Connecting to Purpose
Connection in the workplace builds purpose-driven businesses. Most of us spend the majority of our waking hours working, and feeling connected provides motivation, fosters collaboration, and helps achieve collective goals. Interconnected teams seamlessly share ideas, information, and expertise. This open exchange enhances overall productivity, as individuals leverage each other’s strengths and address weaknesses collectively.
Cultivating connection and community in the workplace makes us happier, healthier, and more productive. A 2019 report by The Institute of Leadership and Management found that building close relationships with colleagues was the most important factor in determining job satisfaction, leading to a more positive and supportive work environment. Beyond operational efficiency, interconnectedness promotes a sense of unity and shared purpose.
As 2023 comes to a close, we asked our portfolio companies, our “Builders,” and our team to reflect on how they feel connected to purpose at work. Their responses demonstrate how the connections with colleagues, family, community, and our environment motivates our collective work and delivers positive impact. We are honored to be working together to build a better world.
Barbara Montero, Chief Growth Officer, Acelero Learning & Shine Early Learning
As a mother of three children, I find myself exhausted by the constant chatter about “consequences.” Opting for screens over homework may result in lower grades, leading to reduced (or zero) screen-time — an unfortunately common refrain in our home.
Conversely, as a leader in our organization, I relish discussions about consequences, more commonly referred to as impact. When we invest in the early care and education of historically marginalized communities, the outcomes are quantifiable (4–9x ROI). With every step, word, and expression, interconnection embodies boundless consequences — positive, neutral, and detrimental.
A practice we’ve ingrained in our organization for nearly two decades is to start meetings by celebrating ripples. The concept is drawn from RFK’s 1966 Day of Affirmation Address: “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.” Acknowledging the contributions of our teams — both monumental and petite — reinforces our interconnectivity and grounds us in our humanity.
I’m grateful for the pause to think about interconnectivity: I recently turned to my oldest and simply said, “Just be a good human, because that’s what the world needs.”
Ben Healey, Chief Financial Officer & Lauren Williams-Elstein, VP Channel Development, PosiGen
In reflecting back on the last year in our work and our world, we immediately think of what we see in the news everyday — the disastrous effects of climate change that are increasingly becoming our reality. For Ben, what stands out is the day I had to pick up my baby from daycare basically wrapped in a plastic bubble due to wildfire smoke. More broadly, 2023 was a year where it became undeniably clear how climate change is affecting the world’s most vulnerable populations — those people who also have the fewest resources to adapt or to obtain systems for resilience, who live on tight budgets and often paycheck to paycheck. As Lauren reflects daily, at PosiGen we are choosing the harder path of aiming to advance two critical missions — that is, fighting climate change, yes, but with a solution that also helps underserved households put food on the table and buy shoes for their kids. We can’t think of much greater meaning than that.
Jamie Horst, Chief Purpose Officer, Traditional Medicinals
Traditional Medicinals’ purpose is to inspire active connection to plant wisdom in service of people and planet. Nurturing interconnection between people and plants is what we do through our business, our supply partnerships, our interactions with colleagues and our consumers every day.
One relatively small, but incredibly meaningful, initiative is the medicinal plant garden we cultivate at our production facility in Sebastopol, CA. Our vision for the garden is to offer herbal education opportunities for employees and the community and to create a connection between products on the shelf, in the lab, and in the soil. The garden provides a local source of herbs for employees and a beautiful space to host community events and nonprofit partnership events.
We have certified our garden as part of the Botanical Sanctuary Network, and as a Certified Wildlife Habitat so that it can promote biodiversity and a healthy ecosystem, and as a demonstration of our commitment to conservation and sustainability. This year, a resident fox has become a near-mascot at the facility!
In 2023 we increased the number of employee volunteer events in the garden, offering everyone a chance to get their hands dirty planting, weeding and building support structures for climbing plants. Our care for the land has extended to our neighborhood, where we have begun monthly neighborhood clean-ups to ensure the trailways and roadsides allow our native habitat to shine.
We are proud to be a continually growing business, creating a positive impact on the lives of people around the world. Sitting quietly with a cup of tea in a medicinal garden full of magic is the perfect location to contemplate the truth that we are all needed, and in just the right place at the right time.
Ann MacDougall, Builders Investment Committee
Part of my work these days is impact investing and strategic philanthropy. Whether my investments are in the circular economy, clean energy, women/POC-led businesses, tackling depression in Africa or narrative for change, I have the privilege of working with passionate, brilliant people bringing positive change to people and the planet.
Often I am a “beginner” in the space where these people work and I have the privilege of learning in their orbit. Often I am inspired by their vision as well as by their dogged tenacity. And often, nearly always, this work reminds me of our interconnectedness in the world. And that the success and survival of humanity depends on us all.
Tripp Baird, Founder and Managing Partner, The Builders Fund:
In a world literally and figuratively on fire, dominated by transactional relationships, consumption by sound bite, and a constant barrage of noise without signal, our work is ultimately all about connection — or perhaps I should say “re-connection.” The financial systems that dominate our social contract have long become disconnected from the systems of the biosphere, and the impact of that disassociation is everywhere around us — inequality, climate change-fueled natural disasters, political polarization, violence. These social and environmental problems are symptoms, not root causes. The underlying issue we ultimately face is our disconnection — from each other and from the systems of the planet, rooted within the faults in our perception and understanding of reality.
Builders’ purpose is deeply grounded in representing a re-connected approach to corporate governance, investing, and company building — one that recognizes our interconnectedness and interdependence, one that respects and serves humanity above the false icon of extraction for shareholder profit above all else. As I reflect on our work this year I am energized and inspired by the work of our partner companies in their respective mission-driven organizations, by the shared purpose of our co-workers in this endeavor, and by the work of our peers in the impact investing community. As good old “Mr.” Fred Rogers once told a younger version of myself, “look for the helpers” when times are dark. They are all around us. For that I am grateful and holding space for our interconnection.
