All Fired Up
Last month marked our one-year anniversary of becoming a B Corp. Over the past twelve months, we’ve been asked to meet with a handful of design studios interested in learning more about the certification process. We always start by encouraging curious folks to review the B Corp Assessment first. It is a free Q&A process that you can go through to assess the health of your business in terms of governance, workers, environment and customers.
It is a great learning experience even if you don’t plan on going through the certification process as you can get immediate feedback on areas where you have potential for growth. For us, it revealed opportunities for impact that we never even considered.
In most of these conversations with colleagues, we’d be asked what to do first and/or what were the easiest steps to take. The one that kept bubbling up for us (because it wasn’t at all on our radar and because it was so satisfying to put into action) was: banking.
Before we started exploring the B Corp certification process, we banked with one of the top four US banks. We didn’t do it intentionally, it's just where we ended up when they bought our local bank in 2008. Fast forward to 2019 and we were introduced to the concept of impactful banking through our B Corp Assessment. We learned that we could actually work with a bank that was in alignment with our values and we went on a mission to find one. We landed on Beneficial State Bank which serves California, Oregon and Washington and is not only a local independently-owned bank and fossil fuel-free, but is a certified B Corp itself.
Not only was it better aligned with our values, but the experience of banking was totally transformed for us. We have a real-life-human banker again and even have their personal number that we can text with time-sensitive questions. This is not something that we do often, but during the PPP process in 2020, we were one of the first small businesses that we knew of in our community that received funding because we had that one-on-one guidance to help us through. We were so grateful to navigate that potentially stressful experience with someone we knew and trusted and who we could be totally transparent with.
Besides the warm feeling of wonderful customer service, why is having a values-based bank important? Your money - this includes everything from your checking to savings to your retirement and investment funds - is being leveraged right now out in the world at a rate of at least 10x. This means that if you have $100,000 in your various banking and investment accounts right now, you essentially have $1,000,000 out in the world being invested in projects and industries (think fossil fuels and deforestation) that you may not think are just. In fact, the top four US banks invested over $1 trillion in fossil fuel projects since the Paris Agreement in late 2015. This got us really fired up!
We have been taught that our dollar is our vote and because of this we do our best to be minimal and conscientious with our consumption. It was really eye-opening for us to understand that where our money lives is also a vote and for many of us, it can have an environmental footprint larger than the one we have calculated for our business or our family every year. In fact, if you have $125,000 in traditional banking and investment funds right now, that money has a larger environmental footprint than the average US adult every year. For many US companies, the cash they have on hand has a larger carbon footprint than their entire business operations.
According to environmental activist Bill Mckibben: “Depending on how much money you have, your bank account is two or three or four furnaces chugging all day; it’s a trio of Escalades idling forever in the drive, or six, or nine. Without knowing it you’re setting your money on fire, over and over and over, and that fire is filling the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. Nothing could be more important.”
The good news is that banking can be a powerful accelerator for positive change that we have more individual control over than many of us may know. (You can find a fossil-free bank here today.) Right now, there is over $19 trillion on deposit in US bank accounts. What if those dollars were leveraged for decarbonization projects and regenerative agriculture?
The UN estimates $1.6 trillion to $3.8 trillion will be needed each year through 2050 for the world to transition to a low-carbon future and avoid warming exceeding 1.5 degrees. As a planet, we are investing just under $79 billion right now. That means that if US citizens were to invest just 20% of our collective wealth into climate solutions every year, we could turn it all around.
If this gets you fired up as well, and you are interested in exploring your own financial institutions, we recommend listening to this A Matter of Degrees episode featuring the inspiring Marilyn Waite (she starts in at about 25 min) and checking out her resources on sustainable banking and investing. We learned many of the statistics mentioned above from her work.
Don’t forget to look at your retirement investments too. If you are passionate about ending our dependence on fossil fuels, you will want to ensure that your retirement is not invested in a fund that supports it through this site. You can also use your ticker or fund name to search for gun-free, prison-free, deforestation-free, weapon-free, tobacco-free and/or gender equity funds.
We hope that your new year is off to a great start and that you delight in researching all this as much we did. We can't understate how empowering it was to make these changes in our business and personal banking.
We hope it inspires you all too!
- Chelsea & James