Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.

Since it’s still early in 2010, I thought I’d throw my hat in the ring and share my New Year’s Resolution.

My family and friends know that one thing I love to talk about is food.

Between my husband Dan studying to become a chef and my own studies of sustainability and the environment, the topic of food and the questions we have about it – what to eat, where to buy it, what impact it has on the planet – come up often in our family.

To us, food is a big deal. In fact (at the risk of sounding cliché), in 2009 food became a central focus for us as we defined who we wanted to be as individuals and as citizens of the earth.

Mainly this was for selfish reasons: eating food made us happy. Yet the more we learned about where our food came from, the less happy we felt.

In the early days of this conversation, I often felt more helpless than hopeful. Trips to the grocery store were spent worrying over food labels, wondering about the origins of the meat we wanted to buy, and fretting over the cost of anything labeled ‘organic’ (not to mention wondering whether organic was really all it was cracked up to be).

We often asked ourselves: how could we ever find a balance between eating food that's good for us and that we’re proud of, while also not driving ourselves nuts trying to only eat "perfect" (aka: local, seasonal, sustainable, delicious, nutritious) food?

With that, 2009 became the Year of Food Education.

Our learning started with an investigation of where our food comes from and an examination of how hard it can be to find sustainable food sources in our area. I also took a stab at defining what local food really is, and I learned about the potential dangers that exist in our current industrial food production system. Over the course of many months, we read, discussed, debated, and searched for more and more information.

In the end, all of this research proved to me and Dan that we wanted more control over what we ate and where it came from. We also wanted to know that the foods we put in our bodies were actually nutritious (and not overly processed, refined, or generally interfered with).

If you take this newfound awareness and combine it with a chef’s passion for cooking, you’ll create a kitchen that looks a lot like ours does today. Over the course of 2009, our kitchen literally went through a makeover. Slowly but surely, staples like canned soup, processed snack bars, and Ben & Jerry’s were replaced with homemade soups made with fresh stock, our very own granola bars, and even made-to-order ice cream. In fact, there’s actually very little pre-made food in our pantry and fridge at all these days. What a delicious experiment this turned out to be!

Sure, the kitchen is Dan’s favorite room in the house, so putting him to work (and motivating me to help) hasn’t been all that hard. But beyond that, our kitchen transformation is actually very reflective of the new approach we’re taking in 2010 with the food we eat.

Which brings me to my 2010 Resolution: “Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.”

Ok, so those aren’t my words – they actually belong to author Michael Pollan, whose book “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto” I just finished reading. But those seven words of advice (and the entirety of his book, actually) are so perfectly aligned with the way Dan and I want to approach food in 2010 that I’ve co-opted them to use as my own.

I’m not going to write a review of this book (mainly because I think it is so full of good words of wisdom that it would mean basically re-writing the whole thing), but I can’t endorse Pollan’s ideas strongly enough. “In Defense of Food” champions the idea that eating foods (not to be confused with ingredients – for example, eating a whole food like broccoli versus an ingredient like high fructose corn syrup) is good for your health, for your spirit, for our culture, and for the environment.

To give you a little taste of Pollan’s ideas, I’ve scanned in a copy of a pamphlet I picked up in a bookstore recently. While Pollan doesn’t create a set of rules relating to what foods we should eat, he does outline some guidelines to consider when shopping for food. I’ve reprinted them here to inspire you and encourage you to think about any changes you could make in the food you buy and eat.

The thing I like best about Pollan’s ideas is that, unlike diet fad books or nutritional guidelines, “In Defense of Food” encourages us to find the pleasure, satisfaction, and joy in eating. It’s not about what you can’t or shouldn't eat; instead, it’s about embracing the history of our food and shortening the length of the chain between us and what we eat. By doing this, we'll not only feel better ourselves, but we'll feel better about our connection with the people who grow our food and with nature itself.

As I said at the beginning, Dan and I love food because eating makes us happy.

Michael Pollan's book makes it easy for us to find even more happiness through our food - and anything that can do that is a big winner for us! I hope you'll take some time to read through this book too...

And by the way - Happy New Year!

The Basics of CSR Reporting

As I mentioned in an earlier post on The Changebase, one of the projects I’ve been working on this semester is a CSR Reporting Directed Study for a Fortune 300 company.

This company (who will remain nameless since the project is still ongoing) contacted the Boston University School of Management and asked if the school would put together a team of MBA consultants to evaluate the company’s current CSR report and make recommendations for changes or improvements. Since CSR reporting is such an important and popular topic these days, I really wanted to be a part of this project. And, since the opportunity was presented as not just a consulting gig, but also as a class, I knew there’d be some good learning too.

