GACSO explores the big questions about the CS career. At a recent workshop we engaged with 50 sustainability professionals and got their views on some key topics. Click the image to hear their views...
Supporting and promoting our members' careers
Our members enjoy the following benefits:
- an organisation focused on making the sustainability professional role more successful and more effective
- membership of a respected organisation that works to increase the quality and quantity of opportunities and overall career security
- a safe space providing support and mentoring via GACSO's network of experienced peers
Generating a shared purpose
GACSO is fast emerging as a highly credible source of support for Corporate Sustainability practitioners in the UK and beyond.
In orientating membership around the individual rather than the company, in engaging practitioners at all levels of seniority and focusing on creating intimate peer-to-peer support networks where members can exchange experiences and learn from each other in confidence, GACSO is providing a useful, value-for-money proposition to the Corporate Sustainability community.
Our greatest asset - the thing that most especially differentiates – is our explicit focus on Corporate Sustainability and the career development and impact of those who pursue that.
GACSO is positioning itself squarely around the concept and language of sustainable development and is therefore well placed to become the ‘place to go’ if sharp, edgy, game-changing thinking is your aspiration.
This sense of common purpose will be the glue that binds GACSO members together and enables them, together, to act as a credible source of thought leadership in the sustainability debate.
What’s sustainable development?
The principle of sustainable development can be explained as:
‘...being able to meet our needs today, while ensuring that what we leave behind
for future generations is sustainable, for people and the planet.’
The social and environmental challenges that this generates can be brigaded in any number of ways. One would be to demarcate four categories: carbon, finite resource consumption, poverty and social exclusion, physical and emotional wellbeing.
In one way or another, every GACSO member is facing up to one of these four challenges. Otherwise why would they join GACSO? The challenge of sustainable development and the need for a robust business response, is the route through which practitioners across the membership add value to their organisations.
Forget abstract, nebulous notions of ‘responsibility’ in business. Our agenda is oriented around a concrete challenge – global sustainable development – and our members are here to devise practical, commercially astute solutions in response.
GACSO’s role is to support them in every stage of their career, ‘codifying’ the best practice and encouraging questioning and learning that will help practitioners be more effective and respected in their profession.
GACSO members are also a distinctive breed of Corporate Sustainability practitioner:
- they recognise the scale and urgency of the challenge of sustainable development; they understand that this requires radical transformation, not incremental change;
- they possess the courage to ask awkward and disruptive questions in their businesses, never forgetting the commercial imperative.
- and, crucially, they have the capability to lead their business through change and transition, always innovating, creating efficiency, communicating outputs and delivering value.
