Masawa Minute 38
Masawa Minute 38 | The letter missing in ESG | Should ambition come at the price of our wellbeing? | + More!
This is the Masawa Minute — mental wellness, social impact, and impact investing snippets from what we’ve read the last two weeks + where you can get active.
Friends, we hope you’re doing well! During the last two weeks, we’ve been reading about transformative ideas that lead us towards social change and lasting positive impact — so that’s what this newsletter is about. Enjoy!
Masawa Thoughts
Mental health has been stealing the headlines the past two weeks! Whether it’s famous sports figures standing up for their mental health and the ensuing workplace mental wellness discussion (see below!) or the biggest corporations tokenistically supporting workplace wellness (see here), people are talking! These are great (PR) opportunities for companies to take a step back and endeavor to create real change around mental health.
We’ve noticed in the past few weeks that investors are taking note, too! We’ve received an uptick in investors and co-investors reaching out to learn more about our Nurture Capital approach that holistically focuses on maximizing social impact, founder wellness, and organizational health for purpose-driven companies and portfolios.
As one start-up wrote: “Sustainability is on everyone’s lips, but Masawa understands that the literal sustainability of startup teams — via their own mental wellness — is the most important factor for success.”
Get Active!
🏅 Award or get awarded
Top Tier Impact’s (TTI) Global Impact Awards are here to give recognition to the most impactful global innovators in sustainability and equality across a number of categories. Until June 30th, you can either apply yourself or nominate someone else for an award, which will be granted to winners elected by public voting during the global award ceremony on August 17th.
Besides being publicly announced through the official awards campaign, the winners will receive support for setting up targeted 1:1 meetings with investors in their specific sectors, as well as developing strategic corporate partnerships. Take action now and help the entrepreneurs working to build a better planet every day get the recognition they deserve!
🤝Join
Masawa Ambassadeur and Connecteur Extraordinaire Alistair Langer is launching the next round of his 77 Day Next Level Business Challenge, starting July 12!
Alistair, as an agent for organizations catalyzing radical systemic change, also supports individuals as a Companion to reach their next level.
Modern brain science shows that you need two full months to successfully and permanently change a pattern to install a new behavior in your life. With over 25 years of personal development and 15 years of social entrepreneurship experience, Alistair will guide you to create peak-performance, flow, and impact in your everyday life.
🍷 Attend
Envisioning Mental Health as Larger than Healthcare
Wellcome is organizing a discussion with their lived experience team, where they will be chatting about a principle fundamental for their work on mental health — intersectionality. During the event, a panel of speakers will highlight the intersections between mental health and the social, political and economic context, both in theory and in practice, as well as consider what a lived experience looks like in an organizational setting.
The event, taking place on June 14th at 1:00 pm CEST, is free for everyone to attend. If you can’t make it then, there will be a recording that you’ll be able to access after the discussion. It’s surely going to be an exciting and honest conversation (precisely the kind we love), so come with your questions prepared, and we hope to see you there!
What we’re reading…
🗝 Masawa special: Hoping for a better society? It’s time to prioritize wellbeing
In the last decades, society has made incredible progress, with revolutionary breakthroughs in many sectors, from medicine to tech. However, even with all the progress meant to improve the livelihood of its members, our systems as they currently exist keep perpetuating social injustice, economic inequality and power imbalance that result in billions of people not having their fundamental needs met. The only way to shift towards a more inclusive and thriving world is to build a society that centers wellbeing and prioritizes meeting the basic needs of all people.
One of the problems our economy faces is detaching itself from the social and environmental systems in which it operates — even though they are integral to its preservation. Transitioning into an economy of wellbeings requires a shift in values — leaving the pursuit of endless growth, self-interest, reactionary problem solving behind and embracing collective prosperity, social justice, systems thinking. Most of all, it needs a common understanding that wellbeing is only real and sustainable when it’s accessible by everyone.
To get there, though, we have to see an effort on every level. Governments must move away from GDP as a value creation measurement, and make real progress towards the goals like better education, protecting the environment, and reducing economic inequality. Businesses and investors need to rethink how they invest, adopt the bigger picture perspective and understand how they contribute to the positive outcomes for society and the planet. The road towards a wellbeing economy is long but walkable and undoubtedly worth it.
Why the good society needs a wellbeing economy
🕊 Social economy reimagined
Social economy has traditionally been viewed as a device to tackle market failures, such as economic inequality or the lack of adequate response to homelessness. However, in the last decades, our understanding of social economy has shifted — we began to recognize and value its role in promoting a sustainable and social transformation. Instead of a tool to assist the market and state, it’s now becoming an alternative approach to structuring the economy and society.
In parallel with the broadened understanding of the purpose social economy holds, systems thinking has gained popularity in recent years as a way for organizations to facilitate social change. As an instrument to shape society by creating a long-lasting and profound impact, systems thinking is most effective when individuals take a large-scale approach, use contextual knowledge and direct their effort to pull big levers of social change. While this is helpful, it’s just as important for the social economy to develop indirect solutions which are not always obvious.
