Calls for B Corp Collective Action: Takeaways from Champions Retreat 2024

A Time to Restore Relationships With Environment and Community for Change and Impact

“Being an advocate for change … will require us to keep our hearts open, to work on letting go of our biases but also our deep connections to change how we think.” — Jorge Fontanez

Bringing an end to exploitive and extractive practices requires a collective shift in ways of doing business. Certified B Corporations are nurturing change as companies that value their connections with people and the planet — their business stakeholders — and pursue a restorative vision for a more regenerative, inclusive, and equitable economy. 

The theme of Restore guided more than 700 people in the U.S. and Canadian B Corp community as they gathered in March for Champions Retreat 2024. The event was held in Vancouver, British Columbia, on the unceded homelands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.

B Lab U.S. & Canada CEO Jorge Fontanez encouraged B Corp attendees to revisit how they think, act, and work as they use business as a force for good. “We are entering an era when I believe individualism will fail. Only when we act in community will we see change,” he said. “Being an advocate for change … will require us to keep our hearts open, to work on letting go of our biases but also our deep connections to change how we think.”

He said B Corps can work with partner organizations to build a collective force for positive change through policy advocacy and shared best practices for racial equity, climate justice, and a stakeholder-driven economy. “The vision of an economically just, equitable, inclusive, and regenerative system means that we are committed to the end of human suffering,” Fontanez said. “In the spirit of the theme of our conference, Restore, we are beginning with truth, with healing, with reconciliation in this community on this land. And I want us to explore how we can break the cycle of exploitive and extractive practice for generations to come.” 

Watch the full CEO Address with Jorge Fontanez

The Champions Retreat 2024 session highlights and video links that follow share calls to action — individual and collective — to restore relationships with people and the planet that can help reshape the economy, connect with frontline communities for climate justice and reconciliation, and practice radical collaboration. 

Fossil Fuel Supremacy and Reconciliation: Restoring Our Relationship With the Lands

“That is what every single one of you is working on: The what then? What if? What can we do? That solution-forward thinking is essential.” — Severn Cullis-Suzuki

Vancouver-born Severn Cullis-Suzuki has been an advocate for environmental conservation and intergenerational justice since founding the Environmental Children’s Organization at age 9. “My purpose, that I knew from a very young age, was to heal our relationship with the Earth. Our relationship is very broken as human beings with the lands,” said Cullis-Suzuki, who serves as Executive Director of the David Suzuki Foundation that works to conserve and protect the natural environment. 

Severn Cullis-Suzuki called on B Corps to help unravel established systems through business innovation and inspiration.

As the effects of the climate crisis — record temperatures, forest fires, and more — affect people around the world, business leaders must reawaken to the responsibilities of taking care of the Earth and nurturing healthy ecosystems, Cullis-Suzuki said in her keynote address. That will require a re-examination of systemic practices that have accelerated wealth production and produced an era of fossil fuel supremacy. “The scale of global capitalism has decoupled our time-tested human strategies for survival: examining and understanding cause and effect, actions from consequences,” she said. 

The oppressive systems of racism, colonization, and capitalism are complex and intimately connected, she said. Unraveling these established systems requires new ways of business through innovation, inspiration, and empowerment. “One of the things that is most important is figuring out not only how these systems are intersecting and broken but what we want to emerge out of the ashes,” Cullis-Suzuki said. “That is what every single one of you is working on: The what then? What if? What can we do? That solution-forward thinking is essential.”

Watch the full keynote address with Severn Cullis-Suzuki

Find additional articles on shaping a stakeholder-driven economy 

Youth at the Forefront: Restorative Principles of Partnership with Frontline Communities

“For whom is your better world, and who is building it?” — Naisha Khan, Climate Recentered

The communities most vulnerable to the effects of climate change are among those least responsible, and many are leading the charge for climate justice. The climate movement is powered by advocates shaping grassroots campaigns for justice-oriented policies to halt extractive practices and restore reciprocal relationships with land and water. 

