About The Center for Responsible Business

As part of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, we focus on giving our students the insights, strategies and tools they need to be truly innovative and responsible leaders. We strive to ensure that every Haas graduate is prepared to successfully integrate responsible business principles into their daily work.

Experiential learning, featuring exposure to the complex challenges facing today’s business leaders, is at the core of our initiatives. Our innovative consulting course, Strategic CSR & Projects, gives students unique experience and the ability to influence corporate responsibility strategy and implementation with major firms such as HP, Levi Strauss, & Wal-Mart. We encourage students who want to delve even deeper into corporate responsibility efforts to apply for a CR Fellowship. And we bring in thought leaders in corporate responsibility and sustainability to engage our students via our Peterson Series. We also partner with companies like Target and Gap on innovative case competitions and provide opportunities for current students and alumni to connect.

We are able to offer students meaningful access within leading companies because of the strength of our corporate relationships. CRB works with corporate partners to address the areas of corporate responsibility that they are grappling with today. Whether it is the chance to tap the ideas and varied experience of our students through consulting projects, garner research insights from our faculty, gain a window into leading practices from knowledge sharing events like our stakeholder symposiums, or informally through participation on our Senior Advisory Board, our corporate partners learn from us just as we learn from them.

Our core teaching faculty bring significant corporate expertise to CRB that ensures our course content is relevant and our students are well-prepared upon graduation. The research faculty affiliated with CRB come from a diverse set of colleges on campus and work at the leading edge of corporate responsibility and sustainability research. From issues of environmental sustainability addressed through the Sustainable Products & Solutions Program to Sustainable Finance via the Moskowitz Research Program and the Haas Socially Responsible Investment Fund, our faculty members are searching for answers to the questions that matter.

With the help of our people, advisory boards, and contributors, we want to be the catalyst for Berkeley-Haas changing the practice of business leadership to create a sustainable world.

The Center for Responsible Business is an “action-tank” that builds on the Haas School of Business’ culture of innovation and UC Berkeley’s tradition to run, not walk, towards social progress. We bring students, companies and faculty together to explore issues of corporate responsibility and sustainability and inspire leaders who redefine good business.

It was founded with generous gifts from Mike Homer, Founder & Chairman of Kontiki and Haas Alum (1981); Paul Newman, actor and philanthropist, in honor of John C. Whitehead; and Rudolph Peterson, Former Chairman of Bank of America.