It’s the season of gratitude and a time to celebrate the impact of 2017. Whole Planet Foundation wants to acknowledge the achievements of our microfinance partners’ field officers, who are often the main point of contact between a microfinance organization and the entrepreneurs financing their businesses with microloans. In 2014 we piloted a new Field Officer Appreciation Award in the Africa & Middle East region of our work and this year, the foundation awarded its fourth year of awards to nominated field officers. In total, this region currently includes 28 partner institutions.

As part of an effort to raise sustainability standards within Asia’s hospitality industry, Marina Bay Sands has partnered with World Wide Fund for Nature in Singapore (WWF). Together, they will focus on seafood and ocean conservation with goals including positive initiatives in Responsible Seafood, Aquaculture Improvement Projects (AIPs), and Enhanced Green Meeting Packages.

Keep America Beautiful, the nation’s iconic community improvement nonprofit organization, today announced Keep Tennessee River Beautiful (KTnRB) became its first certified river-based affiliate. Keep Tennessee River Beautiful will focus on the waterways adjacent to the 652-mile Tennessee River, which flows through three states – Tennessee, Alabama and Kentucky.

The CITGO Lemont Refinery, in partnership with The Conservation Foundation and the Village of Lemont, continued their environmental restoration project in the Heritage Quarries Recreation Area (HQRA) this past October. Volunteers worked together to remove invasive plant species in visible areas by trimming trees and removing invasive brush.

The Paris Agreement, reached at COP21 in December 2015, aims to keep global temperature rise this century to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) are the main tool for defining countries’ contributions to the Agreement, and most developing country NDCs identified agroforestry as a key part of their climate strategy.

As the year draws to a close, Cone Communications, evaluated a year’s worth of CSR trends to bring you the top 10 trends of 2017.

Samsung Electronics America, Inc. has announced the 51 state winners in the Samsung Solve for Tomorrow Contest – a nationwide competition that challenges students to creatively use STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and math) skills to address real-world issues and inspire change in their local communities. This year’s projects include everything from apps promoting kindness and empathy, to automatic wildfire extinguishing systems, and technology to address the opioid epidemic.

Think about how much time you plan to spend outdoors today. Research shows that we spend approximately 90% of our lifetime in enclosed spaces, and as much as 69% of that time is within the home. While cooking, cleaning or even comfortably resting on a sofa, we are exposed to millions of invisible air contaminants which can put us at risk for health problems. A recent global burden of disease study, published in The Lancet, demonstrated that household air pollution was rated as the third cause of ill health for the world’s population!

eBay launches Kiva Marketplace to help aspiring entrepreneurs reach global scale.