Category Archives: Sustainability

Finding a Good Sustainable Charity

Finding the right charity to donate too — and by that I mean one that’s likely to use your money to actually help someone besides the administrator — can be tough. That’s why I found the recent article on best questions to ask a charity quite useful. It presented a great flowchart that you can use to determine whether or not the charity hitting you up might be worth donating to.

In brief, the following questions, which should all be met with a resounding yes, are quite important:

  • Are you recognized as a charity by the government? (IRS, CCRA, HMRC, etc.)
  • Have you been around for at least five years?
  • Will at least 75% of my money to to charity?
  • Do you have at least a year’s worth of working capital?
  • Are you cutting services this year?

Basically, a good charity is:

  • Recognized.
  • Not a Fly-By-Night operation.
  • Efficiently run.
  • Financially sound.
  • Committed to its goals.

Deserving of your support and a good use for the budget you have set aside for funding your CSR initiatives.

Structuring Corporate Sustainability for Long Term Success

Times are tough, and that’s why it’s more important than ever to be corporately responsible. Fortunately, it is possible to structure your CSR initiatives to drive long-term business success. An article from last fall in Industry Week provided some good advice around how “good business meets the common good”.

  1. Understand How Sustainability Fits Into Your Market
    To understand how social, environmental, and economic issues intersect with your business, determine how and where these issues are relevant in your company’s marketplace.

    1. Assess Stakeholder Values
      • Non-Governmental Organizations
        NGOs have a deep understanding of various social and environmental issues and may be able to help you identify opportunities for improvement.
      • Customers
        Value-driven buyers make decisions based on factors that include a company’s business practices.
      • Employees
        Nearly one-third of job-seekers said that working for a “green” company would be a factor in choosing a job.
    2. Examine Regulatory Environments
      Companies must anticipate such regulations when defining sustainable business strategies.
    3. Consider Natural Resource Dependencies and Impact
      When resources such as fossil fuels, water, and land are depleted, costs rise. Companies looking to lower exposure to such costs are reducing dependence on fossil fuels and redesigning processes to require less water and generate less waste.
  2. Define Company Specific Sustainability Goals and Supporting Structure
    The scope of sustainability should be limited to activities that offset your company’s own impacts or positively affect its own stakeholders.
  3. Include Current Initiatives in the Structure
    A supply chain initiative originally designed to save on packaging costs may also minimize waste. A company must take inventory of these projects and determine where they fit into the overall program structure. Don’t overlook the following areas of opportunity.

    • Raw Material Sourcing
    • Continuous Improvement of Labor & Manufacturing
    • End-to-End Production Loss Minimization
    • Optimize Distribution & Disposal
    • Production Innovation & Supplier Collaboration
  4. Communicate Progress
    Stakeholders expect transparency in reporting progress and tracking results.

An Update on the Kiva Micro-Finance Experiment, Part II

Last September, I introduced you to Kiva, the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending initiative in a post where I posed the question Can Micro-Finance Make a Macro-Difference? after being referred to the site by a fellow hoser.

In an attempt to answer that question, I decided to conduct an experiment. Since last July, I have been making two loans a month under the hypothesis that if it works, after a year I will have enough capital in the Kiva system to help a new person every month as previous micro-loans get re-payed. To date, the doctor has made twenty $25 Kiva micro-loans (which get bundled with other micro-loans to fund loans to individuals and groups through Kiva’s micro-finance partners). The loans are:

Individual Institution Total Loan Loan Funded Disbursed Repayment Term Repaid to Date*
Gulchehra Rahimova LLC MLO Humo and Partners 1,175 June 28, 2008 July 12, 2008 12 months 67%
Din Ly CREDIT (World Relief) 250 June 28, 2008 July 12, 2008 18 months 44%
Araba Awotwe Christian Rural Aid Network (CRAN) 350 August 14, 2008 August 28, 2008 7 months 100%
Serigne Cisse UIMCEC (Christian Children’s Fund) 975 August 15, 2008 August 29, 2008 12 months 58%
Mavluda Tosheva LLC MLO Humo and Partners 450 September 1, 2008 September 15, 2008 12 months 50%
Mario Aguilar Fundacion Paraguaya 475 September 1, 2008 September 15, 2008 11 months 55%
Irene Microfinanzas PRISMA 1,200 October 11, 2008 October 25, 2008 6 months 83%
Sokhna Sene UIMCEC (Christian Children’s Fund) 300 November 1, 2008 November 15, 2008 12 months 33%
Essoneya Tchindo WAGES 300 November 1, 2008 November 15, 2008 12 months 33%
Guillermo Microfinanzas PRISMA 325 November 1, 2008 November 15, 2008 10 months 40%
Olinda Microfinanzas PRISMA 325 November 27, 2008 October 31, 2008 6 months 67%
Sron Chea Group AMK 200 November 27, 2008 October 28, 2008 4 months 100%
Kayi Lawson Microfund Togo 1,175 January 2, 2009 November 17, 2008 18 months 11%
Abdulhokim Azimov LLC MLO Humo and Partners 600 January 3, 2009 January 17, 2009 10 months 20%
Feliciana Llano Ramirez Manuela Ramos / CrediMUJER 475 Feb 4, 2009 Jan 15, 2009 5 months 67%
Atta Ofori Sinapi Aba Trust (SAT) 525 Feb 4, 2009 Jan 26, 2009 10 months 14%
Moeun Sileng CREDIT, a partner of World Relief 1200 Mar 1, 2009 Feb 12, 2009 21 months 6%
Mohammad Ameen s.a.l. 1200 Mar 1, 2009 Feb 5, 2009 15 months 8%
Daniel Adu Sinapi Aba Trust (SAT) 725 Apr 5, 2009 Mar 26, 2009 8 months 0%
Adetokunbo Fajuke Lift Above Poverty Organization (LAPO) 500 Apr 6, 2009 Apr 20, 2009 10 months 0%
Averages 636 11 months

Since my last update in January, where I presented an interim verdict that Kiva appeared to be great, based on the fact that all loans over 3 months old had partial repayments, I’m happy to say that Kiva beat my expectations. I expected that it would take 13 or 14 months to reach the point where the repayments coming in would be enough to guarantee at least one new (minimum) loan of $25 every month, and preferably two, when, in fact, it only took 10 months! As of this month, the cumulative repayments coming in for the month are enough to make two new $25 loans next month.

