We kicked off our 7th annual celebration on March 1st with an engaging discussion on the challenges of ESG and how women are leading the change. Our esteemed speakers included Jodi Rumble, General Manager of Diageo Canada, Jayant Kairam, Vice President of Society / ESG at Diageo, and Jeff Readman, Senior Policy and Insights Advisor at ACCA.
Jodi shared her insights on creating a global ESG strategy for Diageo and how the company has been focusing on connecting with its brands, community, and social presence to deliver on its Society 2030 promise. She emphasized the importance of setting ambitious yet realistic goals, empowering employees, and collaborating with the community to achieve sustainability objectives. More about their progress in North America can be found here.
Jayant discussed how Diageo works in partnership with its suppliers to achieve its decarbonization goals and how creating incentives can drive progress. He stressed that maintaining stakeholder pressure is crucial for sustainability and that embedding social and environmental impact together is vital.
Jeff Readman provided a toolkit for SMEs to align their business strategy with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). He recommended identifying the SDGs a business can realistically contribute to and evaluating its performance against those goals. Jeff’s recommendations on how SMEs can address/align with all 17 SDGs are:
Identify the SDGs you will contribute to, justify that and evaluate that. You cannot do them all
You build it into a performance and a document
Identify your standards and your performance.
Sharing experience is critical.
We want to thank our sponsors, ACCA, Diageo Canada, and London Consulting Group, for their support. If you want to learn more about our events or get involved with the British Canadian Chamber of Trade and Commerce, please don't hesitate to contact us!