Cultivating Change with Youth

One of my goals for The Changebase is to use the blog as a platform for sharing the stories of companies, organizations and people working to create change in their communities. After all, there are lots of examples of great progress being made in CSR, social enterprise, and philanthropy and they should be celebrated! This time around, I'm pleased to share the story of Christine Guardia and her work with KooDooZ.

I hope, after reading Christine's post, you'll be inspired to find your own "life balance of Heart, Mind, Body and Spirit"!

By Christine Guardia

We live in a world defined by change – change grabs the headlines and demands our attention.  Our access to information has been heightened with globalization and, as a result, it has further mobilized our communities for change. 

The concept of leveraging social media for social good resonates with me, because that’s what I do for a living.  I am the “cause cultivator” for KooDooZ, a “cause-based” social networking site for youth.  In this role, I cultivate non-profit and for-profit partnerships for the purpose of co-creating and co-marketing real-world events and social impact campaigns.The site’s purpose is to provide KDZ (our users, typically ages 9 through 15) with a safe place online to channel their passions into actions and strategies for social change and personal growth.  For the benefit of our non-profit and for-profit partners, KooDooZ provides event and social impact expertise, delivering collaborative real-world events (such as the Tour De Fitness) and online challenges (such as coat drives) to nurture new youth and family engagement.

Despite the fact this generation (Gen Z) is altruistic and cause-centric, their access to opportunities to “create change” has traditionally been limited.  So far, there have been unequal opportunities for civic engagement before the age of twenty.  By challenging themselves with service learning, volunteerism and personal growth opportunities, KooDooZ KDZ learn outside the boundaries of formal education.  Our technology allows them to access information and craft their own identities in unprecedented ways.

Because kids need a higher diversity of ways to engage as social entrepreneurs, KooDooZ challenges KDZ to find their life balance of Heart, Mind, Body and Spirit.  I decided to do the same; since working for KooDooZ, I have been inspired by ChicoBag to stop using plastic shopping bags and switch to reusable bags.  The “Bag Monster,” a person covered in 500 bags (the average number of plastic bags an American uses each year), made me realize I needed to make a change.  Now reusable bags are strategically placed in my car, at my office and near the front door. 

I also carry EcoUsable’s BPA-free stainless steel filtered water bottle, which further reduces my dependency on plastics.  EcoUsable provided stainless steel bottles to the Tour de Fitness (TDF  ’09) participants and also sponsored a challenge within KooDooZ asking KDZ to come up with their own images of sustainability.  The winning bottle design will be produced by EcoUsable and sold via KooDooZ.  In addition, for every bottle sold, the winner will receive $1 and KidShape, a non-profit organization that builds healthy families, will also receive $1. 

The KooDooZ website is currently in Alpha release and this spring we will be launching a pilot program for groups of kids (siblings, classmates, teammates, etc.) and the adults in their lives (parents/guardians, teachers, coaches, etc.) to be some of the first KooDooZ users and provide feedback to help shape the system.  Our goal is to partner with schools, nonprofits and/or companies that would like to help children create change. 

If you would like to utilize KooDooZ to challenge KDZ to achieve in 2010, please contact us at info@koodooz.com.   Christine Guardia is a graduate of the Public & Nonprofit Management Program at Boston University School of Management. In her free time, Christine enjoys spending time with her eight nieces and nephews, walking (she is currently training for an 18-mile fundraising walk this summer) and reading.

CSR from the Inside

Recently I had the opportunity to interview Marcus Chung, director of corporate citizenship at McKesson (To learn more about Marcus, check out his blog and follow him on Twitter).

My purpose for sitting down with Marcus was twofold. First, I wanted to get his take on corporate social responsibility and sustainability efforts at McKesson, as well as ask some questions about the field in general. Second, given that he is a young CSR leader, I wanted to give Marcus a chance to share his own personal story.

Over the course of an hour or so, we talked about:

• Marcus' Professional Background,
• Corporate Citizenship at McKesson,
• Culture and CSR Success
• Reporting on Impact, and
• CSR Going Forward.

