cause meaningfully and bring change to the world. He takes risks, he is persistent, optimistic, innovative and with high standards.

In order to become a social entrepreneur it is of great importance to take certain steps:

Find your purpose, your goal, and the change you want to bring to this world and determine how.

Create a unique, different offering which does not exist already. It is important for your offering to be something new.

Search for people and try to get support from them, who will understand your purpose, share their ideas with you and possibly give you relevant advice.

Develop your business model and search for initial funding sources, a loan or angel investors.

Sustainability Academy’s Online Diploma on Social Entrepreneurship will provide you with a step-by-step introduction to Social Entrepreneurship and Benefit Corporations as well as offer you unique knowledge in a simple and practical way. Let the change begin!

Social return on investment (SROI) represents a set of principles used to measure extra-financial value (environmental/social value) in relation to the resources invested. The goal is for this framework to help you manage, plan and make decisions to increase the value created for your stakeholders by your activities.

The starting point for this calculation is for everyone involved to ask himself “how much difference are we making?” and “how much value are we destroying?”

The value of the outcomes is the one experienced by our stakeholders that result from our activities – the significant ones.

The necessary steps to determine this value is to find out:

Which are your stakeholders?

What are their outcomes?

Which ones are material?

To what extent they result from our activities and what is their value?

A general formula used to calculate SROI is as follows:

SROI = (social impact value – initial investment amount) / initial investment amount *100%

There are four main elements of great importance in order for you to measure SROI:

Inputs – the resources invested in your activity (for example the cost of a program for the care of elderly people)
Outputs – the concrete products from the activity (such as the number of elderly people taken care of)
Outcomes – the changes people experienced due to the activity (for example better health, improved psychological state and quality of life)
Impact – the outcome minus an estimate of what would have happened if the activity did not take place (for example, if 40 people had improved health but 10 people would experience this improvement anyway, the impact is based on the 30 people who had improved health due to the program)

Certain general rules to be followed according to this framework are:

Involve your stakeholders when planning your activities
Be precise and careful when estimating the outcomes of your activities
Value should be accredited to the things that matter
Be objective and transparent
Carry out a proper materiality assessment

If you would like to acquire all the necessary tools and knowledge to calculate the social impact of your organization’s activities, the Introduction to Social Impact Assessment and SROI is the course for you. It will guide you through identifying the inputs, outputs and outcomes of your Sustainability activities and it will help you understand Social Return on Investment.

You have always wanted to “make a difference”. You dream about helping the environment and have a positive social impact on society. So, you decided to pursue a career in Sustainability. But do you think you have what it takes? Below you can find some useful advice on the pursuit of your job in Sustainability.

Do your Research

You have to do your research on Sustainability and what it means, the job description. Sustainability is not philanthropy: you have to really get an in-depth knowledge of the field and understand that it requires communication among departments, it involves various tools and resources and it includes many roles within a Sustainability department. If you want to gain more advanced knowledge in the field, visit Sustainability Academy’s online courses.

Try New Things

It would also be excellent to have experience on another department. Someone who has championed at a Sales or Finance department for example is considered to have a more holistic view of the organization when entering a Sustainability department. Such a professional is considered to have gotten his “hands dirty” as opposed to someone who has only known a supposedly sterile environment.

Get Out of the House a Little

It is of great importance for a Sustainability professional to be involved in “extracurricular” activities related to Sustainability. This means you can be part of a CSR organization, or to be into volunteerism, or to have done pro bono work at a benefit corporation. All these things count as proof you are indeed passionate about making an impact and Sustainability is not just a job for you. Get more information about things you can do here.

Speak Green

You have to be communicative. If everything goes well and you become a Sustainability professional you will be invited to achieve cross-department communication. You will have to be able to articulate your ideas, since Sustainability is a very specific and a very broad field at the same time. You should be able to be precise and comprehensive. It would also really be helpful if you learned to “speak green”. Getting in touch with the industry’s jargon would definitely assist you in entering and being absorbed in a Sustainability department.

Be a Leader at what you do

Leadership is also a skill you will have to cultivate. There are very few positions and large Sustainability departments for you to choose from. So, it is inevitable that only the best will be hired. This means people who have the ability to persuade others, influence them and make them behave the way you and your department aim to. You will have to make people from different philosophies and departments, such as marketing, finance, legal, to be on your side. Not to forget the significance of networking. You should build your network as effectively as possible in order to maximize your opportunities and impact.

Build your Green Brand

You can also build your green brand. It would be helpful to sell yourself, to have an online presence across social media, online groups, and blogs, anything that will make you kind of famous as a Sustainability professional.

