Environmental Sustainability Plan
Overview
OMNI Institute can have a significant and positive impact on the world by addressing issues related to sustainability in our business operations. We achieve this impact by improving our own sustainability practices and by showing leadership in a way that encourages staff, clients, funders, and our communities to take their own steps toward greater sustainable practices.
Summary:
OMNI Institute already operates with a low-impact footprint due to our virtual operations which reduces the consumption of goods in our business and the impact of employee commutes.
As a consulting business, that does not have products with supply chains or manufacturing emissions, we have naturally lower levels of resource use. Most of our sustainability can be achieved through reduced travel for client projects.
This plan primarily focuses on committing to evaluating the environmental impacts of future business decisions.
As a company, we believe it is important to communicate our commitments to sustainability to our communities, partners, clients, and communities to help spread awareness of these issues and set an example for comparable businesses.
What is Sustainability?
Sustainability is the balance between the environment, equity, and economy.
Sustainability often references three pillars or the “triple bottom line”.
The Environmental Pillar: Practices to limit and reduce greenhouse gas emissions and broadly reduce impact on the natural environment.
The Social Pillar: Practices that promote the health, safety, and well-being of employees, clients, and communities.
The Economic Pillar: Practices to ensure businesses can survive and thrive to make a long-term positive impact through their work.
Why Should OMNI Institute Care?
We believe that supporting a sustainable environment is critically important to our mission of “accelerating positive social change toward a more equitable society”.
As a mission-driven company, with a substantial focus on supporting public health, we must hold ourselves to a standard that contributes to global sustainability through our work. While OMNI Institute is one small company that does not operate specifically in the environment or climate sectors, every step counts toward having a larger scale positive impact.
Other Benefits Companies Often Derive from Implementing an Environmental Sustainability Plan
Beyond living and fully expressing a purpose and mission, we know there are other positive business factors that support all companies that create and take action on an environmental sustainability plan.
Improved Brand Perception: Sustainability issues have a strong link to brand perception that signals values alignment with partners and clients.
Recruiting and Retaining Top Talent: Employees are more likely to choose to work in a company that shares their values, and “will go out of their way to work for a company that demonstrates a genuine commitment to corporate social responsibility, environment, and sustainability. If companies fail to prove that they are sincere about environmental and social sustainability, they risk alienating this group both as customers and employees.”
While these factors are not the central determinations of whether to implement a plan, they are additional benefits that all companies should weigh when considering whether to create and fully and authentically implement an environmental sustainability plan.
Strategy & Commitments
OMNI commits to managing our business in a way that centers and balances the sustainability of our environment, communities, and our business.
As an organization, we begin work on this sustainability plan by making several commitments:
We will continue to prioritize operating as a virtual business to reduce emissions from commuting and other negative impacts from holding physical office space. See OMNI’s Travel Carbon Reduction Program!
We will evaluate future office space with sustainability as a primary lens:
Does the space have a green or sustainability certification?
Can we limit our footprint to minimize impacts from the built environment?
Is any office space within walking distance of public transportation and nearby daily amenities?
We will minimize to the extent possible the need for client travel and will communicate a sustainability statement to our clients during their project onboarding process that will let them know that we try to balance environmental impacts in our work and limit our project travel to essential trips only.
We will prioritize virtual and digital tools, technology, and approaches and attempt to limit our corporate consumption of resources. When we do need to purchase supplies and resources, we will try to purchase sustainable versions.
We will add vendor sustainability, as necessary, in purchasing decisions and consider vendor sustainability plans in our purchasing decisions
Whenever possible, we will dispose of our resources in an environmentally sustainable manner, prioritizing finding opportunities to reuse and recycle our resources.
Next Steps
To begin implementing this plan we will:
Communicate our plans to our staff to make them aware of our commitments to these issues and invite their participation in the efforts.
We will invite staff to form a sustainability working group to discuss ongoing amendments to this plan and recommendations to improve the sustainability of our business.
We will communicate this plan publicly, by including a page on our website and other announcements.
We will develop a statement about the importance of sustainability in our work with client projects, how that impacts our project decisions, and identify the proper vehicle for communicating that to clients.
Our business operations manager will serve as our “sustainability officer” and will help steward our commitments in this sustainability plan over the long term.