Image obtained from https://www.samsungengineering.co.kr/kor/sustainability/corporate/activity/suView

Greetings to 28^th Eco-generation Regional Ambassadors! We are already in our last month of our term. This is your mentor Joon and I am writing this article to announce the Theme of the Month for August succeeding July’s topic, ‘Nature and I’. The keyword for the last month will be <"Social Contribution Activities of Corporations">.

 Getting to the point directly, for this month, we would like our ambassadors to research about the cases regarding social contribution activities of companies around the world. Companies usually take part to solve problems in different fields including environmental, access to education, and so on.

 Despite the images that companies are creating different social problems, such as pollution made during manufacturing process, some of them try to improve their images and break the stereotypes through different social approaches. Some might seem quite obvious that companies are doing it for the line on their web site list, yet there are others which companies put magnificent resources onto it.

 In order to deal with existing social problems, ‘Collective Impact’ is required. It is the term first introduced and coined in 2011 by John Kania and Mark Kramer on Stanford Social Innovation Review. The major definition or explanation of the term is that expertise from different fields should be combined to collaboratively deal with problems.

For instance, when local-scale social problems arise in communities, they might not have sufficient knowledge and resources to solve the problem. Companies could share their hand to such communities with the experts and expertise affiliated and accumulated with it. For those problems requiring some changes in regulations, government bodies could also share some hand by actively amending the policies. We should note that it is not the concept saying local communities cannot solve any problems on their own, but pointing out that it could be solved much more efficiently.

 One of the most famous example for our ambassadors is, obviously, TUNZA Eco Generation. On September 27^th, 2011, UNEP and Samsung Engineering proposed that Tunza Eco-generation be an interactive and vibrant social networking platform to presenting various possibilities to engage children, youth, and environmental organizations from around the world. Its primary purpose is to serve as a global platform for environmental education and networking for young people. Before it was launched globally, It had more than 20 years of history solely in Korea and was the largest running CSR program.

To facilitate this goal, environmental awareness ambassadors from around the world are nominated twice a year. As well as other various programs (such as Online Events, Eco-generation Environmental Competition, Junior Engineering Academy, Hidden Eco-hero Awards) are run at the website on a regular basis in order to heighten the engagement of visitors with expectations to further spread the importance of environmental awareness and conservation.

 Above was the example of company taking active action, yet there are much more companies taking passive form to contribute to society. Donating money to social fund could be one example, and considering to reduce negative social impact on their management decision could be another.

 As there are numerous ways the companies contribute to social problems, try to find out some unique forms of contribution or cases of social contribution of companies on your region. It could be easily found by googling it as most companies proudly post such contribution activities on their websites.

 There is no limited or designated way to write for this month’s topic, as always and feel free to take creative approach!

Thanks for all of you who have actively participated in our ambassadorship. It was nice experience for me to read through your articles with different thoughts.

 Let’s keep up!

Reference

https://ssir.org/articles/entry/collective_impact#