While most CSR definitions mostly evolved around the concept that business can and should act in a manner that respects the legitimate goals and demands of all stakeholders, more recently the concept was enhanced to recognize and include social responsibility and sustainability as an integral part of the business model, fitting and tuned to the core business strategy and thus directly and effectively contributing to the long-term success of the enterprise. This seeks to refocus the meaning of CSR and avoid the unfortunately numerous abuses when it was used for window dressing, ticking boxes of different local regulations to avoid certain taxation burdens or defensive measures for protecting image and reputation. The key challenge is to turn CSR into a true and powerful tool to a proactive cost-benefit calculus that factors in financial gains from productivity improvements (eg. resulting from enlightened human resource management or from higher energy or material efficiency) and ultimately becomes the basis for brand equity and the driver of organisational learning, innovation and technology management. The new and simpler definition put forward by the European Commission refers to CSR as "the responsibility of enterprises for their impacts on society and outlines what an enterprise should do to meet that responsibility. The European Commission's new strategy on corporate social responsibility (CSR), part of a package of measures on responsible business, aims to help enterprises achieve their full potential in terms of creating wealth, jobs and innovative solutions to the many challenges Europe's society is currently facing. Following the rationale and background of the project (described above), three tools ( small, medium and large organizations ) that facilitate the operationalization of the model " RSO Global 3P " and evaluating its implementation are presented . The tools allow users to monitor and measure the progress and performance of each step of the integration of the principles of Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability process. These principles are translated by a set of requirements , guidelines and related indicators that allow us to understand which actions are undertaken by the organisation. Thus, the ENGAGE project will directly reach relevant addressees (stakeholders, target groups) in order to make a new understanding of CSR evident and practicable to them. The main outputs for this sake will be - a Platform (for self-assessment, open educational resources, project area), - Sectorial CSR-kits (for employers, managers, stakeholders), - Integrative Guidelines (for boosting CSR), - training events, - respective dissemination and exploitation measures in order to guarantee for sustainable implementation of the project and its practical use also beyond the funded lifetime of ENGAGE. In this way, the ENGAGE project will be of innovative value for all partner countries involved.
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become one of the standard business practices for business, VET and social institutions in our time. While most CSR definitions mostly evolved around the concept that business can and should act in a manner that respects the legitimate goals and demands of all stakeholders, more recently the concept was enhanced to recognize and include social responsibility and sustainability as an integral part of the business model, fitting and tuned to the core business strategy and thus directly and effectively contributing to the long-term success of the enterprise. The ENGAGE project is constructed on the long term success of the business, VET and social institutions. Based on the three CSR fields KOTO (Turkey) and ISQ (Portugal) from business, GOI (Turkey), BEST (Austria), MYCI (Bulgaria) from VET and CREFOB (Romania), FCPIT (Spain) form Social fields came together to developed ENGAGE project. 7 partners developed four important and useful products which are; 1. Benchmarking Compendium Report on CSR Practices 2. Platform for self-assessment on CSR and storage of Open Education Resources 3. ENGAGE Sectorial CSR-kits for employers, managers and stakeholders 4. ENGAGE Integrative Guidelines for boosting CSR CSR’s implementations are well known by the big companies, big VET institutions and big social organizations, but it is not well known by SMEs, small VET and Social institutions. The ENGAGE project worked on CRR implementations and tried to increase the awareness between these small organizations in partner’s countries. First project revealed the existing CSR implementations and situations of the partner countries via Benchmarking Compendium Report on CSR Practices. The second work is to find out the existing CSR ‘s situations of the organizations, a platform for self-assessment on CSR was developed and tested in partner countries. This tool gives a final report for the users how to start, develop and continue the CSR activities in their organizations. Another important touchstone of the project is the training. Three ENGAGE Sectorial CSR-kits for employers, managers and stakeholders were developed and tested in partner countries. This training kits are the guides for any CSR users. The last stage of the project is to present the whole work to the end users. The ENGAGE Integrative Guidelines for boosting CSR was developed to disseminate the project intellectual outputs between other organizations. English and Turkish Benchmarking Compendium Report on CSR Practices developed and distributed via project website and published version to the stakeholders. 90 Self assessment tools (15 per parners in 6 partner countries) were tested and a common integrative report was published in ENGAGE web site. 63 internal staff was trained how to use the Self assessment tool and how to train the other CSR users via CSR training kits. 246 external users were trained and informed via multiplier events about the ENGAGE project.