Social Responsibility (SR)

1. Pursuing “social impact”

ISO26000, an international standard that provides guidance on social responsibility, requires all the organizations to work on creating a sustainable society including contribution to community development. However, NPO/NGO acts towards social issues as its main mission, and originally works on community development and sustainable society. Thus, standards of social responsibility for NPO/NGO (*1) requires NPO/NGO to not only just work on social issues, but also to evaluate whether their activities made an impact, in other words,“social impact”, to solve social issues in actual situation as a result of activities.
HFW considers that “social impact” is one of crucial issues among various theme of social responsibility. In order to make a social impact, it is important to share knowledge and experience gained through activities with stakeholders. In the Istanbul Principles for CSO Development Effectiveness, “Create and share knowledge and commit to mutual learning” is set as one of the principles. Since HFW is a non-governmental and non-profit organization, and independent of specific thought, religion, political ideas and sponsors, we would like to take advantage of this characteristic to advance our activities.

※1) Accountability Self Check 2012, Criteria of assessment for Excellent NPO, and the Istanbul Principles for CSO Development Effectiveness

2. Focusing on “human resources”

HFW reaffirmed the importance of people who are involved in activities together, especially staffs, interns, volunteers including local residents and Youth Ending Hunger. We recognize them as “human resources”. Among various activities on social responsibility, we create enabling environments to fulfill their potentials. We believe that it will lead to meet our social responsibility to other stakeholders, and also we can grow as an organization that implements high-quality projects.

3. “Food” as a keyword

HFW does not consider social responsibility as pubic excuse or temporary effort, but consider it as a matter of course as an NGO and determined to have it take root. We consider that it is important for both HFW and stakeholders to feel familiar with activities of social responsibility. In this regards, we choose “food” as a starting point since that is the theme HFW works on and people involved are all interested in, and use key phrases such as “delicious”, “fun”, “mottainai (=a sense of regret concerning waste)” to promote activities of social responsibility expansively.

Methods of implementation

Based on the above three policies, with ISO26000, an international guidance document about social responsibility of all the organizations, and three standards of social responsibility for NPO/NGO in mind, HFW adopts a perspective of social responsibility into our project implementation and organizational management to build a trusting relationship with society.