Shifting the Narrative Around a Better Way To Do Business
This article hasn’t been updated since Apr 1, 2021. For more up-to-date information, please visit our blog on bcorporation.eu
A warm hello and welcome to the B Corp Community and everyone interested in the B Corp movement!
The team at B Lab Europe is excited to be launching our brand new Medium channel. This is an opportunity for us to celebrate stories and case studies from the B Corp movement across Europe. An opportunity to reinforce the need for using business as a force for good. But also, it’s an opportunity to better connect with all of you and exchange experiences and perspectives across industries. This channel will offer a small glimpse into all of the work happening across our community as we work together on the most important agenda of our time — making our planet sustainable and equitable — and an invitation to join us on that journey.
For those of you who may not be familiar with the B Corp Community and the B Corp movement, let us introduce ourselves. B Corporations are companies that meet the highest standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability, verified by B Lab, a global non-profit organization. And in recent years, the growth of the B Corp Community in Europe and globally has been astounding.
We’ve recently hit a major milestone:
600 Certified B Corporations in over 20 countries across Europe.
Around the globe, almost 4,000 companies have achieved B Corp Certification, through the BIA submission and score verification by B Lab. The B Impact Assessment (BIA) is the impact management tool used by companies who want to measure their impact on its workers, community, environment, and customers.
By now the number of companies using the free BIA continues to climb with over 30,000 users across Europe and over 190,000 users worldwide. The demand for certification has increased by nearly 30% per annum for the last two years, with over 600 companies submitting the BIA in 2020.
In partnership with the United Nations Global Compact, B Lab has also developed the SDG Action Manager, enabling over 16,000 businesses so far to learn about and set targets against the Sustainable Development Goals.
This first article is a celebration of our growing B Corp community, building on the momentum from B Corp Month.
Throughout the month of March, hundreds of organisations came together to not only celebrate our growing numbers, but more significantly, the collective impact our community is making by using business as a force for good. For example…
But there is still so much more work to be done in creating an inclusive, equitable, and regenerative economic system for all people and the planet. We believe that changing the economic system requires us to change the rules of the game. So as the community has grown, so has the breadth of initiatives available to support B Corps and the broader business community.
This year, we created the Public Policy group addressing EU company governance regulation (which 60+ B Corps co-signed) led by B Lab Europe in partnership with The Good Lobby. And there are many other collective actions businesses can join, including the B Corp Climate Collective with 200+ European B Corps committed to Net Zero by 2030; the Beauty Coalition led by Italian B Corp Davines, and many more led by B Corps across Europe. Follow our social media channels (LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram) to stay up to date on initiatives which you can join.
No matter whether you are a business owner, an employee, a policy maker setting the rules for businesses, an academic, teacher, student, … We would like to connect with you to share, exchange, learn and understand how we can contribute to a #BetterBusiness world to reach our common Global Goals by 2030. Let’s come together and B the change. It is the #DecadeOfAction.
So here’s to 600, and to keeping the momentum of this movement growing as we shift the narrative around a better way to do business.
