“While people purchase value, they bond with values,” explained Divinsky. “The organisations that bring to life their social values and commitments will drive positive social change and enduring business success. Today, Social Purpose is the new brand.”

This bold assertion—that social purpose is the new brand—is core to Pamela’s work. While people purchase commodities, they bond with—and are loyal to—the companies and brands that stand for something meaningful and relevant. To that end, Pamela has developed social purpose strategies for Purina, Walmart, Tim Hortons, the Canadian Cancer Society and the Heart and Stroke Foundation.

Along with Divinsky, the evening will feature distinguished guest speakers Susan Stocker, Manager, Technology and Sustainability Resources, Teck Resources Limited, and Christie Stephenson, Manager, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Evaluations and Research, NEI Investments.

Whether or not CSR and sustainability are central to your work or career interests, a grasp of the issues is increasingly an essential part of your business acumen. Join us February 6, and you’ll leave with a better understanding of the relevance and value of sustainable business.

Coordinates

Monday, February 6, 2012, 6:30pm – 8:30pm

SFU Segal Graduate School of Business, 500 Granville Street, Room 2800

Register on the SFU Net Impact site.

We look forward to seeing you on February 6!

Vertality is an eco-chic celebration of renewed vitality—a place to connect Vancouver’s rich community of change-makers, innovators and sustainability entrepreneurs. If you’re a changemaker, innovator, sustainability entrepreneur or a new friend of the community, join us, and infuse your New Year with renewed vitality with an evening of celebration, local foods, performance art and amazing people.

Where? – Club 560, 560 Seymour Street

When? – January 26, 2012, 6:00pm – 10:00 pm

How? – Visit Eventbrite for tickets

To mark and celebrate the season, we’re pleased to be launching the Junxion Global Foundation.

We believe strongly in giving to causes that matter to local communities where our business operates, and to global causes that are of significance to people around the world. Our Foundation complements and extends the impact we’re delivering with our consulting, volunteering and pro bono services. It provides grants and support to non-profit organisations working on issues we and our clients care about: Climate change, peace & conflict resolution, and social justice.

Junxion Strategy is a mission-driven consulting firm that strives to catalyse social and environmental progress. We support organisations and individuals working to make communities more resilient, organisations more sustainable, and the world more just.

We’re excited to add the Junxion Global Foundation to our growing operations. In gratitude to our clients and friends, we’ll be disbursing donations to local non-profits early in 2012.

And who can blame you? It’s not obvious when you saunter into your local 50,000 square foot supermarket. The shelves groaning under the weight of thousands of products from the four corners of the planet mask the problem.

But if you read between the headlines, then you know that food has been in the news lately due to rising prices and shortages of critical crops like corn, wheat and rice. Already in 2011, the U.N. Food Price Index has eclipsed its previous all-time global high; as of March it had climbed for eight consecutive months.

This situation has been brought on by a range of issues:

• Increasing energy costs and incentives for bio-fuels made from corn and other crops grown on land that would otherwise be used for food.
• Increasingly frequent and severe weather calamities that are having devastating impacts on farmers.
• Water shortages (in part tied to weather) that are getting more severe globally.
• A growing, more affluent global population that is eating more meat than ever before.
• A coordinated move by a number of countries to secure farmland outside their borders to meet their own food needs.

Multiple factors at play, no easy solutions

On the energy front, we continue to see oil hovering around $100 USD a barrel. From farm to fork, this higher input cost is felt along the whole value chain: fertilizer, energy required to operate equipment, distribution, packaging and so on.

At the same time, policies designed to stimulate the production of biofuels mean that enormous areas of fertile land once used to grow food are being used to grow crops like corn that can be turned into fuel for gas-guzzling SUVs. The United States, once a global buffer for poor harvests elsewhere, is one of the worst offenders of this misguided and distorted approach to “energy security.”

On the weather front, a perfect storm of events is also challenging our ability to grow food. Remember that Russian heatwave and drought in 2010 that set huge forest fires burning? It reduced the country’s grain harvest by nearly 40 percent. Similarly, last year’s overabundance of water in Australia inundated fertile farmland almost the size of France, while floods this year in Pakistan and Thailand have had similar devastating impacts.

