How will you act?
A new world after the storm?
Not everything will be the same after the Covid-19 storm. Habits, lifestyles, interpersonal relationships, buying modalities, working modalities, supply chains, transport modalities, relationships with the stakeholders, use of technologies, attention to consumption: many things will have to be questioned, and a lot will change.
We have been caught in a storm, ‘perfect’ in its own way, because it’s forcing us to define a new economic and existential vision of the world based on a new humanism and a new organisational model: we need new priorities, renewed business models closer to people and to a possibly rediscovered social solidarity, a politics more supportive of civil society.
What has the reawakening of a humanitarian commitment in businesses meant? Reconversion, attention to people, making available services and products to face this terrible pandemic all together. A commitment that now has to take deep roots in the organisations, so that we can gain more and more strength in dealing with any possible new crisis. A commitment that must be central to organisations’ and governments’ strategies, with the objective to create value for the whole society, which only this way can become more and more sustainable and resilient.
We’ve now clearly understood that we need to go beyond the attention for environmental sustainability (climate change, pollution, recycling, sustainability of the whole supply chain, responsible consumption of primary goods, land exploitation, energy saving…) and beyond social sustainability (new poverties, social inclusion, immigration…), not in the sense of not taking them into consideration as objectives anymore, but because the emergency is forcing us to accelerate our reviewing actions in order to produce immediate results.
Our priority is public health, which will have to be accompanied by the reconstruction of the economic fabric and work, and the most significant effort will have to be in relaunching initiatives, not in their contraction. We’ll have to prefigure a new global economic asset, a new role for the state (for the states), for businesses, for citizens.
There’ll be a ‘before and after the Coronavirus’, the way there’s been a before and after Christ, a before and after the fall of the Roman Empire, a before and after the Second World War.
What we think should carry on is our work:
1. Promoting ‘sustainable stories’: narrating and communicating through our publication the hundreds of initiatives carried out by institutions and organisations during the pandemic, to discover and identify the protagonists of resilience, of social creativity, of business solidarity, and give an account of a new way of being responsible that will help understand thanks to what new models our society will manage to overcome this crisis, turning a new leaf.
2. Supporting the projects of universities that have invested in scheduling degree and master’s degree courses contributing with the promotion of an educational offer specifically designed to create new professional figures attentive to society, sustainability and the CSR (Check for Sustainability Ranking). And awarding new graduates all over Italy by organising the Premio Socialis for thesis n. 18, whose last edition was also sponsored by Fondazione Pistoletto.
3. Making available defined and updated rules on the digital platform www.csrcheck.it, to help organisations build their new approach: six macro-areas that today more than ever answer the need to trace a safer, more structured and lasting path:
• train people, because competence is growth;
• be coherent, because the terms of you mission need to be set;
• share at all levels, because motivation produces extraordinary results;
• listen to the stakeholders, because you need to know what the expectations are before acting;
• communicate and inform, because making yourself known might trigger emulation;
• plan and measure, because putting everything in order is always useful.
