Our environmental responsibility, sustainability, tech for good
Sustainability and carbon emissions’ reduction plan
Our approach
Environmental protection and sustainability are central to This is Focus, both within our own internal actions and procedures and with the technology we develop.
We follow a green-minded approach and sustainable business practices. We are a relatively small team, and we work in technology which, luckily enough, makes being green and sustainable a bit easier for us than for some other lines of business. This, however, does not mean we overlook our responsibilities.
We are a fully remote business; meaning are staff work from home full-time and avoid additional community. We favour online meetings with our customers, but if an onsite meeting is necessary, we use public transportation or car share.
Our main product, the Care Leavers App, was developed to help Local Authorities to move towards a paperless working environment and to accelerate green transition within Leaving Care Teams. The Care Leavers App offers a cloud-based, electronic and paperless method to handle disseminating the authorities’ policies around support to care leavers and providing advice and assistance for Care Leavers and through digital transformation of your Leaving Care Service.
Our Digital Forest
In December 2021 we created a digital forest with Ecologi.
We did this to take responsibility for the impact that our business may have on the environment and to offset the carbon footprint of our employees and the work that we do. By March 2023 we had offset 108 cubic tonnes of carbon and planted just over 1500 trees across the world in reforestation projects in Kenya, Peru, Morocco and Tanzania.
We have committed to funding for a tree to be planted per employee, per month: so as we get busier and our team gets bigger, so do our contributions.
You can see our growing digital forest at: https://ecologi.com/focusgov
Supply chain
Our whole supply chain follows our sustainability standards. We select our third-party service providers, subcontractors and partners based on their overall acceptability, including modern and sustainable business methods, technological levels, and price. And we always prioritise sustainability over price.
We strive for growing the carbon handprint in sales and marketing. We use online sales meetings and collective webinars to train and meet several customers simultaneously. We encourage our customers to move to paperless management and we develop new features constantly for our product portfolio to achieve that.
Bigger carbon handprint
We strive to achieve a bigger carbon handprint (impact on others' carbon footprint reduction).
We encourage our customers to have all communication between staff and children and young people, centralised in one easy-to-use system which delivers larger environmental benefits.
We encourage our customers to have all their data, documentation, and management in the cloud so that manual admin work is reduced.
We develop online tools for distributing information, advice and guidance to prevent unnecessary printing and train our customers to use them efficiently.
We train administration to use remote solutions more effectively.
How do we measure, monitor and report our actions and impact?
Sustainability is a key part of our ISO9001:2015 quality management system, with operational procedures designed to reduce the impact our business has. Sustainability planning, acceptable ways of working and environmental impact are reviewed annually by our senior management team and externally audited every twelve months by independent auditors. We continually remind our team, customers and other stakeholders of the importance of doing business in a sustainable manner.
Continuous aspiration to develop
Even though our line of business is easier regarding the green transition and our team is relatively small, we acknowledge that our work with carbon emissions reduction is still in progress and continuous improvement is necessary. Our company is growing, and we must not forget the changes in emissions that it brings.
There are several ways we can reduce emissions, from providing our employees with greater awareness of energy saving in their home office, to reducing non-essential work travel to dumping fossil fuels. We will adopt these changes during the 5-year plan we have set.
We calculated our baseline emissions in 2022.
| Year | Staff | Emissions |
|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 11 | 22.4 tCO₂e |
| 2024 | 16 | 32.5 tCO₂e |
| Target year 2027 | 22 | 44.97 tCO₂e |
| Target year 2027 (Changes) | 22 | 32.5 tCO₂e |
Calculate, reduce and offset
We also acknowledge that we can reduce our carbon footprint only to a certain extent. However, we have a great opportunity to develop our carbon handprint. We have discovered several ways to help others to reduce their emissions and drive environmental benefits but the best and the most sustainable approach to carbon neutrality or positivity is offsetting our CO2 emissions.
From the financial year 2023 onwards, This is Focus will offset 150% of the carbon footprint we create. We set our offset rate to 150% to make sure our carbon footprint is covered and we more than cover our emissions' calculations.
Our target year is 2027 which gives us five years to perfect our approach, plans and procedures. With our current CO₂ emissions per head calculations we will reduce our carbon footprint by 27.7%, from 44.97 tCO₂e to 32.5 tCO₂e and we will offset the rest.
Together towards a greener future
We're going green and we hope you join us in this adventure.
If you have any ideas, questions or thoughts on the green transition and our carbon neutrality, please do not hesitate to ask.
Wondering how we can help you?
Get in touch to discuss how focusgov can help support your upcoming projects