Blog for Discussion of the Simmons Human Rights/Social Justice Initiative
Posted by Patricia Deyton
I have created this blog to provide an opportunity for open input and comments about the creation of an Intiative for Human Rights and Social Justice at Simmons and will be posting documents for your review that are relevant to the work underway.
All comments and ideas are welcome (but do remember that this is a public page that anyone with a Simmons ID can access).
Of particular interest and value are ideas about areas which could be supported by, resourced by, relevant to and valuable to the SOM as this initiative goes forward - ideas that will help shape the substance and content of the initiative.
Several areas that have been raised for discussion and consideration include:
Social Entrepreneurship as a way of alleviating significant social problems.
Micro-Finance and its mpact upon alleviating poverty.
Supply Chair Ethics and the impact upon management decisions and the intersection with the rule of law.
Principled Leadership.
What are other areas to be considered from the perspective of the SOM in this initiative?
Posted: January 15, 2008 1:46 pm | 1 comment
Tags: An opportunity for input and comments from the SOM faculty
Comments
From a SOM perspective, as well as from the perspective of involving potential corporate donors, a critical priority area is the assessment of the impact of business activity using the human rights lens. An assessment center approach would allow the businesses and the organizations to evaluate the contributions of their activities to the human rights. For instance, consider a business that invests in an under-privileged region, invests in local schools, offers scholarships to extremely poor local children, and then offers micro finance for the employment of adults in activities ancillary to its business, through an integrated community-business development model. If such a business is able to demonstrate its human rights contributions, then it would allow it to translate the value of its activities into business reputation. This will help create a market for human rights focused behaviors.
The best analogy is the market for emission credits that has been created, whereby the organizations have been committed to continuously reduce their emissions. Special organizations have emerged to pioneer new approaches for emission reductions, and then to trade their emission credits internationally.
Similarly, for a meaningful, sustainable, and visible impact on human rights, Simmons and SOM should take leadership in creating an international market for human rights credits, and the first step in that would be to develop an assessment system for the impact in terms of human rights.
Simmons students should be certified in the assessment of these human rights credits, and they should then become the ambassadors and the change leaders at the local, national, and international level.
Vipin Gupta
Ros Solomon Jaffe Chair Professor in Strategy
Director - International Initiatives
SOM
said Vipin Gupta
Would you like to comment?
If you are part of the Simmons College community, sign in!