Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Community Relations (CR)

Attached "Instruction" is the instruction for the assignment.
Attached "Corporate.." is the textbook for the course and you may use it for the citation.

Our course will explore Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Community Relations (CR) from two lenses:

• CSR as a broad concept: This approach is intended to introduce different approaches to the global industry of CSR. We will address the huge and continuously evolving role of CSR in business through discussion, readings, and ‘non-signature project’ assignments.


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CSR as community relations (CR): This approach will introduce CSR as local, community-centered work. The CR signature project will focus on the tangible work of a CSR/CR manager. The project will focus on a place and organization of your choosing (see below). This may be an organization or community that you are currently involved with, or one that you would like to learn more about. Throughout the course, we will build concepts of CR initiative design. Most weeks, you will be assigned a Signature Project contribution exercise. These exercises will build upon one another to create a final project that you will present to the class. 

Your first Signature Project contribution exercise: 

To Do: Start thinking about your signature project, and propose two communities and two organizations that could serve as the focus of your signature project. 

To Submit/ Deliverable: Please submit a 1 page document that lists identified organizations/ companies(2) and communities(2) with a short summary of why you have chosen each. Please keep in mind that this is an informal, brain-storming phase. 

Suggestions for this assignment:

Choose industries that you are familiar with, interested in, or both: Throughout this course you will be researching and proposing CR initiatives from the perspective of a CR manager. Unless you already hold that position, you will be making assumptions about organization priorities and available resources. It will be helpful to have some familiarity with the type of work your identified organizations does.

Choose communities that will provide public, primary resources: Good CR initiatives are customized to serve the needs of the community. Consider what information you might need to learn to best serve your proposed communities. This can include people/interviews, local journalism, city meeting calendars, or public records such as meeting minutes, police blotters, school profiles, city budgets, or NGO concentration areas. Primary resources are an important part of research. This term, web availability of the resources becomes more important. 

Stay community-centered: This project will focus on practical application of local community outreach from a local organization. The readings and exercises will be customizable, but are intended for use by a CR manager that works on-site at their organization. 

Assignment FAQs:

What do you mean by community? 

For this project, a community is a group of people that will be, or can be, affected by an organization’s actions. In the coming weeks, we will assess what boundaries can be placed on outreach efforts. For the purposes of this assignment, a municipality or neighborhood will likely be the community in question. For this exercise, I recommend a small to mid-sized area. For example: Chicago, IL (population of 2,700,000+) is too large for this assignment, while the Portage Park neighborhood (population of about 64,000) within Chicago, may be more manageable. If researching a less dense or smaller community, for example Highwood, IL (population of about 5,000), assessing the full municipality would be appropriate. 

What do you mean by organization? For this project, you can use any existing organization, or propose an imagined organization. In your signature projects, you will be able to establish the organization’s history in the community, or outside of the community if entering the space. Beware..if you choose to design a fictitious organization, you will need to outline it fully by week two - we'll talk about it in class. 

Do my organizations and communities need to be in the same place and already interacting with one another? No. You will have the opportunity to assess each entity independently. Your signature project will address how an organization might propose CR initiatives within a community space. The organization can be, but does not need to be, active in that space.

Why do I need to submit two organizations and two communities? 

It will be important for you to have choices in the coming weeks while you learn more about the types of initiatives you may want to propose. By week three, you will be able to test some of the early course concepts against the choices that you make this week. Having a few different options will be helpful.