 you all ready? Good afternoon everybody. Thank you for having us. My name is Ben Anderson. I work for B-Lab. We're a non-profit that is based in Philadelphia although I'm based here locally in San Francisco and I'm thrilled to be able to host some friends and colleagues and co-conspirators in the B-Corp movement and let me just get our slide going here. Okay so this is our agenda. I'm gonna start with just a quick overview of where we are in the B-Corp movement 10 years in. There are a number of panels that you may have been to that B-Lab has helped to curate and you may have heard from one of our founders Bart yesterday in the plenary session and so I'll just do a little level setting and get ready on the same page and then we're gonna introduce the panel, hear how they're engaged with the B-Corp movement and then we'll have a discussion about how we can go further together than we can alone and then we'll open up for some of your burning questions and then we'll end with a piece of advice or a gem or something you can take back to your work or your community to hope you hopefully help you collaborate better in your work. So like many things B-Lab and the B-Corp movement is 10 years in like SoCAP, like Big Path Capital, there was energy that came out of that time and people wanting to use business as a force for good and so there are now 2,300 certified B-Corps in 50 countries around the globe and 120 plus industries. That community of certified B Corps has leveraged the creation of what we call the benefit corporation, the legislation that allows and requires a board to govern the company in a way that considers other stakeholder interests. There are 5,000 benefit corps in the United States. Benefit Corp has passed in Italy and that legislation is in play in several dozen other countries around the globe. We also have now over 50,000 companies that are using the B impact assessment, the tool that we use to apply the standards to certified companies, but that community of 2,300 certified companies has leveraged and or attracted 50,000 other companies to use the tools and that standards to serve as the guardrails for running a better business. Just quickly a couple headlines from the past year is that there have been some big precedents that have been set. New pioneers that are helping us to grow our work. You may have seen that a Laureate, which is a benefit corp and also a certified B Corp did an IPO. That's the first IPO of a benefit corp. We also saw the acquisition of a white wave by group Denon or Denon and it's formed into Denon wave and that the combined assets of the U.S. entity with white wave have formed the largest benefit corp in the world at over 5 billion in revenue and we also saw a billion-dollar acquisition by a B corp. Natura, which is based in Brazil, acquired the body shop and so we see a lot of deal making that has happened in our movement but the movement in the first 10 years has mostly been, most cases, small private companies and it's exciting to see how the work of that small and mighty community is now leveraging much larger companies and multinational companies. So that's where we are in the movement and we have focused on certified B Corps but I would say the broad frame is the B Corp movement. Those who are engaged whether their work, whether they're certified or an investor, investing in a B Corp or a benefit corp are using the tools to measure impact. So Andrea, we'll start with you. Could you just give us a quick introduction? Yeah, absolutely. Can everyone hear me okay? Good morning, you guys. I'm so excited to be here. My name is Andrea Walker. I am the creative media evangelista at Beneficial State Bank. So it's like, what does that mean? They let me pick my own title but essentially I run all marketing and communications within our bank. We are a for-profit triple bottom line bank, a certified, a community development financial institution, so CDFI and we were born right across the bridge in Oakland, California in 2007 as well. So we are celebrating our 10 years as well as B Corp in Big Path Capital and others this year. So we serve individuals, businesses, nonprofits. We offer all of the same products that some of these big banks offer but with a totally different focus. You know, we exist to restore the environment and to offer fair and transparent banking products and services to individuals. So we serve California, Oregon and Washington and we have three quick design features that I want to share. I'll go quickly. I know you said be quick. So one that we think that really makes us stand out amongst other banks and sometimes amongst other community banks. So our first design feature is our ownership structure. We are owned, the economic interest of our bank is owned by nonprofit foundation of the same name, beneficial state foundation. So what that means is the foundation and they're separately mandated and separately governed to put any dividends or any revenue that they have back out into the community and through sponsorships and grants and R&D product development and so on. So essentially what that means is we don't have any one individual shareholder demanding that we maximize profit for their personal wealth. We maximize profit for the wealth of the community because all profits are put back into the community. The second design feature is our lending structure. At any time we mandate that at least 75% of our loans outstanding is in what we call the new economy or the resilient economy. So individuals, social enterprises that are helping solve some of the world's biggest problems when it comes to the environment and when it comes to social justice outcomes. And then lastly we are committed to radical transparency. So that means that anything we can possibly share about our lending practice, about what we do, about our hiring, about the big decisions that we make that we're allowed to share, we absolutely share. Beneficialstate.org is our sort of online impact report that we update on a regular basis. So thank you guys for joining us today. Thank you. Jessica, how are you engaged in the movement? Excellent. So good morning. Absolutely delighted to be here at SoCAP. So my name is Jessica Thomas. I am coming from North Carolina State University, the Poole College of Management. And you might ask yourself what is an academic doing up here and how is the academic community collaborating with the B Corp community? Well, I will very quickly share with you four different hats that I wear for different roles that I have, where we're working really closely with the B Corp community. So one of my roles at NC State is on the faculty. So teaching in our Management, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Department. I