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ESG Next: An Interview With Seventh Generation’s Alison Whritenour

Posted on April 20, 2023May 21, 2026Greg Behrman

At a moment of unprecedented attention, investment, and opportunity for the emerging field of ESG, leaders are asking: Who is best preparing their organization for the society of the future? Who is innovating today to meet decades-long environmental and social goals? Who is setting standards that catalyze their industry’s change for the better? Who is defining what bold and aspirational look like — and how best to advance that work in practice?

Enter NationSwell’s ESG Next, an exemplary group of investors, executives, authors, philanthropists, social sector leaders, academics, and field builders who are helping to shape business as a force for social and environmental progress, advancing — and even pioneering — the most forward-thinking and effective programs, initiatives, technologies, methodologies, practices, and approaches.

For this installment, NationSwell interviewed Alison Whritenour, Chief Executive Officer at Seventh Generation, about her journey from traditional marketing to corporate social responsibility, her concerns about this moment in ESG, and how her hope that Seventh Generation’s new approach to CSR reporting will provide the blueprint for its future.

Greg Behrman, CEO + Founder, NationSwell: How did your personal and professional journey to the ﬁeld of ESG begin?

Alison Whritenour, CEO, Seventh Generation: My career kicked off in traditional consumer packaged goods fashion at Colgate-Palmolive. It’s a wonderful company, and I learned tremendously, but during that time, I realized that many of the things I was interested in weren’t being addressed from a brand and product perspective. At the time, sustainability wasn’t really a hot topic yet, but it was undeniably where all my passions lay. I was thinking about things like non-toxicity, having fewer chemicals, how a product’s ingredients interact with human health.

Following those interests gave me my way in: I started exploring how I could apply my passion for brand management to companies I personally believed in and used in my own life. On a whim, I applied through a LinkedIn post to Seventh Generation, which I hadn’t heard much about. They were in Vermont — far from home.

Seventh Generation invited me to come up for an interview, so I went. I spent a day at the office I now work in, and I met incredible people who are, at their core, genuinely interested in changing the world and in thinking about doing business differently.

I was applying for a junior level in the organization, so it was a significant decision to take the job considering I’d be moving my whole family to Vermont. But I was inspired by the idea that business could be done differently from what I’d learned in school — from even what I’d seen at a large company. So I thought, “Why not take this chance? I can always go back.”

People often talk about gut instinct, and I tend to rely on it. That’s how I entered this field. It’s funny because people now ask how I got into ESG or CSR. I tell them, “I didn’t!” And that’s the truth. I just loved the company and what it stood for. Along the way, I’ve learned a lot about what those concepts actually mean and the impact they can have, but a lot of it wasn’t formalized when I started in this space more than 10 years ago. It was genuine interest that led me to this work, and it’s really been what’s driving me ever since.

Behrman, NationSwell: How do you define this moment in ESG?

Whritenour, Seventh Generation: This stage concerns me. We’ve seen many companies adopt ambitious goals, and communicate them to the world. But then what happens to those amazing goals? They shift, they get scaled back, or they just don’t materialize. I’m not seeing the accountability that we need to make sure that business is going to be a driving force in solving the environmental challenges of our time. This is the most urgent moment for our environment, and the combination of big goals not materializing and very real challenges facing business leaders and consumers is a collision that’s really getting in the way of impact and action.

I hope that a company like Seventh Generation can continue to be a great proof point that sustainable practices are possible despite various circumstances. We aren’t a huge company, but what we can do is really influence and punch above our weight class. And that’s really where we see the magic is helping move the big guys along who are going to have the most impact.

Behrman, NationSwell: What are some initiatives you and your team are driving at Seventh Generation that you think are noteworthy or that show promising signs of advancing the field?

Whritenour, Seventh Generation: There’s often a misconception that sustainability or corporate social responsibility (CSR) occurs in isolated environments. I have the privilege of running a company that was essentially founded on the idea of CSR. We have a genuine mission to transform the world into a healthier, more sustainable, and equitable place, and this guides all of our decisions. We have a rigorous set of product standards and practice radical transparency both internally and externally.

We are a B Corp, and all of those things were here before I got here, before many of us got here. It’s in the DNA of the company to really serve as an example of what happens when CSR isn’t a standalone concept or an afterthought, but when the business itself is actually born from the idea of doing more than just delivering profit to shareholders, but truly standing for people, planet, and profitability. That’s how we run the company, that’s how my predecessors ran the company, and that’s how I’ve inherited the role.

It’s a really important part of how this works because when I think about sustainability teams or CSR teams in bigger organizations, I think they’re often just considered around big decisions — you get their inputs, maybe you consider them, maybe you don’t, and then you just do what you were going to do already.

But at Seventh Generation, our chief impact officer, the leader of our corporate consciousness — which represents advocacy and sustainability — sits on our leadership team. It’s a powerful reminder that you can’t make the easy decision.

One key approach that sets us apart is the way we think about storytelling: We need everyone to understand the sustainability of our products the same way that they would understand the science of our products or what products claim to do. So for our marketers, your job is to innovate sustainability forward, all while finding a way to continue to hold our product standards as you do that. And that’s true across every function, but it really becomes the ethos for how these really hard decisions are made because there’s no shortcuts here. It’s all of our jobs.

