B Corps Take the Lead Through Inclusion and Innovation
B the Change Weekly: Feb. 8, 2019
Delivered on Fridays, B the Change Weekly delivers the most important and most relevant stories about people using business as a force for good. The newsletter features a weekly note from the B the Change team alongside insight and context on the stories we share here on Medium. Below is our latest roundup. To receive these insights directly in your inbox, sign up for B the Change Weekly today. Now onto the good stuff:
We each face challenges every day, at work and at home. Most are small with simple solutions. Others are complex and daunting, looming too large to confront on our own.
When we bring in others to help us face challenges — from personal to global — and help us shape solutions, we benefit from a new perspective and create inclusive collaborations that can help all involved. And when collaborators take these shared solutions out into the world, they lead and inspire through shared innovation.
Through inclusion, innovation and collaboration — in small, everyday actions and large, long-term goals — Certified B Corporations and other purpose-driven businesses lead by example and build a stronger B Economy that benefits people and planet.
B Corps Come Together to Act on Climate Change
The threats of climate change, for the near future and the long term, are creating new challenges for businesses. They also are creating new opportunities for action and collaboration, and Certified B Corporations are among the leaders stepping up to this challenge.
At next week’s B Leadership Summit, North American B Corps that have demonstrated leadership in environmental practices and progress will gather to identify and commit to individual and collective actions to address the devastating impacts of climate change on our civilization and biosphere.
In creating an initial six-month action plan and shaping a 10-year vision, these B Corp leaders will identify how businesses can accelerate climate mitigation work as individual companies and through cross-sector collaboration and public advocacy.
Read a preview of the summit on B the Change and follow on Twitter for updates from the summit.
From a Small Idea to a Big Solution
Software created to solve one business manager’s problem has the potential to transform corporate social impact.
In developing the supplier management platform, Rod Robinson was looking to work more effectively as a procurement officer by finding business with supplier companies owned by women, people of color, LBGTQ+ people, and veterans.
As noted in this B the Change article from Conscious Company Media, Robinson’s ConnXus software provides access to a database of nearly 2 million vetted supplier certifications so large companies can begin to build more inclusive, transparent and compliant supply chains made up of small businesses that match their values.
“I didn’t think of us as a mission-driven, socially responsible company until I worked with impact investors who helped me see that we are,” Robinson says. “With our data, we can actually show how women- and minority-owned businesses perform at high levels and bring higher levels of service to the table. Leading companies notice this, too, and they’re pushing diversity requirements down their supply chains because they get it.”
An Inclusive View of the American Dream
Looking for signs of change to come in the United States? Check out a grade school classroom, where students reflect a multicultural America. It’s a precursor of a population that collectively will become majority non-white by 2040.
As Edward Dugger III writes for B the Change, that shift is occurring as a tiny group commands most U.S. wealth: “Along with ultra-concentration of wealth comes ultra-concentration of privilege and power, leaving the vast majority of Americans poorer, more insecure and increasingly disenfranchised,” he says.
It all adds up to what Dugger sees as the “cost of exclusion”: “We live in a nation at risk of losing its soul. … The immeasurable cost of exclusion we face today is the disappearance of America as we know it and the extinguishing of the American Dream.”
It’s up to citizen leaders — “in all their many hues, national origins, religious practices and cultural norms” — to keep that dream alive, Dugger says on B the Change.
Book of the Week
If you have a specific suggestion, let us know at info@bthechange.com with the subject line “book recommendation.”
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
By Edward E. Baptist
As historian Edward Baptist outlines in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. Until the Civil War, Baptist writes, the most important American economic innovations were ways to make slavery ever more profitable.
Through forced migration and torture, slave owners extracted continual increases in efficiency from enslaved African Americans. Thus the United States seized control of the world market for cotton, the key raw material of the Industrial Revolution, and became a wealthy nation with global influence. Conveyed through intimate slave narratives, plantation records, newspapers, and the words of politicians, entrepreneurs, and escaped slaves, The Half Has Never Been Told forces readers to reckon with the violence at the root of American supremacy, but also with the survival and resistance that brought about slavery’s end.
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.
