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Conferences always stir new insights as dialogue leads to a rush of new perspectives. Recently I had the opportunity to attend two great conferences: a partnership event put on at the United Nations through ECOSOC (the UN’s Economic and Social Council) and BCLC’s Environmental Symposium entitled Bricks and Sticks (on the man-made and natural worlds). Both events contained interesting dialogues relevant to research.

Damned Lies and Statistics

At one point during BCLC’s Environmental Symposium, a panelist made an argument supported by “fact-based evidence.” In response, another panelist joked: “you can find ‘fact-based evidence’ to support all positions.” Delivered well, this quip brought a laugh from attendees. While certainly meant as a joke, I think this view struck a chord. Most people seem to believe that you can find a fact to support any opinion.

When I used to teach introductory statistics to undergraduates, one of my favorite exercises was to have the students try to lie with statistics. I gave them a social science database filled with hundreds of variables, and asked them to create spurious connections. Try as they might, the students quickly learned how hard it was to create misleading facts. Correlations failed to be significant. Groups were too divergent to slot into the right places. Never once did a student come to me with a slam-dunk – most could only muster weak, unconvincing relationships.

As...

A coalition of organizations that provided relief in Port-au-Prince following the Haiti earthquake have joined together to systematically apply the lessons learned from past disasters. They have created the Port Resiliency Program, or PReP, a public-private partnership that aims to work with Caribbean and Latin American airports and seaports to strengthen their ability to respond to and recover quickly from a crisis.

Strong, resilient airports and seaports are at the heart of effective response and recovery following a hurricane or other natural disaster. The tragic aftermath of Hurricane Georges demonstrated just what happens when ports fail. In 1998, category 4 Hurricane Georges swept across the Caribbean, devastating Antigua and Barbuda, St. Kitts and Nevis, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, and the United States, causing 604 deaths and nearly $6 billion in property damage.

Sadly, severely damaged ports greatly complicated the distribution of relief supplies and personnel, slowing the pace of life-saving humanitarian aid. Incapacitated or poorly-functioning ports further delayed the recovery of fragile island economies, creating a ripple effect that deepened the distress of stricken communities.

PReP facilitates significant, cost-effective improvements by focusing on fortifying current...

Last year, at the July 18 Role of Business in Environmental Innovation Working Meeting, BCLC and Shell gave a preview of the Environmental Innovation Map. At the time, the map displayed only 25 projects, and the projects were deemed innovative based on a case-by-case evaluation.

Over the past year, with the help of the Institute for Sustainable Development, we are proud to share that we have added a robust and detailed process for discovering and validating projects for the map. We began by identifying over 25 sustainability blogs and an additional 25 Google search terms to search routinely for interesting ideas and products. Using these sources, we assembled a large collection of potential projects for the map.

Once we had identified potential projects we ran them through a strict validation process. To be considered for the map, a project had to meet at least one of nine criteria – which included...

In a world where standing still is never an option and the only thing certain is uncertainty, non-profit organizations face huge challenges as they seek to serve their constituents and fulfill their missions. 

The non-profit Office Depot Foundation, which serves as the charitable giving arm of Office Depot Inc., has long recognized the unique set of circumstances in which non-profits conduct their business.  For the past five years, one of the Foundation’s key areas of emphasis has been helping non-profit organizations to operate efficiently and effectively - or, as its strategic priorities state, “building the capacity of non-profit organizations through collaboration and innovation.”  An essential element of this strategy is the Weekend in Boca Civil Society Leadership Symposium, which was presented for the first time in 2007 as a collaborative effort between the Office Depot Foundation and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Business Civic Leadership Center (BCLC).

The sixth annual Weekend in Boca will take place on May 17 and 18 at Office Depot Corporate Headquarters in Boca Raton, Fla.  The Symposium will give non-profit professionals, board members and volunteers the rare opportunity to pause, reflect and re-energize and – as has been the case from the...