Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) involves looking beyond profit maximization and being mindful of the broader impact on society and the environment.
By integrating sustainability principles and social responsibility into our business operations, we contribute to positive change and help build a more sustainable and just world.
A UN summit set an ambitious sustainable development agenda in 2015. The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the essence of this meeting. These are based on five topics, also known as the 5Ps: Partnership, People, Peace, Prosperity & Planet and are a widely used tool to implement sustainable entrepreneurship.
The ambition to achieve these 17 goals by 2030 is a major challenge for our global economy: we are therefore determined that everyone – and certainly the business world – should do their part. We are also putting our weight behind a number of actions that contribute to the SDGs.
Voka has launched the Voka Charter Sustainable Entrepreneurship, an initiative based on the 17 SDGs, to encourage Belgian companies to embed sustainability in their business as well.
While all SDGs are equally valuable, the following four SDGs are particularly relevant to SBE:
Every year we create a new action plan that includes at least 10 actions. We then link these to the applicable SDGs. At the end of the action year, an evaluation committee evaluates the actions we accomplished. If the evaluation is positive, we will then be awarded the VCSE laureate again.
SBE was crowned an SDG Pioneer in 2020 after achieving the VCSE laureate for the third time.
To accomplish this, we had to complete at least one action in each of the 17 SDGs during the three passing years.
After achieving SDG Pioneership, we embarked on the SDG Champion journey. This was a two-year course during which we achieved the VCSE laureate at least twice. We were also given two years to develop a pilot project around the SDGs in our core business.
We created SPIRIT for this purpose, which is a sustainability questionnaire for our projects through which we want to raise awareness among our colleagues and our clients alike about possible sustainable design solutions.
