The four-day CSR course is designed to enable companies in the international jewellery and gemstone sector to enhance their business practices to help fulfil United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals, which form a blueprint agreed to by the international community to tackle the world’s most pressing development challenges. The course will elucidate principal models and strategies for corporate social investment, their application in an industry dominated by smaller and medium-sized enterprises, impact of CSR on supply chains and a variety of practical case studies.

‘We’re talking about the establishment of a culture and tradition by which our industry returns economic benefits to all sectors of the supply chain, including those in developing nations. This is proactive CSR and I propose that it should set us apart from other luxury product industries. CSR should be recognised as an integral part of our industry’s DNA. It should define us as a community, and be a characteristic by which consumers recognise us,’ said CIBJO President Gaetano Cavalieri.

The programme has been presented and prepared by a team of United Nations-sanctioned CSR experts from the University of Geneva, University of St Michael’s College in the University of Toronto, and MHC International.

While the level of consciousness of CSR within businesses and civil society in Southeast Europe is currently rather low, it is growing steadily. The Dow Jones Sustainability Group Index shows that, in general, companies that embraced CSR tended to fare better during the current economic crisis than those that have yet to incorporate CSR into their business philosophy. With many wood and paper companies, not just in Southeast Europe, fighting for survival in the current difficult economic conditions, it might be expected that companies would be reluctant to embark on the development of CSR in their business practices now. However, forest sector companies and their associations that embrace CSR have a market advantage.

CSR adds value not only for stakeholders outside the corporation or association, but also within, since employee satisfaction is critical for business success. Making CSR integral to a company’s business enhances motivation, productivity, labour retention and safety. To do so, Serbia and other Southeastern European countries are implementing a new ISO 26000 CSR standard.

Those taking part in the workshop concluded that if CSR was to be adopted more widely, governments needed to assume a supporting role. Governments should encourage wider adoption of CSR in the forest sector by developing public procurement policies favouring natural materials, such as wood and paper products from sustainable sources, over non-renewable materials.

CSR is an increasingly important channel of communication between the forest sector and its stakeholders, both within and outside the sector, about the process of sustainable development. For example, when a company uses wood and paper products from sustainably managed forests, and those forests are so certified, the company can communicate this practice internally to their employees and externally to their customers.

“It is a tragic irony to think that in India, a country now wealthy enough that roughly half of the people own phones, about half cannot afford the basic necessity and dignity of a toilet,” Zafar Adeel, director of United Nations University’s Canada-based think-tank for water, the Institute for Water, Environment and Health, said.

The experts also urge the world community to set a new target beyond the MDG (which calls for a 50 per cent improvement in access to adequate sanitation by 2015) to the achievement of 100 per cent coverage by 2025.

Recent UN research in India shows roughly 366 million people (31 per cent of the population) had access to improved sanitation in 2008.

Other data, meanwhile, shows 545 million cell phones are now connected to service in India’s emerging economy. The number of cell phones per 100 people has grown from 0.35 in year 2000–01 to about 45 today.

The report says it costs about $300 to build a toilet, and worldwide an estimated $358 billion is needed between now and 2015 to reach the MDG for sanitation. If current global trends continue, the World Health Organisation and UNICEF, in a report titled ‘Progress on Sanitation and Drinking Water’ in March, predicted a 1 billion person shortfall from the sanitation goal in 2015 – in all, 2.7 billion will lack access.

The number of so-called ‘high net-worth individuals’ in India has grown at about 11 per cent every year since 2000, to number more than 115,000 now.

Charitable giving in India probably totalled about $7.5 billion in 2009, according to the study by Bain & Co, equivalent to about 0.6 per cent of the country’s GDP. While this is higher than Brazil’s 0.3 per cent and rival China’s 0.1 per cent, it falls way short of the 2.2 per cent in the United States and 1.3 per cent in Britain.

Most Indians have no qualms about giving cash to family, friends, household staff and religious institutions, but given the scale of poverty – an estimated 40 per cent of India’s nearly 1.1-billion population lives on less than $1.25 a day – Indians need to become way more generous, said Bain partner Arpan Sheth.

‘Should individuals, particularly the well-off, be giving more? Can they afford to make larger donations? The answer to both these questions is absolutely yes,’ Sheth said at the first Indian Philanthropy Forum in Mumbai.

There are an estimated 2.5 million non-profit organizations in India, and about half of all donations in the country go to religious, sports and cultural organizations, the Bain study showed. About 65 per cent of donations come from the central and state governments, with a focus on disaster relief. A large amount also comes from foreign organizations. Only 10 per cent comes from individuals and corporates, in sharp contrast to the United States, where 75 per cent of charitable giving is from individuals and corporates, Sheth said.

Sheth pointed out that Indians’ reluctance to part with their cash stemmed from a variety of reasons including no tax breaks for charitable donations and a suspicion of what charitable organizations really do with the money.