Over the course of the last few months, I’ve spent the majority of my time with my team (there are five of us) learning about The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI).

As the area of CSR reporting moves forward and becomes more solidified, the GRI has emerged as the leading, best-in-class standard for how companies should address their environmental and social impacts. Much like LEED has become the “gold standard” in green building, the GRI has emerged as the reporting framework that most companies use. While this doesn’t mean that the GRI framework is perfect, it does mean that the GRI is the most popular guide for companies that want to report on these issues and don’t know where to start.

While there are some folks who don’t like the GRI, in general I believe its reporting framework provides a comprehensive, detailed outline of the targets and impacts every company should be measuring. Its framework consists of 79 indicators that are measured along 6 dimensions:

• Economic
• Environmental
• Labor Practices and Decent Work
• Human Rights
• Society, and
• Product Responsibility.

Under each category, the GRI lists very specific metrics that companies should use to quantify and qualify their impacts along each dimension. For example, under Human Rights, one of the indicators is “Operations identified as having significant risks for incidents of child labor, and measures taken to contribute to the elimination of child labor”. You can imagine how hard it is for a global business with operations worldwide to wrap its arms around this kind of question.

And yet, it is understandably crucial for any business to understand something like this.

In addition to the indicator questions, the GRI lays out principles for content and quality – which are essentially a roadmap for how to determine what should be in a report and how to tell the company’s sustainability story. These are:

Principles for Content:

• Materiality
• Stakeholder Inclusiveness
• Sustainability Context
• Completeness

Principles for Quality:

• Balance
• Comparability
• Accuracy
• Timeliness
• Clarity
• Reliability.

Without getting into too much detail, you can probably guess that some of these principles are easier to follow than others. Yet, the more I learn, the more I realize that absolutely every single one of them is crucially important.

The fun part of this consulting project has been poring over the company’s CSR report and looking at it through the lens of each content and quality principle. Over the last few weeks, we’ve been asking ourselves questions like:

• How well does the company present balanced (that is, positive and negative) information?
• What kind of stakeholder analysis has the company done? Does the report speak to the right audience?
• Is the report complete? If not, what’s missing?

It’s really been a lot of fun to take a real-life case study and evaluate it according to what we’ve learned.

And what I’m learning is that CSR reporting is a lot harder than you might think!

Another highlight of the project was having the chance to meet Andy Savitz, a very well-known sustainability consultant and author of The Triple Bottom Line. Andy is incredibly experienced when it comes to CSR reporting, and he was kind enough to sit down with me and my team to talk about best practices in this area. Since this post is about The Basics, I thought I’d share a few words of wisdom from Andy:

A CSR Report is a Living Document: My sense is that some companies want to look at their CSR report much like they do an annual report – it’s published once a year and that’s it. But in a field as new as CSR reporting, many CSR Directors are still getting a handle on what they should be measuring, let alone actually being able to report on it. And since companies are still solidifying what to report on, they’re finding that the data they collect isn’t always perfect.

According to Andy, that’s more than ok. A CSR report should not just be about reporting the good stuff, nor should it just be focused on the past. A good CSR report should focus on being aspirational and strategic, and it should present both the good and the not-so-good (also known as “Opportunities” or “Room for Improvement”).

This leads to a second important point: A Balanced CSR Report is a Trust-Builder. Interestingly, while companies might shy away from sharing negative information, the more transparent a company can be about the good, the bad and the ugly, the more trust it will earn from its stakeholders. Andy gave the example of a company that reported its overseas employees had been offered 13 bribes – and that they turned down 9 of them.

Sure, a CSR department might cringe at the thought of reporting this. But in actuality disclosing this information improved the company’s image and reputation because everything was framed as a work-in-progress. Most audiences, it turns out, aren’t looking for immediate perfection – they just want to know that you’re working on it.

So there you have it – The Basics of CSR Reporting. In truth, there is still so much more that I’m learning – in a month I’ll probably be able to come back and update this post! But I hope this helps lay the groundwork for you as you learn about this topic.

As for my consulting project, my team and I head to their corporate headquarters in late January to present our findings and recommendations. The goal is for their CSR department to take our feedback and incorporate it into their upcoming 2010 report. It’ll be interesting and exciting to see how their new report differs from their old one. I’ll keep you posted!

(By the way, if this post was helpful be sure to check out other posts I've written on "The Basics" - and let me know if there's anything you want to learn next!)

