http://www.ssireview.org/articles/ Strategies, Tools, and Ideas for Nonprofits, Foundations, and Socially Responsible Businesses en walker_kelsey@gsb.stanford.edu Copyright 2008 2008-09-02T19:00:01-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/dropping_the_ball/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/dropping_the_ball/ Sialkot, Pakistan, is the soccer ball capital of the world. Nestled in the northeast corner of Punjab province, this district of 3.5 million people has produced some 75 percent of the world’s hand-stitched soccer balls over the past decade. Each year, Sialkot manufacturers supply millions of soccer balls to multinational companies like Nike and Adidas. But in the mid-1990s, media accounts revealed that children were stitching soccer balls in Sialkot. This news tarnished the reputations and threatened the profits of the global brands sourcing Sialkot balls. In 1997, Nike and other leading sporting goods companies partnered with international organizations to launch the Project to Eliminate Child Labour in the Soccer Ball Industry in Pakistan (the Soccer Ball Project)—one of the world’s first multistakeholder efforts to stop abuses of labor rights. To participate in the Soccer Ball Project, local Pakistani manufacturers agreed to enforce a minimum working age of 14 and to eliminate home stitching (a major source of child labor). In exchange, the multinational brands agreed to source only balls made by Soccer Ball Project manufacturers. Participants invited the International Labour Organization’s International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (ILOIPEC) to monitor… Human Rights, Corporate Social Responsiblity 2008-11-04T06:00:00-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/opening_the_asylum_doors/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/opening_the_asylum_doors/ Social reforms that occur too quickly or promise radical change often fail. Retrenchment and blaming of the reforms’ beneficiaries typically follow. Indeed, prolific author and psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey outlines in his new book, The Insanity Offense, two quixotic reforms of the 1960s and 1970s that followed just this pattern: the adoption of cost-cutting deinstitutionalization policies that whittled down American public mental hospital patients from more than 550,000 in 1955 to fewer than 40,000 at present (despite the nation’s population having doubled); and the extension of civil rights to those with mental illness that make it nearly impossible to commit someone to a mental facility involuntarily. (A half century ago, all it took to commit a patient was a psychiatric recommendation and a judicial order.) These reforms, which emanated from a curious combination of conservative, libertarian, and liberal forces, have allowed people who are sometimes dangerous and who often lack insight into their deteriorated mental states to languish in decrepit community facilities or even on city streets, without any means of getting the treatment they so urgently need. The results sometimes make headlines: People with paranoia and psychotic thought processes have committed brutal acts. But more often, the reforms have… Human Rights, Health Care 2008-09-02T18:00:00-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/beyond_csr/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/beyond_csr/ Google Inc. agrees to censor its Internet search results in China. Tyson Foods Inc. is accused of failing to eliminate hazards that would have prevented a worker’s death at a poultry processing plant in North Carolina. Unocal Corp. settles a lawsuit brought by Burmese villagers who claim their country’s military used murder and rape to clear the way for a new pipeline. Gap Inc. orders an internal investigation after a news report alleges that children were found stitching GapKids blouses in India. As these recent news stories illustrate, all kinds of businesses in all parts of the world have been linked to human rights violations. Still, few companies consider how their business dealings affect human rights. According to the nonprofit Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, only 156 companies in the world have published human rights policies. Compare that number to the thousands that have jumped on the bandwagon to develop corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports. But CSR has no common standards, whereas human rights has a 60-year-old, globally-agreed-upon framework: the Universal Declaration of Human… Human Rights 2008-09-02T06:00:01-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/after_prison/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/after_prison/ The United States has in excess of 2 million people in prison—more than any developed nation in the world—and 95 percent of this population will eventually return to our communities. Yet few ex-offenders are prepared for that reintegration. They seldom meet minimum educational standards and have little employment history, and because few people want to house them, former inmates usually return to familiar environments conducive to crime or end up in homeless shelters. Not surprisingly, the national recidivism rate in 2006 was 67.5 percent, up from 51.8 percent in 1994. If we could lower this rate, not only would fewer people become crime victims, but taxpayers also would save between $52 and $92 per day per inmate (the cost of incarcerating an inmate varies by state). What’s more, criminal justice expenses (public defenders and legal fees), health-care expenses (Medicare), and social services expenses (dependent child welfare programs and food stamps) would dramatically drop. Of course, lowering the recidivism rate would take giving some of society’s most reviled citizens a lot more attention than they’ve been getting. But existing reintegration efforts don’t fill the bill. I know this firsthand: While working as an employment specialist for the Human Rights, Government 2008-09-02T06:00:00-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/getting_human_rights_right/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/getting_human_rights_right/ In 1996, UNOCAL became the first corporation in U.S. history to go to trial for committing human rights abuses abroad. During the 1980s, the oil giant and its partners had hired local military forces in Burma, now called Myanmar, to secure a pipeline carrying natural gas from the Andaman Sea into Thailand. These army units forced locals to work on the pipeline; raped, robbed, and murdered civilians; and displaced entire villages.1 In U.S. federal and California state courts, peasants from Myanmar squared off with Unocal officials, accusing the oil giant of forced relocation, slave labor, rape, torture, and murder. The Supreme Court of California ruled in favor of the peasants, noting that Unocal “knew or should have known that the military did commit, was committing, and would continue to commit these tortuous acts.” After nearly a decade of litigation, the oil giant agreed to a secret multimillion-dollar settlement. Human rights abuses not only cause untold suffering in the communities