Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 20 March 2024
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation
Challenges Facing Businesses in Relation to Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility: Discussion
Mr. Tim Griffiths:
There is a wonderful organisation led by Caroline Casey called The Valuable 500, which is all about working to get people with disabilities an equal opportunity within the workforce. The 500 stands for her recruiting 500 global CEOs to bring this as a policy within their organisations, and integrate it into the DNA of their organisations. I think that is true of most, if not every social issue. One needs to attack it on that sector level and have it as part of the DNA. From a communication point of view, the Senator is right. I spent most of my career in the corporate sector and I know people did not know what organisations like mine were when I talked to them. The challenge we have is that any funding given to the communication of social enterprises is very much bottom up. You might get what feels like quite a big budget on a macro level. It gets split between a lot of organisations to do small things. Communication requires proper expertise to do it properly, and second, it requires investment to do it properly. I think we have approached it the wrong way as a country by trying to do it bottom up. I would be doing it more top down and showing the benefit of the sector we work in and how we all collaborate together. If we all do that we can get to a better place. It is showing the big benefit from on top rather than the macro thing from down below.