End of Semester Recap

Perhaps one of the best parts of being a second year MBA student is getting to pick my schedule. Unlike first year, where all of the core business classes were chosen for me, as a second year student I get to decide which electives I want to take. Not only has this been a relief (since most of the core classes were quantitative, and I am by no means a math whiz), it’s also been fun and rewarding to study topics that interest me through an MBA lens.

Unfortunately, by the end of the semester, there’s little time for anything else – including blogging. I haven’t been able to write on The Changebase for a couple of weeks precisely because I’ve been too busy wrapping up all of the projects, presentations, and papers that these electives have assigned!

But it’s been a great semester of learning, and since I’m often asked to talk about how what I study relates to my interest in CSR and sustainability, I thought I’d share a little recap.

I started out my semester with a one-week intensive course called Global Sustainability, which basically looked at issues like food and water scarcity, energy constraints, and global migration and the impacts they have on our planet. If you haven’t checked out my previous summary on this class, I recommend reading it.

The rest of my four month semester consisted of five other classes:

Government, Society and the New Entrepreneur focused on the topics of “economic globalization, environmental sustainability, international entrepreneurship, and the interplay between growth and prosperity”. Through in-depth studies of various countries (Japan, China, India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Russia and Brazil), my classmates and I gained a broad overview of how globalization impacts trade, economic growth, education, environmental conservation, and entrepreneurship around the world.

Big Takeaway: While our world is more connected than ever, each country’s national interests are more divergent than ever. To solve an issue as big as climate change, for instance, world leaders must balance their responsibility to their own people with a shared responsibility to care for our global resources. Tough job for sure.

On the other end of the spectrum, Consumer Behavior focused on the attitudes, behaviors, social norms, and decision-making processes that consumers use and reference when they make purchases. For this course I worked with a team to develop a hypothetical new product (along with target consumer and marketing recommendations) for green cleaning producer Seventh Generation. Lots of primary data collection, and lots of consumer behavior theory.

Big Takeaway: The more I spoke with potential target consumers, the clearer it became that people really are wary of the “green” label. They’ve heard it so many times – and yet they still don’t really understand what it means nor do they trust its value. A clear warning sign for marketers…

My Corporate Governance seminar centered on the interplay between governance, accountability and ethics in the corporate and nonprofit sectors. Through in-depth, “governance gone wrong” case studies, we developed a framework for understanding how factors like board oversight, compensation structures, and organizational culture affect the level and type of governance at a company. This class was especially timely one year after the global financial crisis.

Big Takeaway: Much like CSR, there are varied opinions relating to the value that good governance brings to an organization. Is governance just about compliance and risk management, or does it actually add value? Are investors willing to pay more for good governance? I think (and hope) they are.

Entrepreneurial Management focused on the challenges and hurdles faced by early-stage entrepreneurs, including the identification of and access to capital, scaling growth to reach beyond the early adapter market, and building a successful team. Perhaps the most fun part of the class was serving as a consultant to a social entrepreneur who’s facing these kinds of issues right now as he builds a line of ethically-sourced footwear. Like consumer behavior, this involved lots of primary data collection and marketing recommendations.

Big Takeaway: As a social enterprise footwear company, the client I worked with wanted to “do good and do well.” Yet, the potential consumers we spoke with reminded us that it’s not just intention that matters – cause marketing campaigns need to be genuine, transparent, easy to understand, and perhaps most importantly, have an immediate and tangible impact on a meaningful cause. Not always an easy task!

Finally, one project that I started this semester and will finish in early January is a CSR Reporting Directed Study. Back in October a Fortune 300 company contacted my school to inquire about putting a team of MBAs together to evaluate their current CSR reporting – and I jumped at the chance. In order to make recommendations, my team and I have spent the semester doing a deep-dive into the Global Reporting Initiative and the Carbon Disclosure Project. We’re now just starting the recommendation phase and I’ll be sure to keep you posted.

Big Takeaway: Sustainability reporting is more than just wrapping your arms around numbers (although it’s fair to say that getting a handle on a company’s data is hard enough!). In fact, two key themes that keep coming up are transparency in information sharing and stakeholder engagement – two crucial topics that are very hard to get right and very easy to get wrong.

So all in all it’s been an incredible four months, especially compared to my first year of business school when it was so hard to “see the forest” through all that data analysis!

In the end this really was a semester of putting all of the pieces together, which is a great feeling. And now on to winter break!

The End of the Barking Dog

So Ferocious!

What’s your opinion on the purpose of corporate philanthropy?

Is it an example of the powerful partnership that can be created between business and nonprofits?

Or is it simply about writing a check – and checking a box?

