The UK government has handed over the running of its flagship corporate
responsibility organization, the CSR Academy, to Business in the
Community.
The academy, established in 2004 to promote training, has been inactive
since last summer when its project director, Andrew Dunnett, left to
become head of the Vodafone Group Foundation. Now the Department of
Trade and Industry, which set up the academy, has announced that Bitc
is taking it over with immediate effect.
However, Julia Cleverdon, Bitc’s chief executive, said she had yet to
decide how to take the academy forward. ‘Our immediate plans include
conducting a review of the marketplace for CSR training and development
so that we can build on the academy’s success and consider how it can
add further value to the business community,’ she said.
A Bitc spokesman said the review had no firm timetable, but should be
completed before the end of this year. There are no immediate plans to
appoint staff.
Bitc has received what it called a ‘relatively small’ dowry of £25,000
($50,000) from the government, mainly to run and update the academy
website. The academy has been supported financially by the trade
department, but it appears the government now wants it to be
self-financing under Bitc’s wing.
During the academy’s early days, 5000 companies registered to use its
CSR competency framework. About 300 large companies attended
master-classes and regional events, and overseas organizations showed
considerable interest in using its training materials. However,
government commitment to the venture cooled without the patronage of
former CSR minister Stephen Timms, who was its main political backer,
and without Dunnett’s leadership. ‘In some senses the academy holds
quite a lot of promise, as there’s very strong demand for its
services,’ said Bitc. ‘We think we can do a bit more with it.’
Many of the academy’s materials were delivered by partners such as
AccountAbility, the Association of Business Schools and the Chartered
Institute of Personnel and Development. Bitc said it hoped to continue
these relationships, ‘particularly in terms of training providers’.
Dunnett told EP: ‘Bitc were
immensely supportive and engaged as one of the academy programme
partners and I am sure they will build effectively on the work to date.’
Andrew Wilson, a director at The Corporate Citizenship Company who
worked with the academy when he was at Ashridge business school, said
there was still ‘strong latent demand’ for what the academy had been
offering, but the challenge would be to find an approach ‘that both
meets the needs of a wide variety of corporates and is relevant to the
specific challenges facing individual companies.’
He said Bitc was ‘well placed’ to take the initiative forward but would
have to ‘depend upon collaboration with other organizations that are
able to deliver management development initiatives’.
