Celebrating G&A's Sustainability Highlights Issue #500 - And Unveiling a New Design

Welcome to Highlights issue #500 – a landmark, we will say, in this, the tenth anniversary year of publishing the G&A Institute’s weekly newsletter. As you see, this is also an enhanced format that is intended to make the newsletter easier to read or scan as well.

Our newsletter is designed to share timely, informative content in topic/issue “buckets” that we think will be of value to you, our reader. So much is happening in the sustainable investing and corporate sustainability spaces these days – we work hard to help you keep up with the important stuff!

Publishing the Sustainability Highlights newsletter is a team effort here at G&A.  Our company was formed in late 2006 and among our first efforts, Ken Cynar, then and now our Editor-in-Chief, began the daily editing of the then-new “Accountability Central” web site with news and opinion. The focus was (and is) on corporate governance, environmental matters, a widening range of societal and corporate-society issues, SRI investing, and more.

Two years later we created the “SustainabilityHQ” web platform – Ken manages content for both platforms today. Back in those early days there was not the volume of news or opinion pieces that we see today. Whenever we “caught” something of note the rest of the G&A team would quickly share the item with Ken. 

“ESG” had emerged as a key topic area about the time we began our publishing efforts and soon we saw a steady flow of news, features, research reports, opinions & perspectives that we started sharing. By 2010, small but solid areas of focus were available for our information and intelligence sharing, part of the mission of G&A from the start. And so, we created the weekly Highlights newsletter.

Interesting to remember: the early issues had scant corporate reports recently published (corporate names, brief descriptions of contents, links). There were so few corporate sustainability / responsibility reports being publicly disclosed, we had a list of those in the weekly newsletter! Soon that trickle of reports became a flood. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) invited G&A to be the data partner for the United States and so our growing team of ESG analysts began to help identify and analyze the rapidly-increasing flow of corporate reports to be processed into the GRI’s global reporting database.

Hank Boerner and Lou Coppola in the early days worked with Ken on capturing and editing. Amy Gallagher managed the weekly flow of the newsletter, from draft, to layout and then final distribution along with the coordination of conference promotions with partner organizations. 

With a solid stream of content now being captured today, all of this is a considerable effort here at G&A Institute.  Ken is at the helm, managing the “AC” and “SHQ” web platforms where literally thousands of news and opinion are still hosted for easy access. He frames the weekly newsletter. Today Ken is supported by our ESG analysts Reilly Sakai and Julia Nehring who capture original research and other content for the newsletter. Hank and Lou are overall editors and authors and Amy still manages the weekly flow of activities from draft to distribution.  Our head of design, Lucas Alvarez, working with Amy created this new format. As you see, it is a team effort!

Today there is a welcome “flood” of news, research and opinion being published around the world that focuses on key topic areas: corporate sustainability, CSR, corporate citizenship, ESG disclosure & reporting, sustainable investing, and more.  We capture a tiny amount of this, of course, and present a few select items in the categories below for your benefit.  Much more of the “capture effort” is available to you on the SustainabilityHQ web platform (see the “more stories” links next to each category of headlines).

We hope that you find Sustainability Highlights newsletter of value. It’s a labor of love for us at G&A, and we would like to get your thoughts and feedback …including how we can continue to improve it. Thanks for tuning in!

This is just the introduction of G&A's Sustainability Highlights newsletter this week. Click here to view the full issue.