Leather Cluster Barcelona hosts the final session of the RSE.Pime programme

Respon.cat, the leading business body for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in Catalonia, held the evaluation session of the RSE.Pime programme on Tuesday 5 April at the Adoberia Bella, headquarters of Leather Cluster Barcelona, a space where Catalan SMEs come together to gain competitiveness by strengthening their social responsibility.

The RSE.Pime programme is structured as a social responsibility learning network that seeks to integrate sustainability into the SMEs selected as participants. Over six months, SME executives meet once a month in a group with all the participating organisations in order to explore the business rationale of CSR in depth and develop their own action plan.

RSE.Pime provides tools and procedures for improving economic, social and environmental management through the introduction of CSR values into the organisation’s business culture. The strength of RSE.Pime is that it swiftly offers companies a complete CSR learning programme with 10 workshops in small groups at management level, a final general meeting for evaluation, and two in-company consultancy sessions, all action-oriented.

The RSE.Pime programme is promoted by the business association Respon.cat, and is run with the support of the Generalitat’s Ministry of Business and Labour and the collaboration of the Council of Chambers of Commerce and other business organisations such as the UEA. In this edition, the Unió Empresarial de l’Anoia took part in the RSE.Pime programme, together with two Igualada companies, MgComunicació and Intarex, a member company of the cluster.

This final session of the RSE.Pime programme began with a welcome and introduction by Jordi Vidal, executive director of Leather Cluster Barcelona. In his presentation, Vidal outlined what the leather cluster is and the whole business ecosystem that forms part of it, as well as the main transformative and cross-cutting projects the cluster is carrying out with various companies and players from the leather industry value chain, aligned with the association’s main strategic pillars such as the circular economy, sustainability and shared value.

Taking advantage of the RSE.Pime programme’s social responsibility forum, Leather Cluster Barcelona explored the concept of Shared Value in greater depth, that is, the operational policies and practices that improve a company’s competitiveness while simultaneously fostering improvements in the socio-economic conditions of the environment in which it operates, championing the Igualada tanners’ water treatment plant, Igualadina de Depuració i Recuperació SL, as a precedent and example of shared value.

Leather Cluster Barcelona is an environment of competitive cooperation for promoting cross-cutting, transformative strategic projects with the aim of driving forward the ecosystem of the Catalan leather sector. The cluster is an accredited body within the Catalonia Clusters programme and has the support of Acció.