As one can intuit from the principles above, we found in our internal and external analysis that our current model for leadership and management lacked clarity in decision-making and budgets, members of our Management Team were all doing a little bit of everything, and despite best intentions for this not to be the case, we were both inefficiently managing by consensus while too many decisions were concentrated and centralized with the Managing Partners. We also found that we were under-investing in organization infrastructure and finance and operational capacity as well as in professional development for leadership and our team, which was limiting our potential impact and the pathways for leadership growth.  

We evaluated multiple structure options and permutations, and as we often advise our clients, we recognized that while structure is important, the values, culture, role definition, decision-rights model, and individual people in each role will drive success and impact.  

Restructuring Our Business Units

At the beginning of 2023 we shifted to a business unit structure for Camber, and created a number of new leadership roles and pathways. Camber will operate with 5 business units (BUs): 

• Executive Office, which is accountable for the overall vision and management of the organization, and will steward of our mission, values, and external communications 
• US Consulting, which is accountable for the impact and economic performance of our US client portfolio 
• Global Consulting, which is accountable for the impact and economic performance of our Global client portfolio
• People, which is accountable for developing Camber’s talent and our internal Belonging work 
• Finance and Operations, which is accountable for building the enabling infrastructure that allows the Camber team to do its best work 

Brian will split his time serving as CEO and US Consulting Managing Director. Brian will work closely with Rozella Kennedy, our Director of Impact and Equity, who will now sit in our Executive Office.  

Ted will split his time serving as CFO/COO and Global Consulting Managing Director. Ted will work closely with Eileen Harrity, our Director of Finance and Operations.  

Sakina Zaidi, whom we are excited to announce has been promoted to Partner/Owner at Camber, will serve as the organization’s first ever Chief People Officer (CPO). Sakina has demonstrated incredible leadership and impact over the last few years. We are thrilled to welcome her to the ownership group, and our clients and team will benefit from her focus on talent development and Belonging in the CPO role. The role was designed to be different than similarly titled roles at other organizations in that it is NOT a Human Resources role.  

Each of these BUs will work closely and collaboratively with important new functional, sectoral, and geographic roles that will shape how we serve our clients and create impact, and how we enable belonging and connection throughout our organization. 

Bethanie Thomas will serve as our Global Functions Leader, and she will be accountable for codifying our world class functional methods and tools and service innovation. Bethanie will serve in this role part-time, and will continue to work with clients to create impact in gender equality and global health. 

Camber will have Sector Leaders for each of the 5 sectors in which we focus. Jessica Vandermark and Ben Jenson will co-lead Global Health, Matt Holman will lead US Health, Dr. Chidiebere E.X. Ikejemba will lead Climate & Environment, Marc Allen, whom we are excited to announce has been promoted to Director, will lead Shared Prosperity, and Ted will serve as interim lead for Democracy & Governance while we search for a Director to lead this work in 2023. Each of our Sector Leaders will serve in their roles part-time and will continue to lead client engagements and field-building efforts and eminence.  

We are also thrilled to announce that Kate Thorson has been promoted to Director, and Kim Langenhahn has joined Camber as a Director. Kate will continue to lead a cross-cutting portfolio of work in health equity and gender equity within global and US contexts. Kim will work closely with Matt to grow our US Health portfolio and impact. 

Both Rozie and Sakina will work closely with newly created Office Lead roles, who will be responsible for local Belonging and connection in our geographic hubs. These leaders are Sarah Burgess (Washington, D.C.), Abdel Agadazi (Paris, France), Bethany Wylie (Seattle, WA), and Joseph Zhang (SF Bay Area, CA). These leaders will continue to serve clients day-to-day. 

The changes and change management of the new roles and structure are significant, and we are giving our leaders and team grace and time to adapt, and we will continue to ask for feedback and ways to improve how we work. We also recognize that our new roles will mean a shift in our working relationship – our incredible friendship and shared vision for Camber will endure, and we are excited to learn and grow and serve our team, our clients and partners in different capacities in 2023. We are also buoyed by the incredible leadership and talent we have at Camber, by the organization’s values and our commitment to Equity and Belonging, and by the incredible partners and clients with whom we work across the globe. We are grateful for a 2022 filled with countless good days and we are filled with hope, optimism, and determination for an impactful and joy filled 2023.  

