Fondazione Sodalitas

Focus on a Partner - January 2009

In this interview, Ruggero Bodo, volunteer executive advisor for Fondazione Sodalitas, discusses the Italian organisation's work with civil society organisations and presents an insight into the CSR Laboratories facilitated by Sodalitas on topics such as gender equality and financial inclusion.

Sodalitas provides services to both its corporate members and civil society organisations. What type of civil society organisations do you work with and what type of services do you provide?

Ruggero Bodo

The retired executives (15 MYE) engaged in Fondazione Sodalitas provide services, on a pro bono basis, to a broad spectrum of civil society organisations: social enterprises, associations, foundations and NGOs.

Advice can regard individual nonprofit organisations, addressing issues such as governance and transparency, strategy and business plans, organisation, training, accounting and management systems, marketing and production or communication.

Other services are intended to generate benefits to the whole nonprofit system, like the Observatory on Human Resources in partnership with Hay Group and the Istituto della Donazione, to enhance through quality assurance donors' trust in NGOs.

The goodwill and know-how acquired with civil society organisations represents also an important asset for our corporate founders, when we assist them in stakeholder dialogue, in pursuing corporate philanthropy initiatives or cause-related marketing campaigns which require partnerships with NGOs. A quarterly monitoring is provided pro bono by Nielsen.

As part of its services, Sodalitas has established a Social Award prize. Could you tell us about its objectives and selection criteria?

Sodalitas Social Award was launched at our Marathon event in 2003 and is now at its 6^th edition, with about 250 companies participating in the last years. The objectives are to provide visibility to innovative CSR best practices and stimulate emulation. Evaluation criteria of applications are based on the EFQM Excellence Model.

There are six Award categories, reserved to projects in human resources, sustainability, partnerships, cause-related marketing, among others, that are feeding our online database Sodalitas Social Solutions, regrouping 950 best practices on the various aspects of CSR.

Sodalitas facilitates a CSR Laboratory on Equality between Men and Women. One of the deliverables of the Laboratory is a comprehensive survey on the Italian women's working conditions. What were the most interesting findings of this survey?

Despite good progress attained in the Lombardy region, almost reaching the activity level goals of the Lisbon strategy, other regions are still lagging behind. Research findings were presented at a high level event with the Minister for Equal Opportunities, together with the toolkit "Practising gender equality in careers: a way to change based on practical company experience".

As a further step in this partnership, we are in the process of defining the last details for the launch of the Italian "Carta for Equality of Treatment at Work". Being part of CSR Europe'snational partner network helped us in this respect, as we were able to discuss in depth with IMS- Entreprendre pour la Cité their experience with the Charte de la Diversité.

Two of the CSR Laboratories that Sodalitas facilitates deal specifically with supporting small and medium-sized enterprises. What, in your opinion, are the CSR priorities and trends for SMEs in Italy?

Diffusion of a culture of corporate responsibility and sustainable development among SMEs is our key challenge, given their dominance in the Italian entrepreneurial landscape (despite having only 3 mid sized corporate founders, out of a total of 67). To address this issue we have launched several initiatives.

In addition to the above mentioned Laboratory - based on knowledge transfer from large multinationals to SMEs - we also facilitate the Financial Inclusion Lab, led by the Italian Banking Association ABI. Micro-enterprises are among the key beneficiaries of the project.

Regarding SME mobilisation and outreach, a special category of our Social Award is reserved to SMEs, to encourage their participation with a fair chance to win.

To raise SMEs' awareness on CSR, Sodalitas was entrusted by Confindustria, the largest employer federation in Italy, with the task to prepare a guide on how to approach CSR-SD issues. By invitation of Cà Foscari University, we are delivering twomodules on CSR and SD at a Master for managers of industrial districts. And these are just a few examples of our commitment.

More information

Read more about Sodalitas at www.sodalitas.it.

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