How to Engage Youth to Drive Corporate Sustainability

Roles and Interventions

Nicolò Wojewoda

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351275460
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Déontologie des affaires

How to Engage Youth to Drive Corporate Sustainability provides practical, specific recommendations that professionals can adopt to improve engagement of young people and drive forward corporate sustainability efforts.

CHAPTER 1
Why Engage With Young People?

THERE ARE THREE NUMBERS that, above others, should give you pause for reflection and prompt you to action: 1.2 billion, 92%, 3.

• There are 1.2 billion young people in the world aged between 15 and 24, making up 17% of the world’s population. If we count anybody under 25 years old, that goes up to more than 50% of the world’s population.
• Profit as the sole measure of success is rejected by 92% of Millennials (roughly, the generation born between 1980 and 2000), as recently surveyed by Deloitte. Even more, according to the same survey, over 50% of Millennials believe that the purpose of business is primarily innovation and societal development.
• In 2011, a young person’s risk of being unemployed was 3 times higher than that of an adult. That ratio translates into youth making up 40% of the world’s unemployed. In 2010, a total of 357.7 million young people were not in education, employment, or training – and that number has been increasing ever since.

What we have here is either an incredible opportunity or a daunting risk.

The risk is continuing business as usual, and the quality of young people’s livelihoods decreasing, with consequent decline in purchasing power. Business as usual is exceeding our planetary boundaries, and young people in most of the world are consequently worse off. But increasing wealth will not be enough. The future middle classes will have to radically change their consumption behaviours, in order to adapt to the multiple crises – those are your future consumers, those are the people you will be dealing with in the market.

Prolonged high unemployment among young people risks producing an entire generation of people lacking the confidence and skills to contribute to the workforce. And let’s face it, baby-boomers are getting older, they’re going to retire soon, and there’s a huge void to be filled with talent. How are we going to address that shortage?

Worse yet, a generation largely abandoned by governments, society and the corporate world has resulted, for example in Europe, in not only high unemployment and emigration figures, but stagnation of the economy as a whole. If left untouched, it can become a pandemic with unprecedented cultural and political impact over the next 40 years. And if you’re skeptical about the power young people really have over established institutions, when those institutions are allowed to proceed unchecked and without the meaningful involvement of younger generations, you need to look no further than the regime-toppling movements of the Arab Spring.

The opportunity, in all this, is in tapping into that often wasted potential, and investing in young people as a source for good, while that window of opportunity provided by early age is open. Such an investment counters economic and political volatility, and has a tangible impact on young people and businesses themselves. As the former Managing Director of the World Bank, Dr Mamphela Ramphele, once said: ‘Young people should be seen as engines of growth rather than a problem to be addressed.’ It’s not just impact in their livelihoods – it’s leveraged impact, as investment in their skills and talents will have unquantifiable returns over the rest of their lives and careers. Think also of the fact that young people are not only future leaders of government or business, but potential future investors, regulators of industry, and active in so many other roles that will be crucial to the survival and prosperity of your business.

What comes across through those initial numbers is a key realization: young people (definitions vary) are a massive force to be reckoned with, who are now bearing the brunt of the crises, but who also want to engage meaningfully with business in order to do some good. They are not just digital natives, they’re also true sustainability natives. And they’re waiting for you to reach out to them.

When researching this book, I’ve had the opportunity to engage in discussions and listen to the stories of entrepreneurs, executives, academics, and young leaders from all over the world. To all of them, bridging the gap between young people and corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts required some social and a lot of responsibility, never forgetting that true sustainable development (which is based on a strong foundation of environmental, social, and economical equity) is an inherently inter-generational challenge, and it is with young people – the closest proxies to future generations – that business has the privilege and duty to take the lead.

The general public often perceives CSR as the charitable arm of a company’s activities, disconnected from its core operations, and geared towards improving brand image. There’s a risk that CSR is being seen only as that. But many companies have sound CSR procedures, and an authentic interest in serving the public good alongside their shareholders’ interests. Young people can play a role in fueling that interest, and in better aligning it with the activities that come from it.

This book will present three key roles that young people can play in a meaningful interaction with your business: as social consumers, future intrapreneurs, and impact partners. Each one of those roles will be illustrated by examples that are hopefully the source of inspiration and insight. The final chapters will be devoted to recommendations that apply across all roles, and to considerations about the future of these kinds of approaches.

What I’m hoping to achieve with this short publication is to stimulate a genuine interest in engaging young people through and towards your corporate sustainability efforts, not only because it’s good business, but also because it can have an effective impact on the lives of those young people, and on the progress of global sustainability as a whole.

If we need that to happen, we need to break free from some forms of CSR that have seen engagement meaning charity, and young people as peripheral and vulnerable. In those cases, CSR activities become very hard to access from outside stakeholders, like passionate and talented young people, who want instead to collaborate on an equal footing, on concrete impact, playing on their strengths and not on their perceived weaknesses, taking their central place in a company’s sustainability efforts. Would you consider peripheral and vulnerable a young green tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley who seeks collaborations to enhance both businesses’ triple bottom line?

And after all, if CSR is recognizing and responding to the interests of a company’s stakeholders (as sustainability standard ISO26000 recognizes), it’s only natural for young people to have a place in that stakeholder analysis.

Tighter budgets can’t be an excuse either: there’s a lot to be done with little funding and lots of organizational commitment. And the numbers are once again stacked in young people’s favor: they are the largest generation in history, the most educated, connected, and powerful, being able to access knowledge, coordinate action, and collaborate creatively. Let’s harness that incredible potential as a force for good.

Summary/What to tell your boss

• There are 1.2 billion young people in the world, many of them are unemployed, and that is putting a strain on our economy and society, with dangerous consequences for long-term economic and political stability if we do nothing about it.
• Young people today are sustainability natives, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Abstract
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Why Engage With Young People?
• 2 Who Are Young People Anyway?
• 3 Youth Engagement - How To Do It Right
• 4 The Next Frontier
• References
• Further Reading