We’re Always Stronger Together, Louder Than Words, The B Corp Festival 2024

Article by Loux Rutherford, Community Manager at People's Mission Hall.

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Who are B Lab UK?

B Lab UK was founded in 2015, to support the growth of the B Corp Movement, a community of businesses committed to using business as a force for good. We are so extremely proud to have B Lab UK as one of the founding members of our community and take great pride in being a part of their community too, we’ve been a certified B Corp since 2021. 

They’re pretty special to us…

They joined us when we opened our doors in 2019, at People’s Mission Hall, they were a team of 5 and there were under 500 B Corps in the UK. You can imagine how it felt, for us, when we arrived in Oxford and made our way to the beautiful New Theatre, full of 1300 people, some of whom working for one of over 2,000 B Corps now in the UK, or curious about the movement in some way. It’s been pretty amazing to have been able to play just a small part in that growth. 

‍What did the festival entail?

The morning was about setting the scene.

After a moving display of spoken word and BMX action, we heard from Char Love (co-founder of B Lab UK) and Chris Turner (Executive Director of B Lab UK). They spoke to three key pillars of the Community: Impact, a yearning to create it, Ambition, a desire to fuel the journey to shifting our global economy from a system that profits few to one that benefits all and Collaboration, striving to do all of the above, together.

As Char Love so beautifully put it ‘Problems in this world are connected, which means we must be too’.

Ambition stuck with me as an important takeaway, that as a community, we must all share the ambition to truly transform the global economy. Legislative change plays a key role in this, it was extremely refreshing to hear about B Lab’s ambition to mobilise more of the community to sign The Better Business act, which you can read more about here: https://betterbusinessact.org/

The true takeaway, for me, was the sentiment that we can go further and faster if we go together. It too, is extremely important that we have equity in our decision making, a diverse set of voices at the table is paramount and important for driving us forward, meaningfully. 

Being a B Corp is a commitment to being better, none of us have all the answers or solutions but we’re part of a community committed to figuring it out, together.

‘Desire is a powerful force’ - Mary Portas OBE 

We, as humans, ‘are beautifully nuanced and contradictory’ Mary Portas tells us before she revealed that ‘65% of us want to buy from sustainable brands, 25% of us actually do’. 

Why is this? We are driven by desire, Portas told us. There are some brands that manage to encapsulate the desire that we all so seek, masking their entirely capitalistic values and poor practices, but seem to capture this sense of desire to such a degree that we allow all of this to go unnoticed. 

‘People’s desire for beauty is deeply rooted in their biology and more so, their psychology’.‍

So what’s the answer? Using desire to drive buying better, Portas believes, alchemising desire and trust and building brands with doing good at their core, but that also fuse together beauty, truth, harmony and balance. 

If we are then able to use desire to drive buying better, can we in the same breath drive under consumption? Maybe so, it certainly rang true with me that desire will forever be a driver for so many of us, maybe it is truly the single most powerful driver? 

Portas doted over brands such as ‘Who Gives A Crap’ who really do epitomise all of the above. They give us all the desire we want, plus the fun, whilst in the knowledge that we are truly doing some good in the process. 

The overwhelming takeaway from Portas’ truly enlightening and masterfully crafted speech for me was that capitalism is deeply embedded within us, the affinity to beautiful things even more so. 

With this, if we seek to create maximum impact, we must appeal to the masses, we must capture desire in ways that brands have done for decades to line their own pockets and those of their shareholders. 

This is why there are such negative connotations attached to desire, because it has forever encapsulated corporate greed. However, with brands that exist to benefit people and planet as well as generate profit, perhaps this can be leveraged for good.

Portas so importantly left us with the reminder that to make real change we have to leave the B Corp bubble and 'go out to the world and show what betterment means.'

We spent the remainder of the 1 of 2 days at a variety of different fringe events scattered around Oxford, there were 40 across the city, ran by a number of different pioneering B Corps doing things differently.

Olly enjoyed digging into the detail at a debate centered around flexible working, Jo took off her marketing hat and delved into ethical finance (next Mission Lit Zine incoming) and Loux was engrossed in a workshop around nurturing conflict in communities. 

Final thoughts?

Louder Than Words was about taking action, and leveraging the power of community to ignite collective community action, we’ve never been prouder to be a part of that community.

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