where they take place, they also exact high costs from the corporations that perpetrate them. If Unocal had foretold how its actions in Myanmar would eventually affect its bottom line, the company might have avoided costly litigation and devastating press. More… Human Rights, Corporate Social Responsiblity 2008-01-03T23:52:01-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_responsibility_paradox/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/the_responsibility_paradox/ In Early 2007, thousands of cats and dogs in North America fell ill with kidney ailments. Many of the pets had dined chez Menu Foods Inc., a company in Ontario, Canada, that manufactures pet foods for more than 100 brands, including Procter & Gamble, Iams, Colgate-Palmolive’s Science Diet, and Wal-Mart’s Ol’ Roy. By mid-April, investigators had traced the animals’ illnesses to melamine, an industrial chemical that tainted a few of Menu Foods’ raw ingredients. They then followed the thread to two suppliers in China, which had spiked the ingredients to cut costs and boost profits. So where should the public point its finger? Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, Wal-Mart, and the many other corporations that own the pet food brands? Menu Foods, which mixed the kibble? The Chinese manufacturers, which adulterated the ingredients? The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which failed to detect anything amiss? The stores that didn’t remove the foods from the shelves, even after Menu Foods recalled them? Traditional notions of corporate social responsibility say that companies are beholden to the communities in which they are located. But globalization has made it difficult to discern exactly which communities to include. With far-flung value chains, decentralized governance, and churning… Human Rights, Corporate Social Responsiblity, Government 2007-12-18T21:50:00-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/review_blessed_unrest/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/review_blessed_unrest/ BLESSED UNREST: How the Largest Movement in the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming Paul Hawken (Viking) Hawken has written a different kind of book: the story of the good in the world. Blessed Unrest charts the civil society movement across the planet – “humanity’s immune response to toxins like political corruption, economic disease, and ecological degradation.” The book is packed with information, covering groups from Greenpeace to tiny neighborhood associations, but its greatest gift is hope. Human Rights 2007-09-05T14:00:00-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/policing_the_police/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/policing_the_police/ In 1999 in the Niger Delta town of Odi, a rebel gang called the Asawana Boys ambushed 12 police officers and disarmed, beat, and killed them. Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo responded by ordering 5,000 soldiers to “shoot on sight anything that moved” in Odi. Within 14 days, the soldiers had leveled the town of 60,000, burning the people who were too old or young to flee and raping the women who remained. Six months earlier, the country had installed its first civilian government in 16 years, but violence was a hard habit to break. During General Sani Abacha’s dictatorship, a rise in armed robberies had “justified” human rights abuses such as torture and extrajudicial executions by the police. Highway checkpoints became hotbeds of corruption, occasionally boiling over into violent clashes between civilians and the police. Nigeria’s own representative to the United Nations, Ibrahim Gambari, publicly dismissed the atrocities: “One cannot eat human rights.” Activist Innocent Chukwuma held his country to a higher standard. As a student, Chukwuma was repeatedly jailed for leading antirepression protests. In January 1998, on the eve of democracy, he used a $25,000 award from the Reebok Human Rights Foundation to found… Human Rights, Nonprofit Management 2007-05-21T17:09:00-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/balkan_boom_to_bust/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/balkan_boom_to_bust/ The United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR) entered Bosnia 13 years ago to help refugees from the 1992-1995 Balkan War resettle. Until recently, UMCOR’s headquarters took up an entire wing of an office building on the outskirts of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. But now its offices are almost empty and no one answers the phone. After spending more than $133.4 million on projects such as building homes and extending microgrants to refugees, UMCOR is leaving the country. That’s partly because its job is done, says John Farquharson, the head of UMCOR’s Bosnian operations. The flood of refugees has slowed to a trickle, but so too has the donor money that washed over the country in the 1990s. “We might have stayed a little longer if there were substantial aid money available, but the donor community has turned off the tap,” says Farquharson, an Australia native who’s been in Bosnia since 1997. Of the more than 10,000 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that were formed in Bosnia and Herzegovina after the war, only about 200 are still active. Some of these NGOs, like UMCOR, accomplished the goals they set out to meet. But many others, which sprang up during the… Human Rights, Nonprofit Management, Government 2006-06-01T11:10:01-08:00 http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/bigger_may_not_be_better/ http://www.ssireview.org/articles/entry/bigger_may_not_be_better/ Behind the story of the impact that fortress conservation has had on indigenous people lies an age-old question that has haunted the nonprofit sector for a century or more. Does size matter? Are vast international organizations like the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Nature Conservancy – with their massive brick-and-mortar and transportation infrastructures, huge professional staffs, power-and-celebrity boards, six-figure executives, in-house PR firms, and offices in 50 or more countries – more productive than 50 local organizations with the same basic mission? It’s not an easy answer. Proponents of global conservation institutions say that only large, prestigious organizations with strong ties to multilateral banks, powerful political leaders, large foundations, and transnational corporations can effectively work the crowd that needs to be worked to protect the world’s remaining natural environments. Grassroots advocates, on the other hand, argue that without the flexibility, innovation, cultural familiarity, and commitment to place that are best found in homegrown organizations, alliances with indigenous communities can never be formed. Both arguments are compelling and both contain some truth. But the financial imbalance that leaves grassroots groups starved for resources and politically weak, while large, Northern Hemisphere institutions set the conservation agenda, leaves a vital resource… Environment, Human Rights, Philanthropy & Responsible Investing 2006-04-01T11:13:00-08:00