These 2 CSR Principles Could Be What The Community Inside of Your Organization Needs

Establishing CSR standards in your business has become a needed part of a successful business plan in 2025. In this blog, I will be focusing on and analyzing 2 of the 7 principles of CSR: Community Involvement and Development and Consumer Issues. In the summer of 2024, I was selected to be the Business Operations Intern at St. Edward’s University, a position I currently still hold. This internship meant that I would be responsible for documenting the process of all current construction on campus, facilitating team success between our team at St. Edward’s and the General Contractor, and ensuring that the students living on-campus that summer were comfortable and uninterrupted by the construction.

An example of the ongoing construction during the Summer of 2024 at the St. Andre Apartments

To address the principle of Community Involvement and Development, St. Edward’s does a superb job of including its team and building a community on campus year-round. During the summer, events and luncheons were held on campus almost weekly, where every employee and supervisor attended and communed with one another. These events provided everyone at St. Edward’s the opportunity to have a break in their day and see how their fellow employees were doing that week. St. Edward’s would provide free catered food and even allowed everyone to leave early that day if the event was held on a Friday. This action by St. Edward’s, although sometimes only a 1 or 2-hour luncheon, provided their employees and community at St. Edward’s the time to reach out to one another and grow in their positions, allowing for no one to feel left out. To me, these events were more than just a free meal, it was a time that allowed me to feel like a member of the team and revealed to me that I could succeed in the community at St. Edward’s.

To begin to address the principle of Consumer Issues, as the summer progressed, our Operations team handled many issues both on the construction and student body side. Many times, students would either call Residence Life or our team in the Operations Building, saying that the construction was too much to handle for them or for their pets if they had any. Our team wouldn’t wait a second to handle the situation or get the ball rolling on fixing the problem.

Our team at St. Edward's addressing an issue on the roof of one Wing of the St. Andre Apartments

In one specific case, the welders we had contracted to work at the Mary Hill Apartments had to wet the area around a certain staircase in order to not cause a fire. This led to water leaking into a first-floor apartment near the staircase that happened to have a student living in the unit that summer. Within the first 15 minutes of getting a call from the resident that water was leaking into their apartment, our Operations and Facilities team was on-site addressing the issue as I talked with the resident to help explain what we were planning to do. This action highlighted our team’s ability to work well with one another to not only learn about an issue but also instantly start planning for facilitating a solution. To conclude, treating the community within your organization with respect and prioritizing ways to help them grow with one another is not only a valuable business practice but has become a need in today’s business world.