Best, 

Brian and Ted 

Brian Leslie, Co-Founder, CEO, and US Managing Director. Brian is a Co-Founder and CEO of Camber Collective and manages Camber’s US Consulting practice. He works closely with Camber’s leadership to define the organization’s vision and strategic direction and is responsible for Camber’s impact, equity and belonging, and communications in partnership with the Chief People Officer and Director of Impact & Equity. Brian has over 20 years of experience in strategy consulting, advising  foundations, individual philanthropists and nonprofits on strategy, organization design, partnerships and operating models. Brian has experience working on a range of social sector issues and geographies, and brings specific expertise working with clients with clients that focus on policy, advocacy, and communications as their primary lever for impact. Prior to Camber, Brian worked at Deloitte Consulting, where he advised clients on corporate strategy and mergers and acquisitions across multiple industries, as well as at Stockamp & Associates (now Huron Consulting) where he advised large health care organizations on finance and operations. Brian earned an MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley and received an undergraduate degree in Economics with honors from Pomona College. Brian is based in Seattle, and spends his free time running, playing soccer, skiing, and enjoying adventures with his wife Anna, who teaches Physiology and Biomedical Science as a local High School, two teenage boys, and his two dogs, Roscoe and Chicken.

Ted Schneider is Camber Collective’s COO and CFO, focusing on managing the firm’s performance and operations, and advises clients on aligning organizational strategy, organization, and business model towards optimal impact. Prior to Camber, Ted worked at Deloitte Consulting, where he advised clients on corporate strategy across many industry sectors. Ted was recognized as one of the Puget Sound Business Journal’s “Top 40 Under 40” in 2012. Ted earned an MBA from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan with Highest Honors and received an undergraduate degree in industrial engineering from Georgia Tech. Ted loves playing tennis, skiing with friends and family and encouraging his two teenage boys to use both the left and right halves of their developing brains.

The post Camber’s New Governance Structure appeared first on Camber Collective.

Around the world, over 5,000 Certified B Corporations in over 70 countries receive this designation, demonstrating they have met the highest verified standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability to all their stakeholders. While many corporations state a commitment and actions to ESG (environmental, sustainable, governance) best-practices and positive social impact, B Corps are legally required to consider the impact of their decisions on all stakeholders: customers, workers, communities, and the environment.

While there are B Corps represented across more than 150 industries worldwide, there are but a handful of strategic advisory firms in the mix. Camber Collective is elated to have become a certified B Corporation at the end of 2022, receiving a score of 100.9 points on the B Impact Assessment, a rigorous measurement of a company’s overall impact on its workers, community, customers, and environment. (The minimum performance score required to meet the requirement is 80.)

I recently talked with our co-founders Brian Leslie and Ted Schneider about what Camber Collective hopes to both gain and model by being a Benefit Corporation. This article has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: The B Corps has been around since 2007 and many of us recognize their “circle-with-the-letter-B-inside’ as a seal of approval. Not everyone knows what’s behind the logo though—a commitment to using the power of business to solve our most pressing global challenges. B Corps certification provides an immensely powerful way for corporations to build credibility, trust, and added value in the marketplace. Is this why you sought to pursue B Corps certification for Camber Collective?

A: One of the primary motivators for our pursuit of certification was to show our commitment to social impact. Camber, as a strategy consulting organization, strives to address today’s most urgent challenges, systemically, sustainably, and equitably. Our values aligned strongly with the principles of B Corps, and we saw many further benefits to becoming affiliated.

We would not only have proof, as it were, that we are committed to positive social impact goals, but we would also be accountable, in a transparent and public fashion, to measure and sustain that commitment.

Q: Yes, because certification has to be renewed every three years. So, certification creates a built-in requirement, making sure that we walk the talk.

A: Another element of being a B Corp is there is a measure of transparency insofar as B Labs publishes a summary version of every B Corp’s Impact Report, so that the public can see how the company compares to other businesses in their industry or sector across a variety of social impact measures.

How to Walk the Talk

Q: This is an interesting point. There are not a lot of consultancy firms in the B Corps cohort I imagine; there must be some evident advantages in the market for us in gaining this certification.

A: There are a lot of advisory organizations and consultancy firms that say they are values-driven, and while they might measure one or two elements of social benefit and progress, the B Corps certification process is quite rigorous. A B Corp must demonstrate excellence in areas, such as management practices, that can sometimes be opaque when corporations report on themselves, and entirely control the narrative of what they wish to divulge!

The certification process helped shine a light on some of the ways we had already differentiated ourselves – for example, we introduced a transparent and equitable compensation model 7 years ago. We now possess a framework for how we manage the firm in a way that keeps us above a certain threshold. So, it’s not just words, it’s a level of assurance and demonstration that we have to execute, measure, and maintain.

