Last year a group of North American social research analysts at 18 investment firms and SRI research organizations issued a collective statement calling on companies to produce annual sustainability reports based on the Global Reporting Initiative's Sustainability Reporting Guidelines. We've gotten great feedback from companies and GRI staff that the statement has had a strong impact both among North American companies and around the world. We're now working to increase the number of signatories on the statement and seek much more international participation so that we issue a global call for sustainability reporting from SRI institutions around the world. 

We plan to formally launch the statement at the U.S. Social Investment Forum's SRI in the Rockies event, as we did last year.

(There's a webcast of our launch that included participation from GRI Chief Executive Ernst Ligteringen at
http://www.socialinvest.org/areas/news/100604-CorporateReporting.htm.)
There's also more background on last year's statement at
http://www.siran.org/sust.html 

Attached is a copy of the current draft for this year, which has slightly revised language to take out references specific to U.S. markets.

To give us time to prepare our launch, we ask that interested organizations contact me to sign on by Monday, Aug. 1. If you can, please let me know by that date if you are considering signing on, even if a final decision or compliance review is still pending.

Again, we've been pleasantly surprised how far news of our original statement has travelled and the influence we've heard it has had.We're excited to leverage even more impact from the statement with a more global set of signatories. 

Steve Lippman
Co-Chair, Social Investment Research Analysts Network (SIRAN),
U.S. Social Investment Forum, and
 Vice President of Social Research, Trillium Asset Management
 slippman@trilliuminvest.com
 (206) 633-7815