Big budget for meeting the SDGs? No thanks, says Walgreens Boots Alliance

The Vice President of Corporate Social Responsibility at the Walgreens Boots Alliance Richard Ellis is happy with only two staff working on implementing the Sustainable Development Goals across the company. Nor, he told Devex, is he interested in having a larger budget. “Let’s say I have 125 staff, and a budget of 100 million [British] pounds,” he said on the sidelines of the Responsible Business Summit Europe in London this week. “Then I’d have to do quarterly appraisals, and I’d have to go to a weekly budget meeting,” Ellis said. But his exasperation at the prospect of more responsibilities isn’t out of laziness or even, he said, a dread of meetings or evaluations. Ellis explained that the most effective way to embed the SDGs is not to insulate corporate social responsibility efforts from the rest of the company “way up on the sixth floor” with a big budget and lots of staff. Instead, what works for Walgreens Boots Alliance — this year’s winner of the United Nations Foundation Global Leadership Award — is to keep staff and funds slim and focus on incentivising other departments to take ownership of SDG-conducive projects. “Just having two of us means I can’t do anything without the buy-in of other departments,” he said. “Now, if I can persuade other people that the things I’m proposing could really work, they will champion them. What happens then is you have a series of champions around the business who will basically make sure these ideas become a reality.” Ellis’ vision for CSR isn’t new; over the last five years many organizations have increasingly decentralised CSR efforts to avoid a siloed approach to sustainability, instead promoting employee, team or department-driven interventions. What sets the Walgreens Boots Alliance approach apart, Ellis said, is how it exploits the framework of the SDGs to augment Boots and Walgreens’ own work. Can you teach an old business new tricks? Unlike the Millennium Development Goals, Ellis said, the SDGs were written “with more clarity” and with businesses in mind. “From my point of view, they helped me to land some quite difficult forecasted targets within the business, but at the same time helped in terms of what I would call the ‘storytelling,’” Ellis said. For example, Ellis said the United States’ side of the business struggled to meet the same recycling and waste metrics as its European counterparts. By executing one pilot in one distribution center, the company was able to increase recycling activity from less than 20 percent to 98 percent. Now, Ellis said, the head of that center has “taken total ownership of that initiative” and become a “disciple of the SDGs,” and has brought that success to the other U.S. distribution centres.’ “He wants to know what we’re doing next, what he can get involved with,” Ellis said. The closer the alliance looked at its own businesses and trends, the more obvious it became that the SDGs could help advance the company’s expertise as well as its place in the world. --— Establishing “disciples” in other departments who can take credit for big wins and in many cases, cost savings (the recycling initiative was able to reduce waste disposal costs by more than 20 percent) means the company’s core shifts are sustainable. “Absolutely we will be a different company by 2030,” he added. As the largest health and beauty business in Europe and North America, the alliance started with somewhat run-of-the-mill initiatives, such as its “Give a Shot, Get a Shot” programme, whereby Boots donates a vaccination to the developing world for every vaccination purchased in-store. Or its partnership with Unilever and nonprofit H2OPE to donate five gallons of clean water to a family in the developing world for every Unilever product purchased. But soon, Ellis said, they found that the closer the alliance looked at its own businesses and trends in the health and beauty market, the more obvious it became that the SDGs could help advance the company’s expertise as well as its place in the world. Don’t take the easy way out But Ellis’ work is heavily reliant on the board’s backing, so harmonising the SDG strategy with the company’s core specialisms became crucial to get board endorsement. At the same time, Ellis said, the board’s business savvy meant this couldn’t result in just going for the easiest linkages. “If we look at the environment, people say every company needs water as part of its agenda. But our board said, ‘you’re much more advanced than washing hands and flushing toilets, so it should be deforestation, things like palm oil,’” he said. The board is “really important now in advising us, in challenging us,” Ellis said. For example, “the big thing now is personalised medicine, especially for cancer,” Ellis explained, so the alliance jumped on the opportunity to help establish a “biobank” in Dresden, Germany, to collect and analyse samples from cancer patients to establish trends in treatment. This meant the company could contribute to its main wheelhouse — health and illness prevention — while bypassing the deadlocked and competitive research and pharmaceutical markets to create an open-source tool for global cancer research. And again, its external-facing, two-person SDG team had the flexibility to “use [their] power” as a huge corporation in the health sector to collaborate with health ministers of many developing countries to get them to both contribute and use the tool. Now other countries are adopting the model, he said. The biggest challenge now, Ellis said, is carving out the data around targets and objectives. Still, Ellis said it hasn’t stopped the alliance from embracing aspirational goals, “because I think on the commercial side of things businesses are reluctant to make long-term commitments if you can’t demonstrate how you can do this.” He said that in his experience, the results are better if you seek a higher goal and fall short, than if you exceed a paltry one. For example, the alliance has pledged alongside several other companies to reach 0 percent net deforestation by 2025. “I’ve not the foggiest idea how we’re going to do it,” he said, “but I’d like to be part of a group that wants to.” Read more international development news online, and subscribe to The Development Newswire to receive the latest from the world’s leading donors and decision-makers — emailed to you free every business day.