AKT Peerless marked its 30-year anniversary this past summer. Since our humble beginnings in 1989, we have prided ourselves on creating value for our clients, while being a steward of the environment and an advocate for our communities. Over the years, this mission has contributed significantly to the development and, maybe more importantly, the redevelopment of sustainable and resilient communities, often in urban settings of historically industrialized, contaminated and abandoned properties. We have achieved growth through a strong commitment to our clients, our communities and our employees. As we look to the next 30 years, we have identified opportunities to strengthen this commitment by expanding our efforts to integrate principles of sustainability throughout our company.
As planning for the future began, we reviewed various topics, trends and evaluated the sustainability activities of our clients. We found that many of our clients have already transitioned to sustainability. A key component of this transition included the development of a formal sustainability plan. As we dug deeper, we began reviewing various sustainability plan guidelines and ultimately decided to focus on parameters defined by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). According to GRI, among the world’s 250 largest corporations, 92% report on their sustainability performance and 74% of these use GRI Standards. In summary, our research has shown that implementing sustainability guidelines improves dialogue with all stakeholders and better positions a company to anticipate and react to economic, social, environmental, and regulatory changes as they arise, thereby adding significant value to a company’s overall bottom line.
AKT Peerless recognizes that sustainability must be more than just a service offering and needs to be woven into the fabric of our company. As such, we formally began developing our Sustainability Plan in 2019 to collectively establish companywide goals and baselines, measure our progress and disclose the results. Some key topics have already surfaced during our preliminary planning and engagement efforts. Enhancing our clients’ experience, while interacting with AKT Peerless at all levels, will be a material topic of our Sustainability Plan. Some implementation activities have begun to advance this topic, which include designing a more interactive website, developing more relevant and interesting content across all platforms and continuing to gauge client satisfaction. We are also developing programs to decrease our environmental impact and increase our employee and local community engagement. As we begin to gather data and engage stakeholders in earnest, we anticipate even more topics will arise, so please stay tuned for more updates on our progress.
We appreciate the opportunity to share AKT Peerless’ direction for the future. As we further engage the pillars of sustainability, we can assure you that as with our first 30 years, commitment to our clients will continue to be the key strategic focus of AKT Peerless. Needless to say, we are excited about the next 30 years!
Sincerely,
AKT Peerless Leadership
Brian Eggers and Tony Anthony
