In 2017 the G&A Institute Team Celebrates the Company's 10th Anniversary -- and Editor-in-Chief Ken Cynar's Continuing Efforts to Keep You Well Informed

In 2017, the G&A Institute team is celebrating the 10th anniversary of the founding of our corporate sustainability consulting, counseling, advice and research firm.  Many of us at G&A worked together in a prominent issues and crisis management consulting practice serving the Fortune 100 companies and many prominent multi-national businesses.  Our former firm was acquired and the business was being wound down.  And so, literally, in a garage with office space, G&A was launched.

Our mission includes sharing information and working to inform and educate managers in the corporate sector, and in the investment community, about the rising importance of corporate sustainability, corporate social responsibility, corporate citizenship, and the increasing focus by investors on all of this. 

Over time the preferred approach of combining corporate environmental management factors, the addressing of social or societal concerns, and adopting more effective and investor-responsive corporate governance by public companies -- the critical "ESG" factors -- included many issues and trend that were familiar to us.  As a team, we had worked on these issue sets for many years as we counseled large company managements.

Our first activity as we got underway was the launch of our Accountability Central web platform.  Our colleague Ken Cynar organized the task, setting up his systems for scouring traditional and other media for "sustainability," "responsibility," "ESG" and related news, commentary and research results.  Very early in the morning, Ken would scour to find (literally back then) a handful of content to share with our growing audience. 

Ten years on, Ken (our Editor-in-Chief) is at the top of his game. This is our 341st weekly issue of the newsletter.  This week he shared with our readers more than 100 articles, all selected by hand, scanning some 1,000 (!) items every week.  A typical week, says Ken, modestly. 

Ken joined our team after a distinguished career in government service almost 20 years ago.  He brings you news and more from "everywhere," in that he has done his scanning, selection and "posting" from such locales as the Czech Republic (his most recent trip), Germany, Italy, France, and various places around North America. 

Ken's selections continue to populate our Accountability Central website; our SustainabilityHQ news selections, and of course, this newsletter.  To Ken, our team member 10 years in -- thank you, and well done!

Ken's selection for you as Top Story this week is a very interesting read.  The panel convened in Singapore was supposed to talk about "Will Businesses Drive the SDGs?" -- but quickly veered into a discussion about the financial markets, not rewarding companies for improving their ESG performance...and so the SDG goals cannot be met.  This turned out to be a very controversial dialogue -- one you'll want to tune in to. Many companies are mentioned as the conversation continued and points were made pro and con about sustainability issues and topics.

Speaking of SDGs, G&A has developed an "SDG Alignment Analysis and Strategic Advice" service offering to help companies leverage and align with the SDGs to maximize the impact and value of their corporate sustainability journey and sustainability reporting.

This is just a sample of some of the articles from this weeks SustainabilityHQ Highlights.  You can view the full Highlights by using the following links. Sustainability | ESG, Highlights for the Week of March 16,2017