It’s a long post, but well worth it! Here's what he had to say:

Marcus' Professional Background

After graduating from Wesleyan University, Marcus worked as a senior research manager at The Corporate Executive Board. While he enjoyed working in the private sector, Marcus felt like he was missing something. It turns out that “something” was a discussion of the social and environmental impacts of business – a realization that led him to enroll in UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

While at Haas, Marcus interned at Net Impact, an experience that was crucial in deepening his understanding of the field of CSR. Throughout his internship Marcus conducted numerous informational interviews with other CSR professionals, who confirmed for him that no two CSR jobs are the same (a key takeaway for anyone looking to find their own CSR job!).

After completing his MBA, Marcus accepted another internship at Gap, Inc. which later turned into a full-time job. His role there focused on strategic planning and communications for the company’s CSR department. In this position he was able to observe how the many different aspects of Gap's CSR program – from ethical sourcing to environmental affairs to the Foundation – all reinforced Gap's key business goals.

In July 2008, Marcus left Gap, Inc. to become director of corporate citizenship for the environment at McKesson. As we’ll hear throughout my conversation with Marcus, this new role challenges him to be entrepreneurial, think strategically, build empowered partnerships, and act as a constant champion for corporate social responsibility.

Corporate Citizenship at McKesson

Headquartered in San Francisco, McKesson is a 176 year-old company that employs 32,000 people and last year had revenues of $106B. As a business-to-business company, McKesson’s two main divisions – distribution services and health care IT solutions – serve business customers like Wal-Mart, Target, and 70% of the nation’s hospitals. While many consumers may not be familiar with the McKesson name, it’s safe to say that we’ve all used or been in contact with McKesson’s products and services at some point in time.

Recently McKesson has experienced very rapid growth, which has mainly been fueled by acquisition; in fact, the company is actually made up of 40+ independent business units, each with its own degree of autonomy. This has interesting implications for McKesson’s corporate citizenship program because, at the corporate level, Marcus and the rest of the team are trying to create company-wide CSR standards. Yet when each business unit operates independently, it can be tough to create a cohesive program.

McKesson's Corporate Citizenship Program takes many different forms. In his role, Marcus reports to the vice president of corporate citizenship, who is also the president of the McKesson Foundation. He splits his time in a few different ways:

• Managing the Environmental Councils: While Marcus directs enterprise-wide environmental strategy for McKesson, he also manages a system to empower different business units and facilities to get involved through the development of environmental councils. Right now there are 17 councils throughout the McKesson network, each staffed by employee volunteers (between 3 and 30 people) who look for location-specific projects to reduce the company’s impact.
• Producing the Corporate Citizenship Report: If you haven’t checked out McKesson’s CSR report, I highly recommend it. While Marcus is the first to admit that McKesson is still wrapping its arms around its environmental impact, I was very impressed by the report and its ability to tell the human side of McKesson’s story.
• Engaging with Internal and External Stakeholders: Whether it’s partnering with vendors, responding to inquiries from the socially responsible investment community, or working with internal groups to champion McKesson’s corporate citizenship program, Marcus spends a lot of time in stakeholder relations. Interestingly, one of the company’s biggest stakeholder communities is real estate – since 50% of McKesson’s greenhouse gas emissions comes from its physical buildings, Marcus sees a huge opportunity to work with McKesson’s real estate constituents to improve the company’s environmental performance.

Culture and CSR Success

One of the questions I often ask CSR professionals is “What is it about your company’s culture that makes your CSR program successful?” There’s clearly a unique recipe for CSR success at each company, and my sense is that culture has a lot to do with it.

Marcus says McKesson's corporate citizenship is a work in progress, and that the company is still trying to get a full picture of its impact. That said, he believes that the company’s culture and commitment to corporate citizenship enables his team to better visualize what the company’s success will look like down the road.

One of the main examples of McKesson’s culture is what is known as the ICARE Shared Principles. These principles are meant to set the tone for all employee behavior and decisions. Yet according to Marcus, they are not just some funny corporate mantra that no one cares really about; instead these principles are truly internalized by employees as a set of values that everyone should follow.

