Sustainability Stakeholder Engagement Conference Summary

I'm back from the Sustainability Stakeholder Engagement conference, which was held last week in New York. A few of my thoughts are below, but I'd also recommend reading Perry Goldschein and Beth Bengston's more comprehensive review of the event, published at GreenBiz.com.

It was a really enjoyable event, with a great mix of engagement-focused topics and sustainability-focused topics. I spoke on the last panel of the event, which focused on how to engage communities (community engagement was last but not least!). Community engagement is such a broad topic, and I focused primarily on how companies with industrial facilities can engage local communities around controversial issues, using The Environment Council's work with the Rugby Cement Plant as a case study. Another speaker on the panel, from EcoMedia, focused on the community giving aspects of engagement, citing a case study involving fundraising for a local school. I really appreciated having multiple types of community engagement represented on the panel, as we were able to give concrete examples of how a company should think differently about its community engagement, depending on how urgent and controversial the engagement topics are.

The Sustainability Stakeholder Engagement conference also served as the first public debut of The Stakeholder Score, a best practice guide and evaluation tool for companies' stakeholder engagement programs, which has recently been made available for free public use. I'm giving a webinar on the Stakeholder Score in a few weeks, on October 15th; for more information see the AltaTerra website.