I mentioned in an earlier post on The Changebase that I recently attended the 2009 Net Impact Conference at Cornell University, and one of the panels I attended tackled this question.

The panel was called “The Evolution of Corporate Philanthropy: Achieving Greater Impact through Strategic Giving” – and moderator Mark Kramer, managing director at FSG Social Impact Advisors, immediately set the record straight regarding the changing role of corporate philanthropy over time.

His hypothesis is that in the last twenty years, the purpose of corporate philanthropy has evolved from mere existence (he actually used the word "irrelevance") to creating shared value for a company, its nonprofit partners, and its community.

To prove this point, Mark enlisted the help of an impressive corporate philanthropy panel:

• Anne Bronson, director of US Corporate Citizenship at Accenture
• Jason McBriarty, senior manager of Worldwide Community Affairs at Levi Strauss (and a Boston University MBA!)
• Hasting Stewart, vice president at Shell Oil Company Foundation.

Here’s what I learned:

Question: Do you still run into the issue of people doubting whether philanthropy is an important part of business?

Jason from Levi’s started out by noting that his company is privately-owned with a history of philanthropic community support (a factor that I believe is crucially important when it comes to the successful adoption/implementation of sustainability and CSR programs). He noted that the company’s new CEO understands that even in bad times philanthropy is a core component of Levi Strauss’ business.

Anne from Accenture said that, in this tough economy, shareholders don’t always want to see large checks going out the door. To respond to this, she and her team have focused more on donations of employee time through skills-based volunteering – which, given the experience of the Accenture workforce – is certainly a valuable gift.

Question: How can philanthropy be used to drive business goals?

I thought this was an especially important question – as I learned this summer as a corporate philanthropy intern, “doing the right thing” will only get you so far.

In the end, it’s about proving that the corporate philanthropy program is aligned with the business objectives.

Hasting said that philanthropy often reinforces the work that his company does by enabling Shell to have a presence in local communities. For example, every city or town that hosts a Shell refinery also has a community advisory panel (managed by the Shell Foundation and made up of local leaders and city advocates) that meets quarterly to engage in dialogue and share feedback or concerns. Thus philanthropy serves as an entry point for Shell to connect with its local communities.

Jason acknowledged that Levi Strauss engages in philanthropy because it’s the right thing to do, but it also looks critically at how philanthropy can have an impact on the business. One area of focus for Levi’s is its network of over 600 suppliers. Through its Foundation, Levi Strauss is training suppliers and their employees on issues relating to human rights and labor conditions in factories. In this way, corporate philanthropy is another lever that Levi’s can pull to ensure that its business is successful and sustainable.

Question: What kinds of attitude changes have you seen taking place in regards to public/private partnerships?

Anne noted that in the past relationships between the for-profit and nonprofit sectors had been strained, and even antagonistic. But, she believed that partnerships among business, nonprofits and governments were growing in popularity – and that when you focus on opportunities to partner with, rather than fight against, other organizations you ultimately create even more value and impact.

Jason highlighted the recent launch of a new partnership with Goodwill as an example of the power that can come through partnerships.

After evaluating their supply chain, Levi’s found that the greatest use of energy in the lifecycle of their 501 jean is consumer washing of the product at home. This made the company realize that it needed to do a better job of educating its consumers regarding how to care for their jeans as well as what to do with them once they were no longer wanted. And thus the Goodwill partnership – and a new Levi’s care tag on the inside of all 501 jeans – was borne.

Question: Given our economy, how has your company’s outlook on philanthropy changed?

In general, all of the panelists agreed that they’ve seen cuts to their budgets and staff. But, they also all agreed that they’re not seeing an abandonment of philanthropy just because times are tough.

As one panelist put it, “philanthropy is about being in it for the long haul” – and companies can’t just leave their communities because the economy is struggling.

All panelists did agree that, beyond measurement, monetizing the impact of philanthropy is a huge challenge. Levi’s, for instance, looks at measuring impact through the “buzz” that their cause marketing campaigns create, while Accenture uses storytelling to demonstrate the impact of their community investments.

Perhaps the most powerful moment of the session came when one panelist asked why corporate philanthropy was being forced to prove financial returns to the business when other functions (like marketing) have always had dubious connections to ROI?

In the end, he said, we need to stop being “the barking dog” - that is, forcing a conversation about why philanthropy matters - and instead showcase the assets that philanthropy has to offer to the business.

I couldn’t agree more!

A Tale of Two (Green?) Cities

We’ve all heard the saying, “You are what you eat.”

