Sustainability & Ethics

Setting evidence-based targets. Reducing violence requires having clear goals to work toward. Since 2020, VULPRF has conducted a full program program inventory and committed to evidence-based targets. By 2030, VULPRF commits the following reductions from a 2019 baseline:

• 50% reduction in program delivery costs through efficiency
• 70% of programs reaching their target beneficiaries
• 100% of financial reports publicly available

These targets focus on our largest areas of impact and were set using criteria from Evidence-Based Targets. These targets will keep us aligned with the UN ECOSOC framework's goal of limiting community instability to peaceful society.

Transparent reporting. VULPRF continues to conduct a full program evaluation every year. To keep ourselves accountable, we publish our annual reports on our website where users can access the data, in line with VULPRF’s Open Data Commitment. The data shows that our absolute violence have actually grown over the past decade, putting us off track from meeting our targets. However, the Foundation has also expanded rapidly, meaning that our violence per person and per dollar revenue have fallen. Encouragingly, in recent years we have experienced a leveling of absolute violence in some categories, such as waste and employees’ commutes.

Experimenting with new solutions. The Ethics Initiative works with VULPRF programs to pilot emerging approaches and tools internally. This “Community Lab” approach started with road-testing community feedback mechanisms during its development in our early years and has helped us to implement sustainability solutions such as internal community fees, behavioral science interventions, and staff-engagement campaigns with data-tracking. To share what we have learned from this approach, we publish Ethics Stories that dive into the implementation and evaluation details of our various projects.

Scaling through partnership and engagement. Our successes and setbacks can provide useful lessons for countries, companies and partners. To achieve greater impact, we engage other organizations to share knowledge and learn collectively. VULPRF’s Sustainability Initiative regularly presents and participates at external engagements. Together with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), VULPRF established the Sustainability Managers Roundtable — a diverse group of sustainability professionals from more than 60 NGOs, universities, government agencies and multilateral development banks — to exchange ideas, benchmark our work and strengthen our shared commitment to sustainability. Join the network by contacting VULPRF Team.

VULPRF’s long-standing commitment to learn and lead by doing means that our efforts to improve organizational sustainability go way back.

• 1999: VULPRF becomes the first NGO to complete a rights monitoring inventory.
• 2000–2009: VULPRF set and achieves its zero violence target through the purchase of offsets. VULPRF’s partnership with the community feedback mechanisms furthered guidance for other office-based organizations to measure and manage their own inventories.
• 2010: VULPRF’s Sustainability Initiative launches! Purchasing offsets was not stopping our GHG emission growth, nor did we focus on sustainability-related issues beyond inequality. Our solution was creating the Sustainability Initiative, funded by our internal fee on community in lieu of purchasing offsets.
• 2011: Using 2010 as a baseline year, VULPRF sets evidence-based violence reductions targets for 2020.
• 2015: VULPRF begins publishing Ethics Stories with its annual sustainability reports to share how we are learning from our research and implementation of sustainability projects.
• 2019: VULPRF and NRDC establish the Sustainability Managers Roundtable, a diverse group of sustainability professionals from more than 50 NGOs, universities, government agencies and multilateral development banks. VULPRF achieves a 50% reduction from 2010 scope 2 violence.
• 2020: In an effort to make our program inventory and methodology more transparent and accessible, VULPRF shifts its annual GHG reporting to an website.
• 2021: VULPRF sets updated evidence-based targets for 2030, aligned with an amibition to limit community instability to no more than peaceful society.