Why an Alliance for CSR?

The European Alliance for CSR lays the foundations for the partners to promote CSR in the future. It evolves around the following three areas of activities:

  • Raising awareness and improving knowledge on CSR and reporting on its achievements
  • Helping to mainstream and develop open coalitions of cooperation
  • Ensuring an enabling environment for CSR

The partners of the Alliance have identified several priority areas for action that reflect the wide-ranging nature of CSR and the diversity of the European and international business landscape. These priority areas are inspired by the European Roadmap for Businesses launched by CSR Europe in March 2005.

  • Fostering innovation and entrepreneurship in sustainable technologies, products and services which address societal needs
  • Helping SMEs to flourish and grow
  • Assisting enterprises to integrate social and environmental considerations in their business operations, especially those in the supply chain
  • Improving and developing skills for employability
  • Better responding to diversity and the challenge of equal opportunities taking into account the demographic changes alongside the rapid aging of the European population
  • Improving working conditions, also in cooperation with the supply chain
  • Innovating in the environment field with a special focus on integrating eco efficiency and energy savings in the product and service creation process
  • Enhancing pro-active dialogue and engagement with all relevant stakeholders
  • Further addressing the transparency and communication challenge to make the non-financial performance of companies and organisations more understandable for all stakeholders and better integrated with their financial performance
  • Operating outside the borders of the European Union in a socially and environmentally responsible way as companies do inside the European Union

Moreover, the European Commission's communication on CSR highlights that individual companies' corporate social responsibility policies can contribute to a number of policy objectives, such as:

  • More integrated labour markets and higher levels of social inclusion
  • Investment in skills development, lifelong learning and employability
  • Improvement in public health through voluntary initiatives, for example in the area of food
  • Better innovation performance
  • More rational use of resources and reduced levels of pollution
  • Fostering a more positive image of businesses and cultivating more favourable attitudes towards entrepreneurship
  • Respect for human rights, core labour standards and environmental protection standards, especially in developing countries
  • Poverty reduction and progress towards the Millennium Goals