Many firms use the words that B Corps includes in its mission: building an inclusive, equitable, and regenerative world, but if you are a B Corps, you are required to show it, on an ongoing basis. There is nothing in that statement that is misaligned with our own values or the way we try to operate and grow our firm.

Tax Code Does Not Equate Virtue, or Lack Thereof

Q: Let’s stay with the self-governance topic for a minute more. Camber is a social impact advisory firm that works for equitable and sustainable outcomes. At the same time we are an LLC, and not a nonprofit corporation, which is the legal entity people generally associate with altruism, positive impact, and social good. Foundations are not-for-profits, for example. How does our identity as a for-profit firm create both opportunities and misconceptions, and does being a B Corps help mitigate this dissonance?

A: We sometimes hear what almost approaches a purity test in the social impact space, wherein nonprofit equals good, and for profit equals harmful, extractive, and bad. One of the great strengths about the Benefit Corporation certification is that it models a third way out of that binary.

These are companies that not only perceive themselves as enacting positive outcomes in the business world, they are given the opportunity—and the mandate—to demonstrate that, through both hard data and ways of working.

Q: I like that framing of it as an opportunity. Sometimes there is a knee-jerk assumption that if you are a for-profit company, your goal is to make the most return on investment, full stop. If anything good for society comes out of your venture, that’s secondary. But it seems like B Corps provides industry a way to model that defining and tracking positive impact is not that hard. In this moment of climate emergency, consumers, investors, and employees alike are all asking for companies to demonstrate they are good.

Some might not have knowledge or access to the tools to know how to best accomplish this; so the examples and resources B Corps provides through its outreach and brand actually have trickle down benefit even to companies who do not or cannot at present pursue certification. There are over 75,000 businesses actively using B Lab’s B Impact Assessment and benefit corporation governance structure, and many more who are incorporating B Corp Talking Points into their theory of change and business model.

A: That’s true. It is a good entity, for both direct and indirect impact in the business world.

Q: Yes, and now that they are more global, the potential for world-changing is even bigger. OK, I see that values alignment and accountability were key drivers in the decision to pursue the certification. I imagine there are also significant upsides in terms of the brand and market differentiation.

A: Yes, and this assertion extends the notion of pushing past the nonprofit/good, for-profit/bad binary we were just discussing.

We believe that being a B Corps is wonderful for Camber in terms of, again, not just saying, but proving that as a consulting firm and an advisory firm, we bring a profound set of social impact values and activations to our practice. And in our sector, that is a market differentiator.

We didn’t join B Corps expressly to attract more clients, but we sense becoming part of this cohort will over time connect us more readily with the kinds of agencies and entities we want to work with and assist, and it will provide opportunities for learning and exposure to positive impact best practices to improve Camber’s practices.

One facet of this, with broader lens, one with which you are very engaged, is the complexity around navigating internal equity and belonging. The B Corps has a growing body of work around SDG tracking, and increasingly so when it comes to DEI, racial equity, and anti-racism. They are growing their awareness, communities of practice, and bodies of work around these concepts, and indeed, we expect to not only to learn from these cohorts, but to be able to contribute to the discussions as well.

Q: And not just regionally or nationally… B Corps is a growing transnational entity, which I imagine will open networking and community-building opportunities for us as a global firm.

A: Most definitely. We are not approaching certification from a hardcore business development lens of: “let’s go find new clients,” but more from a viewpoint of, “how can we build an even more robust network with familiarity and trust,” which can lead to collaborations,  brand visibility, influence, and certainly referrals too.

To put a finer point on it, many B Corporations are consumer brands, which we are not. But we know that people not only want to buy from companies whose demonstrated values match their own, but they want to partner with them, hire them, and work for them. All of these facts provide tremendous opportunity for Camber.

