For the last 25 years Hollyhock, a conference centre on Cortes’s sandy south shore, has been stirring up dissent, promoting social activism and talking cash flow through a movement called the Social Venture Institute (SVI). Founded by a trio of Greenpeace activists from the “Save the Whales” 1970s, Hollyhock began by offering weary urbanites programs in personal growth and the healing arts. In 1995, 30 entrepreneurs who had assembled to explore how business can heal the planet ended up founding what is now SVI. In the years since, Hollyhock’s lush gardens and cedar lodges have become a crucible for more than 3,000 practical altruists who believe the best way to achieve equity and social justice is to build your own change-making platforms.

Through annual events at Hollyhock and in Vancouver, Banff and San Francisco, SVI has developed robust networks of values-driven activists in sectors such as organic food, climate-change mitigation and sustainable tourism. Happy Planet – the Burnaby, B.C., producer of organic juices and smoothies now carried by most Canadian grocers – came out of the SVI community. So did Happy Planet’s co-founder, Gregor Robertson, an organic farmer who served three terms as Vancouver’s greenest mayor.

Caring communities are contagious, says SVI co-founder Joel Solomon: “SVI was a petri dish out of which a lot of good things grew.” SVI has spun off such prominent organizations as Canadian Business for Social Responsibility, which also turned 25 last year; Net Impact, a global non-profit that helps business students pursue social purpose in 435 universities; and MakeWay (formerly Tides Canada), a donor-driven foundation that changed its name last year to distance itself from the US-based Tides Foundation.

Why focus on entrepreneurs? Social ventures have the potential to become self-sustaining agents of change. Where most non-profits struggle for funding, and reform-minded governments may be blocked by stubborn lobbyists, progressive entrepreneurs fund themselves – and need no one’s permission to grow. As they build new business models in finance, food, health products, energy, workplace training and even the arts, they’re also building ecosystems of social innovation. Where 1960s activists railed against corporations, today’s social entrepreneur knows that power grows out of a solid business plan.

“Business and finance are close to neutral tools,” says Solomon. “The values and purpose we put into them is what matters.”

SVI events come with unusual ground rules. Solomon, a Vancouver impact investor who sat on Hollyhock’s board for 30 years, says SVI organizers personally select their attendees, ensuring that two-thirds come from for-profit businesses, one-third from not-for-profits. (They also throw in lawyers and accountants, because entrepreneurs can never have too many professionals on speed dial.) SVI also seeks a majority of women attendees.

“We’re trying to feminize business a bit,” says Solomon. “We want to get away from the macho ruthless business model to a more collaborative one.”

SVI sets another quota: half of attendees should be first-timers. “The do-good conspiracy,” as Solomon calls it, isn’t building a club; it’s seeding a movement. Before COVID-19 struck, SVI was planning to expand to Toronto, and maybe New York. Which is good news, because social entrepreneurship isn’t just a West Coast thing. And it’s hard, sometimes lonely work.

A 2016 survey by Mount Royal and Simon Fraser universities found social enterprises sprinkled across Canada, employing 31,000 people and generating revenues of $1.2 billion (the sector has grown significantly since then). Their average profit margin was a reasonable 4.8%. But two-thirds of the surveyed companies were more than 16 years old, so those findings don’t reflect the difficulty of launching a business or battling the status quo.

Enter SVI, whose events develop not only business savvy but resilience, empathy and connectedness. Because of COVID, SVI’s fall conference was held virtually. Gone were sunrise yoga and long walks in the rain, but the organizers orchestrated four days of highly engineered learning and mentorship for 230 attendees on Zoom. For those who couldn’t make it, here are six top takeaways from SVI 25 for anyone hoping to make change.

1. SVI 25 opened on a Tuesday evening with music and a review of the Hollyhock rules. The most important one turns out to be even more relevant in real life than at any conference: “Relationships first, business second.

2. In a session called True Confessions, Karina Birch of Rocky Mountain Soap Company spoke about growing her Canmore, Alberta, soap business into an international brand with 200 employees. Working with a chemist, she insisted that her soaps be 100% natural – using only “pronounceable” ingredients, with no chemicals or preservatives. When the chemist argued that 98% natural was good enough, Birch insisted on 100%. Even her business philosophy gets boiled into pronounceable steps: Trust your intuition. Go rogue. (“Everyone in the company has the ability to do something they don’t have approval for,” says Birch. “It doesn’t always work, but neither do the things I do.”) And finally, stay humble and keep learning. As her company grew, Birch took a course at Harvard to learn how to manage a complex organization. “I started as the soapmaker,” she says. “I had to earn the job of CEO.”

