Excellent sustainability videos – the White Dog Cafe

Judy Wicks transformed her Philadelphia restaurant into a Community Food Enterprise. She has created multiple environmental and social good. Restaurant profits are sourced from local farms  - farmers are featured on some of the menus. From a simple start of looking for free range pork, her enterprise has snowballed into a huge range of sustainability projects. [...]

Stakeholder engagement drivers – Part 2: Self-interested organisations

In the first part of this series of posts we looked at three levels of commitment to stakeholder engagement, self-interest, enlightened self-interest and altruism. This, and the following posts will expand on these and illustrate them with examples. The antithesis of engagement Lets start by looking at an extreme level of disengagement – methamphetamine (P) [...]

Stakeholder engagement – what are the drivers?

If you want your organisation to engage better with stakeholders take some time to understand why. This blog explores three levels of commitment to stakeholder engagement – self-interest, enlightened self-interest and altruism. As with any classification system, these levels are arbitrary and could be endlessly debated – they are simply offered to stimulate thinking about [...]

Engagement stories – the New Zealand Army

The New Zealand Army provides an inspiring example of a journey of engagement, and how the engagement ethos supports their effectiveness in the field. New Zealand is a young nation with a compressed history. 150 years ago, British and Colonial forces were engaged in a series of wars with indigenous Mäori tribes, leaving the inevitable [...]

The heart of sustainability

Ultimately, sustainability can only be built on the transformation of human character. The brilliant John Elkington did a great job by presenting three dimensions of sustainability – economic, environmental and social (people, planet and profit). Its becoming ever more clear, that the myopic pursuit of economic sustainability alone, is ironically, unsustainable. Or to put it [...]