Change For Good

Paul Klein

Sujets

• Gestion et management

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 15 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781773059310
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Change for Good An Action-Oriented Approach for Businesses to Benefit from Solving the World’s Most Urgent Social Problems
Paul Klein





Contents Advance Praise for Change for Good Dedication Introduction: The Journey to Change for Good Chapter 1: Change for Good Today Chapter 2: Change for Good History Chapter 3: Change for Good Employees Chapter 4: Change for Good Risk Chapter 5: Change for Good Action Chapter 6: Change for Good Responsibility Chapter 7: Change for Good Investing Chapter 8: Change for Good Experience Chapter 9: Change for Good Jobs Chapter 10: Change for Good. Good for Change. Conclusion: You Are the Change for Good Notes Acknowledgements About the Author Index Copyright


Advance Praise for Change for Good
“When Jerry and I built Ben & Jerry’s we had to invent a way that our company could help solve social problems and be profitable at the same time. In Change for Good , Paul Klein provides a roadmap to do just that. By sharing stories, examples, tools, and inspiration he shows businesses how to become more successful by taking action to change people’s lives and make the world a much better place. I wish we had this book 40 years ago!”
— Ben Cohen, co-founder, Ben & Jerry’s
“Paul Klein’s Change for Good is an excellent guide for practitioner or student. Paul thoughtfully walks the reader through case studies, expert advice, and recent trends to provide a practical and enjoyable guide to achieving the next stage in sustainable business outcomes.”
— Liz Maw, President, Presidio Graduate School
“Guiding skittish business leaders to make a real difference is never easy, but in Change for Good Paul Klein asks thoughtful questions and outlines practical ways to help you come to grips with the apparent contradiction of impactful business. Rather than a contradiction, it’s a path to succeed and make a positive impact.”
— Rod Lohin, Executive Director, Lee-Chin Institute at the Rotman School of Management
“Full of stories and simple strategies, for corporate, community, civil servants, and frontline agencies, too. Klein shows and tells how change is possible: when we act intentionally, think long term — and do so in a united way.”
— Daniele Zanotti, President and CEO, United Way Greater Toronto


Dedication
This book is for my mother and father, who believed deeply in social justice and in the power of creativity.
To Joanne, Sophie, and Joshua, who give my life purpose.
And to changemakers everywhere, who believe it’s important to make the world a better place.


Introduction The Journey to Change for Good
In 1988, I was working at the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and attended a conference of the American Symphony Orchestra League in Chicago. The keynote speaker was Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s. At the time, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream wasn’t available in Canada, and I’d never heard of them. The essence of Cohen’s talk was that businesses could contribute to solving social problems in addition to making a profit. Earlier that year, Cohen had founded 1% for Peace, which advocated for 1 percent of the national defence budget to be redirected to fund peace-promoting activities and projects. In support of this campaign, Ben & Jerry’s created the Peace Pop ice cream stick that spun off proceeds to the 1% for Peace campaign. At the end of the presentation, Peace Pops were passed out to the audience.
Hearing Cohen talk about business doing more than making a profit was the first time I’d heard that businesses could have a social purpose. I remember feeling incredibly inspired by Cohen’s message about how the company was intentionally using its business platform to create social change. I also remember thinking that I wanted to help companies support social change.
A few years earlier, Anita Roddick created The Body Shop, a cosmetics company that produced natural beauty products in ways that reduced environmental impact such as using refillable containers and encouraged social change through campaigns that challenged societal norms on issues related to beauty. For example, in 1997 they created a size 16 doll called Ruby, to challenge that beauty is related to body size. With the exception of Ben & Jerry’s and The Body Shop, I hadn’t heard of any other businesses that were intentionally connecting the dots between profit and social change.
A large part of my work at the Toronto Symphony Orchestra involved finding corporations to support the organization’s concerts, tours, and educational programs. It never occurred to me that helping to increase access to music was a dimension of social change. However, I was connecting businesses with a social good and starting to learn about what mattered to the corporations that were our partners at the symphony and how they made decisions about supporting social causes.
Continuing along a path that was largely serendipitous, I left the Toronto Symphony to join the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS), a national charity dedicated to the protection of public land, ocean, and freshwater. The experience I had at CPAWS was also the first time I had the chance to develop programs that were designed to make Change for Good. While I was at CPAWS, I also discovered the possibility of bringing creativity and innovation to social change.
For example, we created “Banffopoly” an advocacy campaign disguised as a board game to engage and involve Canadians in understanding the impact of business development on the environment in Banff National Park. Our direct mail “game” had players considering how business decisions about real estate development in Banff might, on the one hand, create economic benefit by increasing environmental tourism and, on the other hand, harm the environment by interrupting wildlife migration and compromising other aspects of the local ecosystem. Another campaign to protect the very remote Tatshenshini River in the southwestern Yukon and the northwestern corner of British Columbia featured a map with day-by-day journal entries of a trip down the river. Our hope was to create an immersive experience that would resonate with people who would likely never have the opportunity to visit the Tatshenshini.
During the time I was at CPAWS, I had the experience of working with corporations that were being helpful and harmful at the same time. In this case, natural resource businesses that were causing harm to the environment and supporting environmental protection. The duality of businesses that are often responsible and irresponsible is an important theme you’ll see throughout this book. For most businesses, balancing profit and purpose is extremely difficult — especially in situations where shareholders’ interests are prioritized over the interests of other stakeholders such as employees and local communities. The spectrum here runs from companies that are genuinely harmful and make donations to charity in order to appear less egregious, to businesses that have less negative impact and have a culture in which doing good is of great importance. In Chapter 2, I share examples of how this duality has been a part of business since antiquity. More recently, new business structures such as B Corps have made it possible for companies to give equal balance to making a profit and making a positive contribution to society and the environment.
CPAWS needed funding and our corporate partners wanted to do something good, but we had no means of assessing whether or not this was appropriate or how far we should go to build and promote these relationships.
In 1993, I got a call from John Kim Bell, an Indigenous orchestra conductor I’d met at the Toronto Symphony. Bell had founded the Canadian Native Arts Foundation, an organization that gave grants to Indigenous people to pursue studies and build careers in the arts. He had the idea of recognizing Indigenous accomplishment in other areas and developed the National Aboriginal Achievement Awards and what later became the National Aboriginal Achievement Foundation (now known as Indspire). Bell was beginning to work on the first awards program and live television broadcast, and he wanted help in securing funding from corporations. It was an incredible opportunity to learn more about how corporations invest in social change and to be immersed in a largely Indigenous organization.
Bell and I had the privilege of being invited to an Indigenous ceremony in a longhouse with local chiefs in British Columbia. Afterwards, one of the chiefs told me the difference between his people and others. He said people who weren’t Indigenous walk into the future facing forward, and people from his culture walk into the future facing backward so that they don’t forget the value of their culture, language, and natural environment. I’ve always remembered that story because, for me, it captured the dichotomy between business and social change: looking at the world through a lens of values, purpose, and meaning or focusing only on creating economic value and profit to the detriment of what really matters.
I think that story also touched on what I was trying to do but didn’t realize at the time: create social change by building relationships with groups that had contradictory perspectives and priorities but needed to find a middle ground for the purpose of something more important. Helping to find the corporate funding for the first two years of the National Aboriginal Achievement Awards was an opportunity to help bring Bell’s vision to life in a way that connected businesses with social change.
In the 1990s, businesses began considering how to become more strategic in why and how they supported the communit