Good Luck

All the best from Sustainability Academy in your endeavors. If you indeed want to equip yourself with the latest skills, tools and resources on the field of Sustainability in the most flexible yet effective way, take a look at the Sustainability Academy’s online courses.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has. ~ Margaret Mead

When anthropologist Margaret Mead talked about changing the world, global population was less than 3.7 billion. Now, the population stands at 7.6 billion and growing! How small of a group do we need to promote sustainability? Or how big?

The Centre for Sustainability and Excellence (CSE) wants to change the world. We’re taking on a piece of this “small group of thoughtful, committed citizens” with an initiative to reach 100,000 of them by 2020!

CSE has created the Sustainability Academy, an innovative online platform for organizations to maximize their Social Impact! The goal is to teach the language of sustainability, promote its common goals and explain its unifying principles, across disciplines and international boundaries. With the academy, companies can educate their staff, suppliers and other stakeholders in the field of Sustainability.

“Education is key to individual, corporate and global prosperity,” says Nikos Avlonas, president and founder of CSE, best-selling author and sustainability pioneer. He defines prosperity to include financial, social and governance (ESG) concerns and the triple bottom line – people, planet, profit.

Beyond the lofty objectives of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), corporations face EU directives on sustainability, mandates from ASEAN on sustainable energy, and a global fixation on limiting carbon emissions. Through education, organizations learn tools such as SROI (social return on investment) to help understand and calculate their Social Impact.

For start-ups, world-changing opportunities are even greater. The academy platform helps organizations support Social Entrepreneurship and young entrepreneurs who want to start careers and enterprises already focused on sustainability. Established corporations or new, building a common understanding, knowing key definitions, where to turn for advance guidance, how to report ones successes – these all add to financial performance.

We at CSE are practical dreamers – dreamers with results. Based in part on his work with the Sustainability Academy, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the largest community foundation in US and globally, honored Avlonas as 2018 Practitioner of the Year for Corporate Responsibility, together with Google, Inc., winner of the corporate award.

Innovative platforms such as the Sustainability Academy help us all become committed citizens who can change the world!

For more information on how you can promote the initiative or join in the effort, contact [email protected].

The Emerging Corporate Sustainability Role

Over the course of the last 20 years when the terms Sustainability and CSR were first introduced to companies, organizational teams have undergone multiple shifts, urging them to slowly but steadily reevaluate their strategic objectives and goals in order to cope with real challenges on Sustainability. Transformation has been required to be made so that sustainability and CSR departments operate in such matters that reflect the evolution in sustainability both internally and externally.

According to recent researches, sustainability practitioners are not entitled to simply lead and manage projects so that their company is positioned as sustainable and environmentally responsible but have themselves positioned as leaders in the field. That emerging job role states that Sustainability leaders are capable of driving their companies’ initiatives to enhance the sustainability impacts in their operations and value chain. There is a mandate to embed sustainability so that it is in compliance with social and corporate culture; it is financially beneficial whereas it constantly meets the stakeholders’ concerns. The role of Sustainability practitioner evolves in the most fundamental way meaning that professionals need to shift from an operational behavior to a more strategical focus on how to embed sustainable contexts within the organizations.

What can they do

Sustainability directors have to involve all departments and integrate sustainability across business teams within the organization in order to improve sustainable performance and add value to business segments. Foremost, what it is noted in terms of holistic collaboration when it comes to a truly successful sustainability strategy is the direct involvement of the board of directors. It appears that the role of sustainability leader is not one-dimensional but it is wider and more strategical than ever. On that note, the emerging corporate sustainability role implies that the approach on handling the particular job description has to be dynamic and constantly applicable to the requirements and priorities of the organization. During this evolving process, sustainability practitioners need to be proactive and put themselves into the situation of identifying what skills and competencies have to be advanced to become more impactful.

It appears that the role and actions of sustainability professionals have to be defined on a long term which means they constantly re-evaluate their skill-sets, knowledge and experience to be always competitive among the sustainability group of leaders.

If you aim to break into this field and identify the current needs to evolve your sustainability profession, the Center for Sustainability & Excellence (CSE) offers you the globally recognized and challenging Certified Sustainability Practitioner Program that is hosted annually around the world – N.York, Houston, Atlanta, Toronto, London, Dubai, among other cities. Check them out here.

For a more flexible and affordable education, the Silicon Valley awarded Sustainability Academy offers specialized education on hot issues of the field! Check the online courses here.