teach social innovation and environmental sustainability in our undergraduate as well as our MBA program. And we're really excited to be bringing the B Corp framework into the classroom as a teaching tool to really help our students connect with and understand what it means to be an impactful, sustainable business. Another one of my roles at NC State is as the director of our Business Sustainability Collaborative. And so that's our academic research center in the Poole College of Management, where we are focused on integrating sustainability across our undergraduate and graduate curriculum and focused on working with our faculty to translate research. I'll talk a little bit later about how faculty really around the globe are working with the B Corp community to spur, to develop, to translate research to help drive the social innovation movement. And we're very focused on applied learning. So how do we connect our students to real world learning opportunities for win-win scenarios where they're getting real world experience working with local companies and local companies. And we're specifically focused on working with B corporations, but how B corporations can get access to really talented, passionate students to help them really strengthen their impact business model. A third role that I also have is I'm part of our North Carolina B local movement. So essentially, there are a number of B local movements really around the world. And these are collaborations primarily of B corporations, but I think we're different in North Carolina and that we have academics represented from certified B Corps and NGOs who are working together, working collaboratively to help drive and support and build the B Corp movement in North Carolina. And this might explain why I've only had three hours of sleep last night, but I do have a fourth role. And that's in really being part of the team helping to build the global B Corp academic community. We've got several hundred educators from around the world who are doing work similar to what we're doing at NC State bringing B Corps into the classroom as a teaching tool, identifying opportunities for collaborative research to help inform the B Corp community and engaging with B corporations in their community. So great. Yeah, many hats. That's why I'm exhausted. All right, Michael. So you every movement needs first followers. And I think we've seen that video. It's like really important to have first followers. But in order to have a first follower, we need the person or the leaders to follow. Michael, can you just introduce yourself and as you are founding B Corp too. And so thank you for for being one of the leaders to help us get going. I'm really, really excited to be here. Good morning. So big path. We are an impact investment bank. So what does that mean? So 100% we work with companies and funds that have some type of an environmental or social mission to their, you know, their business or their business model. And so for us, we look for companies, typically in the 20 million to 100 million revenues, these are not smaller companies, these are sizable companies on the fun side, it could be anywhere from 50 million up to 500 million. And so our role in that situation in those scenarios is to help those companies or funds either raise capital, mission aligned capital, or if a company is at a position where they're wanting to sell, you know, a minority piece to the company or a majority piece, they can do that and bring in capital that's kind of aligned, aligned with their mission. So we've been around like Ben said, we've been around for 10 years. And we really look at the three components of our company, one working with companies, one working with funds, like I mentioned, the third piece is we also do a series of events for impact investors. Because what we found as more and more family offices out in foundations are getting interested in this sector, they need an on ramp. And so we've got a series of events, one in Chicago, one in Antucket will be the one in London later in November, really show those families and foundations how to take a portfolio approach to impact investing. And you know, many, many families now are doing kind of 100% impact. But to do that, you've got to really take a portfolio approach. What can I do in public equities? What can I do in public debt? What can I do all the way down to direct investments? And so we started that series about four years ago. And we found that families behind that to be a really instructive way to kind of get up the learning curve. Last thing I was saying about, I guess it was about three months ago, Barron's did a piece on us. And they kind of termed us impact investing investment banks. So we've decided not to call that fake news, as we're going to run with that one. So I want to go through a couple slides right now, and then I'm going to set the context for why we're talking about cooperation, interdependence. And when I talk to people about the B Corp movement, sort of what is the secret sauce, it's around culture. And sometimes that is around attracting and retaining the best talent. But ultimately, there's a thread that runs through all of us around interdependence. And so I just want to take you through. Great. So you have the slides. So that's the image you're looking for when you're looking for a B Corp, whether it's a website designer, banker, or the food that you're buying every week. And these are some of the B Corps that you may know. And there are 2,300 others. I came to the B Corp movement helping to run a company called Preserve that makes toothbrushes out of recycled yogurt cups. So there's a whole range of different types of companies. If you look on the slide here, tons of different industries. Any business can certify. So across all industries. So I'm going to give you 3 quick examples of some of the collaborations that are happening. And then we're going to go to the panel in here more specifically about the work that they're doing. So we have seen many times over B Corps collaborating and selling in together at retail. And this is harder than you think having been involved with it to sort of coordinate buyers in different places and engage deeply with the retailer is easier said than done. And so we've seen that over and over with B Corps, and that's been a collaborative endeavor, but it's more traditional sort of business endeavor. We've also seen our breweries come together and create an open recipe and brew up a batch of beer that includes ingredients like guaya key, which I think you see around Socap here, and a number of other B Corps. It's an all B Corp here. And so that's kind of fun. So we like to have fun. And this year, we've also had a real huge endeavor with a community of B Corps around what we're calling the inclusive economy challenge. And so inherent in the design of the standards is that we're trying to use business as a force for good to redefine success in business, so that we can enjoy a society that has a shared and durable prosperity. So shared and durable prosperity is in the underpinnings of the standards. But what we've done this year, in collaboration with the B Corps, particularly many of them locally is to lift up those metrics, the 25 metrics that most reinforce a more inclusive economy. And you'll see here on the link, those resources available to any business, there are 25 metric digest, there are about 20 best practices guides, there are a whole host of resources for any business to becoming more inclusive business. And those are available to you. And I think Jessica will talk a little bit about the work there. And we're also seeing our community come together around the fires up in California today. So it is inherent to what we're doing. And I want to use this document here as the launch point to this discussion, which is the Declaration of Interdependence. Every B Corp signs this and agrees to abide by this philosophy in running the business. I think this is, and I'll leave it up so you can read it for a little bit. And as we turn to Andrea to talk about that, because I think we really saw that in the creation of what we call build or B Corp leadership development, which came out of the Bayer community under Andrea's leadership. So talk about how that was a collaborative endeavor. Yeah, yeah. Thank you, Ben. Absolutely. And I'll also just I'll preface that with saying that we started in 2007. And at some point, our founders, Tom Steyer and Kat Taylor, husband wife, dynamic duo met the founders of B Corporation, B Lab, and floated the idea of joining. But the time it was kind of like, well, you guys are doing the exact same. We are B Corp. We know we are, because it's an eight and everything that we do. It's in our DNA. Why do we need to go the extra mile to become a certified B Corporation and join this separate movement? So fast forward five years, realize, absolutely, we have to. That's the only way that we're going to, you know, make some forward progress together is to formalize or formalize this particular movement and share it together. That's the only way that we can actually grow businesses, those using business as a force for good. So fast forward five years later, in 2012, we certified as a B Corp. And I, for the first time, went to a B Corp. Champion's Retreat. So that's an annual opportunity that B Lab puts together for at least two people from each of the certified B Corp. To come together, learn, grow, share best practices and figure out how we can grow this movement of businesses and movement of people. I was very young when that happened. And I was learning on the fly. And I really feel like I grew up in the B Corp communities, like I grew up at my, at my bank. And I was just floored and taken away by the enthusiasm, the, the uplifting of me speaking up and sharing my voice and my ideas. I was sitting next to people, you know, the co founders of Method, for instance, you know, sitting at a dinner next to them and learning from them. And I just blew my mind. I was so thrilled. And I just knew that I had to take that, that enthusiasm that I felt at that B Corp. Retreat and take it back home to my colleagues and bring it to the other colleagues that didn't have the opportunity to come together on a yearly basis. So I think at that time then there are like 33,000 B Corp. employees. How many do we have now? It's over 200,000. It's over two. So when we talk about growing the movement, we have to start with the low hanging fruit. The move, the people in this movement are the people that work at the B Corp. So after a couple more champions retreats, I went to Andy Fife who is also works at B Lab. He used to work here in San Francisco. Now he's moved on to grow the community in New York. I talked to him and I also talked to a gentleman named Ryan Honeyman and Ryan is a longtime B Corp. leader. He wrote literally the B Corp. Handbook and he also started the first B Corp. accelerator fund. And so I teamed up with the three of them to create the B Corp. Leadership Development Day, a one day conference that's localized in your local B Corp. community created by local B Corps for local B Corps to figure out how we as employees can take this movement to the next level. Our CEOs have bought on our board of directors have bought on. They go to the annual CEO meeting and so on and so forth. But we're boots on the ground that can actually make this happen. So how can we come together and encourage our friends, our families to grow this particular movement? So that's really what the B Corp. Leadership Development Day was about. We had the first one, I believe in 2014. And the year after that we presented in about four other B Corps around the world, four other communities of B Corps decided they wanted to replicate that in their own way and they held a couple builds. And then this year, there's 15 B Corp. Leadership Development days in the planning across the globe. So we're just thrilled that a that people, you know, there was a response to that people wanted to come together. People wanted to sort of like, you know, it's hard. You're in your everyday work and you get shot down and you get you feel like I'm just trying to do good, you know, I'm trying to do good in the world. Why is doing good so hard, you know? So sometimes you need to speak to other folks that they may not be in your industry, but just to sort of share your war wounds and say, Oh my God, you're going through the same thing I'm going through. I didn't even know that, you know, and start to build community because that's how I think we're going to continue to take this from a movement of businesses to a movement of people. Great. Thank you. Powerful. Michael, let's turn to you in the context of SoCAP. I think there's a deal that you've been involved with. And can you bring that out? Like, why did that have the spirit of interdependence and collaboration? And why was it better because you're part of this community? Yeah, great. So I'll tell you a little story about it's a B Corp called Traditional Medicinals. Anybody know about Traditional Medicinals? Yeah, it's a great, great company. So it's the largest medicinal tea company in the country, actually just north of here, Sebastopol, Petaluma area, 43-year-old company. Just every direction you look, it's a story of authenticity and impact from the supply chain to the way it treats its employees for the efficacy, you know, basically the efficacy of what the product does. And so what they, you know, the founder, Drake Sadler, never wants to sell. He feels that he can fulfill the company's purpose, which is using the power of plants to improve people's lives better than any conglomerate, right? So he never wants to sell. But he does have some outside investors, and he wanted to create a mechanism of maybe taking like just a small part of the company, say 20% of the company, where there could be some liquidity. So some of the existing investors could get out, but he would never have to have this pressure, because a lot of times there's this pressure where you have to do like a, you know, an exit to a conglomerate at some point. So he engaged us to help him through that process, to find the right capital partner that was mission aligned, that could, you know, basically could, you know, a lot of times when you say we're never selling, a lot of investors head out the door, because they're like, how do I get out? But he wanted, so we found the right partner for him, and it was a group called the Builders Fund. If you're familiar with them, they're based here in the Bay Area, you know, a fund, also a B Corp, and also what's called Gears Rated, if you're not familiar with that. So what was unique about this, and there are a lot of unique aspects about this deal, but I think what, for me, was the first time I saw this, was the whole ecosystem around the deal, the people supporting the deal were all B Corp. So you had traditional medicinal B Corp, so you had the investor, the Builders Fund, you know, both B Corp and their fund is Gears Rated. You know, BigPaths, their investment banker, B Corp, and you had traditional medicinal counsel, Wendell Rosen, who was actually the, you know, the counsel that was part of the deal, where it was a B Corp. And so, you know, I think there's a milestone there. There's a kind of symbolic milestone that, you know, I think the maturation of this industry has come to a point where you have this whole support system around these B Corps that are also mission-aligned. So I think that's, but for me, even, I think, even more significant was how it affected the dynamics of the deal. You know, having all of us having kind of a shared history, kind of shared language. What I'd like to do is just since the CEO, Blair couldn't be here, and Tripp, the Managing Partner Builders Fund, so I got a quote from them about how, how they, how was this different, how was this deal different than the other deals that they've done? So this is the CEO of traditional medicinal, Blair Callison. He said, when working with another B Corp in any capacity, there is inherently a level of comfort and trust. It's no accident all four parties to this transaction were B Corps. This transaction involved preserving the mission and the long-term independence of traditional medicinal, and a social mission is the DNA of every B Corp. He's really, really nicely said. One of the quote from Tripp Baird, so he's the co-founder, Managing Partner of the Investor, the Builders Fund. Having all the players be certified B Corps creates a strong element of shared vision and values from which to build trust and around which to construct the finer points of a partnership. Getting large equity investments done is often a difficult process. So being able to come back to that shared understanding and vision really helped us to get this deal over the line. So, you know, I've heard, you know, trust is kind of the new currency of this economy, the new economy. And so I think, you know, given this, that all of us being B Corps, I think, you know, the exchange rate of that currency, so to say, it was definitely in our favor of having that kind of shared vision and shared history. The next Bitcoin, B Corp currency. Sorry, there you go. Sounds good. So we've had a company perspective, investor perspective, and there are other deals that involve B Corps like Patagonia, Beneficial State Bank, New Resource Bank, are involved in a solar deal together. And so we're seeing increasing sort of commerce together, investing together. So let's complete, complete this triangle and think about the future talent pool. And Jessica, if you could just bring us closer to sort of the work on the ground with students like what you're seeing with students and they're applying these standards and working with businesses and hopefully you can give us a little hope with the next generation that's coming along. Well, I have a lot of hope based on the students. I have the pleasure to work with and the conversations I have with my academic colleagues around the world. I think there's a lot of reason for hope. So a lot of the work that we've been seeing is, I think, you know, pulling on a thread that we've seen is very much of a grassroots movement. And so we've been part of building essentially a program called Be Impact Teams. There's a whole network of Be Impact Teams across the country and we're seeing a global movement as well. But the idea is essentially bringing together teams of students advised by faculty or business leaders to work with aspiring B corporations as well as certified B corporations with aspiring B corporations to help them work through the Be Impact Assessment to help them work towards certification and for certified B corporations to help them to continue to strengthen their impact business model. And we at NC State came to build a Be Impact Team through really, we didn't even know we were building a Be Impact Team at the time. So I had in the same week about three years ago, I had a group of student leaders come to me and say hey, we've got great resources, we're learning about all these frameworks, all these business challenges in our classroom. We're looking for an opportunity to practice these frameworks to put this into practice in the real world. We'd love to be able to find local companies we can work with on real world projects. And so I said, yeah, absolutely, that's a great idea. Let's figure out how we can do this. And that same week, we had one of our local partners, a company called HQ Raleigh, HQ Raleigh, which is a business incubator, a mission driven business incubator with over 120 companies in their network. Liz Tracy, the director of HQ Raleigh came to me and said, hey, we've been working towards B Corp certification and we just can't get over, you know, we can't get past the 80 point threshold. We've been spending months on this, we just don't have the capacity, we need, you know, we need somebody with some engineering background, with some business strategy. Do you have students you can connect you with who might be able to help work with us through a summer internship or do you have a program where we could, you know, connect students from NC State to help us work through the assessment. So I said, hey, you know, how about we bring these students together with HQ Raleigh. Essentially, again, we didn't call it a B impact team, but we launched a pilot, so a summer pilot and built really the basic framework for what we learned was actually part of a grassroots movement of academic institutions building these B impact teams. And so we've evolved our program. One of the things I think that's really exciting about the B impact team model and it really connects to this idea of interdependence is how it really provides us with a platform to bring together students from different disciplines. And so oftentimes we'll see a really traditional consulting model where you've got MBA students working together from the same university on a project with a local company, but we have an opportunity based on the B impact assessment based on the framework based on the fact that the challenges that it addresses are really interdisciplinary. We bring together students from business, engineering, environmental sciences, design, and we also have an opportunity to bring together students from different universities as well. So the program that we've evolved over a number of years actually connects students not just across disciplines from NC State University, but we engage students from private universities in the area, Duke University, Elon University. We connect students from some of our other local public universities, UNC Chapel Hill. We've also built a partnership with our local community college, Wake Tech Community College. And so we're bringing together students from different disciplines, different backgrounds to work collaboratively with members of either academics serving as advisors, or we've got really an incredible network of certified B-Corps in North Carolina and representatives from leaders from those B-Corps who serve as mentors, as subject matter experts for the students. And so for us it's been an incredible opportunity to create what we thought it was really a unique learning opportunity, but we're seeing it replicated again across the country and beyond, but to create a really rich learning opportunity for our students and to really add value, add capacity, add, you know, connect passionate, talented students to our local aspiring and certified B-Corps community. And so we have students who worked on projects from, you know, everything from startups to working with publicly traded multinationals on their B-Impact assessment. They get an opportunity to work with companies from across industries, from education companies, companies in the footwear and apparel, food and ag, you know, from consulting companies, law firms. I think that's one of the things that's exciting about the B-Corp movement is it's really this broad umbrella, but united by the sense of shared values, shared vision, and it provides, I think again, just a really broad range of opportunities for our students to work on everything from, you know, conducting an environmental footprint analysis to developing employee engagement strategies for the companies they're working with, to working with companies to figure out how to better engage and impact the communities in which they work. And one specific example I'll mention is actually we had an opportunity for a team of our students to work with a company for the second time. He worked with, we had a local company called Vital Plan, which is a natural products company. Two years ago, we had a team of students work with them to help them complete certification, so they've been certified for a year now. And they came back to us this past spring and said, we've made a commitment to the inclusion challenge. You know, B-Lab, as Ben mentioned, has asked all certified B-Corps to make progress on three areas related to diversity inclusion. They said, we've made a commitment to the inclusion challenge. We'd like to work with the clinic again to help us strengthen our policies, our training around diversity and inclusion. And so we had a targeted team of students who focused specifically on that. And that's one of the other things I think is really exciting for our students is they get to see businesses that are focused on continuous improvement. It's not just, hey, we're certified, we're there, we're done, but it's exciting to work with companies like Vital Plan who are saying we want to continuously be thinking about how can we really amplify, improve, strengthen our, our impact. Great, thank you. So we've talked a little bit about the decade of the past and we've talked a little bit about, like, what's ahead and maybe we can hope in ten years when we do the second edition of this panel that instead of people asking, what college did you go to? People say, what B-Impact team were you on? That's what we'll set our sights on. I love it. So Michael, let's turn to you and then I think we'll maybe start to open it up into some questions and we have some more questions I can ask the panel but I think we all want to make sure that this is answering your questions. But Michael, can you, convenings are a part of your work that you do a big path and just wondering if you can kind of take us into that and in the approach and how does that embody sort of the spirit of interdependence and you can just sort of take us into the room where those deals are getting done. That would be great. Those relationships are built. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean, so we kind of sit in an interesting nexus because, you know, we know the companies, we know the funds of the private equity venture capital funds and then we know the families and the foundations that are part of this whole ecosystem. And so, I mean, ultimately our kind of our vision, our mission is to basically convert where people have kind of a higher expectation of capital. You know, so ultimately what we want is that the smart money in the room are investing in, you know, B-corps. So, because ultimately, I mean, if you think about if you want to be a savvy investor, what's a savvy investor? A savvy investor is someone who wants the maximum return on their capital, right? So our kind of view of the world is if you can get a similar or even better financial return, then you're leaving return, i.e. social and environmental return on the table. You're not being a savvy investor if you're not invested in some of these things. So it really flips it from, you know, why would I want to do that to why wouldn't I? So ultimately, that's the kind of the world that we want to see is where the smart money in the room is investing in is because it makes, it makes sense. So part of that is bringing together, you know, that whole ecosystem of the companies, the funds and the families to, and that's that interdependence of, you know, and the, I think, you know, if you want to go, if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, you know, go together. And I think with us, these relationships that we're building, you know, here at SoCAP and all the different ways that we connect, I think we can go both fast and far because we need it. I mean, it's, it's, I mean, it's definitely, I think all of us realize that, you know, we need to go fast and far. And the only way to do that is together. Great. So let's, let's see what's on your mind and then we have questions that we can ask each other. But if there's is there anybody that I'd be interested to hear the experience of B-Cores in applying for and receiving impact investing funding? For example, what percentage of B-Cores have applied for impact investing funding? What percentage have those that applied have received it? And does being a B-Core make it easier to get impact investing funding? Yeah, and you can maybe speak more on the ground. I can give you sort of the broad base. I don't, that's not a statistic we track. Like there's plenty of private companies in the B-Corp movement and we don't track their investors and investments, although they many sort of share that with us. But what we do do is have and Michael alluded to it is what we call a gear's rating, which is using the same performance standards that we use to certify companies. We have a hundred funds that then use the same rating system to evaluate their portfolios. So we have about a hundred funds that have another almost thousand companies that get gear's rating. So those are companies aside from certified B-Corp, many of which are also getting investment from traditional investors or B-Corp investors. And so there are a lot of deals getting done and more and more. But you can maybe speak to it more sort of on the ground. Yeah, I mean, I think it's definitely a positive. I mean, you'll have some funds that, you know, it may not be a requirement, but it gives kind of a value, a metric that is grounded in data. And so I think it's definitely useful. I think just as an anecdote, I mean, like this year out of the, you know, 10 companies we've worked with, you know, six of those were B-Corp's. And we didn't, we don't set out just to work with B-Corp's. But I think it also shows and I think there's also there's something to say for people who've gone through that process that have the management capability and the foresight to go through that, that says something in and of itself. So I mean, it's like, I think when you look at ESG companies that implement ESG, they do better. But part of it is it's the management capability and the foresight that do that. It means it shows and exhibits a characteristic of the management team. So I think that's part of it as well. Yeah. And I also can say if you take the top, sort of top 25 VC firms, kind of in almost every one of those has an investment in a B-Corp, which we couldn't have said three years ago. So many sort of traditional mainstream investors are investing in B-Corp too. Any questions over here? Hi. Thank you guys for being here. Fellow Wolfpacker in the house. So my name is Chris Webley. I run a benefit corporation based out of Minneapolis, Minnesota, where a real estate development company that goes into black and brown communities and takes their feedback and produces businesses that support the needs that they ask for. And so I have a two-part question. Can you just put the mic a little closer there? Oh, so I have a two-part question. The first being I'm in Minneapolis, where oftentimes I'm being asked, what is a B-Corp, even from the CDFIs and traditional lenders? And you layer on top of that, I'm a black businessman and less than 2% of black businesses are funded by traditional lending institutions. And so I'm curious to know and sort of knowing the lay of the land, what advice would you give to one of the more innovative B-Corp? I think B-Corp tends to be more innovative in nature. Therefore, there's a risk associated with that. So I'm curious to know what best practices, what techniques could I use in terms of pitching and sharing my business to have it seated at the table. And then part two, Jessica, you talked about the partnership with the kids. And so we've done a lot of work with the state of Minnesota and the University of Minnesota. And so I'm curious to know what best practices you guys have seen around sort of sharing the story of B-Corp's because one of the things that I'm not seeing is sort of that marketing and sort of engagement with the customer and what does that look like. So I'm curious to know if you guys see different techniques work in terms of telling the story of B-Corp's and their impact. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. Great to hear that you're a benefit corp. Does anybody in the panel want to take either of those? Yeah, I can take some of the first question for sure. So when we certified in 2012, we were one of just a handful of B-Corp banks. And so there was an internal conversation of Andrea, we have a limited space on any fly or any one given billboard or any whatever, right? Why are you taking up so much space with this B-Corp logo that nobody even knows about? So it's like you have half 61 hand and a half and dozen and the other. Yes, no one knows about it, but it's because we don't talk about it. So we need to put that at the forefront of everything that we do. We lead with that as much as possible. So we put it on our business cards. We made lapel pens and we gave all of our folks that are out in the community the most, the lapel pens. We held information sessions. So in our space, we're gathering different businesses from across different industries for whatever reason, right? Often, we always are either co-hosting a network event or putting something together on our own. So we constantly push the B-Corp values and thoughts and intentionally had a lot of information sessions and bringing groups together that we know were doing a lot of this work. We knew that they had these values in their businesses, but they just didn't know about B-Corp and they just didn't know how they could translate that and make that actually work for them. So we put it on the website. So anywhere that we were visible, we talked about it. In our CEO, Cat Taylor, she put that in all of her remarks whenever she went out and spoke about us. And she's our external facing brand. So she goes out almost every day, damn near talking on different panels and keynotes. And that was another big thing. We got a lot of speaking opportunities as well. So we went and looked for speaking opportunities within our network that fit with what we were doing. Not from the idea that we're gonna get people to come down and go on our website and open an account because usually that doesn't happen. But just from the thought that, hey, we're trying to push a movement of better banking, of beneficial banking. B-Corporation is pushing this movement of using business as a force for good. We're all aligned. So let's talk about it as often as we can. So we talked about it at Nazium. So some people are like, okay, we get it. And also our customers and our vendors, that was actually a really key part. Our customers, our clients, we talked about it to them as often as we can. It's not a prerequisite to bank with us or anything like that. But if we find a client that we think really fits this, we'll talk to them about it. And even if they don't really fit it, and we think that there's a potential, we mentioned that as often as we can. And our vendors as well, we put that as part of our process for evaluating vendors, are they a B-Corp? And sometimes we know you're not a B-Corp, but we'll ask you and just play dumb. Are you a B-Corp? Like, what's that? I can be, if that means I get your business. Like, oh, okay, we'll go to this website and let's just start from there. So looking at our communication channels internally and externally and pushing that as much as we could and putting that logo everywhere was one way that we were able to get some movement with people recognizing it in our space. I think the only thing on the point about kind of other sources of capital that might be out there, I mean, I think if you look at those, it's the ethical banking alliance, but there's an association of banks that are really interested in more of a kind of a triple bottom line, obviously beneficial being one of the leaders there. And even like an RSF here based in the Bay Area, because they do nationwide lending and kind of the social element, the social return component is key to them. But I think it's definitely, you're gonna have a lot better luck, I think, trying to kind of develop relationships within those communities to find that kind of, especially debt, because it's hard to find debt. And I would just follow up the question of telling the story of B-Corporations with mentioning B-media. And I don't know, Ben, if you wanna share more about the work of B-media, but I think this is a really new arm of the B-Corp movement, which is really focused on telling success stories within the B-Corp movement's stories about impacts that B-Corporations are having collaborations. So I know this is part of the larger vision for the movement is really how to better communicate that message. And I think individual examples, because every B-Corp is different and each one is going to be sharing a different message. There's a different kind of connection with stakeholders to make that case. But I think there are lots of great examples in addition to what you're hearing up here this morning through the B-media platform. Yeah, part of our theory of change is one component of it is shine the light on leaders. And as Jessica mentioned, you can see the stories and the movement on the website B, it's the letter B, the change, be the change.com, it's on medium. And that's where we're kind of trying to lift up leaders and show best practices. And to the point of like, well, people don't know about it and in my community is, yes, it's still early days in terms of market awareness. Everybody here may have heard of B-Corps, but the public doesn't. And to speak to collaborations, there have been 10 of our leading B-Corps brands have gotten together and said, hey, now is the time to do a campaign. And so they have done a study and we've hired an agency and they said, hey, we're putting in 100K and we wanna see this and try to build towards a million dollar fund to raise awareness of B-Corps. So we're beginning to do more of the direct broader public awareness, the awareness raising we've done has mostly been focused on PR to kind of get stories told, but there's that next level of going more broadly to the public. And come talk after and we'll connect you and into the community in Minnesota. Hi, thanks a lot. Can you talk a little bit about the sort of, for startup sort of going from scratch is would you sort of recommend starting out and trying to build it into your ethos from the beginning? I mean, officially as sort of, I know there is I think a track on the B-Corp movement for these startups and just like is that distracting when you're trying to do a million other things at the same time and get your business off the ground or is it beneficial? So it may not be. The thing that you can do, any entrepreneur can do is use the tool for free at the impact assessment. Just Google the impact assessment, you'll get there, it's free. 50,000 companies are using it for free and if you think of it as, okay, I'm starting a business, I want to run a good business, I need the guardrails for running a good business and it'll help you make decisions about how you want to express your value system and there's a whole bunch of best practices, guides in there that anybody can use. There's some companies that really like want to be a certified company and so we do have for companies in their first year of operation what we call pending certification and in order to do that, you need to do our legal requirement which is either become a benefit corp or if you're an LLC it's inserting the language around stakeholder considerations and so you can associate but you have to make the first of the two steps because there's no performance that we can evaluate in that first year but you also may just decide like, hey, we'll use the tool and we got to figure out our business model and I think there's equal argument to not trying to do it like right out of the gate. You want to? I mean, I was in that same kind of question because it got started in 2007 and it's like, okay, should I be focusing on landing that first client? I've got four kids, I've got a little bit of a runway but not that long a runway and I'm so glad I did it. Just from a, I think the community that it makes you a part of, I do think it helps you to think through things that you may not think through as you're kind of forming the company and I think as when you're the smaller you are, the easier it is too. As you get larger, it's harder to kind of go through that certification so on a lot of different levels, I was in that same spot of like, is this really the smart thing to do? Because I mean, when you're starting a company, it's focused, you know, it's focused, focus, focus but yeah, and for me, I mean, looking back on the hindsight, it's totally the right decision. Great, so I think we can do one more question and then we're gonna each give you a piece of advice. Hi, my question is a little bit about the future of the BLOG movement. We are at a point where, unlike when you first started, companies are paying more attention to ESG in general. There's more mainstream investing in ESG. Is that, you know, there's a lot of controversy around that but in terms of what is really truly ESG and is this, are the companies that are on these indexes really truly ESG, paying attention to ESG metrics? The question is, when BLAB started, it was the only thing. How does BLAB expand the movement to these bigger companies to stay relevant or is BLAB always going to be more, as you said, you know, relevant for smaller companies and startups and so on. What's the thinking around the future? Whether it is the increase in benefit corrupts or sort of figuring out how to make this assessment valid for large companies like the Non-Wave and so on. Yeah, I think I can cover a couple of those things. First, I would just say, BLAB does not think we invented anything. We would not take credit for the work that we're engaged with. There are tons that came before us and our entire platform relies on many other certifications, whether it's FSC or organic. There are tons, hundreds of certifications that we're relying on and we're creating a holistic certification that goes across social, environmental, worker, customer governance practices. What I would say, and so I think many of those elements are covered in sort of the question that you're asking, but sort of where we're going is, one is, I would say this had been an American thing for the first five years and there's now tremendous global growth and we have global partners in BLABs around the world and so that's why we're in 50 countries. That has then prompted and provoked what we're now seeing as this engagement with multinationals because the assessment was really designed more for a under a billion dollar private company but we have a Denon knocking on the door, 30 plus billion, which has a few subsidiaries and said, hey, we want to become a B Corp and they've stated this publicly and so we are working with a couple dozen large multinationals to make it still hold the rigor but be something that they can use as a tool and connect into the movement. Another thing that we're doing is trying to use our assessment and partner when we are partnering with the UN to overlay the sustainable development goals with our assessment and try to help companies who are using that or have their sights on those goals, a tool that will help them get there. So those are some of the things I don't know if others want to add in. One other, I think point, I don't think it's, I think it applies to larger companies as much to smaller companies and I would even say that as consumers want more authentic brands, they're looking for companies that really have a mission. I think you're seeing some of the larger companies like a Unilever, they're actually looking for companies like Plum Organics or even Traditional, and Traditional Medicinals could easily sell if they wanted to. I think they're actually, can it be actually an attraction for some of the conglomerates because I think ultimately the consumer behavior is changing and it fits right in line with B Corp, the values and the mission. Great. So we just have a couple of minutes so I think we're going to wrap up. I just want to acknowledge my colleague, Amanda, who's right here. So if you're in the investment landscape, she's my colleague you want to go to. She runs our gears rating and works with funds and companies getting those ratings so she'd be a good person to talk to. So I think we're just going to try to leave you with one piece of advice and let whoever chime in first wants to go. Well, I would just say if you do want to feel hopeful about the future of the movement, I would encourage all of you to think about how you can connect with your local academic communities. It's an incredible opportunity to influence the next generation of social entrepreneurs, future impact investors, consumers and just really be a part of shaping the next generation of the movement. So I encourage folks to connect with your academic communities. And there's 500 universities that we know of 1,000 faculty that are teaching some aspect of the work in their classrooms. So just sort of knock on the door of the university you went to, could be one way in. And I'm happy to make that connection. Yeah, great. I would say don't let the certification, like if that's too much of a hurdle, it prevents you from getting involved in the community. Because I mean, the certification is not for everyone but I think you can get a lot of benefits by plugging in and being part of it. I think that gets back to this interdependence. It doesn't, that's maybe the summit but there's a journey that we're all on. Yeah, I put it on my banking hat. I think I'd probably just impart that as you, I'm sure I probably, you guys have already drunk the Koolay, you know, you guys get it, I know. But if you haven't given me thought to aligning your finances with your values, perhaps that's something you give some thought to because how do we change business as usual? How do we change banking as usual to make sure that never again will a bank account be opened and you never, you not know about it. You know, the way that we change the system is by the movement of people and we demand certain things by voting with our dollars and voting with our wallets. So consider a values aligned bank or if that's too much, because we get it, consider pushing back on your financial institution and saying, hey, I wanna know your lending practice or why do you lend to Koolay? Why do you lend to Payday Lending? Tell us why. So the bigger noise that we can make, that will actually impart some change and change the practices and business as usual. So I'd consider looking at your credit card and looking at your personal banking if the business banking is too much of a big step but that's the ultimate as well. And all about interdependence and co-opetition, we don't go out there saying that we want everybody open account with beneficial state. We can't serve everybody. You know, there's some amazing other financial institutions like new resource bank and stuff all across the United States. We just came from, I just came from Amalgamated Bank in New York, a 100 year old bank that started to serve, that existed to serve unions and they're doing some amazing work. So sort of seek out those banks in your particular area and promote them and help them because that's how we're gonna grow this particular movement. So thank you guys for joining today. Thank you everybody. We'll stick around to have conversation afterwards. Thank you. Thank you.