Environmental, Social & Governance Briefs

Deloitte’s Center for Board Effectiveness, a member of The Conference Board Governance Center, has released its 2018 Audit Committee Resource Guide. It offers practical considerations and resources to help audit committee members execute their responsibilities by outlining regulatory requirements, questions to consider, and tools and resources available from governance organizations.

Through corporate philanthropy, employers not only support the communities and societies in which they operate, they signal their company’s values and priorities to their own employees. By choosing to support people with disabilities through philanthropic efforts, companies also signal support for nearly a third of their workforce.

During the second quarter of 2018, the Governance Center released three pieces of research that cover the activist hedge funds’ perspective on the corporate director job, ESG ratings and ranking initiatives, and the EU Circular Economy legislative package.

(This is part of a two-part series on the philosophy of filling boards with competent directors, making them more effective, and rebuilding them when necessary.) Most every chair we engage acknowledges that board composition is the foundation for competitive advantage; in their belief, the mix has to be right or nothing much good can happen.

Science Based Targets (SBTs) for greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction are increasingly being discussed, however what they entail in detail is often not well understood.In contrast to a simple incremental approach, targets are considered ‘science-based’, if they aim at carbon reduction in accordance with the internationally agreed global climate change targets. In this blog, we want to give a very brief overview of the approach and its application.

The 2018 Business Contributions to the Arts survey, conducted by The Conference Board and Americans for the Arts, is open until Friday, June 8. Please share your data regarding your organization's support for the arts to help us provide important benchmarking information to the corporate philanthropy and arts communities. The survey should take no more than 15-20 minutes to complete.

As part of staying up to date on corporate social responsibility and nonprofit program management best practices, we sat down for a chat with Jason Saul, Founder and CEO of Mission Measurement, and Alex Parkinson, Senior Researcher and Director of the Society for New Communications Research of The Conference Board (SNCR). Here’s what we learned about why it’s important to measure impact, what donors expect, current trends—and common mistakes.

Public and private businesses today face many decisions that do not arise from, and have consequences far beyond, solely financial performance. Rather, these decisions are primarily driven by, and implicate, important social, cultural and political concerns. They include harassment, pay equity and other issues raised by the #MeToo movement.

Governance Center member PwC Governance Insights Center, in conjunction with Diligent and Boardroom Resources, is hosting a webinar at 2:30 p.m. EST May 23 about the value of adding younger directors to a corporate board.