“Poverty: Punishment for a crime you didn’t commit”

The Sustainable Development Goal 1 aims to end poverty in all its forms everywhere. Extreme poverty is a fundamental problem worldwide and it has been targeted by the United Nations through the 2030 SDGs.

Poverty is a violation of basic human rights and dignity

It is shocking that 1% of the population controls 50% of the world’s wealth. At the same time, a great percentage of the world’s population faces life-threatening problems. These include hunger or malnutrition and lack of access to a proper education among others. Other problems for this unfortunate segment include social discrimination, inequalities and exclusion. It is also very common for them not to participate in decision-making.

According to the United Nations the numbers are disappointing

Less than $1.90 a day: that is amount of money 20% of people living in developing countries have to live on. At the same time, 800 million people live on less than $1.25 a day.

Southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa are the two regions mostly hit by extreme poverty, while conflicts and small size seem to affect a country’s percentage of poor people.

Concerning children, 25% of them under the age of 5 have insufficient height for their age.

SDG1 Targets:

The United Nation’s SDG1 prioritizes men and women having access to basic human needs and people having equal rights and access to economic resources. It also encourages governments to develop social protection systems for all people.

According to the United Nations, the SDG1 targets include the following:

By 2030, eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere, measured as people living on less than $1.90 a day

By 2030, reduce at least by half the proportion of men, women and children of all ages living in poverty in all its dimensions according to national definitions

Implement nationally appropriate social protection systems and measures for all, including floors, and by 2030 achieve substantial coverage of the poor and the vulnerable

By 2030, ensure that all men and women, in particular the poor and the vulnerable, have equal rights to economic resources, as well as access to basic services, ownership and control over land and other forms of property, inheritance, natural resources, appropriate new technology and financial services, including microfinance

By 2030, build the resilience of the poor and those in vulnerable situations and reduce their exposure and vulnerability to climate-related extreme events and other economic, social and environmental shocks and disasters

Ensure significant mobilization of resources from a variety of sources, including through enhanced development cooperation, in order to provide adequate and predictable means for developing countries, in particular least developed countries, to implement programmes and policies to end poverty in all its dimensions

Create sound policy frameworks at the national, regional and international levels, based on pro-poor and gender-sensitive development strategies, to support accelerated investment in poverty eradication actions

For more information on essential sustainability issues and for you to become part of the solution, you can take a look at Sustainability Academy’s online courses

Following the current emerging trend of climate change and its drastic rise along with the acknowledgement of the insurers that climate-related factors have to be identified and reevaluated, business need to be more prepared and reliable on their sustainability plans. However, behavioral economics research argues that there is an underestimate of the risk exposure thus it is questionable on how the firms and cities are effectively implementing strategies that address the climate change.

As cities especially the large ones have become awesome in size, greenhouse gas emissions are accordingly growing. A voracious appetite for energy is created, consuming 2/3 of the world’s energy resulting in over 70% of global CO2 emissions. Recent facts show that US holds number one place in terms of overall CO2 emissions compared to the rest of the world.

Despite Greenhouse Gas Protocol initiative is no longer a newfound practice for the majority of companies to measure and report their emissions, there is more unexplored room for efficient infrastructure and planning. The global climate debate has triggered a greater concern over the need of adaptation following the latest Hurricane Sandy. It is broadly accepted that extreme weather events cannot be exclusively prevented by the Greenhouse gas emissions mitigation.

Society along with business are both liable to adaptation as physical impacts are translated into real time business problems such as resource availability, safety of personnel, facilities and operation as well as major market changes.

There is an onslaught of challenges that happen in the corporate field during this year which demands from executives to initiate a more realistic approach by understanding the risk exposure on a lasting view. To effectively cope with climate adaptation means immediate benefits a long-term positioning, and more solid relationships with stakeholders as well as re-activeness before others do it.

We all have neurons in our brains called gamma receptors. They are responsible for the fact that a person is worried. And if these neurons become too active, they start to burn. Thanks to Xanax (Alprazolam), the activity decreases, which means that the number of lost neurons decreases. A person loses the feeling of anxiety, does not feel panic, can adequately assess what is happening around him.

Have 2018 managers established the mindset to deliver the necessary changes and show leadership on the matter? The Center for Excellence and Sustainability (CSE) is offering to those who are truly determined to be proactive, the Certified Sustainability Practitioner Program in New York City, June 11-12 and address the importance of Sustainability in Supply Chain and Carbon Footprint Reduction. Having completed the program, professionals will be enabled with all the practical tools to implement effective strategies and be prepared for any possible scenario regarding climate change.