American CORE rating system: Community Orientated & Responsible Enterprise

By Kostiantyn Galak, Robert Holst, Alan Galak and Ilya Galak

CORE – Community Orientated & Responsible Enterprise

Private enterprise and entrepreneurship is found at the core of our country and its economy. They provide jobs, spur innovation and make it possible to sustain communities everywhere. They’ve helped make the United States one of the richest countries in the world.

However, they also have the potential to make this country even greater and improve the quality of life in the communities in which they exist by being good neighbors and responsible to the communities in which they exist. For this reason, we are working on a system by which a business’s positive contributions to the local economy can be measured.

We are looking at issues in regards to economics, interaction within the community, environment and how important a role the company plays to the sustainability to the community in which it operates.

If a business qualifies for CORE recognition by scoring high enough on this scale that recognition could be used in other aspects. Such as when deciding to offer tax incentives and rebates from government.

For too long government has used taxpayer funds to help prop up businesses that offer nothing back to the community and in some cases make the community worse. Such as Big box stores forcing smaller neighborhood shops to close because they are unable to compete. Another example is when a business pays so low that their full time workers need government assistance.

The community should not have to supplement the workforce of a bad neighbor business. These are just examples of how CORE recognition can be used. We believe that a Community Orientated & Responsible Enterprise is not only good for a local economy but also serves to strengthen itself.

Some may question the idea of a company investing in the community as investing against its own profitability. This is simply not the case. We need to pull back and look at the larger picture in this regard.

A businesses practices in a community have the ability to affect more than their own ability to operate. If a business sells goods that are manufactured locally more people in a community are employed at good wages. Those employees spend their money locally and the demand then moves out in concentric circles to affect everyone. Restaurants open, movie theatres and smaller stores open to meet the demand and thereby more jobs are created across the economic scale.

A healthy and strong consumer base will be the result. More local well-paying jobs will be created which will lead to more profitability and financially secure future for the businesses and people that live in the community. An economy that grows from the middle out will be the result.

At this time we have created our own table with numerical ratings to use in order to determine if a business qualifies for CORE recognition. We have determined that there are at least 18 important factors to determine if a business is community orientated. A company’s score is the sum of all points it earns from this list of 18 factors. A company would need to earn at least 85 percent to be a C.O.R.E. business and start to qualify for tax incentives and rebates.

The closer to 100 the more incentives and rebates become available. We have included an example of how a business (local supermarket chain) would earn and lose points. Please take a look and consider it. We are looking for feedback and things that could be added or taken away. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Table 1

This is the table itself. Here you can see the factors that go into considering if a company is qualified to earn American CORE approval and how important each one of them is.