Grassroots Capital Management Corp PBC Honored as Best For Governance and Best For Customers

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Grassroots Capital Management Corp PBC Honored as Best For Governance and Best For Customers,Creating Powerful Governance Structures to Protect Company Mission

Evaluated by Comprehensive B Impact Assessment

B Lab has released lists recognizing B Corporations as Best for Governance, Best For The World Overall, Best For Environment, Best For Customers, Best For Workers and Best For Community. Grassroots can be found in the Best For Governance and Best For Customers categories at bthechange.com/bestfortheworld.

Grassroots is honored in the Best For Governance and the Best for Customers categories which include businesses that earned scores in the top 10 percent of more than 2,400 Certified B Corporations on the B Impact Assessment. The full assessment measures a company’s impact on its workers, community, customers and the environment. To certify as B Corporations, companies like Grassroots must complete the full assessment and have their answers verified by B Lab. The Best for Governance, Best For The World Overall, Best For Environment, Best For Customers, Best For Workers and Best For Community are selected based on an independent, comprehensive assessment administered by the nonprofit B Lab.

Honorees scoring in the top 10 percent set a gold standard for the high impact that business as a force for good can make around the world. Grassroots made Best For Governance and Best For Customers thanks to exceptional practices: converting to a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation; leading GIIRS ratings of its funds’ portfolio companies and assisting other funds to do the same; leading efforts to preserve the social side of the “double bottom line” in impact investments.

Since 2003 when Grassroots’ principals began mobilizing private capital to support the scaling of microfinance and impact businesses, Grassroots has been committed to preserving the distinctive double bottom line character of these business models. This requires a constant balancing act: ensuring that profitability is sufficient to satisfactorily remunerate investors, while ensuring that financial returns do not become the default priority in all business and strategic decisions. This has required thoughtful interventions in every aspect of the investment process: selection of partners, entrepreneurs and co-investors; implementation of metrics and reporting system; transparency and third party assessments; development of and adherence to industry codes of conduct; “hardwiring” of social mission into company by-laws and shareholders agreements; continuous investor education.

Based on this framework, Grassroots was named 2018 Best for Governance because of our commitment to transparency, active engagement in enhancing efforts to improve impact metrics, and continuous advisory work to improve governance of double bottom line companies. Grassroots publishes an annual impact report highlighting the social impact metrics from our portfolio companies. We also work with industry experts and standard setting bodies such as: B Lab, GIIRS, and the Social Performance Task Force to help establish, measure and report the social and environmental impact metrics and through initiatives such as the Africa Board Fellows Program and ad hoc advisory engagement to enhance governance.

Similarly, Grassroots was named 2018 Best for Customers. Best for our customers recognizes our careful selection of mission-driven businesses led by committed management and supported by well-aligned co-investors both in our portfolio investments as well as our advisory and consulting services. These businesses share a common fundamental purpose of using private capital as an instrument to better the lives of their clients, their families and communities.

“With the rise of anger at a system that feels rigged, people are hungry for companies like Grassroots, who are changing the system by building businesses that seek to create the greatest positive impact,” says Jay Coen Gilbert, co-founder of B Lab. “Best For The World is the only list of businesses that uses comprehensive, comparable, third-party-validated data about a company’s social and environmental performance. As consumers, talent and investors increasingly demand transparent, values-aligned businesses to buy from, work at and invest in, companies will need to not just be the best in the world but the best for the world, and not just to be nice but to be the most successful.”

Nearly 1,000 Certified B Corporations were named 2018 Best for the World Honorees, including: Patagonia; King Arthur Flour Company; Green Mountain Power; and the United Kingdom’s Charity Bank. Over fifty countries are represented, including Denmark, India, South Africa and Taiwan. The selection criteria for Best For The World honorees are available at https://bit.ly/2IgAzF5.

Today there are more than 2,400 Certified B Corporations across more than 150 industries and over 50 countries, unified by one common goal: to redefine success in business. Any company can measure and manage social and environmental performance at http://bimpactassessment.net.