Take this and combine it with a CEO who believes in the importance of corporate citizenship and environmental sustainability, and you have a company that clearly values the right things.

Still, any CSR director knows that changing mindsets and behavior is a slow process. At McKesson, Marcus spends a lot of time educating employees that corporate citizenship goes beyond employee volunteerism and philanthropy.

“It’s an evolution,” Marcus said, “but at least there’s an appreciation for what we do.”

Reporting on Impact

Having just finished a post on The Basics of CSR Reporting, I was eager to get Marcus’ thoughts on how the Global Reporting Initiative’s guidelines factored into McKesson’s reporting strategy. Given that he had written reports at Gap, Inc. and is now doing the same for McKesson, Marcus had some interesting insights.

In general, he felt that using the GRI was a bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the GRI clearly validates any company’s reporting efforts while also pushing it to improve its measurement process every year. Still, Marcus struggled with the idea of trying to fit McKesson’s data collection and reporting process into the rigid GRI categories, stressing that the company does not yet have a lot of the tools in place to measure what the GRI wants (not to mention the fact that some of what the GRI asks for isn't even relevant to McKesson's business).

Beyond the GRI, reporting at McKesson is still a challenge, Marcus said, because as a B2B company it’s not really used to disclosing this kind of information to various audiences (versus a company like Gap where today many end-consumers demand these details).

Not only is it difficult to collect data, then, but the company has to be comfortable with the story that the data tells – a concept that internal groups like marketing and legal might not always applaud. Thus, “reporting is an iterative process” at McKesson – and everywhere else I’m sure!

CSR Going Forward

Our interview concluded with a few final questions about the future of CSR at McKesson and in general. For Marcus, the key to McKesson's success is leveraging the enthusiasm and interest of its employees who clearly want to be involved in these initiatives. He wondered, “How do we connect them, get them educated and involved?”

He also said it’s time for the company to “start putting a stake in the ground” and set goals for measuring and reducing its environmental impacts. That is, rather than always looking backwards to tell stories and report results, Marcus wants the company’s focus to shift toward being pro-active about where McKesson will head in years to come.

As for the field overall, Marcus believes CSR is only going to grow in importance as more companies see the value of getting involved (and feel pressure from their stakeholders).

The big question, however, is how well – and how quickly – companies will realize that CSR goes beyond public relations and becomes instead about a deeper connection with, and impact in, communities worldwide.

Thanks, Marcus, for sharing your thoughts and opinions with The Changebase, and good luck at McKesson!

Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.

Since it’s still early in 2010, I thought I’d throw my hat in the ring and share my New Year’s Resolution.

My family and friends know that one thing I love to talk about is food.

Between my husband Dan studying to become a chef and my own studies of sustainability and the environment, the topic of food and the questions we have about it – what to eat, where to buy it, what impact it has on the planet – come up often in our family.

To us, food is a big deal. In fact (at the risk of sounding cliché), in 2009 food became a central focus for us as we defined who we wanted to be as individuals and as citizens of the earth.

Mainly this was for selfish reasons: eating food made us happy. Yet the more we learned about where our food came from, the less happy we felt.

In the early days of this conversation, I often felt more helpless than hopeful. Trips to the grocery store were spent worrying over food labels, wondering about the origins of the meat we wanted to buy, and fretting over the cost of anything labeled ‘organic’ (not to mention wondering whether organic was really all it was cracked up to be).

We often asked ourselves: how could we ever find a balance between eating food that's good for us and that we’re proud of, while also not driving ourselves nuts trying to only eat "perfect" (aka: local, seasonal, sustainable, delicious, nutritious) food?

With that, 2009 became the Year of Food Education.

Our learning started with an investigation of where our food comes from and an examination of how hard it can be to find sustainable food sources in our area. I also took a stab at defining what local food really is, and I learned about the potential dangers that exist in our current industrial food production system. Over the course of many months, we read, discussed, debated, and searched for more and more information.

