CENTER FOR BUSINESS
AS AN AGENT OF WORLD BENEFIT

Starbucks Coffee Company’s C.A.F.E (Coffee and Farmer Equity) Practices program ensures that Starbucks sources sustainably grown and processed coffee by evaluating the economic, social and environmental aspects of coffee growing along the supply chain. In 2005, Starbucks purchased 76.8 million pounds of coffee from the C.A.F.E Practice providers, which represents 24.6% of all coffee purchased by the company. By improving the environment, economy, and the educational and health services within local communities, Starbucks creates stability for its farmers and, in turn, for the company, according to Cindy Hoots, Senior Specialist at Starbucks in the Corporate Responsibility Office.

Women's World Banking's vision is to expand low-income women's economic participation by giving them greater access to financial information and markets. In doing so they are enabling women to not only keep their families fed but also engage in the community and develop a political voice that could bring about great change worldwide.

Bank ABN AMRO has made sustainability a cornerstone of its business. The bank strives to include a concern for social and environmental issues in the decision-making of every strategic business unit. These activities have gained such prominence that a special unit, the Sustainable Development Group was organized to coordinate sustainability work across the organization. The innovativeness of this sustainability mindset has led to numerous activities that are creating a shift in the impact of ABN AMRO on environment and society.

The third largest cement manufacturer in the world, CEMEX, decided it needed to move from selling materials to selling solutions. Using low fixed prices, materials on credit, pre-costed housing designs, and supervised construction services for Mexicans, CEMEX developed its "Patrimonio Hoy" program to make housing affordable and possible for 70,000 of the poor in Mexico.

Macroplastic, maker of plastic bags, along with a businessman from a supermarket chain, a non-governmental organization and the Federation of Industries (FIEP) for the state of Curitiba have decided to address the issue of garbage pollution in one of Brasil’s most industrialized regions. The innovative scheme to address the consumer-caused pollution is working in one area, Matinho. Macroplastic produces grocery bags of 6 different colors (rather than traditional, single one-design-fits-all bags). A supermarket chain purchases the bags for their regular packaging needs, the consumers receive the bags for free when shopping for groceries, and get educated about recycling process by trash collectors who are trained to separate and handle the trash correctly and communicate with consumers around the right use of bags.

Cummins is a global power leader and family of four inter-related, yet diversified businesses that create or enhance value as a result of doing business with each other or having those relationships. It averages more than $6 billion in annual sales and is a technology leader in the diesel engine market, providing cutting-edge solutions to the increasingly difficult challenge of producing cleaner-running engines. Currently, Cummins clean diesel engines are powering transit buses in Southern China.

As the oldest and largest for-profit Fair Trade company in the U.S., Equal Exchange trades directly with 28 democratically run farmer co-ops located in 14 countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Its mission is to build long-term partnerships that are economically just and environmentally sound, to foster mutually beneficial relations between farmers and consumers and to demonstrate the viability of worker cooperatives and Fair Trade. They strive to build social and economic justice through the marketplace.

Millions of personal computers sit idly on desks and in homes worldwide, but what if they could be linked into a power grid to help address the world's most difficult health and societal problems? IBM asked this question and answered it in 2004 by creating the World Community Grid, a global humanitarian effort to harness unused computing power of individual and business computers and direct that power toward research designed to help unlock genetic codes that underlie diseases like AIDS and Alzheimer's or improve forecasting of natural disasters. Anyone can volunteer to donate the idle and unused time on a computer by dowloading the World Community Grid's free software and registering to participate.

A number of major financial institutions have come together to adopt a framework for determining, assessing and managing environmental and social issues in project financing. These global voluntary regulatory guidelines, the “Equator Principles” (EPs), are revolutionizing the way large projects are financed. Banks that adopt the EPs apply them globally to project financing in all industry sectors including mining, oil and gas, and forestry, and they make loans only to those projects whose sponsors aim to be socially responsible and environmentally sound.

Green Mountain Coffee Roasters is one of the top producers of double certified – organic and fair trade - coffee. As such, the company is uniquely positioned to promote ecological restoration while at the same time participating in poverty alleviation. To assure the overall successes of the double certified product like, every year Green Mountain Coffee Roasters takes its employees, customers, and partners for a "trip to the origin". To date, about 20% of the company has taken the trip to learn about the intricate interdependencies of all coffee production processes, "from tree to cup," and to engage with partners at the origins in order to create new mutually beneficial policies, methods, and approaches to coffee production.