The Rescue Society expands its positive impact with a sustainability plan

Making a change for a sustainable future

Making the world a better place is a complicated, time-consuming task that requires the creation of entire organizations to accomplish. One of these, The Norwegian Sea Rescue Society (RS), is a nationwide humanitarian association whose purpose is to save lives, salvage assets, and protect the coastal environment of Norwegian waters. After 128 years spent in the pursuit of this mission, its members are experts as sea rescue and have made a significant contribution to local communities all along the coast of Norway. However, the organization was keenly aware that it could still help in other areas, such as contributing to the fight against climate change.

With that in mind, The Rescue Society made the decision to become a more sustainable organization by 2030, an ambitious undertaking that would align it with broader European goals. However, doing so meant identifying the ways in which the association could become more sustainable and understanding the challenges associated with the process. Without the expertise to do so, The Rescue Society decided to partner with frog, a part of Capgemini Invent to put together a plan that would dictate a decade’s worth of effort to become more sustainable.

Defining a path forward

The frog team began by using its Planet Centric Design Framework to study the unintended consequences of such an initiative as well as look at how The Rescue Society was both affecting the world and affected by external drivers. The team performed a series of in-depth interviews with members at all levels of the organization to explore different perspectives on sustainability and what it would mean to the association. Combined with a visit to The Rescue Society Academy, this provided the frog team with a comprehensive view the existing barriers that made sustainability difficult for the organization to achieve and both the initiative’s positive and negative effects on people, society, and the planet.

As a result, the partners were able to select four key focus areas for the initiative: day-to-day sustainability, a sustainable core purpose, diesel reduction, and robustness. Another key revelation that emerged from this initial phase was that, as a result of the geographically widespread nature of The Rescue Society, the organization needed to be careful when designating objectives to ensure that its members all over the nation could relate to them. This led the partners to focus on the United Nations’ sustainable development goals (SDG), which ensured that the sustainability initiative represented and connected to The Rescue Society’s core operations.

First step towards sustainability

Working collaboratively throughout the project, The Rescue Society and frog jointly created an extensive strategy plan that included analysis of the organization’s current circumstances as well as concrete goals and the manner in which it could realize them. The partners achieved this in spite of the unprecedented disruption of the COVID-19 global pandemic, during which the teams managed the planned meetings and workshops remotely in order to keep employees safe and avoid any delay. This included two days of workshops, during which participants exchanged ideas and remained connected even from a distance.

With this plan firmly in place, The Rescue Society can now take action in order to achieve its goal of becoming a more sustainable organization over the next decade. The partners have ensured that the association will be able to continually engage with its members on the topic, all while continuing to fulfill its original mission. In doing so, The Rescue Society has once again demonstrated its commitment to improving the world in any way it can.