Corporate social responsibility statement

Financial year ending 31 July 2020.

Our approach

Jisc aspires to go above and beyond our charitable mission and to make positive contributions to the communities we are in and to the nation overall, while ensuring that this does not detract from our core purpose. We aim to act responsibly in our actions with key tenets of:

  • Adding value to the community through our assets, for example, govroam for the public sector, Janet for science, free and fair access to online resources and data
  • Reducing our impact on the environment, with a goal to reach Net Zero status
  • Supporting our members with their own climate emergency and Net Zero initiatives
  • Enabling our staff to contribute positively to local, national and global communities through volunteering, fundraising and using their skills/expertise
  • Investing responsibly to ensure our investments do not support unethical activities
  • Conducting all our business in an honest and ethical manner

In summer 2020 we launched our corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy, and we’ll be reporting our plans and progress in each of the three key areas of the strategy in future: business ethics, environment and community.

Our commitment

We want to make a positive difference through the services we provide, the way we provide them and the way we run the organisation as a whole. Our CSR strategy guides our work across:

  • Providing sustainable benefits for our stakeholders
  • Minimising our impact on the environment, both directly and through what we do for our stakeholders
  • Providing support for the wellbeing and development of staff
  • Securing our own financial sustainability and independence
  • Improving the positive impact on the communities we live and work in and reducing the negative impact
  • Developing our partnerships with suppliers
  • Continuous development of our governance and transparency.

Our achievements

IIn our last CSR statement, we identified a number of actions that we’d take in 2019-20. In the last year we have:

  • Developed a CSR strategy to confirm our plans and identify performance measures and raised awareness of the work underway to inspire staff to think about CSR issues
  • Achieved Platinum status through our Trees for Life partner, with more than 3,100 trees planted as a result of our commitment to carbon off-setting
  • Launched our anti-bribery and corruption, gifts and hospitality, conflict of interest and modern slavery policies accompanied by mandatory training for all staff
  • Launched a health cash plan and focussed on mental health support for staff through the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic
  • Initiated a diversity and inclusion programme to inform a diversity and inclusion strategy
  • Continued our programme of work to address our gender pay gap and to encourage women into the technology sector and Jisc
  • Completed a colleague engagement survey with identified actions and reporting on progress and learned lessons to apply to further organisational mergers.

In addition, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and in support of our members and society, we:

  • Worked with content providers and publishers to make more content available online with many resources available free of charge to ensure that students can continue their studies through the pandemic
  • Successfully engaged with the Department for Education to provide access to devices for disadvantaged students to support their continued studies through the pandemic and avoid digital exclusion impacting on their success
  • Extended eduroam/govroam into NHS Nightingale hospital locations and student accommodation housing NHS workers through the pandemic
  • Removed restrictions on numbers of users from OpenAthens allowing organisations full access for all staff and students. The NHS Nightingale hospitals became OpenAthens enabled and all end user restrictions were removed free of charge
  • Launched a learning and teaching reimagined programme to support the move to increasingly online provision for students, with equality, diversity and inclusion as a guiding principle for the programme
  • Initiated a pilot project to provide reliable access to course materials and virtual learning environment (VLE) systems for international and transnational education students in China

Our plans for 2020-21

In 2020-21 we will take the following actions:

  • Following the launch of the CSR strategy, we will harness the passion of our colleagues and invite ideas from across the business to help us further shape our commitments
  • Share information about our CSR approach broadly to attract prospective employees to the business

Business ethics

  • Seek information from our partner organisations about their approach to social responsibility
  • Map our supply chain to better understand where risks to our environmental and modern slavery commitments may exist and identify areas for further review
  • Make sure that we have a commitment from every supplier we use that environmental standards are met and modern slavery policies adhered to and check compliance during contract periods

Environment

  • Develop an environmental policy and align with ISO14001 (Environmental management systems) where possible
  • Aim to rapidly identify services which have the most climate impact and set a programme for each service towards achieving Net Zero. In the longer term we will begin to assess and report on the contribution of our services to our members’ own impact
  • Prioritise environmental responsibility throughout the design and execution of future refurbishments 
  • Work towards achieving Net zero for Jisc with all energy use from renewable sources (where we own the building) and work towards off-setting the emissions of our energy use across our estates and all operations, including service provision
  • Take additional steps to actively promote recycling across our offices and review the need to travel to meetings and events that have been successfully delivered virtually through the pandemic
  • Include our carbon impact in our impact in numbers reporting

Community

  • Introduce a charity voted for by colleagues to partner with each year
  • Introduce payroll giving in the new HR system and give colleagues the opportunity to give to the Jisc chosen charity or a charity of their choice
  • Consider introducing fundraising and employee involvement at our main stakeholder events
  • Keep encouraging our people to take advantage of the opportunity to take a volunteering day and have at least half of our people use their volunteer day by 2025

Previous statements

View our previous corporate social responsibiity statement for: