Business for Good and Operating a Sustainable Company

In the fall, Durham Academy partnered with Green Places, a Raleigh-based company, to measure our carbon footprint. Paul Wang, CJ Nwafor, Owen Brent-Levenstein, and I decided to continue working with them as summer interns. We started in the middle of July, meeting with Green Places’ head of business operations, Jess Porta. On our first day, we were given a tour of Raleigh Founded. Raleigh Founded is an office/community that hosts startups and fosters entrepreneurship in the NC State community.

Jess and a few other Green Places staff had previously worked for Raleigh Founded, and their mission resonates with the company as a whole.

Raleigh Founded is a certified B Corporation, which means they are a for-profit corporation that provides benefit to society by meeting certain environmental, structural, and employment standards. As it turns out, Green Places is considering becoming a B Corporation, and one of the tasks that Jess gave us was to analyze the B Corporation requirements and make a list of all the policies they needed. She also tasked us with surveying the Green Places employees and providing recommendations to improve their internal sustainability. Jess explained that Green Places is primed for growth, so our tasks would help maintain company culture while they expanded. After they showed us some in-depth details of the product they offered, we got to work, both excited and impressed.

After working together for the next three weeks, we were able to deliver the list of policies as well as sustainability recommendations based on the survey responses of the 15+ employees. Through this experience, we gained an understanding of the tremendous amount of decisions company leaders make. The recommendations were more up our alley, as we have previously created similar recommendations for our school; Nevertheless, businesses like Green Places have different factors we had to take into consideration, such as implementing incentivization and employer responsibility. We ended up producing eight recommendations, including starting a pop-up store as well as subsidization of renewable energy and composting. In order to find the required policies Green Places needed, we combed through the B Corp assessment, making note of all the possible responses, in the process learning a lot about what it takes to run a business. None of us anticipated this type of work when we began the internship, but in the end, our knowledge of business operations increased greatly. One of the biggest pieces of advice Jess had given us was to master a skill and use it for a passion, and our B Corporation work showed us that sustainability work is just as much about skill as passion. We hope that Green Places finds our work useful, and we thank them for this invaluable opportunity. As we move on to college and our future, we will keep Jess’s words in mind.