Conclusion? While the site continues to disclaim (in the footer of every page) that lending to the working poor through Kiva involves risk of principal loss, Kiva is working great. And in this economy, it’s less risky than investing in the stock market and mortgage funds, especially since an investment in Kiva last year would have resulted in your principal being returned to you, while those of us with market-based investments (stocks, mutual funds, 401Ks, RRSPs, etc.) are finding them (considerably) underwater at this time.

Thus, I would still encourage you, if you’re still lucky enough to have any discretionary funds left, to take part of them and try lending through the Kiva platform. Considering that you can start for $25, or the cost of one good bottle of wine (at the liquor store and not your local 300% mark-up restaurant), it’s an endeavor that the vast majority of us should be able to afford. And if even half of the 1.2B people in the developed world made even one loan a year, think of the sustainable difference it could make. That’s something worth aiming for. And if you do lend, remember to tell them that jeff <at> hosernews <dot> ca sent you (because one should give credit where credit is due). (And if you’re a fellow hoser, you can even consider joining his team.)

And remember, there is a supply chain lesson here for all of us. If a good supplier is in trouble in these hard financial times, key customers can band together to keep it financially solvent until times improve through faster payments, guaranteed orders, and low-interest loans. And, in addition to the good feeling these customers will get from knowing they did right, they can also secure long-term capacity from a strategic supplier. Let’s face it — most business people want to do the right thing when given the choice, and many will be quite happy to sign a long term contract or guarantee if you help to bail them out. This means that if you stick by a good supplier when it’s having a bad day, it’ll stick by you through thick and thin.

*As of April 22, 2009

What’s Worse? The Personal Automobile or 15 Container Ships?

A recent article in The Guardian noted that the health risks of shipping pollution have been ‘underestimated’, to put it very lightly. A recent study by the Danish government’s environmental agency found that ONE giant container ship can emit the same amount of cancer and asthma-causing chemicals as 50 Million cars. That’s right … just 15 of the world’s biggest cargo ships emit more pollution than the roughly 750 Million cars currently in operation around the globe … AND THERE ARE 90,000 of them! Current estimates is that global shipping is responsible for 3.5% to 4.0% of ALL climate change emissions.

So the next time you start calculating the costs of global sourcing you might want to step back and think about whether a temporary savings of a few percentage points is really worth global sourcing when YOU could be ultimately responsible for not only draining trillions of dollars from the world’s economy to pay for the health care required to treat the tens of thousands of victims who suffer from pollution-induced lung and heart disease but causing thousands of deaths a year. I don’t know about you, but I think it’s time for home-cost country sourcing.

Has Aberdeen Caught the Green Bug?

Browsing the Aberdeen site, I noticed a benchmark report on “Going. Going Green: Planning for The Green IT Ecosystem” which caught my eye for three reasons: (1) I hadn’t noticed a study of this specific nature before (and as far as I can tell, it’s their first), (2) last year was the first time I noticed Aberdeen addressing the concept of Green (with their “Green Initiatives: Lowering Costs and Increasing Efficiency in the Data Center”), and (3) if they build on the research they started with “Building a Green Supply Chain”, it could revolutionize both their “Procurement & Supply” and “Supply Chain & Logistics” practices, which, despite their continued consistency in benchmark quality, could use a little jazzing up as many of the topics they’ve been covering haven’t changed much in the last few years, and the benchmark reports start to become nothing more than updated statistics once you get to the third, fourth, or fifth study on a topic. (While this is great for tracking your progress against your best in class peers, it’s not so great if you are looking for new ideas to take your practice to the next level once you reach best-in-class.)

This latest report, which notes that the global economic downturn and the fluctuations in energy prices emphasize the financial need for organizations to understand and manage their consumption of energy as a key part of their ongoing corporate strategy requires IT to examine its role in the larger organization relative to corporate responsibility and to implement strategies that not only decrease consumption and optimize performance, but also catalyze the proper management and achievement of overall corporate sustainability goals.

IT can play a big role in energy reduction and sustainability efforts as it can:

  • decrease power consumption requirements in the data center and on the desktop (see my posts on Green Your Desktops and Green Your Data Centers for more details and check out the Green IT Savings Template to calculate how much Green IT can save you)
  • decrease the size of the data center
  • decrease the cooling requirements of the data center
  • reuse the heat generated by the data center to heat the surrounding building

The study found that of the best-in-class performers in Green IT,

  • 67% have a formal green/sustainability policy and documented energy efficiency policies
  • 78% include sustainability principles in the requirements for new systems and products
  • 81% use energy efficient components to decrease power consumption
  • 69% use tiered storage to manage the data life-cycle
  • 63% use alternative data center cooling technologies

and this tells us that you can Green Your IT Ecosystem and Save if you

  • make it a mandate to go Green
  • develop and document appropriate procedures and policies
  • take a holistic approach in your operations
  • make green a requirement in everything you source
  • take advantage of new technologies to reduce your energy and operating footprint

Allowing you to sustain the environment and sustain your business at the same time. How can you go wrong?

Want more information on green technology? See my previous posts on greening your data centers, greening your desktops, and calculating your savings with green technology.