A few weeks back I profiled a new effort called Carrotmob for WorldChanging, the gist of which was here was a new effort to rework capitalism to reward businesses for taking positive environmental steps -- the idea being that the best way to motivate a profit-seeking business is to make there be significant monetary rewards for the behavior we'd like to see. Some commenters, though, have suggested that there's some amount of cognitive dissonance involved when you're helping out a corner bodega with installing more energy-efficient lights by stocking up on bourbon and Lucky Charms. If that's your feeling, then you'll be interested in Buycott for Change. A buycott works by rewarding businesses who are already "doing something positive for their employees, their community, and/or the environment" -- in the hopes that they might serve as a model for other businesses to start doing some good. Their first target was Brooklyn's own Habana Outpost -- home of the margarita bike -- and I'm hearing that it went well.
I think about things like Carrotmob and Buycott for Change when I read something like Sally Kohn's recent piece in the Christian Science Monitor on the need for millennials to embrace face-to-face activism. It scares me to think that we're going to find ourselves stuck in this culture war driven by the '60s that isn't hippie vs. conservative or whatever, but liberal/progressive who still sees the world through a 1960s lens rooted in conflict and younger folks who embrace the more non-zero world view that Robert Wright writes about. There's a distinct possibility that there are younger people (in both age and spirit) who are going about changing the world in a way that just doesn't look much more than buying a fruity beverage. Of course, whether you can indeed change the world through non-adversarial actions like this is very much an open question, but it's certainly worth a try.
I mentioned a few days that I'm on the hunt for stories involving these new ways popping up for organizing business efforts with a more social goodness than we're accustomed to. I talked a little bit about the U.K.'s community interest companies (CICs) that I've been studying, where the government has created a new category under the law for businesses that might benefit from being a little bit non-profit and a little bit for-profit. It's exciting stuff, and I'm still very much trying to wrap my mind around re-imagining a capitalism that doesn't have winning the money race so centrally at its core.
With that in mind, I came across another way being experimented with to give socially-minded businesses some unique standing. B Corporations work a lot like the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED environmental standard program, with companies qualifying for certification based on their commitment to their communities, employees, planet, yadda. We're in the weeds here, but note the difference: CICs have benefiting society in some way at the very heart of what they do, but the B Corp designation can be awarded to the manufacturers of anything from dish soap to sports cars if they prove themselves to top a minimum bar of social responsibility.
Both B Corps and CICs point a hunger out there for new models for doing business that don't hew so closely to our old for-profit/not-for-profit way of thinking.
