Prosperity: Companies foster sustainable communities when they take a long-term view and measure progress

• Prosperity goals seek to help communities thrive, which is crucial to ensure a sustainable future.
• Companies often overlook the importance of tracking the effect of their community initiatives.

Sustainability is not possible without thriving communities. Prosperity goals are designed to foster the health and growth of communities across multiple tracks — including adequate employment, economic opportunity, and access to education and training.

The World Economic Forum's International Business Council said four of the United Nations' 17 Sustainable Development Goals relate to prosperity:

• Goal 1: No poverty
• Goal 8: Decent work and economic growth
• Goal 9: Industry, innovation, and infrastructure
• Goal 10: Reduced inequalities

Companies may believe that they feed prosperity by simply by being successful at doing what they do. Growing corporations hire people, fund healthcare, and offer training. They pay taxes. Cities compete for big employers precisely because they bring these boons to their local areas.

So if companies are doing all this simply by existing, why focus on prosperity as one of the pillars of a sustainable future? The answer is at the heart of the term "sustainability." It's not enough to take satisfaction from what the organization is doing now. It's critical to take a long-term view of the community and tailor programs designed to endure.

That means acting outside the company and its own employees. "A company's value is increasingly reflected in the off-balance sheet intangible assets and value drivers associated with economic and social prosperity," said a WEF International Business Council report on measuring sustainable outcomes.

In Target's 2021 report on corporate responsibility, for example, the retail giant broke down its strategy for community investment, pledging to spend more than $2 billion at Black-owned businesses by the end of 2025 and reporting metrics such as its overall workforce demographic by gender and race.

"The communities where we live and work sustain businesses, employees and families. We recognize our success is intrinsically linked to their well-being and prosperity," the report said. Target said it gave 5% of its profits to communities, which in 2020 equated to $245 million in cash and in-kind donations.

Quantifying these efforts, and reporting on them, is commonly overlooked. "Most businesses, however, are not fully capturing these intangible assets and value drivers," the WEF report stated. "By measuring and reporting on aspects of prosperity more holistically, companies and their stakeholders can become better informed."

Launching, and tracking, Citizen Verizon

Verizon has issued three green bonds over the past few years, but its sustainability declarations expand beyond climate. The telecommunications company announced its new responsible business plan, called Citizen Verizon, in July 2020.

"Citizen Verizon is actually the culmination of 10 years of work," said Rose Stuckey Kirk, Verizon's chief corporate social responsibility officer, citing the Verizon Innovative Learning initiative, which provides children access to STEM education programs.

Verizon started thinking about how to expand its commitments into other core areas, eventually settling on "digital inclusion" and "climate protection," Kirk said. "And what we call human prosperity. How do we elevate economic opportunity for everyone?" she continued.

The Citizen Verizon program comprises its education programs, digital resources for small businesses, technology employment training, an extensive volunteer program for employees within their local communities, and ongoing climate initiatives.

Verizon has baked measuring and reporting into its programs for the past decade. "It takes about 10 years to actually drive change," Kirk said.

One example is its digital-skills training, which pledged to provide 10 million young people training by 2030. "We took a look at what would be the components that would enable that," Kirk said. "So as we built that platform out, we built it against that target. And then we set year over year, month over month, goals against 10 years. So I can tell you, and my team can tell you, at any given month where we are against our annual targets, and what that means against our 10-year target."

The work is audited by third-party companies to verify accuracy. Even on a day-to-day level, the employee responsibility for analyzing the data and results was separate from the program managers, which Kirk believed was key to ensuring that those closest to the program weren't reporting only on positive results.

Kirk said, "I don't want to be a brand that's just doing performative work out in the market, shouting about how much we care without being able to show the proof in the pudding of what that impact looks like."