Over the past several months, CLF Ventures has been participating as a founding member of a new collaborative effort with diverse organizations to improve their social and environmental performance. The Stewardship Action Council is a collaborative multi-stakeholder membership organization dedicated to partnerships that advance environmental performance in the broader context of sustainability. Conceptually, this means continuous improvement at the corporate and facility level to reduce environmental impacts, advance community goals, and report on progress.

CLF Ventures’ goal in joining the SAC is to develop collaborative efforts that drive excellence and raise the bar on sustainable innovation. The unique value of this collaboration is the multi-stakeholder approach where varying levels of experience among participants provide opportunities alternatives for leaders and learners—those that commit to putting an Environmental Management System in place and those for whom an EMS is already functioning. This broad based, multi-sector network of partners and organizations creates a learning network focused on the exchange of ideas, sharing of best practices and implementation of collaborative projects enabling our members to improve their social and environmental performance and includes representatives from the academic, state government, non-governmental organization (NGOs), investment and industrial and services sectors.

CLF Ventures is an Alliance Member and plans to work with our Participating Members to coordinate partnership opportunities, data review and analysis, and best practice development. In particular, we are excited about the opportunity to advance principles of sustainable innovation – that is, how members can efficiently and sustainably develop new products that advance environmental performance. Members will share best practices, participate in discussion forums and research studies, and collaborate on improvement projects.  The founding members of the Stewardship Action Council represent a breadth of NGOs, industry and service sectors, state government, and academic institutions.   Moving forward we will be designing a sustainability standard, to be used by members to both direct and measure sustainability improvements. Additional goals include providing research data to academic institutions, provide a link for students at the participating academic institutions with innovative companies, and link NGOs looking to partner with industry on unique projects.

Please contact me to discuss your interest in collaboration. For additional information about the Stewardship Action Council and how to check out the website at www.stewardshipaction.org .  A webinar providing additional information on membership in the Stewardship Action Council will be held in the next several weeks.