The campaign was organised as part of an initiative —‘Let’s do it Delhi’ — to clean up the city before Commonwealth Games in October this year. Started by a group of professionals, students and activists, the initiative was joined in by employees of many corporate houses.

“The idea first came to us while watching a video on YouTube about Estonia, where more than 50,000 citizens cleaned up the city in a single day,” said Anita Bhargava, the brain behind the campaign.

Corporate houses that pitched in on Saturday included ICICI bank, Hyatt Hotels, Jindal Steel, Punjab National Bank, Abir Infrastructure, Radisson Hotels, Nimbus Harbor and FabIndia.

In three hours, volunteers spruced up the sprawling commercial complex. Bhargava said more than 4,000 garbage bags were used to remove litter and garbage from the site.

“Each of the 900 volunteers carried at least two garbage bags and we cleared about 5-6 tonnes of garbage,” she said.

The group had carried out a similar cleaning campaign at Rose Park (near IIT Delhi) earlier this year.

Bhikaji Cama Place was their second project and next on the agenda is cleaning up one municipal ward (most likely South Extension), one New Delhi Municipal Council circle and one slum. “This is our second attempt at creating a model of cleanliness which all Delhiites can follow and clean up areas where they live,” said Prableen Sabhaney, who works for Fabindia. “If Estonia can do it, why can’t Delhi?”

Sabhaney said instead of blaming the government and civic bodies, Delhiites should themselves try to keep their city clean. “We also need to change the way we are,” she said.

A series of street plays were also enacted at the Complex to educate and inspire office-goers and shopowners to keep the area clean.

Source: Hindustan Times

The initiative, a part of the organising committee’s (OC) youth activation programme, aims to sensitize students in various educational institutes across the country about the quadrennial multi-discipline competition.

Suresh Kalmadi, chairman of the OC, said, “We hope to mobilize support of the country’s youth for the Games through this initiative. The Games will leave behind world-class infrastructure in the country and will proliferate a sporting culture that students and youth will benefit from.

“Hosting the Games is also an opportunity to project India’s cultural diversity on the world stage.”

According to Kiran Seth, founder-chairman of SPIC MACAY, the organization will reach out to 500 schools and colleges in Delhi and surrounding areas to spread awareness about the Games by distributing specially created literature on the sporting event, arranging visits of Shera, the mascot, to campuses, organizing special photography exhibitions, and showcasing short films on the Games.

In addition, there will be a series of signature ‘Music In The Park’ concerts. A message on Commonwealth Games will be read out to the people during and at the end of each concert.

NDTV’s Vikram Chandra, Cyrus Brocha and the Green ambassador for this year, Priyanka Chopra, will host the show, which will also showcase a series of on-the-ground activities all over India such as: a 100-km runathon by Milind Soman; mural wall painting on the environment, in Delhi; installation art made from waste materials, in Mumbai; aerobicathon; Chennai’s Elliott Beach cleanup; call-ins and live chats with celebrities; and a musical performance by famous Bollywood stars. Chief ministers from across India will also join the movement and participate in various green activities.

CCE hosted the virtual tour and a live Q&A with chairman and chief executive officer John F. Brock and other senior leaders in October 2009. The forum provided an exclusive look inside CCE’s Bellevue, Wash., production and distribution facility. As part of their commitment to the company’s three environmental focus areas of water stewardship, energy conservation/climate change, and sustainable packaging/recycling, employees at the Bellevue facility have reduced water use by approximately 17 per cent, deliver products using hybrid electric trucks, and recycle more than 99.8 per cent of materials.

“It is important that we continue finding innovative, thoughtful ways to engage our stakeholders and communicate Coca-Cola Enterprises’ corporate responsibility and sustainability efforts,” said John H. Downs, Jr, senior vice president, Public Affairs and Communications. “This recognition validates the work we are doing to embed sustainability into our operations not only at our Bellevue facility, but also in our more than 400 facilities throughout North America and Europe.”

PR News’ CSR Awards recognize corporations that have executed highly successful and impactful CSR campaigns.

Charlie Denson, president, Nike Brand, stated, “With today’s announcement, we are equipping athletes with newly designed uniforms that not only look great and deliver performance benefits, but are also made with recycled materials, creating less impact on our environment.”

To make the 2010 national team kits, Nike’s fabric suppliers sourced discarded plastic bottles from Japanese and Taiwanese landfill sites and then melted them down to produce new yarn that was ultimately converted to fabric for the jerseys. This process saves raw materials and reduces energy consumption by up to 30 per cent compared to manufacturing virgin polyester.

By using recycled polyester for its new range of national jerseys, Nike prevented nearly 13 million plastic bottles, totalling nearly 254,000 kg of polyester waste, from going into landfill sites. This amount would be enough to cover more than 29 football pitches.