In 2022, we came out with what we’re calling our Fingerprints report, which is truly the next generation of CSR reporting. We did our first CSR reporting in 2004, and we were one of the only companies to really do that at the time, so we’ve been in this for a while, and we’ve inspired a lot of Fortune 500 companies to do the same. But this year, we were really grappling with the question of what does the future of CSR reporting, of work like the work we’re leading, actually look like?

It led our team down a path of not just looking at your carbon footprint, because this really is about everything we touch. The thesis around Fingerprints is that you really follow the impact of everything you touch, not just what you create. The most tangible examples being the investments you make, the services that you invest in, where you do your banking and where banks are investing your money.

Success for us looks like one other industry partner doing this, because if they do this, it can cement this approach as the reporting of the future.

Behrman, NationSwell: To which leadership practices do you most attribute your success?

Whritenour, Seventh Generation: A few things come to mind. First, I genuinely believe in what I do. I really give a shit, and am committed to leading this company to the next milestone. If we get there, we can be a successful business model that shows the whole world that this is possible. I am purposeful in making sure I show up every day with this ethos in mind.

Second, I take the role of being an empathetic leader very seriously, and there’s power in that. If you understand where you are, then you can understand where your team and where your consumers are, and you can address their needs and concerns as though they’re your own. This human connection is critical to the work we do.

Behrman, NationSwell: Who are some leaders in the field you admire, and who inspires you on a regular basis?

Whritenour, Seventh Generation: It’s funny you should ask me that question because I’ve been asking that question to others since I came into this job. To be honest with you, I don’t know how many people are out there doing roles exactly like mine. I’m someone who deeply values female leadership, and for me, other women doing this work and leading this work are where I find most of my inspiration. That’s been a sweet spot for me: Finding other women in the climate movement who are also willing to stand up and lead a company in that direction.

Jenna Johnson, President of Patagonia, is one of these women. As a fellow leader in the space, she’s someone out there living the operational complexity of running incredible legacy businesses that stand for so much. She’s a true champion of not only the vision for driving sustainability forward, or in Patagonia’s case, raising the bar, but also what it takes from an operating model, financial delivery, and ensuring employee well-being. I take a lot of notes from her, especially regarding the challenges she’s wrangling these days.

Winona LaDuke joined one of our community conversations, and if you don’t know Winona, she is an Indigenous frontline community member and the executive director of Honor the Earth. She’s a total badass who doesn’t hesitate to tell people what they need to do to protect the sacred land she deeply believes in. I think the radical energy she brings to conversations is amazing, and she and her tribal partners represent a remarkable commitment to being true stewards of the environment and land around them. I’ve continued to watch her.

I always follow what The Sunrise Project is up to. I think the voices of the youth right now are crucial. I’m focused on what the next generation is calling for, and their willingness to take action gives me a lot of inspiration. I tend to follow their work and actions because they’re articulating what’s needed so well right now.

I’ve also been finding inspiration from podcasts — and one I’ve been following is Michael Gervais’s Finding Mastery. As a sports psychologist, he interviews people about how they become experts in their fields from a leadership perspective, physical perspective, and mental standpoint. Although I know nothing about sports, listening to this podcast has been enlightening and has provided me with some out-of-the-box applications for myself.

To learn more about how our ESG Next honorees are shaping business as a force for social and environmental good, visit the series hub.

ESG Next: An Interview With Nike’s Caitlin Morris

Posted on April 20, 2023May 21, 2026 by Greg Behrman

For this installment, NationSwell interviewed Caitlin Morris, Vice President of Social + Community Impact at Nike, about this moment in ESG, the intertwining of people and planet, and the unique power of measurement not to gauge impact, but actually facilitate it.

Greg Behrman, CEO + Founder, NationSwell: How did your personal and professional journey to the field of ESG begin?

Caitlin Morris, Vice President, Social + Community Impact, Nike: My journey to this field began almost by accident. I graduated from the University of Virginia during a recession, and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do next. I went to Hungary to teach English my first year out of school.

My second year there, I worked for a consulting firm as the only native English speaker in the office, where I had some high-profile accounts. I specifically recall my secretary saving all her money to buy a pair of Levi’s, highlighting the power of American business as a force for good. But like any situation where you think you’re giving something, you get more than you give. I learned a lot from Hungarians about a diversity of worldviews, and about not taking things for granted.

After returning to the U.S. from Hungary, I worked at a consulting firm focused on capital markets development. I was drawn to the idea that we could make a difference by changing government structures to be more open and democratic through capitalism. My path was set early on, and it would eventually lead me to Nike.

I joined Nike because of their first Community Impact report — it wasn’t because of Michael Jordan or any great sports moments, but because of the innovation they were driving around corporate responsibility.

Behrman, NationSwell: How do you define this moment in ESG?

Morris, Nike: I don’t really think ESG is a framework. It’s more of a collection of letters that roll nicely off the tongue. But the environmental piece of ESG is critically important, and at the same time, it often gets elevated over social without people recognizing the strong intersectionality between the two.

I don’t disagree that we need sharp measurement on environmental factors, but people and the planet are two intertwined issues. If you don’t solve poverty and other challenges that communities are facing in their daily lives, we’re going to continue to make decisions that aren’t good for the planet. My team sits in social and community impact, so we lead with the people piece. That doesn’t mean we don’t see the intersectionality with the environment. It’s part of why we launched the Community Climate Resilience Fund, where we’re directly investing in intersectionality with the Trust for Public Land.

My team has never been in more demand from the brand. Community used to be a “nice to have”; now it’s “table stakes” for companies. As you look at the Edelman Trust Barometer, consumers expect companies to solve problems more than they expect governments to. So, we have to have a clear point of view on which issues we take a stand on and how we’re addressing them. I feel proud that we have a team that can stick with long-term change around physical activity and supporting leaders who are working to address social justice issues.

This moment in ESG brings so much excitement, but that excitement also brings challenges. Everyone grew up in a community, so the passion for thinking about the community component of social factors can feel quite outsized. That passion comes from an authentic and honest place, but it can be noisy, and the noise makes it difficult to maintain focus on the strategy, all while giving it enough space to

constantly evolve and emerge. The challenge is to balance the desire to keep people focused and to be flexible and responsive to current issues.

Behrman, NationSwell: What are some initiatives you and your team are driving at Nike that you think are noteworthy, or that show promising signs of advancing the field?

Morris, Nike: Nike has a mission, vision, and purpose — and the purpose part is relatively new for the company. This guiding principle has made our work central to the company’s operations, which is exciting.

One of our most important initiatives began with a big framework: believing the world needed to understand the global cost of inactivity. We created Designed to Move, an advocacy play that we hoped would catalyze a movement around physical activity. For Designed to Move, the theory of change is supported by science. We collaborated with scientists to understand the various benefits that come from sports, and we learned that it’s a uniquely efficient investment — it pretty singularly combines physical literacy, emotional intelligence, and cognitive function. As the nexus of all of those things, it has been undervalued.

So, for Designed to Move, our theory of change had two key focuses: one is integrating physical activity back into everyday life, the second is providing kids with early positive experiences in sports and play.

At an individual level, it’s crucial to give children the ability, confidence, and desire to be active, as this sets them up for a lifetime of activity. The cycle is intergenerational — inactive adults are two times more likely to have inactive children. When we provide kids with positive early experiences in sports and play, they continue engaging in these activities. We began with a high-level macro approach, and then shifted to more programmatic work, testing innovations on the ground to gather proof points and inspirational stories.

Another initiative I’d like to spotlight is the Nike Community Ambassador Program. This initiative excites me because it demonstrates the power of measurement and using the company’s full resources. The program involves training retail athletes to be coaches in local community organizations. What I love about this is that it was driven by insight. For instance, in Seattle, a group of Nike retailers were volunteering

at a school when the PE teacher left them in charge of 50 kids, assuming they could handle a PE class since they were associated with Nike.

This experience highlighted the need for our teams to be better equipped as coaches in the field. The program began as a way to rally teams around the cause of getting kids active and walking our talk. We believe that quality trained coaches are critical to a child’s experience, so we can’t have untrained employees volunteering. What we didn’t expect was the incredible impact this program had on the employees and their connection to the brand. Some Nike employees may have grown up in the local Boys and Girls Club and now are returning to volunteer at a place that was meaningful to them. Others might have a master’s degree in sports science and are working retail because it was the available job.

These employees didn’t necessarily see a future for themselves in retail, but now they’re able to use their knowledge and apply it in the community. This has unlocked a different reaction regarding their longevity with the brand. The program allows us to test our coaching materials, authentically engage with communities on a larger scale, and drive an employee engagement strategy that delivers returns to the brand.

Behrman, NationSwell: How are you measuring and evaluating the success of your initiatives?

Morris, Nike: Nike’s power lies in innovation and inspiration, and when we are at our best, we utilize the full power of the brand along with my team’s work on the ground. About seven years ago, we transitioned from a separate mission-based team to the company’s philanthropy center. As the company’s budget grew, so did ours, allowing us to do some exciting things.

We’ve invested in digital tools for scaling our reach, providing resources such as coaching guides and inclusive coaching tools. We adopted a collective impact approach, focusing on local partnerships and place-based investment. This enables us to align our efforts on a city or neighborhood level and measure the impact of our work. I do think that this power of partnership at a local level is absolutely profound: You can’t get scale without first making a hyperlocal impact and measuring it properly.

Speaking of measurement, our increased budget gives us more tools to better measure our efficacy, ensuring our work is genuinely effective. With a smaller budget, you want to spend all your money doing good work. As your budget grows, you can be more honest about assessing your performance and asking, “Well, we’re doing it, but is it really working?”

Effectively measuring our progress is new territory for us. We’ve been good at selling inspirational concepts and catalyzing movements, and now we’re prioritizing holding ourselves accountable by leveraging both internal and external tools to measure our reach.

We’re also getting granular with measurement, even measuring the effectiveness of our tools. We’ve historically built things in partnership with experts and gained insights from users, and now we have experts examining how well our tools are being used.

Behrman, NationSwell: To which leadership practices do you most attribute your success?

Morris, Nike: Stakeholder engagement has been the connecting thread of my career. I make a dedicated effort to actively listen. Great leaders are excellent communicators, and communication starts with listening. That, for me, is probably my connecting thread and belief. People often ask why I stay at Nike. I stay because of our commitment to innovation and the people. I am fortunate to lead and partner with a team of 70 incredibly intelligent individuals, and my job as a leader is to be a multiplier for them, helping them do their best work.

