On Tuesday I went to the launch of ‘Shaping our Future’, which is a 112 page document aiming to describe the role that charities will play in promoting a more sustainable future and how Government will help them.

Charities and climate change

As can be judged immediately by the suitably anodyne title, it is a mass of great hopes and expectations supported by the obligatory action points (57 of them if you are interested).

Will it achieve anything or will it be consigned to an ever-growing recycling bin of policy statements? On the positive side some of the actions will have an impact, particularly those that indicate that commissioning requirements from Central Government and some charitable foundations will change. 

On the downside, it is so closely associated with New Labour that it could easily be sidelined by a new administration. The only new funding commitment associated with the launch was a mere £200,000 to promote innovation, which definitely has the sound of a barrel being scraped.

At the launch itself most of the charities present banged on about the innovation of the sector. On the issue of climate change this simply doesn’t ring true. Not one of the big 10 charities has done anything as profound, thoughtful and thorough as Marks and Spencer’s Plan A. 

If one of them took the plunge and did, I am sure that many others would follow as has happened in the retail sector. If this level of leadership did appear we certainly wouldn’t need the depressing range of tool-kits, self-help modules and other nonsense that was announced at the launch and which I am sure has virtually no impact.

Corporate responsibility: the on-going debate

A few weeks ago I went to see the excellent play ‘Enron’. The introduction to this play described how the collapse of Enron sent shockwaves through the business community and was one of the drivers for a new culture of corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Well the details might be slightly different but the same unholy alliance of mischief-makers including a big corporate in trouble, their auditors and legal advisers, are remarkably similar in both Enron and the more recent collapse of Lehman Brothers.

For many this will be further evidence that CSR simply provides a fig-leaf of external credibility whilst business as normal carries on. Unfortunately in many cases this is the reality – but definitely not everywhere. 

What is needed is far deeper analysis of CSR policies in order to drive out the charlatans, and to enable the public to know which companies really took the Enron lesson to heart.

What is clear is that to be effective CSR policies need to be understood and adhered to across an entire company – they need to be embedded into the DNA of daily activities. 

One of the strengths of our Environment Champions programme is that it gets the CSR message across the entire company. This is a slow, time-consuming process that won’t grab news headlines but it is effective. 

We saw an example of it this week when the work we have been doing with Friends Provident enabled them to secure a Carbon Trust accreditation which will help the company meet commitments under the Carbon Reduction Credit scheme which comes into effect on 1 April.

Read more about how Friends Provident International has secured Carbon Trust accreditation.

Read more about how we work with businesses.

April 2011 – doomsday?

A survey of charity CEOs this week revealed that all of them are already preparing for Armageddon in April 2011. The reason is that a huge number of charities have public sector contracts that end on 31st March 2011.

Inevitably there is massive uncertainty about whether there will be funding to replace these, or whether political policy will have changed to the point where charity funding will come less from central government and more from local authorities.

We are in this position too, with around £1 million of grant funding that will almost certainly disappear at the end of March 2011. Knowing that a third of your income could walk out the door overnight certainly focuses the mind. 

Options for replacing this funding are limited. Corporate giving is being squeezed, the funding available from charitable foundations is being hit by the poor returns they are getting on their investments, and the public sector is already tightening its belt.

The only realistic option for us is to see if we can commercialise some of the services that we have created. By selling these products we can generate an income that can be invested in our activities that benefit more disadvantaged groups and which need subsidising. 

Creating this sort of model within a small charity is fraught with difficulty. It requires bringing people together who have massively different skills, expectations and motivations. 

It also requires our Board of Trustees to take risky decisions, particularly as they may be personally liable if it all goes pear-shaped. 

To help us on this journey we have brought in a small group of Master students who are looking at the viability of our business case. They have a couple of months to complete their work and what they discover could have profound implications for our future growth.

Authenticity

My weekday mornings consist of a 30 minute cycle ride dodging the ever-increasing numbers of potholes and then trying not to set off the office alarm system. Arriving safely at my desk is always a bit of a relief. 

This week, however, my early mornings were strangely uplifted by the fact that after months of trying we have finally managed to get our milk delivered in old fashioned glass bottles. 

I did get a wave of nostalgia about the tiny milk bottles we used to get at school before ‘Snatcher Thatcher’ intervened. Our new milk bottles are being religiously washed and returned and mark another step in the constant greening of the office. 

We have already secured the environmental standard BS8555 and this month we are being accredited for ISO14001. Helping us reach this target is an internal Green Team who regularly undertake spot-checks and bring in new procedures and ideas. All of this is essential for our authenticity. 

We must walk-the-talk if we are to have any credibility as an organisation. Looking at the massive proliferation of overnight experts and carbon cowboys that seem to be appearing on the scene these days I often wonder how many of them are practicing what they preach.

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