Katie DeWitt, Haas MBA 2014, is featured in Greenbiz’s “Generation S” column.  In this week’s post, she writes about her involvement in a student fellowships, in which she and her teammates are  helping to roll out Walmart’s sustainability scorecard to suppliers.   

At business schools like Berkeley-Haas that specialize in corporate sustainability, Walmart has become the unlikely gold standard for its groundbreaking, ambitious initiatives.

So when I had the opportunity to attend a summit on the rollout of the company’s much-hyped sustainability index at the Walmart home office in October as part of a fellowship offered by the Center for Responsible Business and Walmart, I was more excited than I ever imagined I would be about a trip to Arkansas.

The purpose of the meeting was to introduce the supplier sustainability scorecards that Walmart had developed as part of a three-year effort with The Sustainability Consortium to a subset of Walmart and Sam’s Club merchants. These merchants would be responsible for engaging their suppliers to not only fill out the scorecards but also identify opportunities to improve their sustainability performance. Walmart announced in September that sustainability would now play a role in the merchants’ annual performance reviews, which help determine pay raises and potential for future promotion, signifying that the company takes this initiative seriously.

Visit Katie’s column on Greenbiz.com to continue reading.

Photo courtesy of trekandshoot / Shutterstock.com.

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