Young climate justice movement leaders in Canada shared how B Corps can show up as partners and allies during the “Youth at the Forefront” session. Moderator Jacqueline Lee Tam of the Climate Justice Organizing HUB was a co-creator of the Principles of Partnerships with Frontline Communities, a resource developed with B Lab U.S. & Canada. 

The Youth at the Forefront session featured, from left, Jacqueline Lee Tam of the Climate Justice Organizing HUB, Janelle Lapointe, of the David Suzuki Foundation and Common Horizon, Bodhi Patil of InnerLight, and Naisha Khan of Climate Recentered, Change Course, and Solid State. (Photo by Set Sail)

“The principles aim to guide B Corp leaders on understanding how they can build trust-based, reciprocal, and long-lasting partnerships with frontline and grassroots communities,” she said. “For our collective survival, we’re going to need to overthrow some systems and reimagine how we do things.”

In introducing the young climate leaders, Tam encouraged the B Corp audience to lean into discomfort and question old ways of thinking and understanding. “This is a session for all of us to take the next step in our climate justice journeys,” she said. 

As Co-Founder of Climate Recentered, Naisha Khan works with other Black, Indigenous, and People of Color youth in Surrey, British Columbia, to connect people and incorporate joy in their advocacy for a better future. Khan’s family is originally from Bangladesh, one of the regions most affected by the climate crisis. The frontline and grassroots communities advocating for climate justice seek a shift to degrowth — an economic framework that respects Earth’s limits. “Business cannot continue as normal,” she said. “We cannot have eco-friendly capitalism, philanthropic capitalism, millionaires or billionaires save us — those are solutions that cause harm.”

Addressing the climate crisis will require dismantling the extractive systems of oppression that support capitalism. “We cannot business plan ourselves out of the climate crisis,” Khan said. “Challenge your idea of comfort. Challenge your idea of a better world. Because comfort is not where growth happens.”

Business leaders who share a desire to help create a better world must recognize the power imbalances that are supported by the byproducts of colonialism and the continued oppression of frontline and Indigenous communities. “These people have the solutions themselves,” Khan said. “I want to push you to ask: for whom is your better world, and who is building it?” 

Watch the full session: Youth at the Forefront 

Planting Seeds for Collective Action: A Radical and Restorative Approach to Complex Challenges

“If you don’t see you’re part of the problem, then you cannot be part of the solution.” — Monica Pohlmann

Collaboration is a powerful tool to address global challenges like the climate crisis, but it can be challenging to do effectively. The “Planting Seeds for Collective Action” session, led by Monica Pohlmann and Gerardo Marquez of B Corp Reos Partners, gave the B Corp audience an interactive opportunity to practice ways of listening and talking for effective collaboration. 

Reos Partners is a global team that helps drive systems change by bringing together stakeholders to explore challenges and develop long-term solutions for action. The current global polycrises require us to collaborate and bring human values back into our everyday interactions, Marquez said. “When thinking about all of those issues, that cannot be solved by a single entity. That means we need to start doing things differently,” he said. 

As social and environmental challenges become more dire, they increase the need for urgent collective action by varied stakeholders, Marquez said. “When working on complex challenges, it is possible to work with others we do not agree with … when we are trying to go in a direction of solving an issue that is affecting us all.” 

Monica Pohlmann and Gerardo Marquez of B Corp Reos Partners gave the Champions Retreat 2024 audience an interactive opportunity to practice ways of listening and talking for effective collaboration. (Photo by Set Sail)

It’s a framework that Reos Partners calls radical collaboration that asks participants to embrace conflict and connection, experiment their way forward, and recognize their role as part of the system. “If you don’t see you’re part of the problem, then you cannot be part of the solution,” Pohlmann said. “In radical collaboration, we understand that we actually have to spend time creating a common understanding of what the problem actually is.” 

Through an interactive exercise, Champions Retreat attendees explored how to create spaces where people feel safe to share their varied perspectives and see themselves as essential to creating a path forward. “Reminding ourselves how to collaborate is bringing human values back into our everyday interactions,” Pohlmann said. 

Watch the full session: Planting Seeds for Collective Action