AXIS Corporate Social Responsibility Report

Year 2002

 

Axis Performance Advisors uses Ralph Estes concept of a Corporate Annual Report as a way to track how socially responsible we are. Unlike the typical annual report, this describes our contributions to all our stakeholders--not just owners/shareholders, but also employees, customers, the community and the environment. The real bottom line is about more than just money. The following report summarizes our contributions to our various stakeholder groups. Since the employees are also owners, we combine those two stakeholder groups.

 

Clients

For AXIS adding value to our clients' organizations is our primary mission.
Here are some highlights of our work in the last year.

We organized the Sustainability Now workshop series for Ecotrust, 19 workshops around economic, social and environmental solutions to pressing current problems.

Marsha facilitated a stakeholder consensus process to determine criteria for sustainable cleaning products through the Zero Waste Alliance.

Darcy taught a number of workshops for the Oregon Natural Step Network, including Applying the TNS Framework and Building a Case for Sustainability.

Darcy and Marsha organized a series of site visits for the Oregon Economic and Community Development department to educate their regional development officers on the business benefits of pursuing sustainability.

We released five more booklets in the Sustainability Series, a set of how-to booklets designed to help organizations implement sustainability :

 

Darcy and Marsha participated in the Oregon Natural Step Network's coaching service, supporting the transition of the following organizations to sustainable practices:

 

Marsha delivered leadership training programs to the Oregon Employment Dept and various agencies in the government of Botswana.

Marsha helped the Oregon DEQ develop a leading-edge performance management system.

Darcy coached an executive for an athletics shoe/apparel company.

 

 

Community

In addition to our work with clients, we make a point of adding value in our communities.

AXIS has been in discussion with a number of organizations about the formation of a Sustainability Institute.

We continued our free services: the Axis Advisory, a quarterly newsletter (5 issues) and our newsflash service (15+ issues), a summary of interesting articles and books. [To join, send an email to AXIS-Advisory-subscribe@yahoogroups.com or AXIS-newsflash-subscribe@yahoogroups.com respectively.] We also continued moderating NW-Sustainability listserve to support people in the Pacific Northwest who are interested in sustainability. [To join, send an email to NW-Sustainability-subscribe@yahoogroups.com]

Marsha and Darcy did 9 presentations (most on sustainability); most were local but they included presentations in Idaho and New Orleans.

Darcy facilitated pro bono a retreat for the Women's Center for Applied Leadership.

Darcy volunteered for the SMART reading program for elementary students.

Marsha volunteered on the DaVinci Middle School water reclamation and garden project.

Darcy sat on the board of SageWorks, a non-profit working on a video/education/outreach effort to preserve wild salmon.

 

Environment

Though as a consulting service we have low environmental impact,
we still feel a responsibility to being good earth stewards.

We continued tracking the percentage of trips where we used alternative transportation (mass transit, biking or walking.) We've increased our use of alternative transportation methods from 34% in 2001 to over 43% in 2002. If we counted carpooling, this percentage would be higher.

Again this year, AXIS is climate neutral. We purchased carbon credits to offset our greenhouse gas emissions for the previous year, paying a premium for a project that had social as well as environmental benefits.

Marsha became certified as a speaker for the Greenhouse Network.

Employees/Owners

As owner/operators we naturally set business goals for our own development.
This year, we focused on deepening our knowledge of technical environmental issues.

Darcy and/or Marsha attended workshops on

Darcy read and summarized dozens of books on the topic.

Profits are up about 20% this year, some of which was due to the timing of certain accounts receivables. Almost 40% of our revenues came from environmental sustainability work. The remainder came from more traditional economic/social issues internal to organizations (e.g., team building, conflict resolution, executive coaching, etc.).

 

Clients we served in 2002

 

PLANS FOR 2003

Sustainability Institute--Since the Pacific Northwest is becoming a mecca for sustainability practices, we're exploring with a number of other organizations plans to create a collaborative Institute. We are also designing a certificate program for people who want to learn how to implement sustainability within an organization. One option is to use distance learning software services to lead a cohort of clients through an implementation process to meet certain regional goals. Since these projects may take some time to get going, we may begin by offering a series of public seminars in 2003 to help organizations get sustainability projects going.

 

Sustainability Series -- Once people understand the need to pursue sustainability, they often are stumped. "What do we DO?" So we plan to continue publishing new Sustainability Series tm booklets and hope to find additional distribution channels for them. Look for...

Designing Green Buildings: Facilitating Eco-Charrettes (coauthor: Nathan Good, CH2M Hill)

 

Newsletters, Newsflashes and a Sustainability Listserve -- We will continue our free quarterly newsletter [AXIS-Advisory] and book/article reviews [AXIS-newsflash] services. We continue to add subscribers to our [NW-Sustainability] list, a central source for event listings/announcements and a way to get answers to your sustainability questions. To sign up for any of these services send an email to [listname]-subscribe@yahoogroups.com (replacing [listname] with the service you desire) or go to http://www.yahoogroups.com and search for the title of the service you want.