Businesses receive favorable public attention when leveraging their resources and expertise for community benefit. Consumers value philanthropic endeavors that mend the infirmed, empower the underrepresented, repair broken ecosystems, and respond to our global woes. By embracing this notion of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), businesses generate positive publicity, improve their reputation, and engage the future generations of employees and customers concerned with global equity and environmental sustainability.

In 2008, the Häagen-Dazs ice cream company initiated a CSR campaign focused on honeybee preservation. The ice cream company implicitly relies on honeybees to pollinate many ingredients required for their product; without honeybees, worldwide pollination would decline, thus impacting Häagen-Dazs’ ability to procure ingredients for their ice cream. By supporting research to understand the global honeybee collapse, Häagen-Dazs addresses an environmental catastrophe that threatens international food networks and their own supply chain.

This successful CSR example illustrates the symbiosis between enterprise and community. If the economic sector can continue to align civic issues with business goals, CSR will become a potent method of creating healthy societies and wealthy economies.  

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