GRI will charge for its services

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The Global Reporting Initiative is to adopt a more self-sufficient business policy of generating money from training and educational services that will reduce its dependence on grants.

GRI chief executive Ernst Ligteringen says the idea is to ‘shift reliance away from a philanthropy-based model toward a self-sufficient model’ by finding different funding sources.

As a result, the GRI will begin to develop and charge for ‘new services and products’ to support its sustainability reporting guidelines, which are going through their third revision (EP7, issue 4, p12). It will advise companies on writing and evaluating sustainability reports and offer training on how to use the guidelines. It will also produce a system for registering reports, under which it will verify the extent to which its guidelines have been used by reporters and ‘officially recognize’ those that conform to them.

The GRI board will discuss the new business model at a meeting next month.

Ligteringen said the change towards paid-for services is needed ‘to further assure the sustainability of GRI’.