In the end, all of this research proved to me and Dan that we wanted more control over what we ate and where it came from. We also wanted to know that the foods we put in our bodies were actually nutritious (and not overly processed, refined, or generally interfered with).

If you take this newfound awareness and combine it with a chef’s passion for cooking, you’ll create a kitchen that looks a lot like ours does today. Over the course of 2009, our kitchen literally went through a makeover. Slowly but surely, staples like canned soup, processed snack bars, and Ben & Jerry’s were replaced with homemade soups made with fresh stock, our very own granola bars, and even made-to-order ice cream. In fact, there’s actually very little pre-made food in our pantry and fridge at all these days. What a delicious experiment this turned out to be!

Sure, the kitchen is Dan’s favorite room in the house, so putting him to work (and motivating me to help) hasn’t been all that hard. But beyond that, our kitchen transformation is actually very reflective of the new approach we’re taking in 2010 with the food we eat.

Which brings me to my 2010 Resolution: “Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.”

Ok, so those aren’t my words – they actually belong to author Michael Pollan, whose book “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto” I just finished reading. But those seven words of advice (and the entirety of his book, actually) are so perfectly aligned with the way Dan and I want to approach food in 2010 that I’ve co-opted them to use as my own.

I’m not going to write a review of this book (mainly because I think it is so full of good words of wisdom that it would mean basically re-writing the whole thing), but I can’t endorse Pollan’s ideas strongly enough. “In Defense of Food” champions the idea that eating foods (not to be confused with ingredients – for example, eating a whole food like broccoli versus an ingredient like high fructose corn syrup) is good for your health, for your spirit, for our culture, and for the environment.

To give you a little taste of Pollan’s ideas, I’ve scanned in a copy of a pamphlet I picked up in a bookstore recently. While Pollan doesn’t create a set of rules relating to what foods we should eat, he does outline some guidelines to consider when shopping for food. I’ve reprinted them here to inspire you and encourage you to think about any changes you could make in the food you buy and eat.

The thing I like best about Pollan’s ideas is that, unlike diet fad books or nutritional guidelines, “In Defense of Food” encourages us to find the pleasure, satisfaction, and joy in eating. It’s not about what you can’t or shouldn't eat; instead, it’s about embracing the history of our food and shortening the length of the chain between us and what we eat. By doing this, we'll not only feel better ourselves, but we'll feel better about our connection with the people who grow our food and with nature itself.

As I said at the beginning, Dan and I love food because eating makes us happy.

Michael Pollan's book makes it easy for us to find even more happiness through our food - and anything that can do that is a big winner for us! I hope you'll take some time to read through this book too...

And by the way - Happy New Year!

The Basics of CSR Reporting

As I mentioned in an earlier post on The Changebase, one of the projects I’ve been working on this semester is a CSR Reporting Directed Study for a Fortune 300 company.

This company (who will remain nameless since the project is still ongoing) contacted the Boston University School of Management and asked if the school would put together a team of MBA consultants to evaluate the company’s current CSR report and make recommendations for changes or improvements. Since CSR reporting is such an important and popular topic these days, I really wanted to be a part of this project. And, since the opportunity was presented as not just a consulting gig, but also as a class, I knew there’d be some good learning too.

Over the course of the last few months, I’ve spent the majority of my time with my team (there are five of us) learning about The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI).

As the area of CSR reporting moves forward and becomes more solidified, the GRI has emerged as the leading, best-in-class standard for how companies should address their environmental and social impacts. Much like LEED has become the “gold standard” in green building, the GRI has emerged as the reporting framework that most companies use. While this doesn’t mean that the GRI framework is perfect, it does mean that the GRI is the most popular guide for companies that want to report on these issues and don’t know where to start.

While there are some folks who don’t like the GRI, in general I believe its reporting framework provides a comprehensive, detailed outline of the targets and impacts every company should be measuring. Its framework consists of 79 indicators that are measured along 6 dimensions:

• Economic
• Environmental
• Labor Practices and Decent Work
• Human Rights
• Society, and
• Product Responsibility.

