A ‘Perfect Storm’ for Inclusion: Now Is the Time for B Corps to Lead Anti-Racism Work
Founder of B Corp TMI Consulting Says Community Must Be Intentional with Inclusion Efforts
As a community of businesses founded with the goal of creating a more inclusive economy, Certified B Corporations have been innovators in justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion practices — a field now known as JEDI. But as Dr. Tiffany Jana of longtime B Corp and JEDI consulting firm TMI Consulting notes, these same companies have plenty of room for improvement as well as an opportunity to provide real-world examples of progress that other businesses can follow.
Paying a fair wage, providing health care benefits, building a workforce that reflects its community, offering training and educational programming — these are just a few of the ways that B Corps can and have advanced inclusion, sometimes through the Inclusive Economy Challenge program that B Lab operated in previous years. But as recent violent attacks against Black Americans that sparked racial justice protests across the country and around the world have shown, much work remains.
Hundreds of businesses around the world have contacted TMI Consulting about JEDI work in recent months, Jana says, but that includes just a few B Corps. Jana recently shared their thoughts with me on the role of businesses — especially B Corps—in advancing anti-racist practices as part of my research on the B Corp community’s work to create a more inclusive economy. Below are excerpts from our conversation.
Since the George Floyd murder there has been much more public conversation and awareness of the issues of systemic racism. Is real change happening? What are your thoughts about the momentum?
Tiffany Jana: There’s a difference between understanding racism intellectually and actually feeling and witnessing the impact of racism on a screen in front of your face as we did with George Floyd. That caused a seismic shift in the collective consciousness because we actually felt it. And it didn’t matter what race you were. It didn’t matter what color, creed, or class; we all had our hearts cracked open. In 8 minutes and 46 seconds, we watched that happen, and that has turned the tide.
You have some organizations that are like, “We need to put out a Black Lives Matter statement, otherwise we’re going to look racist.” Yes, you could. But if you don’t follow it with any meaningful action, then it really doesn’t matter that you did that.
We do have momentum on a scale that we’ve never had before. What we’re seeing is a significant number of organizations — across sectors, across industries — that are actually putting time, money, resources, and staff behind meaningful, sustained action. Every organization that I talk to is saying things like, “We recognize that we can’t do this in six months. We recognize this isn’t a short-term effort. We’re looking for a year, two years, three years of engagement.”
Ten years ago, 100% of the client work came from executive teams that said, “We need to do this,” usually in response to a lawsuit. It came from leadership. In the last five years, most of the work came from individuals saying, “We don’t like what’s going on here. We still want to work here. We know that there are people who specialize in fixing this. Go get to it, team.” They’re forcing the JEDI work up the food chain and holding them accountable.
Now you have external pressure colliding with internal pressure, and we have a perfect storm for action.
What responsibilities do B Corps and other businesses have to advance and amplify JEDI work?
The B Corp community has an outsized responsibility and opportunity to lead the way in anti-racism, global inclusion, and really setting a new model for how businesses interact with their communities, with society, with the economy, government, the whole 9 yards. So, I do believe that is a really big responsibility.
That was my contribution to The B Corp Handbook second edition. We looked at all the different sections and measures from the B Impact Assessment and articulated how each of these measures can be seen through the lens of the JEDI angle and calibrated with greater global inclusion in mind.
For companies pursuing anti-racism work with my agency, the overall trend looks better than the B Corp community, sadly. I do have a couple of B Corp clients now. But the B Corp sector itself is very white and pretty gosh-darn liberal, which is not particularly diverse. I don’t think that they are doing a good enough job of diversifying the sector yet, and they have a lot of work still to do in cooperative economics and the intentional pursuit of anti-racism and JEDI work.
So, what would you recommend, specifically for the B Corp community to do? Attracting new types of companies? Transforming the companies that are there already too?
This cannot be a one-pronged effort, right? The Inclusive Economy Challenge should be ongoing. People should continue to work to calibrate their inclusion scores, both internally and externally, in meaningful ways. Hopefully my brother, George Floyd, did not die in vain, and people will wake up and realize that we all have a responsibility to be more intentional, and more effective in the way that we interact with communities of color.
The B Corp community needs to be intentional, and stop using the excuse that, “We don’t have money. We don’t have time. We don’t have this or that.” No — because when it’s something you want to prioritize, you find all those things. If a community of B Corps got together and said, “We all want to do this thing, and we want to do it together, because we don’t have the resources independently to do it,” agencies like mine would work with them as a cohort.
I am not convinced that the will is actually there. I’m calling the community out because you can talk about it all day long, but until you put a dollar behind it, and you actually take a step, it’s disingenuous. We do need to be calling in, and sponsoring, mentoring, guiding, inviting businesses of color to join the community. We need to be more intentional.
The cooperative economic piece is one of the missing pieces in the B Corp community. Being a B Corp means that you should do more business with more B Corps whenever possible. If that were actually an imperative — like a next-level Inclusive Economy Challenge, to do business with B Corps of Color — that one change would bring droves of minority-owned businesses into the B Corp community.
Based on your work with B Lab, the nonprofit that oversees B Corp certification, how has that organization progressed over time and does it signal a broader change that could happen within the community?
When B Lab engaged with us a few years ago, they were a homogeneous population of people with little to no representation when it came to People of Color. They were growing, and knew that they were growing. So we did the first kind of demographic- and inclusion-based assessment with them to begin their journey of calibrating their internal metrics and considering internal goals.
Jay Coen Gilbert, one of the B Lab co-founders, wrote the foreword to my second book, Erasing Institutional Bias, in which he was really transparent about the process of finally getting that representative diversity, and then starting to reassess, and realizing that even though they now had the diversity, they didn’t have the equitable experiences that they wanted to have. So they had to go deep again. And all of that ended up instigating the Inclusive Economy Challenge.
Now B Lab U.S. has co-CEOs, one of whom, Anthea Kelsick is a Woman of Color, and B Lab has taken a very anti-racist stance as an organization. They were moving in that direction before George Floyd.
Through that journey, the organization went from three white guys who went to elite schools, starting something cool, hiring a bunch of people who look like them, to now having a Black female co-CEO and a wildly diverse organization across age, sexual orientation, gender identity, race, nationality — the whole gamut. They’re still not at destination perfection, but when you look at where they started, and you look at where they are, there have been a lot of intentional choices that have gotten them to where they are.
B The Change gathers and shares the voices from within the movement of people using business as a force for good and the community of Certified B Corporations. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the nonprofit B Lab.