The focus of this year’s Pathways stories is on three of the seven core areas of the ISO 26000 Guidance Standard on Social Responsibility: Community Involvement and Development, Organizational Governance, and Environment.

The stories included in this monograph are all companies and organizations that have embarked on their own paths to social responsibility, providing a broad spectrum of engagement and business success.

To read the 2010 Pathways to Social Responsibility, click here. You can also view the individual stories on the SRO Stories tab at the top of the home page.

Author and ASQ SR Discussion Board Moderator, Chad Vincent, provides this webinar overview of SR, its connection to the upcoming ISO 26000 standard and an update on its progress. Click here to view the webinar.

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Local and worldwide accountability and transparency on social, financial, and environmental issues are bringing about an increased interest in social responsibility (SR). An emerging international standard—ISO 26000—provides guidance to organizations that seek assistance in integrating SR into their practices. The importance of SR and the many wide-ranging and critical issues currently facing society prompted ASQ to embark on a major initiative to align quality methodologies to socially responsible practices and systems.

The ASQ SR Think Tank was designed to engage thought leaders and organizations in a strategic dialogue about SR and the role of quality. The desire was to facilitate an international dialogue and potential collaborations on the lasting contribution quality can make to the SR movement and provide direction and scope to the ASQ SR agenda.

Click here to read more of the ASQ SR Think Tank Executive Summary.

Goodwill Industries of Southeastern Wisconsin, a nonprofit organization with a long history of social responsibility, successfully uses lean techniques and kaizen events to improve processes and enhance its social responsibility efforts.

Within two years of introducing lean techniques, Goodwill had completed16 process improvement events that saved an estimated $2.8 million in labor and supplies.

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The future International Standard ISO 26000, Guidance on social responsibility, will provide harmonized, globally relevant guidance for private and public sector organizations of all types based on international consensus among expert representatives of the main stakeholder groups and so encourage the implementation of best practice in social responsibility worldwide.

This article  first appeared in the September-October 2009 edition of ISO Management Systems magazine and is reproduced with the kind permission of ISO Central Secretariat www.iso.org.