british colombia

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Visit http://3blmedia.com/theCSRfeed for the latest sustainability and CSR headlines. Interview with Lorraine Smith, Consultant for Canadian Business for Social Responsibility. Part 3. Transcript: Vancouver is quite interesting the whole left coast; perhaps similar to the US. You can paint some stereotypes if you will of the more granola crunchy style you might associate with California, you could also tie to BC as well. Interestingly, Canadian Business for Social Responsibility CBSR, began in Vancouver in the mid-90's. that is where it was started, it was founded. And most of the companies that joined CBSR, in fact all for a number of years, were British Colombia based companies. Small some sort of medium sized companies. So I think you could fairly say that the active interest from business in terms of what do we do about these social and environmental challenges definitely saw more discussion, more public agitation if you will and simply more business take up in British Colombia before other areas. And CBSR, as an organization then opened up an office in Toronto in 2003, and the mission of that office was to really start to bring corporate social responsibility to the larger corporations in Canada and try to unfurl it across the land, which I think to a large degree it has done quite successfully. It is important to note that the corporate activity in Vancouver is generally smaller businesses, not entirely, there are some large companies headquartered in Vancouver and there are some very interesting and high impact initiatives underway but the corporate dynamic is different. Exceptions would be large companies like BC Hydro for example, it is a large electricity company. But generally speaking the early days were sort of very small, not quite mom and pop smaller companies. They are influence, Mountain Equipment Co-op, not a huge company, but its influence has affected I would go so far to say all companies across Canada because they are so willing to share their corporate social responsibilities, successes and lesions learned and that has affected large corporations across the country. The CSR Report is produced for 3BL Media by Video4Good: http://www.video4good.com