Behrman, NationSwell: Who are some leaders who inspire your work?

Morris, Nike: My first choice is Shelly Omilade Bell, founder of Black Girl Ventures. Shelly is entrepreneurial, creative, and authentic in everything she does. She radiates energy and possesses the wisdom to lead her organization forward while recognizing that her role may need to change over time. It is not easy for founders to do this, and she is doing it brilliantly.

Charlie Brown, CEO of Context Partners, also comes to mind. I’ve known Charlie for a long time and admire his work, starting at Ashoka, where the power lies in believing in individual game-changers. Charlie’s philosophy centers on the idea that no one achieves success on their own — we always do it in a community. I have learned a lot from Charlie, who has not been afraid to reinvent himself. As someone who has been consistent in my career, I am always impressed by people who take risks and change things up.

Last but not least, there’s Maria Bobenrieth, CEO of Women Win. What I love about Maria is her constant joy. She has a saying, “Don’t get angry, get curious.” She leads with joy and innovation, changing how we support women and girls through sport. We have collaborated on our first participatory grant-making initiative outside of our employees: the ONSIDE Fund, funded by us and Puma. While there has been good collaboration on the labor rights side, there has been less collaboration on community impact. The Onside Fund and the participatory grant-making initiative, as well as the ability to co-fund with others in the industry, are fascinating.

Alongside those leaders, I’ve also become a big podcast fan. I keep going back to “No Off Season,” a Nike podcast that features Megan Bartlett from the Center for Healing and Justice through Sport. I highly recommend it.

To learn more about how our ESG Next honorees are shaping business as a force for social and environmental good, visit the series hub. Nike is a NationSwell Institutional Member. To learn more about membership in NationSwell’s community of leading social impact and sustainability practitioners, visit our site.

NationSwell Collaboratives: Making the Case for Childcare

Posted on March 8, 2023May 22, 2026 by Anthony Smith

NationSwell Collaboratives are a vehicle for bringing together committed actors to push towards collective action on a specific issue. Anthony Smith, NationSwell V.P. of Editorial, spoke to Uyen Tieu, NationSwell President, Amy Lee, NationSwell Chief Strategy Officer, Allie Mahler, NationSwell Senior Strategy Director, and Austen Zoutewelle, NationSwell Associate Director of Strategy, about the Case for Childcare Collaborative, a cross-sector coalition working to solve our nation’s crisis of childcare and help 1.1 million women return to a better workplace than the one they left at the outset of the pandemic.

Anthony Smith, NationSwell V.P. of Editorial: Why should leaders make the case for childcare?

Uyen Tieu, NationSwell President: The moment for leaders to make the case for childcare has been such a long time coming. This isn’t a new conversation in America, but it’s one that till this point had been led largely by women, experts, and activists. It took the wide scale disruption of the pandemic to get us to where we are now, where it’s now as clear for men — especially fathers — as it has been for us. We have to take advantage of this moment.

NationSwell: How did the work begin?

Amy Lee, NationSwell Chief Strategy Officer: Our first step was to recognize the mass exodus of women that left the workplace during the pandemic. At the beginning of the Covid era, 2 million women left the workforce; 1.1 million still have not returned. Their reasons aren’t just because of the tangible realities of school shutdowns and the lack of childcare — they’re about societal norms around which parent is chiefly responsible for caregiving.

One of our Studio partners told us, “We really want to work with you to tackle the problems that working womxn* and caregiving womxn are facing,” and that’s really how our Collaborative was born — out of the idea that we didn’t just want to help these women get back to work, we want to build the structures that allow women to actually thrive at work once they return.

Allie Mahler, NationSwell Senior Strategy Director: Collaboratives are all about building coalitions of committed actors for scaled, collective action. We have an incredible group of partners that have coalesced around this Collaborative initiative: American Family Insurance, Annie E. Casey Foundation, Caring Across Generations, National Domestic Workers Alliance, Working for Women, and others. It’s a powerhouse group who each bring unique expertise, funding, programming, organizing capabilities, and community to the table. I have no doubt this group will move mountains when it comes to helping businesses support low wage workers and the caregiving economy.

NationSwell: What are some of the challenges facing working caregivers in this country?

Austen Zoutewelle, NationSwell Associate Director, Strategy: Given what we know about economic disruption, it’s unsurprising that the women who are most affected by the lack of childcare in this country are women without a college degree, women of color, and small business owners.

But one big learning for us is that the care industry — not only for early childhood education, but also for eldercare — is predominantly run by women. So not only are working mothers being affected by this disruption, but working mothers within the industry of care are also affected — even as we expect them to be at the frontlines of this crisis. Not only does that lead to fewer workers, it leads to fewer options for daycare and childcare.

NationSwell: What advantages does the Collaborative model provide in tackling this challenge?

Lee: Philanthropy and corporate social responsibility functions are evolving at a rapid pace. Legacy models have been focused on a personal or organization-specific mission, but the new generation of leaders in this space have embraced the idea that these issues — whether it’s climate change or childcare — are too large to be solved by one person, or one family foundation, or one organization alone. We have to work together. And at the same time, we need to provide funders with a way to see what their peers are doing so that we don’t support redundant work.

Collaboratives allow us to do exactly that — we bring funders and committed actors together to deepen and broaden their impact. We allow them to look across the space and really identify where there are unmet needs. And it also allows them to work together with partners that may not organically be at the same table without our support.