Under each category, the GRI lists very specific metrics that companies should use to quantify and qualify their impacts along each dimension. For example, under Human Rights, one of the indicators is “Operations identified as having significant risks for incidents of child labor, and measures taken to contribute to the elimination of child labor”. You can imagine how hard it is for a global business with operations worldwide to wrap its arms around this kind of question.

And yet, it is understandably crucial for any business to understand something like this.

In addition to the indicator questions, the GRI lays out principles for content and quality – which are essentially a roadmap for how to determine what should be in a report and how to tell the company’s sustainability story. These are:

Principles for Content:

• Materiality
• Stakeholder Inclusiveness
• Sustainability Context
• Completeness

Principles for Quality:

• Balance
• Comparability
• Accuracy
• Timeliness
• Clarity
• Reliability.

Without getting into too much detail, you can probably guess that some of these principles are easier to follow than others. Yet, the more I learn, the more I realize that absolutely every single one of them is crucially important.

The fun part of this consulting project has been poring over the company’s CSR report and looking at it through the lens of each content and quality principle. Over the last few weeks, we’ve been asking ourselves questions like:

• How well does the company present balanced (that is, positive and negative) information?
• What kind of stakeholder analysis has the company done? Does the report speak to the right audience?
• Is the report complete? If not, what’s missing?

It’s really been a lot of fun to take a real-life case study and evaluate it according to what we’ve learned.

And what I’m learning is that CSR reporting is a lot harder than you might think!

Another highlight of the project was having the chance to meet Andy Savitz, a very well-known sustainability consultant and author of The Triple Bottom Line. Andy is incredibly experienced when it comes to CSR reporting, and he was kind enough to sit down with me and my team to talk about best practices in this area. Since this post is about The Basics, I thought I’d share a few words of wisdom from Andy:

A CSR Report is a Living Document: My sense is that some companies want to look at their CSR report much like they do an annual report – it’s published once a year and that’s it. But in a field as new as CSR reporting, many CSR Directors are still getting a handle on what they should be measuring, let alone actually being able to report on it. And since companies are still solidifying what to report on, they’re finding that the data they collect isn’t always perfect.

According to Andy, that’s more than ok. A CSR report should not just be about reporting the good stuff, nor should it just be focused on the past. A good CSR report should focus on being aspirational and strategic, and it should present both the good and the not-so-good (also known as “Opportunities” or “Room for Improvement”).

This leads to a second important point: A Balanced CSR Report is a Trust-Builder. Interestingly, while companies might shy away from sharing negative information, the more transparent a company can be about the good, the bad and the ugly, the more trust it will earn from its stakeholders. Andy gave the example of a company that reported its overseas employees had been offered 13 bribes – and that they turned down 9 of them.

Sure, a CSR department might cringe at the thought of reporting this. But in actuality disclosing this information improved the company’s image and reputation because everything was framed as a work-in-progress. Most audiences, it turns out, aren’t looking for immediate perfection – they just want to know that you’re working on it.

So there you have it – The Basics of CSR Reporting. In truth, there is still so much more that I’m learning – in a month I’ll probably be able to come back and update this post! But I hope this helps lay the groundwork for you as you learn about this topic.

As for my consulting project, my team and I head to their corporate headquarters in late January to present our findings and recommendations. The goal is for their CSR department to take our feedback and incorporate it into their upcoming 2010 report. It’ll be interesting and exciting to see how their new report differs from their old one. I’ll keep you posted!

(By the way, if this post was helpful be sure to check out other posts I've written on "The Basics" - and let me know if there's anything you want to learn next!)

End of Semester Recap

Perhaps one of the best parts of being a second year MBA student is getting to pick my schedule. Unlike first year, where all of the core business classes were chosen for me, as a second year student I get to decide which electives I want to take. Not only has this been a relief (since most of the core classes were quantitative, and I am by no means a math whiz), it’s also been fun and rewarding to study topics that interest me through an MBA lens.

