Insights

New Chief Sustainability & People Officer at Centrus

News
George Roffey, CSPO - Centrus
30/09/2021

George Roffey is taking on the new position of Chief Sustainability & People Officer at Centrus

This role aligns the commitment to our people with the integrity of using our platform for positive ESG impact.

To sustain your purpose, you need to sustain your people.

At Centrus we have brought our HR and our sustainable business responsibilities together.  The range of work across these two elements is simply vast and both will benefit substantially from a coordinated approach.

Back in 2016, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) was the acronym en vogue, and in my experience, it was making good strides in community work but was too often a side of the desk effort.  It was only just starting to nod its head towards broader social impact, or the climate crisis and it was hardly ever in the same room as financial performance.  Under the new ESG acronym, it has thankfully now passed an inflection point.

Evidence, learning, ideas, sharing, goals, science, regulation are just some of the things helping and even more crucially, increased demand has shifted the momentum. I sometimes refer to ESG as the David Attenborough effect – something in which every generation is now motivated to play their part.

The sustainability ambition at Centrus was a core founding principle that first attracted me to working here 5 years ago; ‘Build a sustainable group to help the essential sectors in which we operate’. I was reading Waste to Wealth: The Circular Economy Advantage at the time (thank you Peter Lacy), and I was motivated to meet founders who wanted to use their financial expertise in a way that would have tangible impact on core sectors of the real economy.  I was motivated to meet founders who did more than pay lip service to helping change for the good.

Bringing this Together

Culminating the pieces that you can control through your platform of work is a decent starting point and in our service provision at Centrus we create products that bring financial and sustainability benefits – like ESG linked loans, bonds, and derivatives. In this service provision, people are our most valued asset and therefore linking HR and Sustainability on common ground better enables this asset.

Being valued and respected in the workplace and knowing how your role contributes to wider ESG Goals, is gold dust.  With this support and awareness, you are then very naturally an advocate of the mission externally and under this new role our people and business purpose are inextricably linked.

This will be no easy task, and there are so many pieces to the puzzle that each Centrus team member can fit to add tangible, positive momentum for the essential sectors in which we operate. I am excited to coordinate measurable progress.

George Roffey, CSPO