Strategic Plan Towards 2014: Introduction

Since 1989, Business in the Community has been working with companies in Northern Ireland to inform, support and engage business in addressing their responsibilities – to local communities and wider society; the environment and their own workforce.

In those 21 years, the concept of corporate responsibility has really ‘come of age’. The recent recession, rather than damaging or slowing down the development of the concept, as some might have expected, has brought home to companies how vital it is to engage stakeholders, listen to their concerns and respond accordingly.
Currently our membership stands at almost 250 and our members employ more than one in three of the Northern Ireland workforce. Naturally, we have lost some members as a result of cutbacks, closures and mergers, but we’ve recruited 25 new members in the past year and grown our membership during one of the toughest economic downturns in recent history. That says something very positive about the commitment companies here have to corporate responsibility.

We began planning for this new strategy in a starkly different economic climate from three years ago. We know many businesses are operating under much more challenging conditions and with greater financial constraints than was the case pre-recession. That is why we have taken the decision in this new three year strategy to help companies embrace corporate responsibility at their very core. That means a paradigm shift away from focusing on the social and community responsibilities of business as encompassed in the term corporate social responsibility (CSR) to the wider aspects of responsibility, from supply chain considerations and environmental responsibilities to being a good employer. This is reflected in our use of the term corporate responsibility (CR)