Businesses--Not Government--Are Best Suited to Create Thriving Local Communities
When a business grows, its responsibilities grow to include additional stakeholders, including the local communities in which it operates. By seeing this as an opportunity, an Evolutionary Business can generate a positive effect on this key building block for itself and many people’s lives. This is the sixth article in a series on Service to All Stakeholders.
Many large businesses, like Amazon and Apple, are headquartered in urban and suburban areas throughout the world, with branch offices or other facilities in smaller cities and even rural areas. Each of these local communities supports the company by housing workers, educating their children, providing police protection, hospitalization, sports, cultural activities, and more. All these community benefits can easily be taken for granted by the company. And in some extreme but still too frequent cases, the company can harm its local community by polluting the air or water. Or by selling itself to investors who then shut it down, as frequently happens when a business is acquired for its assets but not its people.
Beyond these extreme cases, which deserve special attention, many conventional large businesses don’t consider their local communities enough. Perhaps they sponsor a local sports team or ask their employees to volunteer one day a year at a soup kitchen. But it’s in their best interest to take more responsibility for the welfare of their communities. Some say that’s the role of government and other public or nonprofit institutions, but clearly, that system isn’t working in the United States. Just visit San Francisco, the home of many of the world’s most successful tech companies, and you’ll see the magnitude of the problems it faces: homelessness, lack of affordable housing, mental illness, and crime, not to mention potholed streets and littered sidewalks.
Some companies have recognized this gap and started doing something about it. In San Francisco, Salesforce’s founder and CEO Marc Benioff used his money and company’s influence to drive voter turnout to victory for a bill to provide affordable housing. In November 2019, Apple announced it would donate $2.5 billion for affordable housing in California, its headquarters. Amazon recently established a 63,000 square foot residence for homeless people in a building attached to its Seattle campus.
But much more is required to create healthy and thriving local communities. And businesses cannot exist without them, even when those businesses are mostly virtual or global. While your executives might dislike having to step over used hypodermic needles on their way into the office (as is often the case in San Francisco), or your new manager might have trouble finding an affordable apartment, the people who will probably never work for your company are the ones who suffer the most. The system that benefits you doesn’t adequately support them. Conventional capitalism, it must be recognized, leaves many people behind.
The tech industry, in particular, has contributed to massive changes in San Francisco and other cities like Seattle. We’ve seen the gentrification of neighborhoods, inflated housing prices, increased traffic, and other negative effects of the booming tech sector. Whose responsibility is it to make things better, not just for the privileged employees riding the Google and Apple buses, but for everyone?
Business, conventionally, has not been about anything but profits and returns. It’s time to make a change. The solution isn’t to wait until you’ve made a fortune and then start giving it away to a local shelter. It is to build a business that can be of service to your local community while you’re serving your customers, workers, investors, and other stakeholders. That’s a lot more impactful and world-changing.
How to do this? Here are few ideas:
Start by considering your local communities as equal stakeholders, like all others, such as shareholders and customers.
Set goals for how your company can serve your local communities and hold yourself accountable.
Imagine what’s possible, not the minimum necessary for your company to be considered “successful” in conventional terms.
What are some specific ways your company can serve your community?
Invest in public schools
Support voter registration
Build affordable housing
Drive awareness for broad-based causes, like mental health, and sponsor best-in-class services
Offer your company’s products and services for free or at a discount
Open your offices for various community uses
Invest in improving basic human needs: drinking water, roads, electricity, etc.
Companies--not governments or nonprofit organizations--are best suited to drive rapid, large-scale change. While certainly not standard capitalistic practice, Evolutionary Businesses can play a key role in improving local communities wherever they operate. How much and in what ways are up to each company. This isn’t about “giving back”. It’s about serving each and all of a company’s stakeholders to the best of your ability--what an Evolutionary Business does.
For the next article in the series, we will consider how companies can be of service to historically oppressed people, including Black, indigenous, and other people of color, as well as women.
