How Heart of the City is helping SMEs embrace sustainability
Embracing Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is essential for businesses of all sizes and industries. It is widely known that responsible business practices help a company achieve competitive advantage, as having a positive social impact tends to optimise profitability. There is no doubt that large companies can dedicate more time, money and resources to CSR projects than SMEs. However, according to the 2015 statistical release of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, SMEs constitute almost 99% of businesses operating in the UK. Therefore, it is important that SMEs are encouraged to adopt and develop a well-structured CSR strategy.
The business-led charity Heart of the City was founded in 2000 as a joint initiative of the Bank of England, City of London Corporation and the Financial Service Authority. Currently, Heart of the City is the largest SMEs network in the UK, despite being open to firms of all sizes. The primary goal of Heart of the City is to encourage SMEs to embrace sustainability and maximise their positive impact on society. In addition to this, Heart of the City aims at providing the firms operating in London with the necessary tools to measure and improve their social impact and to communicate their CSR programmes. The members of Heart of the City have access to various resources, tailor-made guidance and an extensive network of partners.
Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, acknowledges that Heart of the City plays an important role, helping firms of all sizes, large and small, develop their corporate social responsibility programmes. Furthermore, he encourages all businesses to become members of Heart of the City and take full advantage of its broad range of resources and support.
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- This article was compiled using information from https://theheartofthecity.com. For the sake of readability, we did not use brackets or ellipses but made sure that the extra or missing words did not change the video’s and webinar’s meaning. If you would like to quote these sources from the original, please watch the video and the webinar, as seen above.
- 2015 statistical release of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills