3p Contributor: Amelia Timbers
Recent Articles
How PwC Turns CSR Into Revenue
On its face, PriceWaterhouseCooper’s (PwC) CSR program is perplexing. Why does a firm famous for accounting focus on youth education, diversity, and greenhouse gas emissions in it CSR program? I posed this question to PwC’s CSR Leader Shannon Schuyler. She explained that in the context of risk, these issues do fit their business. She also illustrated PwC’s fourth CSR prong: ‘marketplace’ – an ingenious strategy in which PwC’s CSR campaigns act as a laboratory for CSR best practices it then flips into consulting services. This business model demonstrates one way in which firms’ CSR can be monetized in a fortuitous cycle.
Whole Foods + Etsy = Abe’s Market
Abe’s Market has experienced a rapid evolution since spring, when it just seemed like digital WholeFoods- not much to write about. But in less than a year, Abe’s Market blossomed into so much more. The companies supplying Abe’s Market appear to have quintupled, and its business concept has morphed from a natural foods website to a healthy lifestyle community. Its business model is designed to launch small retail social entrepreneurs (like Etsy did for crafters), but Abe’s Market adds value by facilitating supplier-customer bonding through company bios. The end result is a customer base with personal affinity for suppliers. Does a deeper personal connection create customers with a higher willingness to pay for “green, natural, eco-friendly” goods? If so, it’s a critical triumph for the retail sustainability industry, whose historical stumbling block has been retaining customers when unable to compete on price.
Google Invests in Bike Powered Pod Transport… Why?
Google recently invested a million dollars in a futuristic transportation system called Schweeb (possibly named for the sound it makes). Schweeb mixes a user-powered bicycle setup with the old-fashioned pneumatic tube pods- in this case, for people instead of interoffice mail. Users zip around a monorail as their energy spent pedaling is accelerated by the track. Despite testers’ giddy response to the New Zealand prototype, the technology raises a question: why should we care about Schweeb when we can’t even get a high-speed rail in place? Another way- considering how radically we need to rethink transportation to address climate change, is “cool” enough to justify investment?
CSR Rankings War: How does JustMeans’ Top 1000 stack up?
The most frustrating aspect of writing about corporate social responsibility (CSR) is the lack of leadership. Green building has the US Green Building Council, conservation has the Sierra Club, cleantech has companies like FirstSolar, but CSR lacks a leader. In the vacuum, countless consultancies have ranked company sustainability to guide consumers. JustMeans, a CSR website, adds another by launching the Top 1000, a new ranking of mid-large cap companies based on the GRI standards. Maybe this one will stick.
How Clif Bar is Saving Retirement Through CSR
Has the financial crisis killed retirement? Pension expenses toppled GM. Stock market losses destroyed lifetimes of savings. Retirement plans are disappearing from benefits packages. Social security is attacked in politics and the EU is poised to raise the retirement age to 70. Things are looking bad, but just as retirement needed a superhero it found one in Clif Bar.
Clif Bar owners Gary Erickson and Kit Crawford have launched a program that could invigorate retirement benefits. The program sold 20% of Clif Bar’s $200 million equity to a trust that pays dividends into employee retirement accounts.
CSR: How Investor Proxy Votes Win
Post financial crisis, shareholder resolutions are emerging as an underestimated risk management tool. Mainstream investors are finally waking up to the power they have to influence dangerous firm policies via shareholder action. While shareholder votes are notorious for hypo-participation (getting 5% of shareholders to vote is a feat), activists that focus on deploying proxy votes effectively have produced impressive results.
Where the Ladies At? In Search of the Female Entrepreneur
In the same way ecosystems with high biodiversity have higher survival rates, businesses with high personnel diversity also fare better than those with one variety of employee. Increased diversity of employees results in a wider variety of thinking, more robust solutions to problems, etc. In the same way, it’s not surprising that evidence has emerged that firms do better with women in the ranks. Evidence also surfaced that female fund managers outperform their male counterparts. In short, women and profit go together.
Are You Ready for Peak Sushi?
Over dinner a couple years ago, one of the foremost coastal attorneys in the nation ordered poke at a Hawaiian restaurant. “Eat up!” he told me. “Consumable fish will be gone in fifty years.” The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS)–an agency housed within the (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)–confirmed as much in its sixth annual “Our Living Oceans” report. The report, an annual report on marine life in U.S. waters, concludes that while the conditions of fisheries could be worse, fish populations continue to battle for sustainability in the face of structural and increasing deficits.
How to Write Mission Statements That Keep You Out of Court
Mission statements can be painful exercises for entrepreneurs that have yet to truly define their business–or for people who just hate writing. But they are an important part of your planning, and writing a meaningful one can be a cathartic step in business development. Besides, getting it wrong can land you in court.
Infuse mission statements with meaning
Mission statements, at minimum, are statements of purpose: what is your company going to do? At maximum, they are statements of aspiration: what does your company want to do? In “How to Write a Mission Statement That Doesn’t Suck”, Fast Company’s Dan Heath advocates infusing mission statements with meaning by being specific through concrete wording, and by adding at least one clause regarding the founders’ beliefs the motivated the business in the first place. Triple bottom line businesses have an advantage here; social purpose is part of the business plan, and so it should be easy to state.
Don’t let your mission statement be a liability
United Prosperity’s Powerful Upgrade to the Microfinance Model
Microfinance is feel-good. It’s win-win-win for investors without demanding return requirements. It’s low risk. It helps the poor and empowers an escape from subsistence living. Microfinance is finance we can live with, far from Wall Street’s psychotic derivatives and Madoff-styled sociopaths. Microfinance is lending and investing that’s so ideal that it’s almost cutesy. However, it’s also small-scale, and its small scale reduces its potential to change the world quickly. United Prosperity is a new organization that includes all of the charm of a typical microfinance outfit, but also incorporates more serious, higher impact financial strategy. Ladies and gentlemen: the power of the guarantor.
Can We Put a Price on Solving Climate Change?
Earlier this week, Lisa Zelljadt from Point Carbon wrote of her company’s new “Carbon 2010” report, which is a worthy attempt at covering the complex set of variables involved in creating and sustaining markets for carbon allowances. The report quantifies the responses from their proprietary data and marketing survey of approximately 1,500 carbon professionals who are all involved in some way in carbon markets/ resource finance (and who are disproportionately carbon traders).
It looks at the success of market-based carbon initiatives, with particular focus on the EU Emission Trading System, where problems may be used as case studies for the eventual U.S. carbon market (as sixty percent of the respondents still think will happen by 2015).
Thus far, most people involved in the day-to-day of carbon markets come from regulated organizations (output sources) and dealers—aggregators or middlemen between governments distributing allowances and the firms that need them for compliance. Europe is suffering from an EUA (EU Emission Allowance) oversupply, and illustrates some of the problems that can occur with mispriced carbon.
Can the EPA’s Lisa Jackson Rally Black Communities Around the Environment?
Although environmental harm is disproportionately concentrated in low-income communities and communities of color, so far the green movement has largely been one of white people. The EPA’s latest top gun, Lisa Jackson, is its first African American administrator and also the first EPA administrator unafraid to speak frankly about the important overlap between environmentalism and race.
Although leaders tout the promise of green jobs uplifting urban populations, this heyday hasn’t arrived yet. Instead, the environmental movement has so far failed to meaningfully engage communities of color, though these communities often bear the brunt of environmental sins such as toxic dumping, contamination, landfills and plants that wealthy NIMBYs fought off. For the most part, typical environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and Greenpeace have not addressed domestic environmental justice issues, or have only done so narrowly.
GDP vs. “Happiness”: Economics Are Getting Smarter
Five years ago, 3p reported that GDP does not correlate with happiness, and that another, more holisitic metric—GPI, or Gross Progress Indicator—would be more apt. Now, in 2010, some say this is still true. This finding has been repeated and reported almost constantly in the last five years, which begs two points. First, that happiness is not related to income. Second, that GDP is the wrong metric for measuring a country’s value.
If I recall an undergrad environmental studies lecture on this topic, The Easterlin Paradox predates 3p’s report and is probably the origin of thinking about GNH, or gross national happiness. The Easterlin Paradox, a 70′s era economic theory, refers to the phenomenon that once basic human needs are met (food, shelter, community stability, etc) human happiness does not quantitatively increase through fiscal gains.
Why a National Renewable Energy Standard *Is* a Jobs Bill
Last week, the American Wind Energy Association held a webinar that went through a study by Navigant Consulting, pointing to the many ways passing a national renewable electricity standard would lead to an economic boon across the U.S.
It seems that the FOXNews message that a climate change bill would hurt job growth is untrue. (Surprised?) Paired with rigorous renewable energy standards, Navigant Consulting suggests that 274,000 blue collar construction jobs could be added in areas of the country that need both jobs and renewable energy. While Navigant based its assumptions on the big “if” that climate change legislation passes both houses, however its study should increase the momentum toward such a result.
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