Tieu: One of our partners said it the best: This time can be different because the table is different. NationSwell approaches this work with the nuanced understanding that the players need to work towards something that can last.

NationSwell: How is the case for childcare personal to you?

Tieu: I’m a mom, I’m a daughter, I’m a woman, and I’m a business leader. If we’re to compete without actually addressing the urgent need for childcare, there’s going to be a knock-on effect across every aspect of society. The problem is too urgent to rely only on federal policy change. If committed actors come together now to co-create the roadmap, we can turn the case for childcare into a reality.

Zoutewelle: I watched my mom balance raising three kids and working full-time when I was in high school. She still manages caring for my brother with Down syndrome while working full-time. I’ve seen first hand the urgency of this issue, the importance of flexible working arrangements, the necessity of public policy to support parents, and the need for collaborative, systemic strategies for making an impact. The urgency is even greater for women of color in low-wage industries. It’s important to me to elevate this work so that more women can participate in the economy and feel supported as a parent. It’s critical for our moms and the future generations.

Mahler: This work is incredibly personal to me. I just returned back to work at NationSwell as a mom of two young babies under two years old while also leading our Strategy team. I love what I get to do at work, and I love my daughters, but it is not only mentally and physically taxing on a daily basis but also financially taxing to coordinate care for my children. During my maternity leave, I thought daily about how fortunate I was to have the time to connect with my daughters, and how so many women and their families are taken too soon from their babies as they go back to work at 6 or 8 weeks post-delivery. That’s why this work inspires me and lights a fire for me.

Lee: I am a privileged white woman, but nonetheless the pandemic showed me how hard it is to be a working parent. My children were one and three years old when the pandemic started, and my husband and I were suddenly thrust into full-time childcare and a full-time job at a time of huge uncertainty and fear. We were only just able to make it work and that was with the benefit of being able to work remotely and having a flexible, empathetic employer. I can’t even imagine how hard it must have been for people working shifts, or people from single parent families.

For more information on Collaboratives, visit our site.

Editor’s Note: To exercise intersectionality and inclusion, one member of our collaborative uses the spelling “womxn” whereas other members use the traditional spelling, “women.” You can learn more about “womxn” and other forms of intentional, lexical inclusion at the Womxn’s Center for Success.

ESG Next: An Interview With Prudential’s Lata Reddy

Posted on February 10, 2023May 21, 2026 by Greg Behrman

At a moment of unprecedented attention, investment and opportunity for the emerging field of ESG, leaders are asking: Who is best preparing their organization for the society of the future? Who is innovating today to meet decades-long environmental and social goals? Who is setting standards that catalyze their industry’s change for the better? Who is defining what bold and aspirational look like — and how best to advance that work in practice?

For this installment, NationSwell interviewed Lata Reddy, Senior Vice President, Prudential Financial Chair, The Prudential Foundation, about the importance of place-based impact, the power of anchor institutions, the next frontier for ESG measurement, and the importance of tried-and-true approaches alongside newer, more disruptive technologies.

Greg Behrman, NationSwell CEO + Founder: Tell us about how your personal and professional journey led you to ESG work.

Lata Reddy, Senior Vice President, Prudential Financial Chair, The Prudential Foundation: While I was finishing my first year of law school, I had the life-changing opportunity to work and intern with Bryan Stevenson, who is now Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative. I was in Atlanta at the time, and Bryan was a young lawyer right out of law school. I spent the next couple of years working with the organization he was working with, which represented people on death row and people who had been incarcerated.

During the experience, I had the opportunity to speak with those on death row and learned how their experiences were so indicative of structural racism. It raised my consciousness and helped me understand, even as a law student, how the legal realm played a role in perpetuating these inequities, and that one day I could use my experience to address these historic and systemic injustices.

Behrman, NationSwell: How is the work you’ve been leading unique in the social impact and the sustainability field? What distinguishes you from others working in ESG?

Reddy, Prudential: Prudential started this work early, we take more risks with our capital than others do, and we stay in the work longer.

Our organization has been ahead of the curve in that we’ve thought about the work we do from an impact lens for over 50 years. Our ethos was formed in Newark, New Jersey. It’s where we were founded almost 150 years ago, and it’s where we’ve stayed, where our headquarters are to this day.

We’ve learned so much while operating in a community that has ridden so many waves of this country’s history — and that includes the good, the bad, and the ugly. We’ve had the opportunity to engage in the community of Newark, which is our front yard, backyard, all around.

Early on, the company bundled our resources together. It started with philanthropy, other cash giving and corporate contributions, employee volunteerism, and impact investing — long before anyone was calling it impact investing. We were spending the capital anyway, so we wanted to make sure we did it in a way that maximized impact. It morphed over the years, and we grew exponentially: about two years back, we had reached a billion dollars in impact assets under management on the impact investing side. And that, by the way, was all Prudential balance sheet money, so our own capital that we had invested in that way. We had doubled the size of our philanthropy, which for us is $35 million annually, and our total cash giving is more than that.

We do it in a place-based way in Newark, and we continue to be deeply engaged in a broader set of issues because we know that these systems are interacting with each other; through Prudential’s deep history and commitment to Newark residents, we’ve helped redefine the place of an anchor institution in its community. That effort has been transformative. We now have a larger set of institutions working together in a very concerted way, and so I think there’s a lot of stickiness to that and people are really taking to that, which is exciting to see.

