Monthly views on the future of responsible business
JUNE 2023
“Poorly structured voluntary diversity programs pose both legal and practical risks for companies. Those risks existed before the Supreme Court's decision today. Now they may be even higher.”
This week, the United States Supreme Court ruled against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina could no longer consider race in their admissions processes, effectively ending affirmative action in American higher education. Affirmative action—widely recognized as a flawed but helpful initiative—is meant to give motivated students from marginalized backgrounds the shot at a high-quality education that they may not have had without it.
But this decision will have ripple effects outside of academia, impacting nearly every workplace in the country. Soon, the Department of Justice and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission may take up, “a host of increasingly popular race-conscious corporate initiatives,” including:
…providing race-restricted access to mentoring, sponsorship, or training programs; to selecting interviewees partially due to diverse candidate slate policies; to tying executive or employee compensation to the company achieving certain demographic targets; to offering race-restricted diversity internship programs or accelerated interview processes, sometimes paired with euphemistic diversity "scholarships" that effectively provide more compensation for "diverse" summer interns.
So what are diversity-minded corporate leaders to do now that the future of affirmative action has been thrown into question? The struggle for more vibrant, diverse communities will not end because of a single court ruling. Instead, global companies are trying harder than ever to unite all their employees in a shared goal to make a positive social impact.
Our takeaway? It’s time to double down on our efforts to foster inclusive, welcoming communities in and around every workplace.
By the way, you can now browse the full Vantage archive on our website. Read it here.
A bombshell report in New York Magazine reveals that “behind even the most impressive AI system are people—huge numbers of people labeling data to train it and clarifying data when it gets confused,” with some earning as little as $1.20 per hour. But it’s not just technology companies developing machine learning tools that need to treat workers fairly; it’s up to all of us learning to work alongside AI to think deeply about the ethical issues involved with an increasingly complex industry. Read “AI Is a Lot of Work."
Venture capital firms demand ESG commitments
From diversity to the environment, more VC term sheets now ask startups to adopt forward-looking policies than ever before. Many early-stage companies are agreeing to do so as soon as three months after signing on for funding. The results are clear: For one E.U.-based firm, “90% of [the] portfolio has at least one female board member, up from 25% of companies before they joined the portfolio,” thanks in part to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) clauses. Read more in Sifted.
What keeps social impact leaders up at night?
Market pressure, internal scrutiny, waning budgets—these are just a few of the issues social impact professionals pointed out at this year’s Social Innovation Summit in Los Angeles. But thanks to employees all over the world leaping to make a positive social impact, the future is bright. Now it’s our turn to put them in the drivers’ seat. Hear how industry leaders are making a difference in our six key takeaways from #SIS2023.
How to (finally) take the politics out of ESG
Shivaram Rajgopal believes that ESG investing, a “free market, organic and an investor driven movement,” is controversial today because it responds to a broken reporting model. On one hand, there is a misinformed notion that companies pursue ESG without informing their investors, which is “inconsistent with the evidence.” On the other, the Columbia University business professor argues that companies should “make their [proxy] voting record easily accessible to the investing public and to explicitly [declare] conflict of interest.” Read Rajgopal’s Congressional testimony and follow-up.
Opportunity: Share your experiences measuring social impact
From data inputs to real-world impact, business ROI to community advancement, the Association of Corporate Citizenship Professionals (ACCP) knows that measurement profoundly impacts the daily work of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and ESG practitioners. And yet, it is often an area filled with contradictions, misunderstandings, and lack of consistency. Now ACCP and True Impact want to hear from you. Take the Impact Measurement Insights Survey by July 12 .
Product spotlight
Major expansion to Deed’s content library
We are thrilled to announce two new integrations and one major enhancement to our partnerships with leading volunteer opportunity platforms. Now, you and your employees can browse 87,500+ brand new ways to do good—all on the Deed platform.
This expansion includes new opportunities from:
Working with others, in a spirit of generosity and mutual respect, Idealist wants to help build a world where all people can lead free and dignified lives. A 501(c)3 nonprofit organization headquartered in New York, Idealist has connected more than 130,000 organizations with tens of millions of people, and posted over one million social impact jobs and hundreds of thousands of internships and volunteer opportunities since their founding.
As the premiere volunteer recruitment and management portal for people who are passionate about supporting causes managed by United States federal government agencies, Volunteer.gov makes a substantial social impact in the U.S. Volunteer.gov partners with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the National Park Service, and the U.S. Geological Survey to ensure crucial social and environmental services reach all 50 states.
VolunteerMatchis the world’s largest and most popular volunteer recruiting platform, designed to complement and co-exist with social impact platforms like Deed. Bringing at least one million interested volunteers to thousands of nonprofits every month, VolunteerMatch has generated over $40 million in mission-related revenue from its legacy corporate volunteering product YourMatch.
This may be the last week to support your LGBTQIA+ employees during Pride Month, but that doesn’t mean the work is over. We encourage you to take an active role in your community’s education by distributing the resources included here so that, as a whole, your organization can develop a better understanding of the LGBTQIA+ experience.
Our "Cause of the Month: Pride Month" toolkit includes:
Volunteering and giving opportunities in the U.S. and around the world.
In-depth look at specific cause areas, including: health & wellness, human rights, and economic justice.
A calendar of awareness days.
Employee and employee resource group (ERG) engagement ideas, as well as a walkthrough of how to craft a social impact campaign around Pride Month.
Recommendations of worthwhile books, podcasts, and films on issues of importance to the LGBTQIA+ community.
Click on the image below to preview the toolkit and learn how to get full access. 👇
Here are some nonprofits you can support right now on Deed:
New to the social impact space? We know how challenging it can be to get a grasp of the who, what, when, where, and how of doing good deeds (even though we all know the why). Here are a few explainers:
Thank you for reading Vantage. We want this monthly newsletter to be of real value to everyone working to make a real social impact. If there’s a topic you’d like to learn more about, or if there’s someone pushing the conversation forward whose work deserves more attention, we’d love to hear about it. Drop us a note: vantage [@] joindeed [dot] com.
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ICYMI, you can now browse the full Vantage archive on our website.
