This semester in SIRI Practicum my team and I are working with a client in the nonprofit sector whose goal is to help make it so that corporations’ political activities reflect positive climate policies. In a time where companies are more in the public eye and under a microscope, it not only makes moral sense to incorporate sound climate policies into companies’ strategic agenda, but also economic sense. One such way that it makes economic sense is as a tool for attracting top talent. As the U.S. economy continues to shift further and further towards a techno-centric service economy, highly skilled labor from top institutions becomes even more in demand. While having a good ESG report or high levels of corporate social responsibility are unlikely to be the sole factor in graduates’ decisions on where they want to work, these factors can only serve to expand the pool of interested candidates. Our project this semester is to create a tool for these graduated to be able to compare the top hiring companies against each other on various metrics of environmental and social responsibility. With this tool in place, we hope to create a dynamic of a 'race to the top' among these companies where they will compete against each other to perform better on these metrics and in turn will adopt better climate policies.
Having not personally worked in a consultant capacity or in the ESG/CSR space prior to attending Columbia, I was both excited and a bit nervous for this project. Learning more about these topics is exactly why I came back to school, but it is a bit daunting to be consulting on them when I have only just begun being exposed to them myself. However, it is a very interesting thesis, and I believe it has the potential to catalyze positive change in some of the largest organizations in the U.S. That is why I chose it as my project. While many of the concepts are new to me, I have still been able to utilize the skillset that I already possessed in tandem with the skillsets of my teammates to achieve our goals and produce the deliverables required so far to get this project off the ground.
The most challenging tasks and deliverables for our project are still ahead of us this semester. While my group has learned to work together quickly and has already established both norms and a cadence for working, we will no doubt face challenges ahead. As the semester progresses, I believe my team and I will all continue to lean on and learn from each other in order to create this tool for students to use to compare the policies of their potential employers. All four members of my group come from extremely different backgrounds and have different experiences and plans from each other, however, we all share a common cause in fighting climate change. We also all chose this class and chose this specific project because we believed those choices would help us to get closer to our goals. While the road ahead may not be perfectly smooth, uniting around that shared mission, I believe, will be our best way to achieve what we have set out to accomplish.