It is a function of being the kind of corporation we are. We’re in the business of managing risk and pooling risk, and thinking about it over the long term. I think we all need to be taking more risks, and I would argue that it’s imperative for us as businesses to engage a broader set of stakeholders, and the only way we’re going to do that is through nontraditional stakeholders, and that inherently will involve a little bit of risk. It’s informed risk, or it can be, and you can mitigate the risk. So there’s the business imperative which is clearly a moral imperative for us to do more with our capital.

Behrman, NationSwell: What initiatives are you leading that exemplify your approach?

Reddy, Prudential: Somebody once said to me, and I love this phrase, people live their lives horizontally, not vertically. Systems interact, and you have to think holistically about a place.

Years ago, Prudential wanted to redefine what it means to be an anchor institution in Newark. So we did that by casting a wider net: We brought in cultural organizations, other corporations, universities; really, all facets of the community writ large. It was a core group of about six, and it’s grown since then. We commissioned some research to look at opportunities for us as anchors, to do some fact-finding around small businesses, like what would a procurement initiative look like, and the realization that if we just allocate an additional percentage of our spend to Newark businesses, we can exponentially impact the local economy.

And then it grew to a hiring initiative around hiring local Newark residents, and then living initiatives — meaning, how do we get more of our employees to live in the city and have that take hold? That approach is what we’re still managing today. It started about five years ago or so, and we’ve had some great success working with Mayor Ras Baraka; we’ve actually helped him achieve some of his goals around making sure that 2,020 Newark residents had jobs at anchor institutions by 2020, which we did — and we well surpassed that number.

That success also impacted Gov. Phil Murphy and his work with the CEO collective that our CEO is part of, especially as we looked at post-Covid recovery strategies for the state of New Jersey. So some of what we did in Newark is now a part of the state’s strategy, so we were able to grow it there.

Berhman, NationSwell: What’s your take on ESG as a framework, what’s your read on this moment? How do you make sense of the field, where are we, and where we’re going?

Reddy, Prudential: This all began with negative screening. Many of us remember the time when the prevailing sentiment was, “First, do no harm.” We avoided investing in programs, initiatives, or really anything that had the potential to cause harm.

Now, it’s moved more into a conversation where we’re mitigating risk against Environmental, Social, and Governance factors. That’s an important shift, but I’ve still yet to hear very many conversations about impact — especially around proactively and affirmatively trying to create impact in whatever we do.

I’m hoping the shifts that brought us to this current moment will accelerate us towards that. We’ve certainly talked about it in the impact investing space, where there’s an intention to create impact alongside financial returns, so I’m hoping that other players in the social impact and sustainability field will think about it as well.

Behrman, NationSwell: What are your aspirations for the field? Where do you think it’s going, and what will drive its progress, its evolution?

Reddy, Prudential: For me, the next frontier is tying it to business value, like how do we measure the impact we’re creating in a way that’s also demonstrating business value? I believe deeply you can create business value by going after societal impact, but it’s on us to prove that out. And the more we can prove it, the more baked in to our business strategy it will be. Our field will evolve when businesses make it core to what they do, rather than something they keep on the sidelines.

Behrman: How has your leadership evolved?

Reddy, Prudential: One lesson I’ve learned, which I think every leader learns, is that you can never overcommunicate. Try to communicate the same message in different ways because it will resonate with different people at different times in different ways. It’s an obvious but important one. The other thing is, leaders look around corners — that’s our job, and we get paid for it. But doubling back to bring people along is usually necessary in helping people to move forward. Helping people to see it on their own so that they have the buy-in and taking the necessary time to do that is really important as well.

I’ve found that having a “true north” for what you’re trying to get to is what has helped cut through the noise, this audience today, the messaging, so that at the core, it’s the same, and it’s based on what you believe and what you’re trying to execute against. And then on the margins you can modulate to the particular audience.

My true north is about leveling the playing field. That’s what I think about when I think about my personal purpose.

Behrman, NationSwell: What is one thing you think folks are really missing? Anything you would move people a couple degrees over on?

Reddy, Prudential: I think in some ways people are often looking for the next shiny object, the next innovation, the next disruption. That’s very intellectually exciting, but when you talk about a specific place, it’s quite often the tried and true. It’s building authentic relationships. It’s engaging the very people who know best about what’s needed, it’s about an asset framing — so not talking about the problems, but framing it all through what a community has, and the opportunities to make that even better.

Behrman, NationSwell: Who are some leaders you really admire in the space?

Reddy, Prudential: Paul Polman, author of “Net Positive” and former CEO of Unilever. I think he’s done so much for this notion of purpose, and really having purpose as a core part of your business as your brand. Under Ajay Banga’s leadership, Mastercard did some really great work, and they were very clear about the purpose, clear about the fact that change needs to be brought about through business. When you have the vision and the clarity, everything else just falls into place.

To learn more about how our ESG Next honorees are shaping business as a force for social and environmental good, visit the series hub.

ESG Next: An Interview With George Serafeim, Harvard Business School Professor of Business Administration

Posted on January 6, 2023May 21, 2026 by Greg Behrman

At a moment of unprecedented attention, investment, and opportunity for the emerging field of ESG, leaders are asking: Who is best preparing their organization for the society of the future? Who is innovating today to meet decades-long environmental and social goals? Who is setting standards that catalyze their industry’s change for the better? Who is defining what bold and aspirational work looks like — and how best to advance that work in practice?