Unfortunately, by the end of the semester, there’s little time for anything else – including blogging. I haven’t been able to write on The Changebase for a couple of weeks precisely because I’ve been too busy wrapping up all of the projects, presentations, and papers that these electives have assigned!

But it’s been a great semester of learning, and since I’m often asked to talk about how what I study relates to my interest in CSR and sustainability, I thought I’d share a little recap.

I started out my semester with a one-week intensive course called Global Sustainability, which basically looked at issues like food and water scarcity, energy constraints, and global migration and the impacts they have on our planet. If you haven’t checked out my previous summary on this class, I recommend reading it.

The rest of my four month semester consisted of five other classes:

Government, Society and the New Entrepreneur focused on the topics of “economic globalization, environmental sustainability, international entrepreneurship, and the interplay between growth and prosperity”. Through in-depth studies of various countries (Japan, China, India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Russia and Brazil), my classmates and I gained a broad overview of how globalization impacts trade, economic growth, education, environmental conservation, and entrepreneurship around the world.

Big Takeaway: While our world is more connected than ever, each country’s national interests are more divergent than ever. To solve an issue as big as climate change, for instance, world leaders must balance their responsibility to their own people with a shared responsibility to care for our global resources. Tough job for sure.

On the other end of the spectrum, Consumer Behavior focused on the attitudes, behaviors, social norms, and decision-making processes that consumers use and reference when they make purchases. For this course I worked with a team to develop a hypothetical new product (along with target consumer and marketing recommendations) for green cleaning producer Seventh Generation. Lots of primary data collection, and lots of consumer behavior theory.

Big Takeaway: The more I spoke with potential target consumers, the clearer it became that people really are wary of the “green” label. They’ve heard it so many times – and yet they still don’t really understand what it means nor do they trust its value. A clear warning sign for marketers…

My Corporate Governance seminar centered on the interplay between governance, accountability and ethics in the corporate and nonprofit sectors. Through in-depth, “governance gone wrong” case studies, we developed a framework for understanding how factors like board oversight, compensation structures, and organizational culture affect the level and type of governance at a company. This class was especially timely one year after the global financial crisis.

Big Takeaway: Much like CSR, there are varied opinions relating to the value that good governance brings to an organization. Is governance just about compliance and risk management, or does it actually add value? Are investors willing to pay more for good governance? I think (and hope) they are.

Entrepreneurial Management focused on the challenges and hurdles faced by early-stage entrepreneurs, including the identification of and access to capital, scaling growth to reach beyond the early adapter market, and building a successful team. Perhaps the most fun part of the class was serving as a consultant to a social entrepreneur who’s facing these kinds of issues right now as he builds a line of ethically-sourced footwear. Like consumer behavior, this involved lots of primary data collection and marketing recommendations.

Big Takeaway: As a social enterprise footwear company, the client I worked with wanted to “do good and do well.” Yet, the potential consumers we spoke with reminded us that it’s not just intention that matters – cause marketing campaigns need to be genuine, transparent, easy to understand, and perhaps most importantly, have an immediate and tangible impact on a meaningful cause. Not always an easy task!

Finally, one project that I started this semester and will finish in early January is a CSR Reporting Directed Study. Back in October a Fortune 300 company contacted my school to inquire about putting a team of MBAs together to evaluate their current CSR reporting – and I jumped at the chance. In order to make recommendations, my team and I have spent the semester doing a deep-dive into the Global Reporting Initiative and the Carbon Disclosure Project. We’re now just starting the recommendation phase and I’ll be sure to keep you posted.

Big Takeaway: Sustainability reporting is more than just wrapping your arms around numbers (although it’s fair to say that getting a handle on a company’s data is hard enough!). In fact, two key themes that keep coming up are transparency in information sharing and stakeholder engagement – two crucial topics that are very hard to get right and very easy to get wrong.

So all in all it’s been an incredible four months, especially compared to my first year of business school when it was so hard to “see the forest” through all that data analysis!

In the end this really was a semester of putting all of the pieces together, which is a great feeling. And now on to winter break!