Q: Yes, indeed, this looks like a very impressive community of peers to interact with—as they say, a community of “high performing peers.” I have seen many indicators around B Corps on the aggregate that show we are entering into “good company”: To pull from their fact sheet, compared to ordinary businesses, B Corps are:

• 9% more diverse
• 33% more likely to have gender-inclusion trainings
• 48% more likely to have LGBTQ-inclusion trainings
• 45% more likely to have Diversity and Inclusion training (on people of color)
• 49% more likely to employ managers from traditionally underrepresented groups in comparison to ordinary businesses (in the U.S.)
• 41% more likely to have conducted a pay equity analysis by gender, race/ethnicity, or other demographic factors and, if necessary, implemented equal compensation improvement plans or policies to manage and improve workforce diversity and inclusivity in comparison to ordinary business (which 43% of B Corps do)

Opportunities for Impact

These are impressive DEI levers. I also found impressive data around ESG impact. Compared to ordinary businesses, on the global level, B Corps:

• Protected 200,000 hectares of land, offset 16 million tons of carbon, saved 225 million liters of water, and diverted 207 thousand metric tons of waste in 2020
• Outperform on natural-resources conservation by 15%
• Are 2.8x more likely to use 100% low-impact renewable energy 9% of B Corps in developed markets have offset 100% of their GHG emissions, and are 2.5 times more likely to be carbon neutral
• Are 1.1 times more likely to donate more than 1% of their revenue to charity
• Are 28% more likely to have hosted or organized company service days in the last year and 71% more likely to offer paid time off for community service
• Are 75% more likely to hire workers from chronically underemployed populations
• Are 150% more likely to have supplier policies that encourage purchasing from local suppliers
• Screen suppliers based on use of positive social and environmental practices 210% more often 
• 32% of B Corps have a policy to give preferences to use suppliers that are owned by underrepresented groups (400% more likely than ordinary businesses)
• Are 1.9 times more likely to provide training/resources to improve the social or environmental performance of its suppliers, either through the company itself, or through a third party in comparison (23% of B Corps achieve this standard)

A: These data indicate congruence in practice with our theses around Just Transition and equity. And even though many of these measures don’t apply to our business model (we don’t manufacture products or sell consumer goods, for example), the shared thought leadership is very exciting, as is the alignment with the goals of our clients and partners.

Influence and Be Influenced

Q: Since we have been on our own ESG journey, specifically around racial equity, I would imagine we see many opportunities to influence companies in our circle as well, through some of what we are learning and experiencing as we grow as an advisory firm. What opportunities to learn and teach excite you?

A: There are so many opportunities to learn and upskill within the B Corps ecosystem. We were attracted by the depth of technology, talent, and expertise accessible within the B Corps community. And there is something really terrific about being in cohorts that have already figured out a lot of the issues around growth, scale, etc. that we are facing as a firm.

These include nuts and bolts topics like managing distributed teams, working across time zones—and even things one doesn’t necessarily correlate to strategic consulting, but which do touch upon some of our work with health care and product distribution, such as global supply chains. Additionally, our climate and environmental work is very focused on Just Transition and influencing the private sector to be better environmental and sustainable citizens. So, we see many ways to be in circles of influence and develop our own theories and practices more deeply.

Camber is now connected within a network, which provides some opportunity for building relationships with organizations that are also on a pathway to positive impact. Both when it comes to climate, or when it comes to equity and anti-racism, and even issues like how do we manage travel: client visits and workshop delivery while also trying to grapple with our own carbon footprints?

Such discussions and solutions are so essential, and existentially important. It’s encouraging to feel we aren’t going this alone, but are part of a global group of enlightened companies and entities all navigating similar challenges and driving towards the same kinds of positive solutions.

Q: Yes, B Labs has some 15 or 20 years in this game, and have a profound track record of driving positive social change. It’s unique.

The Power of Many

A: And furthermore, the opportunity to network is tremendous. We pride ourselves in being functional experts, but we are not deep content experts in every single are, nor in every single geography. There will be lots of opportunities for Camber to continue building networks of organizations and firms doing best-in-class work around everything from sustainability, to how they manage across geographies, to the efficiency tools and methods they use, just to name a few.

Take one of the most visible examples, Patagonia. They set the standard for ESG and social impact as a B Corp, and now they have shifted their model to be employee-owned. Seeing what they do gives all of us a vision for how we can become better, and evolve, and grow with what our models and realities evolve into.

I think the influence and learning and osmosis of being in these very enlightened corporate thinking spaces is going to be enormously impactful for Camber.

Q: And while we won’t be sitting in weekly meetings with hundreds of B Corps companies, there are formal and informal spheres of interaction and influence we will engage with. What other ideas or opportunities do you see in this aligned space that can help us positively influence our new peer circles in the B Corps?

A: Well, the B Corp itself is ever-adapting, and learning, and growing. And so we are all in a way on a similar path of evolution. Racial equity for example is becoming a bigger part of what they’re trying to do. In fact, when we first started in on the assessment process, their racial equity component was just starting to emerge.

