On June 15th, the Convene ESG team hosted a networking evening at House of St Barnabas in London attended by governance and sustainability professionals in the social housing sector as well various guests invited by Convene ESG to give their insights into how ESG reporting is evolving in the housing sector.
After meeting and greeting, attendees exchanged their experiences of their ESG processes, their thoughts about the SRS and the various hurdles they face both in achieving their ESG targets and obtaining sustainable finance, before hearing from our guest speakers.
Our own Arturo Dell first gave a brief summary of our journey developing Convene ESG, alongside some of our existing Housing Association Board Portal customers. He explained how, through regular discussions with customers - such as Orbit Housing Group - and close monitoring of the SRS, we have made Convene ESG the go-to, simple solution for Housing Associations to track, monitor and report on the ESG activities against the SRS as well as other frameworks.
Russell Smith then explained how Orbit had successfully integrated Convene ESG in to their reporting process and how the ability to share and assign the tasks of monitoring and data collection from various activities simplified the whole process and made it easy to pull together a final ESG Report.
We then had insight from the financial side of ESG reporting with David Willock of Lloyds Bank, explaining how important ESG now is to investors - for every sector. Sustainability and social responsibility are not a short term trend but really the new normal and financiers expect all organisations and companies to prove they take sustainability considerations seriously. Reporting against the SRS show that Housing Associations do just that!
Our partners Ad Hereijgers and Austen Reid from RITTERWALD then gave their insights into how the SRS has been received and updated and how it links to their Certified Sustainable Housing Label. Ad emphasised the importance of the entire ESG reporting process in obtaining sustainable funding with accurate and extensive data being at the centre of it all.
Luke Cross from Social agreed with the theme that sustainability and social responsibility are here to stay. He believes that the increased engagement of various stakeholders over the past few years has led to ESG being a vital part of a businesses considerations and ultimate success.
Convene ESG is an endorser of the Social Housing Sustainability Reporting Standard with a dozen customers in the sector already benefiting from streamlined data-collection, target tracking and report production. Get in touch to see how you can improve your ESG Reporting process with Convene ESG!
We would like to again thank all our attendees and speakers for an insightful and cheerful evening! Keep an eye out on our socials and regular newsletter for a chance to join our next networking event.