Clearly, adequate water in the right amounts at the right time of the growing cycle is critical for farming. As global precipitation patterns change, it’s of great concern that more than half of the world’s people live in countries where water tables are falling. Much of this water is used for irrigation that produces 40 percent of the world’s food.

The Middle East is the first geographic region where grain production has peaked and begun to decline because of water shortages. Here in India, where farmers have drilled some 20 million irrigation wells, water tables are dwindling at a rate of up to six metres per year. The situation in China is just as bad. The World Bank reports that 175 million Indians are being fed with food produced by overpumping. In China, that figure is 130 million people.

Growing population presents two-fold challenge

The world’s growing population presents a challenge on two fronts. First of all, each year the world’s farmers must feed 80 million additional people, nearly all of them in developing countries. In just 40 years, agricultural production needs to increase by 70 percent to keep everyone fed. Second, the great productivity gains we saw in food production during the “green revolution” of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, are simply no longer in the cards. Most of the major gains have been made and are terribly reliant on fossil fuels. Genetically modified foods are fraught with issues too.

As incomes rise, people are eating more animal protein and calorie-dense foods instead of a plant-based diet. Consider that 10 kilograms of feed is needed to produce just one kilogram of beef, three of pork, and five of chicken. This also doesn’t factor in the methane producing impact of the world’s 1.5 billion cows and billions of other grazing animals. (Incidentally, a single cow produces as much greenhouses gas in a day as the average car).

Early signs of trouble ahead

To understand how all of these food challenges are playing out, some of the first signs of trouble came in 2007, when farmers began having difficulty keeping up with the growth in global demand for grain. By mid-2008, grain and soybean prices tripled. Not surprisingly, many exporting countries like Argentina, Russia and Vietnam (the world’s second largest rice exporter) tried to control the rise of domestic food prices by restricting exports.

In developed countries where we spend just 10 percent of our income on food, these price rises are manageable. Food input costs represent a fraction of the price we pay at the till; the rest is spent on processing, distribution, marketing and profit margins. However, in developing countries, citizens spend up to half their income on food. Most of that is a direct cost since people buy unprocessed food directly from local markets. For many, it means going from two meals per day to one.

Three years ago, fearing they might not be able to buy needed grain from the market, some affluent countries like Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and China, took the unusual step of buying or leasing land in other countries on which to grow food for themselves. Last year, a World Bank analysis of these “land grabs” reported that a total of nearly 140 million acres were involved. This is a serious ethical and social justice issue. It deprives local people of food security as well as their livelihoods.

Politics and ethics can’t be ignored

As Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, writes in the May/June issue of Foreign Policy, “The new geopolitics of food looks a whole lot more volatile — and a whole lot more contentious — than it used to. Scarcity is the new norm.” He goes on to say, “If we cannot produce higher crop yields with less water and conserve fertile soils, many agricultural areas will cease to be viable. If we cannot move at wartime speed to stabilize the climate, we may not be able to avoid runaway food prices. If we cannot accelerate the shift to smaller families and stabilize the world population sooner rather than later, the ranks of the hungry will almost certainly continue to expand.”

So, what’s a globally aware, socially-conscious person like you supposed to do in the face of this sobering news? The next time you cruise the aisles of your local supermarket, ask yourself these questions:

• How are my food choices contributing to the deteriorating global food situation? Can I get by with less meat?
• How self-reliant is my family when it comes to food? Can we grow some of our own or join a community shared agricultural group?
• How are the other decisions I make – around things like energy or water use – contributing (or not) to the viability of our food system?
• How can I make choices that will help reduce the 30–40% of food a typical family wastes?

As I mentioned in my last article, as social entrepreneurs, we’ve learned to acknowledge intractable challenges, connect our values with the power of enterprise, and generate clever solutions. From local food and community resilience projects to efforts to shift global consumption, we’ve shown our mettle. Now it’s time for us to decide if the future will be about feast or famine.

This article was originally published in SEEChange Magazine.

You’ll find more about our firm, our approach and our ideas about fueling the sustainability movement.  We also invite you to explore some recent case studies of projects that we’ve completed around the world.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be incorporating additional features to share our thinking and engage you in an ongoing conversation about sustainability. In the meantime, we invite you to contact us to discuss how we can assist your organization to make the world a better place.