Enter NationSwell’s ESG Next, an exemplary group of social impact and sustainability leaders who are shaping business as a force for social and environmental progress, advancing — and even pioneering — the most forward-thinking and effective programs, initiatives, technologies, methodologies, practices, and approaches.

Greg Behrman, NationSwell CEO and founder, sat down with George Serafeim, Charles M. Williams Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and author of “Purpose and Profit: How Business Can Lift Up the World,” to discuss the current state of the field of ESG, why criticism of the field — even bad faith or partisan criticism — can be a good thing, and the integral ways that purpose and profit depend on one another. Here’s what he had to say.

Greg Behrman, CEO + Founder, NationSwell: Was there a moment in your life that drove you to purpose-driven work?

George Serafeim, Harvard Business School: Growing up in Athens, Greece, I witnessed the golden years of our country — years marked by a tremendous amount of growth. But at the same time, I witnessed that if you don’t have transparency in a system, then you don’t have accountability — and if you don’t have accountability, you actually don’t have meritocracy. I witnessed all the bad outcomes that come from that lack: a 25% decline in gross domestic product, a lot of people losing their livelihoods and their quality of life, a lot of people going into unemployment, and, as a result, a tremendous amount of pain.

Witnessing that has shaped my belief that transparency is extremely important for building accountability — and therefore meritocracy — in society. I think historically, we in America have had very little transparency about the extent to which organizations are impacting the environment and society around them. For me, it was almost like connecting dots — it led to a lot of my work around creating measurement, and metrics, and increased levels of transparency because once you can measure stuff, then you can start building momentum and unleashing waves of innovation that can improve outcomes.

That has been the story of ESG in the last decade.

Behrman, NationSwell: As you think about this field of ESG, where are we now? How do you assess this current moment?

Serafeim: There was no field of ESG a few years ago — and that is very important to recognize because when you create a field, you’re also trying to educate people about the need for a field. And then you scramble to put a field together using the best available tools that you have, the best data that you have, the best frameworks, the best models, the best learnings, the best of everything. Much like product development, you have a minimum viable product (MVP) of a field.

In the beginning phase, there would be people at an organization responsible for ESG and sustainability, and they might not even be in the right places in terms of organizational structure. Think about a tech company where the tech people have no idea what’s happening on the sustainability side.

But now we’re a step or two past this MVP stage, and we actually understand what works and what doesn’t, and we have an understanding of what we need to do to improve it, and improve the infrastructure around it. ESG is more and more incorporated into what an organization does, its core products and services. We’re creating guardrails around what the field of ESG should be. Now it’s a matter of actually improving the field.

Behrman, NationSwell: Does it advance us past the MVP stage to incorporate ESG throughout the core of the organization, as opposed to as an ancillary appendage?

Serafeim: Absolutely. It requires a different mindset. It requires us to ask, “How can we make a profit by having a more positive impact on the world?” instead of treating profit and purpose as disparate entities wherein we’d be asking ourselves how we can distribute the profit that we’ve already created based on some ESG consideration.

The evolution in thinking we need actually requires ESG to be integrated into the important functions of our organization — it is an entirely different mindset.

Behrman, NationSwell: What is the next big step we have to take as a field — and how do we unlock it?

Serafeim, HBS: The first step is a systemic level of impact measurement and evaluation. We need to get to a world where we actually have comparable, reliable, and relevant impact measurement and evaluation inside organizations. This is what we have been working on with impact-weighted accounts. We also need more collaboration across organizations. Many of the environmental and social challenges that we’re facing require collaboration across multiple companies, across value chains, so that needs to happen more.

Behrman, NationSwell: Are impact-weighted accounts the answer to systematic evaluation and measurement — or does it need further development?

Serafeim, HBS: I think it still needs further development, for sure. So, as context, we created the idea of impact-weighted accounts about two and a half years ago. And now, it is an idea that has spread worldwide, from the United States to China. And we’re seeing the idea of impact-weighted accounts applied in companies, in investment firms, by policy makers in cities and municipalities, everywhere around the world. I don’t know if it will be the ultimate solution, but I do know that it is a step in the right direction, where we need to systematically measure the environmental and social outcomes that we’re creating, and the value of those outcomes. We need to understand the value that we’re achieving because allocating scarce resources is a very difficult task, and that understanding would help us to prioritize those resources.

Behrman, NationSwell: What are some takeaways from “Purpose and Profit” that help advance the way that the field’s leaders think about ESG

Serafeim, HBS: I wrote this book because when I reflect back on my experience, I think we went from a world where very few people that went into business were asking, “What is the purpose of business? What is the purpose of me, specifically, going into business?”

I have witnessed a tremendous amount of change, and I’m fortunate to be sitting in a seat where I observe hundreds of young people going into business every year, and whose decisions about their careers are being guided by the central questions of, “How can I make a difference? What is the impact that I will have?”

So, I wanted to write the book around two questions. The first one is, “What has changed?” And the second one is, “What can I do about it as an individual?” I think there are many people that are extremely competent at telling other people what to do, but the most important question to me as an individual, manager, entrepreneur, young person — whatever that might be — it’s always about what I can do within my own organization. And as a result, the book is focused on both trying to understand what has changed, and how I should think about those issues within the context of my own individual career.

