We are excited to announce our involvement in 6-part Environmental, Social and Governance training series designed to document, implement and/or enhance our company sustainability program. Some details of the program are as follows.
What is sustainability?
Sustainability is often defined as meeting our own needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
What is Environmental, Social, Governance or ESG?
ESG is a bucketed means of thinking about and acting on sustainability pursuits. “E” focuses on things like energy consumption, pollution control and emissions. “S” surrounds fair employment, safety, health, and community welfare. “G” is about oversight processes, diversity, and quality of management. Together, they represent a non-monetary value to the business. As time moves along, reporting on ESG is trending toward mandatory as documenting and measuring ESG issues is standardized.
ESG provides a way to adapt to changes, manage risk, engage employees, reveal opportunity, and incentivize innovation. When founded in good business decisions, authentic ESG practices and initiatives increases the value of the business.
What does the program entail?
The six presentations over the course of a 3 to 5 months engages with a sustainability team within the company to teach and to help apply what is taught. The presentations breakdown the process to help the team …
- understand the role of stakeholders and why sustainability is important
- determine what are the most relevant sustainability issues facing the company
- learn a method for prioritizing the most relevant issues
- learn an 8-step process for implementing solutions
- implement authentic changes to address the prioritized issues
- communicate the solutions and results to stakeholders
What is the goal of the program?
The goals of the 6 sessions are to…
- gain a better understanding of why sustainability is important, and gain clarity around ESG terms and definitions
- define the current state and communicate it as most businesses are already doing things in the sustainability space
- discover a few new initiatives that address the prioritized sustainability issues to limit risk, spark innovation and increase the value of the business longer term.
As we learn and complete the training, we will be updating our website with ESG actions we are currently undertaking as well as communicating the initiatives we will be pursuing.
We look forward to keeping you updated on our ESG journey!
The training is done by Trent Romer who is a LongueVue Capital operating partner focused on sustainability. The training is based on executive education coursework at Yale University and Harvard University, extensive travel to learn, his book Finding Sustainability (2021 John Hunt Publishing) and years of practical implementation in working with companies.