The event date is set for March 8, 2012, so put in your calendar! The actual event is an entertaining and informative evening that celebrates the role of social enterprise in our communities. Come witness the finalists make their “pitches” to the Social Enterprise Dragons and watch the judges’ decisions to allocate the financial and consulting support!

Junxion’s Mike Rowlands will co-MC with Renewal Partners’ Pam Chaloult—ensuring that the evening is engaging, entertaining… and informative, of course! We’ll have more details here in the coming weeks, but encourage you to check out the Social Enterprise Dragons site as well.

While Prudential is a world leader in relocation services, they had no global sustainability management strategy. Furthermore, they recognised the need to build internal and supply chain capacity to understand and respond to more frequent and violent weather events, and an increasingly carbon-constrained future.

Junxion brought sustainability to the front and centre of Prudential Real Estate and Relocation’s business planning.

Junxion Strategy took on an advisory and educational role with Prudential to embed sustainability understanding and practices throughout their organisation. To start with, we completed a best practices study on sustainability/CSR practices and reporting, which led to the development of a global sustainability/CSR strategy and vision. To support that vision, Junxion developed HR employee engagement education materials on sustainability/CSR. We also helped gauge the sustainability actions and understanding of their supply chain to help their suppliers support their sustainability activities.

Sustainability is now front and centre in PRERS’ business planning, as well as employee and supplier education.

BC Housing was challenged by a lack of employee engagement in its community philanthropy strategy and lacked a cohesive strategy tied to the agency’s core business.

Junxion launched an employee-driven community investment programme for BC Housing that saw a 300% increase in the volume of donations.

To both increase HR employee engagement and fundraising, Junxion Strategy helped BC Housing
develop Community Connections, an employee-driven community investment program. It binds BC Housing’s values and business objectives with an expanded range of fundraising and community engagement activities such as a donations drive, employee fundraising activities, and employer supported volunteerism. Employee involvement and support are key ingredients to the success of Community Connections. Every two years, employees identify the BC Housing investment “pillars,” which are intended to guide their investment and generate more impact for communities in BC. In developing the overall strategy, Junxion also created the program’s brand identity, including launch materials and an employee website.

In the three years since they implemented the new strategy, BC Housing has seen a dramatic rise in HR employee engagement in their corporate giving program, including a more than 300% increase in the volume of donations. The program generates more impact for communities in BC and has deepened BC Housing’s reputation as a progressive and positive member of the community.

BC Hydro needed a comprehensive strategy and marketing plan to support its emerging Power Smart for Business program. The objective was to grow the breadth and reach of the Excellence Awards and Forum. Simultaneously, more strategic work was required to actively position each event at the forefront of the energy conservation dialogue in BC.

Since 2007 Junxion has provided strategic counsel and sustainability management strategy services to BC Hydro; this has resulted in a five-fold increase in Forum attendance, and a sold-out event in 2011.

Since early 2007, Junxion has provided strategic counsel and consultative marketing services to the BC Hydro and the Power Smart Marketing team, including the implementation of the Power Smart Forum and Excellence Awards microsites, new media strategy and activation, a series of ads for the Power of Business Magazine, as well as a variety of print and web promotional materials. In 2011, Junxion provided counsel to BC Hydro on the development of a climate adaptation and resilience theme to the event’s programming, including recruiting the keynote speaker and plenary panel members.

Since Junxion began working with BC Hydro in 2007, attendance to the Forum has grown five-fold. Response to the 2011 Forum was so tremendous that registration was closed 10 days prior to the event.

Download a pdfThe Heart and Stroke Foundation is committed to improving the cardiac health and fitness of Canadians.

Today’s children represent the first generation that will have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. As alarming as this is, the complexity of the problem seems to have eluded any ability to drive enduring improvement. Consequently, the Heart and Stroke Foundation wanted to develop an innovative, leadership approach to championing childhood obesity.

Junxion Principal Pamela Divinsky developed a galvanizing idea and strategic approach that would enable Heart and Stroke, together with communities and organisations across the country, to encourage and inspire people to live healthier lives.

We started by creating the social brand: Spark, Together for Healthy Kids. We then developed a social issue campaign that outlined how Heart and Stroke could coalesce a wide variety of communities and organisations around the idea of living healthier lives. As part of that, we developed full creative for a viral campaign.

Today, Spark is being rolled out as a national initiative of the Heart and Stroke Foundation.