Under the leadership of its new president Isabelle Huault, emlyon business school is committing to a new strategic orientation:raising awareness and training on social and environmental issues.

To that extend, one of the strong ambitions of the School is to scale up its fight against discriminations and sexist and sexual violence (SSV). This commitment against SSV is backed up by the implementation of an ambitious scheme aiming at raising awareness and training the whole of emlyon’s community, especially students, as future decision makers on such matters.

Lead by the CSR Department and in collaboration with all of the School’s stakeholders, this initiative aims at giving everyone the keys to guide and support students and staff members who might be faced with such situations, in the best possible manner.

“emlyon’s mission is to promote open mindedness and mutual respect. We must make room in our School, and more generally speaking in all institutions of higher education, to train and fight against discriminations and sexual and sexist violence, which are a plague to society. No stone should be left unturned; we must keep on denunciating them, loud and clear, and fight them resolutely; this is precisely what we’re doing with this scheme. I welcome this initiative driven by the Department of Corporate Social & Environmental Responsibility. And I would like to thank all the staff members who worked on this matter, as well as all the students who were very much involved in this process”, declared Isabelle Huault, President of the Executive Board and Dean of emlyon business school.

The School rallied a working group made of not only members of different departments (CSR, Legal Department, Human Resources) but also of students, to develop the following features:

• Formalizing a report and support protocol specific to emlyon, relying on the mobilization of a network of internal reference persons (trustworthy people towards whom students and staff members may turn to).
• Launching the online report platform called “speakup”,allowing any person to report situations where discrimination or sexist and sexual violence are involved. This platform is open to the School’s personnel, and to French and International students and participants of emlyon business school.
• Organizing conferences and actions to raise awareness for the whole of the supervising and pedagogical teams.
• Implementing training modules for staff members working closely with students, and to the highest levels of the School’s executive management. For instance, program directors will be trained for 1.5 days to develop the legal and psychological competences required to know how to handle situations of violence, and to guide and protect the people involved.
• Relying on the School’s medical-social team,Human Resources and Legal Department who all stand ready to assist any person who would need to know what the possible legal remedies are or how to lodge a complaint.
• Implementing training modules and awareness campaigns for students, and more particularly for student associations, via notably a partnership with Handsaway.

To take things even further,emlyon is working in close collaboration with students. The Olympe Collective and the Student Corporation Council have been genuinely involved as actors of this major project, and shall conceive and organize attractions around these issues. Via student projects, the School also wishes to adapt this action plan to the cultural specificities of each of its campuses. Recent student initiatives born from makers projects, such as #balance ton stage(#myinternshiptoo), highlight the importance of these matters and further validate emlyon’s position to push its project forward, the School and students side by side.

“With this ambitious plan, our primary goal is first of all to better help and support all the persons faced with such situations. We want to raise awareness in future managers, leaders and business executives of tomorrow, and to make sure they can actively take part in the fight against sexual and sexist violence in their environment”, concludes Bénédicte Bost, CSR Director of emlyon business school.

Press contacts:

TBWA\Corporate: Tiffany Allenet – tiffany.allenet@tbwa-corporate.com – 06 08 16 14 07

emlyon: Julie Guillot – guillot@em-lyon.com – 06 45 23 23 04

About emlyon business school:

Founded in 1872 by the Chamber of Commerce of Lyon, emlyon business school’s intake this year is of 8,600 students from 110 different nationalities, and of more than 6,000 participants in continued education. The school operates on six different campuses (Lyon, Shanghai, Saint-Etienne, Casablanca, Paris, and Bhubaneswar), draws on a network of 190 international academic partners and runs a community of 32,000 alumni spread out in 120 countries. emlyon business school’s mission is to reveal “early makers”, to train lifelong learning responsible leaders, managers and entrepreneurs, with a solid international experience and intra/entrepreneurial capacities, able to address the complexity of the world, to make it meaningful, to shape and transform the businesses and society they live in, in a collaborative approach. The proposition of emlyon business school is to develop such competences within a unique pedagogy, combining academic research output of excellence and the elaboration of innovative learning tracks based on experimentation.