Dear friends and colleagues,
Thank you for giving me and the Future 500 team — now thriving in China, Japan, and the U.S. — the opportunity to do multi-sector stakeholder engagement work that advances the triple bottomline. I have so much to be excited about as we move into the new year…
* THREE BILLION PEOPLE WILL BE WATCHING CHINA when the Olympics open in Beijing this August. To help drive collaboration rather than confrontation, the Future 500 China Stakeholder Initiative is bringing together 13 global companies and over 20 NGOs to advance climate, water, workplace, and social solutions.
* 21ST CENTURY RECYCLING is at the core of several of our stakeholder engagement initiatives that seek to move beyond the now-tired ideas of 1970s recycling to innovative approaches that drive down carbon, water, and non-renewable resource use — not just for bottles and cans, but the billions of other products and packages in the marketplace.
* “WATER POSITIVE” is what companies will need to be as two-thirds of the world begins to confront severe water shortages in the next seven years. Our team of policy innovators is helping companies find SYSTEMS that can drive consumption down, and profits up while meeting multi-faceted stakeholder expecations.
* CARBON OFFSET JAPAN (AND CHINA AND US) brings together Future 500 Japan’s leading companies and stakeholder opinion leaders dedicating themselves to drive down their climate impacts (soon we hope to be emulated by Future 500 companies in the US and China.)
* SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE AND FISHERIES are vital to feeding China, India, Africa, and the world — Future 500 Japan is following up its Science of Sustainability study with a focused drive to help move beyond the confines of 20th century industrial agriculture.
Most of what Future 500 does is purposefully below the radar screen. That is because it is our partners, colleagues, friends and myriad stakeholder who do the real work — by joining in unusual dialogues and collaborations to do together what we cannot do — or would not think to do — apart.
If you feel you may have something valuable to add to one of our initiatives — if engaging in dialogue with stakeholders from “the other side” might help bring sensible and systemic solutions to the fore — then please let us know: contact Mary Ann McDonnell.
And if you are tired of self-satisfied ideological battles between corporations and activists then connect us to your work so that we might help mobilize fresh ideas and influence on your behalf, to serve economic, social, and environmental needs at once.