A few things have not changed since the Investing in the Future Awards and supplement were launched one hot afternoon in the converted garage that used to serve as the offices of what was then called The Weekly Mail.
One is the tendency to confuse social responsibility and investment with marketing, the tendency to put out glossy publications on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate grant-making. The Investing in the Future Awards were designed to cut through the feel-good flimflam, and recognise true commitment to ethical, responsible business.
The Weekly Mail was irreverent and not part of the establishment. Therefore, if we gave awards to the corporate world, they would carry some weight.
With this knowledge, we handed over our first ever Investing in the Future Award to Mike Sandler of AECI in the sweltering heat of The Weekly Mail‘s minimalist board-room. Trays of simple but appetising sandwiches were on offer, and pitchers of fruit juice. The sandwiches wilted as Sandler delivered, for the benefit of the few appreciative guests, a brief and impromptu speech of thanks, outlining his company’s philosophy on CSR.
I could hear Sandler had thought a lot about the issues. As a chemical company AECI was in the forefront of criticism about environmental responsibility, and took its responsibility seriously. But that was not the main reason AECI won the award.
The main reason was their willingness to fill out a comprehensive and probing questionnaire on AECI’s activities in human resources, labour relations, corporate grant-making and affirmative action programmes, among other things.
Transparency on such issues was a big feature of the awards and the questionnaire was adapted from one provided by Myra Alperson, a New Yorker resident in Johannesburg and a specialist in CSR, the dreaded abbreviation that summed up for me a lot of the corporate fluff that filled many of the media supplements that were beginning to appear.
We reckoned that information — as much of it as possible — was necessary for a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of a company’s corporate citizenship profile.
Alperson was one of the chief contributors to a book that rated top United States firms’ CSR, and devoted a lot of time to helping me frame the questionnaire sent out for the awards.
Alperson brought with her a rigorous approach to CSR rating. The groups in the US she had worked with had blazed a path in evaluating companies, and her own work was the inspiration for the awards. She was fearless as well as socially and environmentally responsible: she routinely rode a bicycle to corporate meetings through Johannesburg streets.
South African companies had established a dreadful reputation for union-bashing and lack of concern for workers’ well-being. Migrant labour and the hostel system were still very much in existence.
In one sense business had been politically to the left of the apartheid government, in another so scared of communism and labour that they went along with the excesses of apartheid, agreeing in private with media repression, for example.
I had worked for business publications, so I wanted to bring something like the same sort of rigour to the examination of social responsibility as was brought to bear on company financial statements.
Perhaps CSR could never be quantified in the same way as internal rates of return or after-tax profits, but we could get a better sense of which companies we should recognise for excellence in the way they behaved socially.
So for a few years we followed the approach of sending out questionnaires to the Johannesburg Stock Exchange’s Top 100 companies (by assets), and our approaches bore fruit.
Problem was that companies were reluctant to part with information, especially on racial profile, an example of corporate South Africa’s short-sightedness. I believe that if South African business had embraced affirmative action much earlier in a more enthusiastic fashion, legislation would have been avoided. In a sense we were trying to encourage what employment equity legislation now demands.
This was one reason why we changed the awards to be project-based and recognise excellence in a developmental approach to corporate grant-making. Another was, I thought, that the union-led Community Growth Fund unit trust had taken up the kind of ‘negative screening” of companies by criteria that closely matched ours.
Also, interaction with the various judging panels we put together and with corporations themselves told us we would get more cooperation if we took this approach.
In time Alperson, who played an active and unpaid role in the judging for many years, survived the minibus taxis and returned to New York. Corporate social investment became the abbreviation that replaced CSR, but we stuck to Investing in the Future.
The Mail & Guardian, as The Weekly Mail came to be called, prevailed on what is now SABC3 to flight a documentary on our awards and I traipsed around the country investigating potential winners. Here I saw with my own eyes, rather than through the people sent to investigate projects, social investment in action: flourishing vegetable gardens, cleaned-up squatter settlements, new housing for miners, businesses created in recycled containers, and job-creation projects in Sasolburg and Johannesburg.
In most years we relied on the input of the project managers and the companies, and on the invaluable expertise of the panel members who volunteered their time to help with judging and investigating and even writing the supplement.
The awards and supplement have played a role in the professionalisation of corporate social investment, in the sense of making companies think more about how they spend their money. They helped raise awareness of the developmental approach to corporate grant-making.
I hope they will continue to help refine thinking about CSR and CSI and open a legitimate space for companies to draw attention to their good corporate citizenship.
Changing debates, changing focus
The Investing in the Future Awards 2003 were handed out at a glittering ceremony in Johannesburg attended by 160 guests and addressed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu on October 31.
Investing in the Future, now in its 15th year, is a Mail & Guardian initiative aimed at honouring companies and organisations that contribute to the well-being of society by investing in its people. The nature of the awards has changed over the years, in keeping with the changing focus of the corporate world.
So, for instance, we introduced a category called Corporate Employee Community Involvement Programmes this year, in response to the growing popularity of employee volunteerism.
Sustainability has also become more of an issue in the wake of last year’s World Summit on Sustainable Development. Cause-related marketing and corporate governance are being hotly debated in the light of the King II report.
The Investing in the Future Awards are designed to heighten public, government and business awareness of corporate social investment. In the following pages you will find details of this year’s winners and finalists, as well as some of the current debates.