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For the last four years Center member CA, Inc. has sponsored CA Together in Action (CTA), a month-long program to support non-profit organizations around the world. Launched in 2006 as a two-week event, the program expanded to a month to allow as many employees as possible to participate. 
Hope springs eternal at corporate citizenship conference
By Brad Googins
For me the most promising sign that spring has arrived is the Center’s annual conference that will be held March 29-31 in San Francisco. While the weather here in Boston is an unreliable indicator, the conference is a sure bet and is an event that never fails to exceed expectations. This year will be no different.
The volatile economic climate we’re all facing has been dominant in our minds as we selected keynote speakers and designed the breakout sessions and workshops. Ever the optimist, I favored the Center focusing on the opportunity side of these extraordinary times. The conference, with the theme of “Leading Change, Finding Opportunity”, will examine how business must adjust to the new dynamics created by the economic meltdown.
I believe this moment in history will challenge the soundness of corporate citizenship and test the mettle of those who manage this area. At the conference in San Francisco I’ll be taking measure of how citizenship issues are holding up under the financial pressures of the day. I hope to leave with more evidence of the connection between how a company manages its responsibilities to society and the level of trust, confidence and goodwill it receives in the marketplace.
Integrating corporate citizenship into the core business strategy and managing it well are critical for the successful operation of companies. How this gets communicated is also essential – especially for reputational purposes and stakeholder relationship building.
To signal the importance of communication, the Center launched a competition seeking the best short video that tells a corporate citizenship story. The winner will be announced during the Monday dinner program. We had 25 remarkable entries, all of which met the objective of “communicating for a better world.” Check out all the entries at www.BCCorporateCitizenship.org/filmfestival.
I’m proud to say the conference has weathered the economic storm and we expect close to 400 attendees. We have also heard from many who wanted to attend but couldn’t because of company travel limitations. To share the rich content with those who can’t be there, we will use our web site as a news portal for what’s happening in breakout sessions and keynote speeches and will be posting on our Center blog a few times each day of the conference. You can get these updates and all our blog posts delivered to your email or as an RSS feed. Please consider offering a response to these blog postings so we can get an “outside” perspective.
I’d also like to acknowledge the 25 corporate sponsors who demonstrate their leadership role in corporate citizenship and a commitment to strengthening the field with their support of the conference. The lead sponsor is Intel, convening sponsor The Dow Chemical Company. Other sponsors are: Accenture, Fidelity, Kaiser Permanente, State Street, UPS, Baxter, FedEx, Haley & Aldrich, ING, Levi Strauss & Company, Microsoft, Mohawk Fine Papers, Northrop Grumman, Petro-Canada, Sprint, Target, TransCanada, ARAMARK, CEMEX, CH2M HILL, Toyota, Verizon and Wells Fargo.
Check out our conference guide and see what the conference has to offer.
March 27th, 2009 at 9:28 am
This will be my first time attending the International Corporate Citizenship Conference and as a member of the Center for Corporate Citizenship’s membership team, I am looking forward to meeting our members and learning more about the good work they are going in their communities, environmentally and socially. It will be great to put the faces to the names to so many of our members that I have had interactions with. To our members: please say hi if you see me mingling about! I am hoping to meet as many of our members as possible. Additionally, I look forward to meeting folks who are not members, learning about their CSR and corporate citizenship challenges and start a dialogue about how the Center’s resources can help them.
See you all soon! Rick Ward