The goal of social economy is not only to deliver the necessary improvement to the society but also to act as a model for others to follow by creating collaborative innovation processes and promoting principles rooted in community and solidarity — its two main components. Its full potential can only be realized when organizations and companies, both state and private, are able to form partnerships. These partnerships are essential to mainstream innovative practices — while social economy organizations are often the first to drive social innovation, they can benefit greatly from the resources of the companies as well as policy power and political legitimacy provided by the state organizations.
These are the trends that are currently shaping the social economy as it increasingly gains power and following worldwide as a result of the global systems seeking to reinvent themselves and adopt purpose as a driving force. We’re thrilled to see this happening and hope to move forward with this concept to shape a better world and build a more resilient society.
Reconceptualizing the Social Economy
📎 Ambition won’t get us far — better working conditions might
At this point, many have heard the story of Naomi Osaka, the world’s second-ranked women’s tennis player, who, after being fined $15 000 and threatened to lose her place in the French Open, decided to prioritize her mental wellbeing and withdraw from the tournament. But behind this story lies a broader phenomenon that’s been gaining an increasing following — workers in both public and private sectors choosing their wellbeing and personal boundaries over career ambitions. This didn’t emerge out of nowhere but is rather a result of a long-standing problem that is our workplaces.
A countless number of people have experienced burnout and languishing since the beginning of the pandemic. Ours is a society that values individual achievement, ambition and profit over everything else. Women have often been sold the illusion that ambition is the foundation of the path towards empowerment and workplace equity. Yet, in reality, women across the lines of class, race, and profession have been the ones bearing the burden of unpaid chores and emotional labor at home and at work. It has been a problem since long before the pandemic, and it’s the Black and Latin American women that have been affected the most.
Now people are becoming disillusioned, and those who are in the position to do so are reconsidering whether the work demands and conditions are in line with their priorities and morale. With employees demanding a business-as-usual performance without any regard to employee wellbeing and billionaire bosses becoming richer by the minute, the answer to this dilemma comes easy. Our relationship with work is broken, and endless ambition will not fix it — collective action is the only lasting solution. Be it unions raising wages and workplace conditions or people in positions like that of Naomi Osaka refusing to buckle under the employer’s demands at the expense of their wellbeing — people are standing together and choosing survival in this modern life, calling on the need for change.
We’re Finally Starting to Revolt Against the Cult of Ambition
🌳 ESG is missing a letter: R for resilience
After the Earth Day Climate Summit last month, the Biden administration has refocused its attention on tackling the urgent challenge of climate change. Among the topics brought up at the summit was the role of financial markets in combating this crisis. A lot of it comes down to ESG investments — investments using the metrics that analyze environmental, social and governance factors determining the potential for positive impact. With more focus on the power of investment to create a lasting positive change, the use of ESG frameworks is likely to increase. But is this framework sufficient to evaluate and achieve the impact that is expected?
The ESG measurement as it is now is far from perfect. The environmental measurement evaluates factors like carbon footprint and waste management, yet it fails to consider a company’s exposure to climate-change disasters and future challenges. The social measurement misses the business risk that is lack of employee wellbeing. With a year we’ve faced, it’s clear that the framework needs to account for these gaps. It doesn’t just need more uniformity, rigor and breadth — it needs to account for businesses’ resilience.
Besides tools like City Resilience Index, which is developed with the resilience of cities in mind, to be able to account for it more accurately, companies can use data that is collected in real-time by new intelligence-based technologies and satellite imagery. It’s also essential to upgrade the expertise of both investor and business governing boards and develop industry stewardship standards that can guide them. Only when that is achieved, and companies and investors alike can make resilience a consistent part of their ESG frameworks will we be able to tackle the challenges we are facing right now and prepare for the crises yet to come.
ESG is missing a metric: R for resilience
🚀 Bringing our activism to work
The year of 2020 has made us more aware than ever of the systematic injustice, inequality, violence and prejudice that people around us experience on a daily basis. Many of us feel that it’s wrong and feel compelled to do something about it, but we still dedicate most of our waking hours to our jobs, leaving us little energy and quite some uncertainty about where to start our fight for social justice. The good news is that we can seek ways to bring this spirit of activism into our work and daily interactions — the tactic known as “job purposing.”
It involves adjusting the way we work so that we can incorporate social purpose and meaningful contributions to social causes during the workday. It’s something that workers on every level can engage in — be it by making sure that the thoughts of everyone are heard, adopting an active anti-discriminatory policy in conversations, or ensuring that minority members constitute at least a portion of the company’s suppliers. We can also leverage our positions to support social causes outside of our organizations by partnering with non-profits, learning to offer our clients a response that’s most helpful for their situation, or doing small acts of kindness for the clients in difficult situations.
There are many benefits to be gained from job purposing. It’s known to boost job satisfaction and performance, evidenced by so many studies that the researchers reviewing the evidence concluded the relationship between the two to be indisputable. It also makes us calmer, healthier and happier. Pursuing social purpose affects our brains in many ways, from lowering the negative health impact of stress to activating the area responsible for producing pleasure. Finally, at the end of the workday, we can be confident that we helped the people within our own organization and made a positive change, however small, on the societal level. And this one is the best benefit of them all.
Why Your Values Belong at Work
In Closing
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Gabija works as a Marketing & Communications Coordinator at Masawa. She lets her vision of a more just, sustainable, equitable world guide Masawa’s story and inform the work towards transforming global mental wellness to make it accessible and accepted.
