Seasons Fund for Social Transformation - christopher reardon

CASE STUDYGETTING RESULTSAs a relatively small environmental advocacy group, ForestEthics can’t afford to waste time on thingsthat don’t advance its mission. Its clear focus has yielded some striking achievements in the last fewyears. With a staff of 30 and an annual budget of less than $3 million, the San Francisco-based grouppersuaded Staples to phase out paper products originating from endangered forests. It got Home Depotto stop selling lumber cut from native woodlands. And it recently swayed Limited Brands, the $10 billionclothing retailer that owns Victoria’s Secret, to stop buying pulp from Canada’s Boreal Forest andstart using more certified and recycled paper. For a company that mails nearly 1 million catalogs eachday, it was a major policy change.Todd Paglia, ForestEthics’ executive director, attributes these breakthroughs to an approach that isdecidedly rare in his field. “We don’t treat company representatives like they’re evil,” he says. “Evenwhile we’re campaigning against companies in really aggressive ways, we spend a tremendous amountof time investing in relationships with the people who are hopefully going to be our contacts for yearsafterward in order to implement the changes we create together.”ForestEthics was not always so enlightened. But in recent years it has put considerable effort intotransforming its institutional culture. Most of its staff members have taken a three-day course at theRockwood Leadership Program in nearby Berkeley to develop their management skills and establish acommon language among coworkers. The course includes practical exercises in team building andassessment as well as deeper forays into organizational visioning, inner alignment, self-care, and contemplativediscipline. Significantly, ForestEthics continues to build on this work by regularly bringing inmentors like Robert Gass and William Ury to help its staff expand their capacity to innovate, communicate,and lead.With the vision and tools its staff has cultivated,ForestEthics has developed aremarkable knack for turning its purportedcorporate adversaries into allies. In itsrecent campaign to change the paper procurementpolicy at Limited Brands,ForestEthics publicly took an adversarialpose. It ran a provocative series of newspaperads—titled “Victoria’s Dirty Secret”—that resembled Victoria’s Secret’s ownmarketing materials. But there were somenoticeable differences: the models acces-