CSR Forum on August 26th, 2008

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is a term that has in recent years increasingly
entered into the language of business. It is a term that means many different things to different people, be they businessmen themselves, civil society, academia or public in general. It is a term that is itself subject to variation. To some it is corporate responsibility, to others private voluntary initiatives, to yet others corporate social opportunity. However, no matter what it is called the fundamentals remain the same: they are voluntary positive initiatives by business that look to go beyond legal compliance in a diverse range of social, economic and environmental areas. Corporate social responsibility is not new. Business has long recognized its role along side others in contributing to the development of the communities in which it operates.

The credo “Kerja Untung Tabung” (employment, income, groth) or Kutabung mention that everybody must be aware that aging is not scary if people are prepared for it. Propare when they are young, so they can enjoy when groeing old. The problem is that people are not prepared economically, spiritually, socially, etc. for aging. Facilitators are very important for reminding people of what they should do to prepare themselves. That is a little bit of failure of the system in Indonesia. Governments must be consistent in their approach. Another country like Japan and Thailand are following the correct path in terms of creating a comprehensive and integrated social welfare and health system. I highlighted the need for strong leadership to implement change. Change is a must, and it take place within the communities and from there it flows upward. Compare with the other country, Indonesian experience but that Indonesia has faced more failure than success. So it need the importance of cooperation on the levels of international, national, regional, community.

The number of elderly people in Indonesia may be higher than the total population of some other countries. Indonesia has a lack of capacity, and so must focus more on preventing people from becoming poor when they are elderly. We ever suggested that in this regard, collaboration with other countries to address the various issues raised in the session would be important. We need to send retired senior managers to Indonesia to improve the management of small and medium-sized enterprises. The big countries such as Indonesia have limited capacity to finance such activities. There are also limitations on activities to raise awareness, a lack of trained personnel, a lack of infrastructure for training, and a lack of a system for monitoring and assessment of activities because there is no properly structured data bank available.

Finally, CSR is a business-led response to the business environment. Given the speed of change and uncertainties that exist in the marketplace, business needs the flexibility to respond quickly to market shifts. The voluntary nature of CSR and the vast range of often very innovative responses available to business mean that that responsiveness can be retained and that the social progress to which CSR contributes can continue to develop.
The corporate policies on CSR have been automatically integrated in the corporate management system, written in policies on both annual and long term program. Actually on the recent years after the spirit of “working together to reduce poverty” there’s a growing awareness of the need to address the problem of youth employment in Indonesia –both to provide decent work opportunites for young people and to allow Indonesia to get the full benefit in its economic and social development of their contribution. The time to combat poverty has arrived, sure that hard work lies a head. We have to commit to ending poverty. The first step is commitment to the task: focus to halving poverty by 2015 and struggle to ending poverty by 2025. Better that we did not wait for the rich and powerfull to come to rescue. The poor cannot wait.

Hence, CSR emerges as a responsibility way of the corporation to maintain its beneficence and reduce the negative impacts. The negative impact could be exist resulted from the efforts to build the beneficence values. This objective will not be achieved without a synergetic cooperation between the corporation, community and government. CSR will be successful if the corporation’s plan of CSR conducted by the triple bottom line concept which be implemented by revolutionary change in corporate attitudes in positioning the corporation amid the community and government. Thus, there must be cooperation between corporations, government and community. Starting from this point Good Corporate Governance (GCG) can be achieved. Absolutely, the collaboration between CSR, Triple Bottom Line and GCG can reduce the number of the poor.█ Selengkapnya di This article is presented in CSR Forum, at Jakarta, 26th of August 2008 in Jakarta try to copy, paste, then enter Profesor GUNAWAN SUMODININGRAT, M.Ec., Ph.D, is the Director General of Social Empowerment, Department of Social Affairs Republic of Indonesia