Inaugural UN Global Compact Week Joins Practitioners to Elevate Sustainability Efforts Across the Initiative

(3BL Media / theCSRfeed) (Copenhagen, 17 May 2011) – As the first-ever gathering of its kind, UN Global Compact Week is convening practitioners and experts engaged in the world’s largest corporate responsibility initiative in an effort to improve collaboration and strengthen business commitments to sustainability and the broader UN agenda. 

Built around a series of practice-oriented workshops and sessions addressing common social and environmental issues relevant to business, the five-day event is bringing together nearly 500 representatives from the most active companies and organizations within the Global Compact.  

“This meeting in Copenhagen marks the first time that we are bringing together the Global Compact family of practitioners and champions across issues and regions,” said Georg Kell, Executive Director of the UN Global Compact. “We hope that participants will embrace this opportunity to learn more about the initiative’s work and look beyond their specific vantage point to the wide portfolio of issues addressed by the Global Compact.”  

Featured at the heart of Global Compact Week, the first UN Global Compact Annual Meeting will examine corporate efforts to advance and integrate sustainability in their own strategies and operations. The meeting, to convene today, aims to help practitioners look beyond their areas of focus – such as climate change, human rights, or labour issues – in order to better connect the wide range of sustainability issues and drive more comprehensive organizational change.

Global Compact Week also features meetings of the initiative’s issue-specific working groups on topics ranging from anti-corruption to supply chain sustainability, as well as the Annual Local Network Forum (ALNF) of Global Compact national and regional chapters in more than 90 countries.  

The ALNF is expected to launch formal dialogue in preparation for the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), to be held in Brazil in June 2012.  

More information about UN Global Compact Week can be found at http://unglobalcompact.org/NewsAndEvents/global_compact_week.html.

Note to Editors:  The Annual Meeting on 18 May is open to attendance by the media.

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