CESR Helps Companies Reach Their Global Goals
Thanks to a partnership between the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Ethics and Social Responsibility (CESR), and the United Nations Global Compact, the global business community now has a new system to help them track their progress toward achieving the United Nation’s .
It’s called the SDG Action Manager, a new web-based impact management tool, which was on January 29, 2020, and is free to access by companies worldwide. The tool combines B Lab’s B Impact Assessment (BIA), the Ten Principles of the UN Global Compact, and the Sustainable Development Goals, to enable businesses to determine and measure meaningful action through dynamic self-assessment, benchmarking, and resources for improvement.
“This partnership with B Lab will create a tool to help companies positively impact some of the world’s biggest problems,” said Leeds Social Responsibility and Sustainability Scholar-In-Residence and Director of U.N. Initiatives Mark Meaney. “We cannot accomplish the ambitious aims of the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals without business.”
In 2018, CESR worked hard contributing research and analysis to evaluate where B Lab’s BIA mapped to the SDGs and how the tool could evolve to fill in the gaps between the two sets of metrics. B Lab incorporated CESR’s findings in 2019, preparing for the launch in January 2020.
The B Impact Assessment already covers a wide range of business activities, but with this new tool, companies now have invaluable information about the larger impact of their business. The tool will also simplify the previously daunting task of understanding how specific business actions address the SDGs.
In summer 2019, CESR was honored with the first-ever Collaborative Award from the Best for Colorado program for their partnership with B Lab on the SDG Navigator project and the center’s ongoing support of the B Corp movement.