I think we, and other firms that are paying close attention to these levels, will have a lot to bring to the table. And congruently, we as Camber will find ways to elevate important aspects of this shared work to our peers in the advisory space, and nonprofit, government agencies, and foundations we work with, over time.

Q: This is all a great deal of upside. Why isn’t every corporation with a good mission statement a B Corps?!

The post Camber Collective is a B-Corporation appeared first on Camber Collective.

Introduction and Context

Over the last 12 years we’ve been fortunate to work with incredible colleagues and clients to drive impact and grow Camber Collective into the firm it is today. We always believed that launching a consulting firm during the ‘Great Recession’ took optimism, courage, and luck. However, as white founders, we have come to understand how much we benefitted from whiteness and systems of racial inequity throughout our lives. While these systems were designed to be invisible to us, they played a critical role in our ability to start and grow this organization. We also recognize that Camber has contributed to the systemic inequities that are present in the social sector as well as the consulting industry. We carry significant privilege because of the resources, power, and influence of the clients and partners we serve. We are striving to both be better and do better through our own equity learning and action, to ensure we are better able to understand and correct for the role that systems play in restricting access to power and resources.

In early 2019 Camber launched the first diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) effort in our firm’s history. The effort was inspired and led by a small group of BIPOC team members who pushed the firm to think differently about our values, our culture and our role in the social impact consulting sector. In 2020 we fundamentally changed our DEI work to center racial equity. There is a clear through line from the legacy of racial oppression and historical extraction of labor and lands to the inequities and disparate outcomes that Camber seeks to address. Understanding these systems, and our role in them, can be difficult and uncomfortable. Our belief is that if we do not center racial equity in this work, we would center our own comfort and find ways to focus on other, less challenging aspects of equity.  We also believe that if we can build the internal muscle and approaches to address racial inequality, it will allow us to effectively address other systems of inequity.

Over the last year we’ve seen a growing movement for racial justice in the United States, sparked by ongoing police brutality and the high-profile murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, as well as the health and economic disparities laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic. We were compelled to support this movement last year, through our voice, through additional resources committed to racial justice organizations, and support for our team members who marched and protested. But we are in this work for the long haul, to examine our own complicity, and work towards transformation or our organization and the systems within which we most closely work.

Over the last 12 months, in partnership with our Equity Working Group, we have worked with Dr. Heather Hackman of Hackman Consulting Group and Lindsay Hill of Sojourner Advising to facilitate a learning journey for our team and firm. While we still have a long way to go in our learning, to achieve our equity goals internally, and to create more just and equitable societies around the world, we wanted to provide a snapshot of what we have learned thus far and where we are going next.

Our key learnings

• This is a journey with no end. Transforming our organization will require ongoing structural change, evolution of our culture, internal systems and processes, and a commitment to ongoing learning and listening. As with any long journey, we are defining goals and milestones for ourselves, and periodically checking in on where we need to do more, and where we have made progress. We will continue to align this work with our Camber Values, which provide a north star when this work is challenging or when there is uncertainty on our path.
• This work requires deep personal commitment, confronting uncomfortable truths, and the ability to engage in difficult conversations. Progress comes from individual discovery and emotional vulnerability based first in emotions and feelings. As a former colleague on a nonprofit board once said, “some people will bring lived experience to this work, some will intellectualize it, but everyone has to feel it”. Our conversations with the team over the last year have been challenging, and we’ve grown in our capacity to authentically and emotionally engage in this work.
• The draw of business as usual is strong and requires intentionality to pull out of the grooves. The status quo of our society has been constructed to create and maintain inequities in outcomes across wealth, well-being, and belonging. As white leaders of an organization, comfort with the status quo has been learned and entrenched throughout our lives. Imagining new ways of doing things that disrupts business as usual is critical to achieve equity; disruption feels risky, and yet finding new and more equitable ways to do things leads to better outcomes for everyone.
• Pursuing a racial equity agenda internally means that respecting the backgrounds and demographics of our team is important but insufficient. As individuals, and as a firm, we are beginning to understand the day-to-day experiences of our BIPOC team members. We must continue to invest in a culture of belonging, where our people can bring their full authentic selves, and each person’s unique set of lived experiences and perspectives contributes to our organizational mission and our client engagements.
• We have to focus first on evolving ourselves and then on transforming Camber. Our team is driven by the desire to create impact and drive equity in partnership with our clients. Our starting point is a commitment to ongoing individual learning and action, while integrating learnings into our collective practices, norms, and behaviors at Camber. That will in turn enable us to effectively influence the systemic changes needed to create more equitable and just societies with our clients.

