Corporate & College Collaborative for Sustainability

Starts: November 11, 2011 at 9:00 AM
Ends: November 12, 2011 at 1:00 PM
Location: Brinkley Commons Room, Alan B. Miller Hall
Contact: c.adkins@mason.wm.edu

Summary

The Corporate & College Collaborative for Sustainability connects today's leaders in business and sustainability with student and faculty leaders on college campuses.

Full Description

W&M Student Tickets for sale: Monday, 11/7 - Wednesday 11/9 from 11am-2pm in both Miller Hall & Sadler Center.

Student, Faculty, and Corporations came together on Oct. 1-2, 2010 to discuss sustainability in business education

In Fall 2010, a new partnership was formed - The Corporate & College Collaborative for Sustainability (3CS) – with the goal of sparking innovative approaches to sustainability education and business leadership.

Our inaugural conference was an incredible success:

over 100 students from 12 universities
over 30 leaders from business and non-profits, including IBM, Saatchi & Saatchi, Citi, the Martin Agency, the Aspen Institute, and the Environmental Defense Fund.

At our Spring 2011 conference, 8 universities joined in a NYC event, with a dozen of businesses and non-profits, including IBM, Jones Lang Lasalle, BSR, Warby Parker, and Carnegie Foundation New Leaders.

This year's fall conference will be held on November 11-12, 2011 in Miller Hall, Mason School of Business at the College of William & Mary.

Confirmed participating schools for the Fall 2011 conference include: Notre Dame, Berkeley, NYU, UNC-Chapel Hill, Wash. U.-St. Louis, Bentley, U. Virginia, Ohio State, George Washington U., Wake Forest, Georgetown, William & Mary.

Why create a new community of collaboration in sustainability and business education?

Are colleges keeping up? In just three years, the millennial generation will make up half of the workforce worldwide. However, many students feel unprepared for the challenges ahead. Both CEOs and students have identified sustainability as a key issue for businesses, yet concern is growing that education in this area is falling behind.

Sustainability is a dynamic and cross-disciplinary concept -- and its scope is rapidly growing to encompass environmental, social, economic and cultural concerns. Working alone, undergraduate institutions lack the real-time insights needed to adequately educate their students. But they can obtain those insights from businesses working on the front lines of sustainability in their day to day operations.

A new type of university and corporate collaborative is needed to prepare undergraduates for sustainability leadership: the Corporate & College Collaborative for Sustainability (3CS).

Our events are unique from other conferences:

we spark cross-generational networks to scale impact by bringing together 3 groups who often never have the chance to dialogue - business leaders side by side with students and faculty.
our events are experiential and dynamic: so instead of lecture, students and faculty dialogue in roundtables with business leaders, gaining new insights across generations. And lastly,
the process is co-creative: together corporate and college participants discover new insights and best practices for developing business leaders for sustainability.

Listen to business leaders share the power of these connections here: http://www.cccsproject.com/videos.php

Learn more from previous 3CS Conference Booklets:

3CS focuses on these key challenges:

The gap between corporate sustainability strategy and undergraduate education. To date, the focus on sustainability education has been almost exclusively at the MBA level. At an undergraduate level, sustainability is rarely approached collaboratively across university disciplines or with corporate partners. To be effective, sustainability education must be grounded in the challenges facing today’s businesses. The CCCS offered a forum where businesses and universities co-create this new approach to sustainability education.

The opportunity for problem-solving partnerships. This initiative capitalized on experiential problem-solving with business leaders to support the educational effort. Businesses brought real-time challenges to the universities for student engagement in courses and research projects. Also, the collaborative created opportunities for business executives to inspire and educate the next generation of leaders.

The need to quickly scale impact. Too often, each university addresses innovation in isolation. This collaborative focused on discovering best practices in sustainability business education by creating a new network of universities and corporations. Networked collaboration increases the scale of impact and accelerate the pace of change in sustainability education.

Together participants in 3CS:

Prepare students to understand problems from a systems perspective
Highlight best practices and key concepts for a sustainability curriculum
Identify the leadership skills this future generation of executives will need in an increasing complex and interconnected world
Develop collaborative projects between corporations and universities
Improve understanding of how millennials can change organizations from within.

Collaborative Highlights:

Stories of Success and Challenge in Business and Universities. Our collaborative brought together stories of both business and student leaders, and their innovative solutions to sustainability and social responsibility challenges. Twelve top-tier university business schools and nine corporate partners participated in the Collaborative.

Roundtable Discussions and Small Group Sessions. Participants learned firsthand how companies and campuses are integrating sustainability and social responsibility. They discussed these topics in informal, small group settings.

Expanding Networks. Both formal sessions and informal receptions sparked new professional connections and research collaborations.

New Insights and Action Steps for your Community. Workshops on eco-innovation and sustainability engagement provided novel ways to bring sustainability back to campuses and organizations.

Explore our Fall 2010 event:

Creating new paths in Sustainability Education

Corporate Participant Biographies

Flickr photo album for 3CS

Download the conference overview (PDF).

University Participants in 2010-2011: University of Arizona, Bentley University, Boston College, Columbia University, Emory, George Washington University, New York University, The Ohio State University, Syracuse University, The University of Minnesota, The University of Virginia, Washington University in St. Louis, Wake Forest University, and (of course) The College of William & Mary.