Abstract
The Sustainability Issue by Jessica Grossmeier, PhD, MPH
A couple of years ago, I was invited to present on the topic of sustainability at the National Wellness Conference. While I was aware of the corporate sustainability movement’s efforts to do less measurable harm to the planet, I approached the topic without much understanding for where and how workplace wellness initiatives fit. I initially accepted the speaking invitation to lean into the opportunity to learn more about how to link wellness and sustainability efforts together. My exploration of the connection between them led me to SHINE: The Sustainability and Health Initiative for NetPositive Enterprise. Housed within the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, SHINE helps corporations quantify the ways that they contribute not just to doing less harm (called a footprint) but also to the ways that contribute to a healthier, more sustainable world (called a handprint). The combination of these 2 concepts is called NetPositive, because the goal is for an organization’s handprint to be greater than its footprint. Sustainability and Health Initiative for NetPositive Enterprise’s NetPositive approach immediately captivated my interest as a health outcomes researcher because it occurred to me that in the workplace health promotion field, we too have been focused for far too long on a value proposition that quantifies mitigating the negatives associated with poor health habits and not enough on quantifying how healthy habits contribute to positive flourishing. Like the NetPositive approach, the full value proposition for wellness is the summation of the benefits yielded from reducing undesirable effects of poor health and those yielded from increasing the desirable effects of thriving.
Dr Eileen McNeely, founder and codirector of the Sustainability and Health Initiative for NetPositive Enterprise (SHINE), tees up this special issue on sustainability by describing the drivers of the corporate sustainability movement and contrasting its function, operation, and effectiveness within organizations with that of corporate health promotion initiatives, closing with practical lessons for the health promotion field. Supplementing this guidance is a real-world example from Johnson & Johnson, which discusses how corporate sustainability and health and well-being initiatives have evolved and become integrated in its organization. The case study also profiles how Johson & Johnson’s programmatic efforts and measured outcomes are aligned as a corporate business strategy. Every evidence-based approach begins with an understanding of the gap between an organization’s current and aspirational state, so it’s helpful to be aware of assessment tools designed to identify the gaps. Giselle Sebag, consultant at Bloomberg Associates and the former vice president and director of programs at the Center for Active Design (CfAD), discusses several tools available to assess the influence of the environment on population health. She also explains how the tools work in complementary ways to identify actionable strategies that employers, real estate developers, urban planners, and health promotion professionals can implement to improve workforce and community well-being.
Although I find myself inspired by the growing number of organizations that are boldly aligning their health and well-being and corporate sustainability efforts, it can also be a bit daunting to know where to begin on such a journey. I close this issue by offering up some beginning steps toward aligning these 2 functions.