This is what brought me to profit and purpose. I put them together because purpose is extremely important: it motivates action, and it energizes people. But at the same time, the pursuit of profit is also very, very important because in business, if you actually cannot be profitable, then you won’t be in business for a long time, and you will fail the people you’re serving, to whom you have promised to deliver impact. Profit allows you to scale up, hire more people, create jobs, and provide products. So, the question is: How do we take them both together, balance them out, and ensure we have a great mix of the two?

The business environment has changed in pretty significant ways. Technology has been a fundamental driver of that change in the operating context. Let’s look at employees. If you go back 30 years ago and you were trying to find a job in a completely different state, that was quite challenging, right? But now, because of advancements in technology like LinkedIn, you would be able to actually make a choice that was not available to you before.

The same is true for consumers: not only has choice changed, but voice has, too. Now, most of the competitiveness of organizations is actually driven by things like social capital, the trust that you have from society to the brand that you’re offering; intellectual capital, the collective ingenuity of all your employees; and of course, human capital and natural capital as well. As a result, because of all of those more intangible assets that businesses depend on, the voice of people — of consumers, employees, and stakeholders — has become a really important driver of strategic decision-making and value inside organizations.

My book also gives guidance to readers about actions they can take to align their convictions and values with their careers. As an example, if you are extremely passionate about addressing an environmental issue like climate change, or a social issue like diversity and inclusion, you have some choices. The first one is: you can choose to find employment in a place that maximizes the alignment of your purpose to begin with — like an environmentally conscious person choosing to work with a solar energy company. Individuals making choices like this value that level of alignment right from the beginning.

Others might choose to join organizations where the level of alignment might be low in the beginning, but what they actually value is the rate of change. These people might join a traditional energy company and you try to make a difference by changing that company. We all make different choices and we need to be thinking about those parameters in a systematic way when we think about our own individual purpose and impact at the workplace.

Behrman, NationSwell: There’s political pushback against ESG, and there’s measures of skepticism towards ESG from various quarters of the investment community. Does this criticism impede progress, or is there a world in which all of this is helpful, that the pushback sharpens folks and helps them pressure test their ambitions?

Serafeim, HBS: It would be a shame if the field of ESG becomes a partisan political issue. I view it as a field of development, where it actually becomes part of our management and our governance, that people incorporate into their career pathways — that leads to organizations collectively seeing more positive outcomes. To me, that is not a Democratic or a Republican issue, it’s a human aspiration issue.

Now, I know that many people view it as a political issue, and it would be a shame if we cannot actually shake it and say, “This is about human aspirations, and how we move forward, and how we actually improve real outcomes.”

When it comes to criticism, there’s lots of it that is quite helpful to advancing the field of ESG. I have written papers that could be construed as a criticism of ESG because I think we should improve things — if you don’t criticize it, how else can you improve?

That said, there are criticisms of ESG that are driven by incentives, personal agendas, and misconstructions of what a concept might be. I would separate those out because I don’t think they’re helpful, and they serve very specific purposes. But taking a step back from those, the fact that there’s criticism is a good thing because it means interest in the field is peaking, that it’s making a difference, because if it’s not, nobody would care. So the fact that there’s pushback, helpful and unhelpful, means that after a long period of time ESG is finally really affecting things.

For anyone working in an administration position in an organization, it’s important to filter the criticism, keep the good ones that actually can be helpful in improving your organization, filter out the ones that are not helpful, and then feel good about the fact that there’s any criticism at all — because it means the field is actually making a difference.

Behrman, NationSwell: Who are some of the ESG practitioners whom you admire?

Serafeim, HBS: Social Finance, led by Tracy Palandjian, is an organization that for me is incredible, it’s amazing the amount of work that they have been doing there. We’re working with another organization, the Value Balancing Alliance out of Germany, they are an incredible organization as well.

I have been impressed by many people, and one of my personal favorites is Sir Ronald Cohen. The fact that he has been able to be a serial social entrepreneur catalyzing the whole impact investing movement and going strong for 50 years with the conviction and the vision to drive forward things that — for many people — look unimaginable or impossible.

Ilham Kadri, the CEO of Solvay, is someone that has always deeply impressed me. Her vision around sustainability, advanced materials, and how we can actually use technology in science to move forward is something that I have admired a lot.

Sarah Williamson at FCLT is a pragmatic, collaborative leader who has really made a difference when it comes to how large institutions everywhere around the world are thinking about the issues of long-term prosperity.

And I’d round that out with some scholars and academics: Harvard Business School’s previous and current deans, Nitin Nohria and Srikant Datar, who both demonstrate an enormous amount of intellectual rigor and capacity to implement and visualize the future with conviction for where a long established legacy organization like Harvard Business School needs to go. Lastly, Rebecca Henderson is one of the most important global scholars of our age. I’ve learned a lot from them.

There are so many great organizations and practitioners — I would say what they usually say, that it takes a village, is just so true when it comes to that. We’re talking about system change, and system change takes a lot of people.

To learn more about how our ESG Next honorees are shaping business as a force for social and environmental good, visit the series hub. To learn more about NationSwell’s community of our country’s leading social impact and sustainability practitioners, visit our site.