Our commitments going forward

We will continue to invest Camber resources, including budget and staff time, in our racial equity work. After our current learning phase, we will develop an equity roadmap to guide our ongoing work, including our commitments to:

• Transform Camber’s structures, policies, practices and culture to be an anti-racist organization
• Diversify Camber’s management team and ownership structure
• Integrate racial equity into our Camber theories of influence and our work with clients in pursuit of equity in health, climate, prosperity and democracy
• Continue to listen and learn so that we can better understand and dismantle the systems and structures that inhibit racial equity

One way we will continue to be accountable to this work is to provide updates on this work in this space on at least an annual basis. We also know that many of our clients, partners, and peers are undertaking this important work in parallel. We welcome your thought partnership, feedback and learnings – the work of dismantling systems of oppression will not be accomplished in silos but rather in coordination and collaboration.

The post Our commitment to equity appeared first on Camber Collective.

The recent release of the Scorecard for Shared Prosperity, a new framework developed by Civic Commons to evaluate the Greater Seattle region’s economic well-being, ushers in a new way to consider what it means for a region to be prosperous. Traditional measures of prosperity are based solely on economic growth, with Seattle often at the top of lists that celebrate GDP and wealth creation. While our economy has created benefits for many people, driven primarily by a record stock market and increasing housing prices, a significant portion of people have been excluded from participation in this growth.  

While economic growth alone is insufficient to evaluate regional prosperity, the Scorecard for Shared Prosperity appropriately recognizes that our region’s economic growth is a critical ingredient for all of us to do better. However, growth that further enriches the wealthiest while excluding those on the margins is unsustainable and undemocratic. Growth that serves to enrich all individuals, households and communities is necessary and critical and serves as the basis for shared prosperity.

The Scorecard for Shared Prosperity is not simply a data project. It uses data to change the narrative around two separate but interconnected realities that people in our region face. The first is that while pace of growth in our region is extraordinarily high, that growth has not been sufficiently reinvested to allow individuals, households, and communities in our region thrive.   The Scorecard for Shared Prosperity puts forward a new framework and associated indicators to evaluate how individuals, households, and communities are thriving, supported by both a strong economy and healthy democracy.  We won’t truly achieve shared prosperity in our region until each element of the framework indicates health and progress.

The second reality that the Scorecard for Shared Prosperity highlights is the pervasive disparities experienced by people of color in our region. Wherever possible, data is disaggregated by race to show the significance of these disparities, and to track their change over time. These disparities are driven by many factors. Discriminatory behaviors and individual biases play a role and must be addressed. Far more impactful, however, are systems of racism, enacted through policy, that have excluded many people of color from prosperity over time. The legacy of redlining, exclusionary hiring and lending policies, and a criminal justice system that incarcerates people of color at far higher rates relative to the rest of the population, are examples of these systemic causes that lead to the disparities we see highlighted on the Scorecard for Shared Prosperity.

The two realities highlighted by the Scorecard for Shared Prosperity are unique yet interconnected. Strategies to address one of these realities without considering the other are insufficient and sub-optimized. For example, The Business Roundtable’s recent “Statement of Purpose of a Corporation” outlines a new model of capitalism that elevates the needs of a broad set of stakeholder groups to be equal to the needs of its shareholders. The Roundtable should be applauded for evolving and supporting a model that is much more aligned with the framework of shared prosperity. However, recognizing the reality of racial disparities in their efforts, and developing approaches that seek to address those disparities while at the same time more effectively supporting individuals, households, and communities will lead to even better outcomes for our region.   By reimagining systems and institutions to include rather than exclude, eliminating barriers to participation and power, and recognizing the value of culturally rich communities that are afforded the opportunity to thrive in our region, we can move toward a reality of shared prosperity. We all can do better if we are all doing better.

My hope is the Scorecard for Shared Prosperity will spur a new conversation and a new frame to guide decision making. As a business owner, I need to evaluate my decisions and investments based not only on revenue and margin, but also on how they allow individuals, households and communities to thrive in our region, and on how they allow people to participate in our essential civic processes. I need to find new ways to collaborate with partners in the public and non-profit sectors in pursuit of these outcomes, bringing my unique expertise and allowing them to bring their unique expertise to the issues at hand. And I need to support all communities in our region to achieve self-determination and effectively wield power and influence. I hope everyone in the Greater Seattle region will join me in this conversation as we reimagine what prosperity truly means for every one of us.

The post Evaluating Prosperity in Greater Seattle appeared first on Camber Collective.