CSR World Congress & Charities@Work Reinforce Sustainable Business for Fostering Social Change

“I am the biggest believer in responsibility—social and otherwise.”

Many responsibly-minded leaders and their organizations the world over endorse this view. Increasingly, conferences and gatherings in the social impact domain have focused on two key themes that underlie the point. First, that responsible action has to be at the very heart of an organization, its mission, and its operations, and secondly, the recognition that responsibility—literally “response-ability”—must be spread across multiple sectors to address the world’s most complex challenges.

H.E. Khaled Al Kamda, Director General of the Community Development Authority of the Government of Dubai, opened the second day of the World CSR Congress in Mumbai with this quote, which perfectly captured the spirit and content of a gathering of some 1,400 leaders from 130 countries. He went on to clarify and propose one of the best definitions for corporate social responsibility, or CSR, I had ever heard.

“This is not just merely about how much you give, but how you act and react, how transparent, how ethical, how much of your work is really touching the people.”

In other words, CSR is not charity. By contrast, effective CSR is not an afterthought, but a mindset that guides the formation of effective and impactful business strategy. Dwayne Baraka of Value CSR agreed, emphasizing that CSR needs to focus on core business, how companies make money in the first place, not solely on philanthropy.

“The obvious answer to ‘giving back’,” says Baraka, “is to stop taking so much in the first place.”

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