As corporate volunteering has grown around the world, so has the effectiveness of the efforts. Today, skills-based volunteering is harnessing the intellectual capital of employees and deploying it against some of the world’s most challenging issues. The United Nations Post 2015 Agenda and The Global Goals… Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), will require a broad set of actors to achieve its ambitious goals by 2030. IMPACT 2030 was launched in December of 2014 by a dedicated group from business, nonprofits and the UN. When the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were launched in 2000, business was not at the table although there have been many efforts put forth by companies towards achieving the MDGs. Thankfully, this time, the planning for the SDGs has been more inclusive.
The Conference Board’s Global Social Investing Council received a presentation on IMPACT 2030 at our Spring meeting. We heard from Sue Stephenson, Vice President, Community Footprints, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, LLC and Vice Chairperson, Executive Committee for IMPACT 2030; and Diane Melley, Vice President, Global Citizenship Initiatives, Corporate Citizenship & Corporate Affairs, IBM. Both have been strong advocates of corporate volunteering.
“IMPACT 2030 is a global, private sector led initiative – developed in collaboration with the United Nations, civil society, academia and other stakeholders – created to advance the practice and impact of corporate volunteering to further the achievement of the Post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals.” Its mission and objectives are to:
· Promote awareness of the Sustainable Development Goals to employees and showcase how their volunteer actions will advance the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.
· Create and facilitate avenues for cross-sector and cross-industry cooperation between companies and stakeholders to initiate joint commitments and actions.
· Work with existing resources to develop methodologies and frameworks through which to measure the impact of volunteer commitments of our member companies and the collective results of the IMPACT 2030 network on the development agenda.
· Create and maintain global representation of IMPACT 2030 through the multi-sector Regional Voice Network providing a platform to focus efforts on a country and region-wide basis.
It’s about “aligning company-level strategic human capital volunteering commitments directly to the Sustainable Development Goals, spurring social innovation, driving employee engagement, providing new avenues to develop employee skills, and ensuring all employee volunteer actions are recognized for their contributions.” And “facilitating mutually beneficial relationships with multi-sector partners, leveraging economies of scale, and increasing the significant role corporate volunteering plays as a positive vehicle for business involvement in local communities.”
Many companies are already working on alignment of their current volunteer programs. IBM has taken the 17 goals and mapped where they have resources to deploy in their global locations with where those resources are needed. Other companies are selecting only one or more of the goals that they think they have the expertise to help tackle, or in some cases are issues that could be critical to their businesses going forward. It’s not too early for businesses for all sizes to assess what they can do to help with the SDGs.
For IMPACT 2030 partnership information, email contact@impact2030.com and a member of the IMPACT 2030 Executive Committee will contact you with details.