When it comes to green living, could we stretch that and say, “You are where you live?”

That is to say, is where you live a determinant of how you live?

Plenty of research and evidence exists to confirm that yes, the city you live in has a big impact on your lifestyle, health, and happiness.

And intuitively, this makes sense: the city or town you live in will play a big role in how well you can access nature and the outdoors, locally-produced food, public transportation, and recycling programs. All of these ideas, to me, make up a green, or more sustainable city - but if you're curious about other initiatives that make a city green, this is a good start.

With the rise in interest and action around "living green," I've noticed an uptick in people who care about the relationship between location and lifestyle. In fact, it seems like every week a new ranking of the greenest U.S. cities is published - just doing a search for “green city rankings” yielded a few of the following lists:

• Environmental Leader
• Popular Science
• SustainLane

So clearly lots of people are thinking about this idea. Additionally, two recent examples do a good job illustrating this connection between location and lifestyle.

The first one comes from a conversation I had with Dave Pedersen, a new Twitter friend of mine who works as supply chain director at Resources Global Professionals (follow Dave on Twitter). It turns out that in addition to his day job, Dave is a member of the Hermosa Beach Green Task Force. Hermosa Beach is a pretty small town in Southern California, with about 19,000 residents. With its proximity to the Pacific Ocean and the abundance of outdoor sports opportunities like surfing, Hermosa Beach is a perfect example of a town where location really does dictate lifestyle.

Recently, the Hermosa Beach City Council realized that something needed to be done about how climate change was affecting its local community. That “something” was creating a Green Task Force to advise City Council members on steps the city needs to take in order to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. The Task Force has four main areas of focus:

• Waste reduction, re-use and recycling
• Sustainable private and public transportation
• Water use reduction and storm water management
• Green building including energy and related matters.

According to Dave, the big mandate given to the Task Force from the City Council is first to develop a plan to reduce emissions through the introduction of initiatives like better commuting options, additional biking/walking paths, and improved community recycling and waste reduction programs.

While this is obviously a crucial first step, Dave told me that an underlying, yet equally important goal is to engage Hermosa Beach residents in these efforts by reducing apathy and driving home that climate change is something that affects everyone (once again, the omnipresent “stakeholder engagement” issue rears its little head!).

So how are they doing this? It turns out that Hermosa Beach has signed on to something called the Cool Cities Initiative, a program created by the Sierra Club to help cities to reduce their carbon footprint through specific, achievable milestones. Probably my favorite feature of this site is that you can actually check out Hermosa Beach’s progress on these milestones – and your own city too!

Hermosa Beach is a pretty inspiring example of how a city can proactively engage its residents in its sustainability efforts. And I’m sure that there are plenty of other cities across the U.S. that are involved in similarly innovative and action-oriented programs.

Yet I have to wonder what’s going on in cities throughout the U.S. that perhaps aren’t as forward-thinking?

What role are city councils in “middle America” playing to help shape the way their residents live sustainably? A recent example comes from a trip I took to visit family in a small town about 40 miles outside of Houston, TX.

I haven’t spent much time in Texas, but even after only a weekend it was clear that strip malls, freeways, fast food, and urban sprawl dominated the scene. Even simply casual observers could have spotted the differences between this Texas suburb and a place like Hermosa Beach.

To make sure that I wasn't making any unfair judgments, I asked my relatives about how their town encouraged certain green behaviors like recycling and water conservation. Unfortunately it doesn’t sound like the local city government is doing much of anything to incent or motivate its residents to participate in these types of green behaviors.

Interestingly, on my way to the airport at the end of the weekend, the normally traffic-packed freeways were empty. I wondered aloud where everyone was, and my family said “Church”. This got me thinking: when it comes to green cities, maybe the local city government isn't the only institution that should be encouraging and incenting these behavior changes.

Certainly the City Council in Hermosa Beach is the driving force there, but for other small towns in the U.S., perhaps there are other players who could drive change in their communities. Imagine if your local church, a huge stakeholder in many American towns, started to educate your community on the how’s and why’s of living a green life?

Knowing what we know about the realities of climate change, our overarching goal should be to create radical, sustainable change. It seems to me that this can only come when a collection of organizations – city councils, nonprofits, businesses, and religious institutions – come together to bring the green message to the masses. So maybe it's city councils in one town, churches in another town, and NGO's in another.

At the end of the day, does it matter where the message comes from - as long as it's heard?

What has been your experience in your city or town - are your local community organizations talking about climate change and living green? Whose message has been most influential in getting you to think and act sustainably? I'd love to hear your thoughts.