The Outdoor Industry Association (OIA) Sustainability Working Group (SWG) released the first of a three-part updated Social Responsibility Toolkit, designed to help brands and suppliers start and improve their social responsibility programs.

 

Created by the SWG Social Responsibility Working Group, the toolkit is a guidebook with strategy guidance, tools, and resources that can be adapted to suit any company’s needs.

 

Part one of the Social Responsibility Toolkit addresses basic awareness and compliance issues; parts two and three, scheduled for release within the next year, will cover the “improvement” and “aspirational” levels of social responsibility practices and programs.

 

“It’s important to outdoor industry companies to promote and monitor safe and fair treatment of the workers who make our products, yet it can be challenging to figure out exactly how to go about implementing a program to achieve this,” said Mary Bean of Columbia Sportswear, a leader of the Social Responsibility Working Group who is spearheading the development of the updated Social Responsibility Toolkit. “We encourage companies to use this toolkit to establish new social responsibility programs, as well as to assess and improve the programs they may already have.”

 

The toolkit was developed with the input of dozens of outdoor industry companies. It is an open-source working document designed to evolve with and respond to growing needs as the outdoor industry strives to improve its supply chain operations and management.

 

 

The Social Responsibility Working Group is one of the issue-specific working groups under the umbrella of the OIA Sustainability Working Group, which formed in 2007 to explore issues of corporate responsibility in the outdoor industry. For more information, visit outdoorindustry.org/sustainability. To download the toolkit, go to www.outdoorindustry.org/responsibility/social/toolkit.html.