3. Unlearn your biases: Like many organizations, SVI is struggling to address systemic racism. In a frank session called Anti-Oppression, CEO Peter Wrinch shared Hollyhock’s diversity journey. “We were making strides, but to a limited form of inclusion,” he admitted. “We said, ‘Let’s invite more racialized people – but let’s not do anything to examine what the space feels like for those people.’” Similarly, Hollyhock had long welcomed the island’s Indigenous Klahoose community, shared job ads with them and gladly sold their art. But at heart, Wrinch said, “the relationship was all about us.” As part of what Wrinch calls “decolonizing work,” Hollyhock called on the Klahoose to actually listen to their goals. This year, a 14-day Klahoose expedition setting out to visit families in Washington State, 200 kilometres away, beached their canoes on Hollyhock’s shore. As Wrinch greeted the group, he wondered why he was welcoming Indigenous people to land on their own traditional territory: “We’re just at the beginning of our journey of unlearning.”

4. There’s no learning without reflection. An odd SVI habit is to pause a session to give the audience time to mull over what they’re learning. Compare that to most conferences, where people race from session to session and never get time to reflect. SVI makes time for thinking, because that’s the important part.

5. In a second True Confessions session, Adnan Durrani, CEO of Connecticut-based Saffron Road, spoke about the troubled launch of his Halal-certified food company. Durrani’s products debuted nationally at Whole Foods in 2010, just in time for Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting and self-reflection. The retail chain welcomed Saffron Road with signs saying “Happy Ramadan,” but one Texas manager tore the signs down, saying Ramadan would not be celebrated in his store. Durrani’s response expertly blended composure and commercialism. Before going on CNN to discuss the incident, he negotiated to display his products on-screen – and then refused to criticize his client when the reporter asked, “Did Whole Foods do anything wrong?” Instead, Durrani focused on how new his product was, how helpful the retailer had been, and how the Texas incident was an anomaly. Whole Foods was delighted, and sales took off. Durrani urged SVI attendees to use “halal-jitsu” to turn problems into growth opportunities. “I know there’s a lot of darkness out there,” he said. “Instead of being a victim, be the driver of change.”

6. On Thursday evening, just before SVI’s virtual 25th anniversary party, attendees heard from one of the organization’s founders. Gary Hirshberg, chairman and “chief organic optimist” at Stonyfield Farm, one of the world’s leading organic yogurt producers, urged change agents to embrace the everyday challenges of business: cash flow, marketing, how to treat people, how to retain ownership. “This is where we make or break it,” he said. “The angel is in the details.”

Wearing a cap that said “Make Earth Cool Again,” Hirshberg said that for social entrepreneurs, the challenge is just beginning. “It’s no longer about slowing climate change, it’s about reversing it: taking carbon out of the air and putting it back into the soil.”

“Business,” said Hirshberg, “is the only force strong enough to move us in a different direction.”

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One year from that deadline, UK-based non-profit Global Canopy had some less than laudatory news to share on the International Day of Forests, March 21. Not a single corporation is on track to deliver on their deforestation-free pledges.

There have been so many forest-saving announcements over the years it’s hard to keep track of them all. First came the big news of 2010 that 400+ companies in the Consumer Goods Forum would ensure that all their soy, palm oil, beef and pulp and paper would be zero net deforestation by 2020. Then, during a blue-sky day at a UN climate summit in September 2014, over 190 governments, companies (including Nestle, Kellogg’s and Cargill) and civil society organizations signed the New York Declaration on Forests with the goal of halving the loss of natural forests by 2020, striving to end it altogether by 2030. Amidst a lack of firm climate commitments, the forest declaration – while voluntary – felt fairly concrete, it felt good, it felt doable.

And the pledges kept on coming. After years of bad press, dozens of the world’s biggest palm oil producers and traders earned praise for promising to take on the ‘zero-net deforestation by 2020’ goal. Hundreds more companies from Unilever to McDonald’s had jumped on board.

Considering at least two-thirds of tropical deforestation comes from commercial agriculture, the commitments were – and are – a big deal. At the time, the UN said meeting the New York Declaration would slash carbon pollution by between 4.5 and 8.8 billion tons every year – “about as much as the current emissions of the United States.”

But if forests keep falling, is anyone held accountable? Global Canopy’s annual Forest 500 ranking has been keeping track of the 350 most influential corporations and 150 financial institutions in forest-risk commodity supply chains (linked to palm oil, soy, cattle and timber products). It concludes that while every year the number of companies making commitments rises, there’s a serious implementation gap. According to the report, “Even companies with ambitious commitments are not putting these into practice.”

