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Ashridge Sustainability and Social Responsibility

Ashridge Sustainability and Social Responsibility

Kai Peters

"Ashridge is a charitable organisation whose mission is about helping managers and their organisations to learn and develop to perform better and add value to society as a whole as a result. We’re also an organisation that prides itself on being a great place to work and we’ve been playing an active role at heart of our local community since the thirteenth century. But the new challenge is sustainable development – a set of principles that increasingly organisations cannot afford to ignore.

For Ashridge, this means integrating these principles into our research, thought leadership, education and organisation consulting activities, as well as informing the way in which we deliver our services. We have achievements of which we are proud, but we also recognise the challenges we face. To learn more about what we're doing, please read Ashridge's first United Nations PRME Sharing Information on Progress Report."

Kai Peters, CEO, Ashridge    

Video produced by Projector: www.projector.se

Ashridge and sustainable development

As our global context changes, part of the role of a business school is to help business leaders think through the implications of these changes for both commercial success and broader societal wellbeing. There is an urgent need for this right now as a number of significant global trends from major economic shocks to population growth, aging populations, globalization, shifting centres of economic power, increasing differentials in quality of life and stresses in the natural environment from climate change, water scarcity and biodiversity loss combine to signal major change in the years ahead. As we have understood more about these trends, ‘sustainable development’ has become increasingly adopted as a set of principles to guide political and commercial responses.

For a business school to effectively play this role and rise to this challenge, we need to be doing three things simultaneously: we need our faculty to be engaging in dialogue, learning and thought leadership to understand the implications of this changing context for their own particular fields of expertise, we need to be embracing a ‘sustainable development’ orientation right across our portfolio of learning and consulting work with clients, and we also need to be addressing these long term trends in the way we manage our own operations.


Charitable purpose and mission

As a leading centre for management and organisation learning, the Ashridge vision, as well as charitable purpose and mission, is to make a substantial contribution to the development of managers, their organisations and, by so doing, to society at large.


The Ashridge (Bonar Law Memorial) Trust was constituted as a charitable trust by the Ashridge (Bonar Law Memorial) Trust Act 1954 (as amended in 1983).


The principal activities of the Trust are defined by the Act. They are, and will continue to be, as follows:

  • Providing management education
  • Undertaking research into management related subjects
  • Establishing similar institutions in other countries
  • Preserving Ashridge for the benefit of the nation.

Ashridge as an employer

Ashridge is committed to work in partnership with its staff, listening, supporting, developing and challenging them. In addition to salary, a range of additional benefits are provided designed to support diversity and opportunity, personal and professional development, promote well-being and support work-life balance.

Read more about Ashridge as an employer.

Ashridge in the community

Ashridge has played an important role in the local community since the 13th Century and this continues to the present day.

Read more about Ashridge in the community.