Monday, January 05, 2009 Sanchez: CSR By Benedicto Sanchez Nature Speaks
CSR: Corporate social responsibility. Otherwise known as corporate responsibility, corporate citizenship, responsible business and corporate social opportunity.
Working for the non-profit sector, I found it incomprehensible that corporations can have other notions apart from making piles and piles of profits. Profit maximization, it's called. And nothing more.
Thus, I viewed with skepticism the concept that corporations can obligate themselves to be responsible and accountable for the impact of their activities toward producers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, customers, communities and the environment.
Oh sure, I met the practice and concept before. But I dismissed CSR for the environment as greenwashing. Or corporate-funded poverty alleviation projects as public relations stunts meant to fleece workers, rural mountain communities of their raw materials, and urban consumers.
My thinking came full circle when I first met Dean Cycon, CEO of the Dean's Beans Organic Coffee Company (www.deansbeans.com). We were together the UN Food Agriculture Organization headquarters in Rome for the 2004 Sustainable Livelihoods Workshop of Mountain Partnership.
With a full-beard and looking every bit an aging American hippie, I thought he heads a non-government organization. He spouted NGO-speak of human rights, fair trade and environmental protection through organic coffee.
I was flabbergasted to learn that, yes, he is an Ivy League-schooled human rights and environmental lawyer who became an entrepreneur not to line his pockets but to change the world.
Dean walks the talk of fair trade and environmental protection. His products are all certified organic, fairly traded, and kosher and have the certification seals to prove it. He pays in advance 60 percent of the indigenous communities' cost of production under fair trade regulations.
Yet his company earns enough profits (mind you: profits!) to pay upfront the mountain producers of Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America.
Once an international corporate lawyer, he asserted that "companies didn't have to change their business practices, which were what kept people in a chronic state of underdevelopment."
His argument: "I created Dean's Beans to model how that might look; could I do this and still be profitable? If I could, then no coffee company had an excuse to do things differently." May I dare say, not just coffee companies but corporations in other industries as well.
When I went back to school in Columbia University as an exchange scholar in 2005, I invited him to be a resource speaker for our human rights advocates' round-table discussion on CSR and fair trade at the university's Heymann Center.
For Dean, competition is most welcome when other coffee companies do as he says, and do as he does. Dean bashes Starbucks not because it's the competition but because it's not doing enough fair trading. The company sells in the USA one organic variety one day of every month.
Dean is no gothic activist. He doesn't look who grim and determined who has no time for laughs. He is witty and funny, and liberally peppers his talks with colloquialisms and street slang.
When we broke out for lunch, I had a one-on-one talk with him. His biggest frustration, he says, is that despite his profitable business, no other company seems to follow his lead. I disagreed. The fact that companies such as Starbucks has started to sell fairly traded organic coffee shows his impact.
A capitalist with a social conscience, Dean could put many non-profit people to shame-including us. After the session with Dean, we had a break that afternoon. The advocates took the subway to ritzy Lower Manhattan to see the sights and window-shopped. Unfortunately, it rained that cold afternoon.
To shake off the chill, we decided to drop by a coffee shop. Starbucks. We drank our cup of Java there with a clear conscience only after we agreed that no one will whistle-blow to Dean.