Some of the report’s main findings:

• Over 40% of the companies ranked aren’t doing anything to tackle deforestation in their supply chains when it comes to palm oil, soy, cattle, timber and pulp and paper.

• Almost 1/3 of those that made commitments didn’t include any concrete policies on implementing those commitments, including publishing direct supplier lists or monitoring/verifying compliance.

Some companies are getting with the program. At least a handful are reporting on exactly how close they are to meeting their target. In 2017, Nestle said 58% of its deforestation commitments were met. JBS (the world’s largest processor of a fresh beef and pork) reported that 99.7% of its purchases were compliant and independently audited, with maps of all of its Amazon suppliers. However, Global Canopy points out that the commitment only applies to the Amazon rainforest and not to all the areas JBS source from.

While the latest Forest 500 report does offer a bit of data on whether sectors are disclosing supplier maps (overall, disclosure rates are abysmal), we were hoping to see Global Canopy share a list of corporate leaders and laggards on this front. Transparency is, after all, the oxygen for civil society to hold companies to account. Many major apparel companies have been posting their factory supplier lists for years. If major food companies aren’t sharing their palm suppliers, soy farms or cattle ranches, let’s call them out with a megaphone.

Speaking of cattle, they’re the largest driver of tropical deforestation globally, and yet companies in cattle supply chains are least likely to have a commitment. According to the report, only 16% of companies have a forest-related commitment for the beef or leather that they produce or source.

Cattle are the largest driver of tropical deforestation, but only 16% of companies have a forest-related commitment for their beef or leather.

 

One thing’s clear: companies are pretty spotty about which commodities they’re committing to clean up. Thanks to heavy campaigning by a number of environmental organizations (and all those heart-wrenching images of orangutans losing their forest homes), companies are more likely to have stronger commitments and implementation reporting on palm oil than any other commodity. Unilever, for instance, is singled out as a leader scoring 89% on palm oil, but it only earned 48% for its overall soy commitments. (With the global spotlight on palm, tellingly, no companies disclose their soy suppliers.)

In recognition of the gap between company commitments and impacts on the ground, the Forest 500 methodology was updated in 2018 to “better distinguish between companies who have set commitments, and those that have taken the next step towards implementation.” Still, onlookers will note major discrepancies in how the the organization grades top brands compared to say other forest advocates. Global Canopy gives companies like Nestle, Mondelez and PepsiCo five out of five on their palm policies (see below), when Chain Reaction Research reported in 2018 that the same brands were buying from a top 10 deforester in Asia. Greenpeace International reported that major brands like Nestle, PepsiCo, Unilever and Mondelez were sourcing from palm suppliers responsible for destroying an area of rainforest almost twice the size of Singapore in less than three years.

Global Canopy Forest 500: Palm oil leaders

Greenpeace: brand exposure to “dirty” palm oil producers

Global Canopy researcher Sarah Rogerson explains that the Forest 500 assessments only looks at commitments and reporting made publicly by the companies themselves. Says Rogerson, “This is due to the difficulty of getting standardized on-the-ground information across all of the powerbrokers that we look at,” adding “although of course company commitments and communications should always be considered alongside these reports where they are available.”

Either way, Global Canopy, Greenpeace and others agree that that industry is worryingly behind on sticking to their word. And the longer it takes corporate supply chains to catch up to their public commitments, the more natural forests it’s going to cost us.

The official 2018 progress assessment on the New York Declaration on Forests (NYFD) found that despite corporate commitments from roughly 800 companies, “the world continues to lose natural forests at an alarming rate. In the three years following the adoption of the NYDF (2014–17), the average annual rate of natural forest loss was 42 percent higher than in the previous decade.”

Yet Rogerson is still hopeful. “It’s always worth remembering that when the big commitments were made six to 10 years ago, companies didn’t know what it would take to get there. There’s been a lot of progress in terms of setting commitments and understanding how to implement those commitments.”

Nonetheless, Rogerson says there’s a huge need to put pressure on companies lagging behind. “They can’t just keep pushing the date away without some sort of backlash.” They will, she warns, “be held accountable.”

Investing in deforestation:

Investors can and should be a bigger part of holding laggards to account, says Global Canopy. “Financial institutions are even further behind in setting commitments and policies on deforestation. Of the 150 financial institutions assessed, 97 had no financing policy for any of the four key forest-risk commodities.”

 

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