PRESS RELEASE: Corporate Responsibility Magazine Releases 11th Annual 100 Best Corporate Citizens List
(New York, March 2, 2010) At 9:30am EST today, Corporate Responsibility Magazine (the new name of CRO Magazine) announced its 11th annual 100 Best Corporate Citizens List, based on publicly-available information and recognized by PR Week as one of America’s top three most-important business rankings.
The list includes a number of companies whose rankings rose significantly from last year.
“Thirty-six of the Top 100 were not on last year’s list, evidence that companies are increasing their focus on public reporting and performance, particularly in the areas of climate change, environment, employee relations, and human rights,” said Corporate Responsibility Magazine publisher Jay Whitehead. “Between 2009 and 2010, for instance, the top company’s total score improved by 66 percent, and the average score of all 100 companies climbed by 19 percent.”
The following is the 100 Best Corporate Citizens List for 2010, with the companies’ 2009 rank: read more…
Defining diversity
In college, the one course I dreaded taking was “Cross-Cultural Communications.” I procrastinated on the 100-level course, waiting until my final semester of senior year to finally subject myself to the torture. I feared the professor would spend the fifteen weeks teaching us how to be politically correct. I was disinterested in learning what I already knew: that words have power.
The course, however, wound up being one of the most fascinating explorations of how society works. Rather than teach political correctness, the course eschewed it; forcing us to look into ourselves, our assumptions, and our society to see the operations of society in a different light.
Through reading seminal works like Edward Hall’s Beyond Culture, we learned about how institutions, racial groups, and religious groups all share something in common no matter how different they are from one another: the need to coalesce around unified traits, speech, and actions. Many of the racial-political discourse in the United States, for example, could be read more…
THE REACTION OF CUSTOMERS
Coffee customers can be picky.
So imagine this: you’re a wholesaler and retailer and you have a number of progressive-minded customers. And suddenly you tell them you’re not doing a certification program, but you’re creating your own. “We had a good number of customers asking us ‘Why isn’t this Fair Trade?,’” Watts recalled. “[We had] wholesalers saying ‘We want Fair Trade!’ But we felt our own message was suitable for what we were doing.”
So how do you tell your customers what you’re trying to accomplish? “We did feel pressure to give people something. I felt comfortable explaining to anyone who asked why it was fair and why it was more sustainable. … But you can’t have thirty minute conversations with all of your customers. People want and crave read more…
THE SHORTFALLS OF SOME COOPERATIVES
Intelligentsia worked with some purchasing cooperatives meant to drive a portion of the proceeds back to the original producers of the coffee cherries. After two years in working with these cooperatives, Watts began to see a positive impact on the quality of the products, but not necessarily in social changes – at least to the extent he wanted.
So he started digging around. He looked at the entire custody chain of coffee: from the farmer, to the drier, to the importer and then followed the money backwards. Even though Intelligenstia was paying three times the amount others usually paid, “What I realized is that you can’t read more…



