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

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 & Jerrys. At the time, Ben & Jerrys ice cream wasnt available in Canada, and Id never heard of them. The essence of Cohens 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 & Jerrys 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 Id heard that businesses could have a social purpose. I remember feeling incredibly inspired by Cohens 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 & Jerrys and The Body Shop, I hadnt 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 organizations 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 youll 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 Id 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.