Future 500 | Stakeholder Engagement + Sustainability Experts

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Organizational Update

Jessica Hammett

Here’s a quick update on our Seattle corporate working group next month where we’ll focus on environmental justice, a recap of our stakeholder process with TVA and our virtual session on critical minerals, info on our next virtual meeting on carbon capture, and some recent articles and podcasts that have helped inform our team’s understanding of issue and stakeholder dynamics. 

Spotlight on Future 500’s Work: The Power of Stakeholder Forums

Future 500 has been a proud pioneer of stakeholder engagement, since our founding over 25 years ago. Back then, some corporate skeptics thought our approach was a tad touchy feely, but today, they are the exception rather than the rule. 

What Future 500 does is subtle. We intentionally fly under the radar, positioning companies and their stakeholders to engage constructively. Our team regularly facilitates strategic connections and substantive dialogue that at times leads to breakthrough change. When this occurs, it’s because corporate and stakeholder leaders had the courage to commit to change. While we proved useful prodding along the way, companies and their stakeholders deserve the credit for effecting positive change.

Several partners with whom we have worked commend us for helping change their corporate  cultures. We help corporate leaders shift away from an inclination to hunker down and fight toward a more collaborative mindset, engaging stakeholders for mutual understanding and ongoing consultation that reveals business value. They come to realize that they won’t agree with their stakeholders on all things, but that the engagement process yields far more mutual understanding and business insights than they imagined possible. The engagements lead to deeper, and more sustained engagement and associate operational changes that benefit the business.

When big projects and processes start to wrap up, our team likes to inventory what went well, what we can improve, and what impact we achieved. One such project is our recent engagement with Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), where we helped facilitate a “Utility of the Future - Information Exchange.” This set of five multi-stakeholder convenings helped TVA build mutual trust, by sharing perspectives, and gathering feedback to help guide their future planning.

We surveyed all participants upfront to understand concerns and desired outcomes to guide how we would cultivate trust and facilitate productive conversations throughout the convening process. In doing so, we discovered that misalignment between TVA and its stakeholders was driving frustration and apprehension among the participants, but that there was genuine interest in engaging productively.

We took an experiential design to the convenings that humanized participants and created opportunities for deep conversations. As the meetings progressed, we built the interpersonal connections among the environmental NGOs, local government officials, local power companies, and TVA. Participants increasingly felt comfortable speaking up, disagreeing respectfully, and seeking mutual understanding and shared outcomes. As one participant wrote:

“Being a part of the UF-IX has been one of the most rewarding activities of my career. Not only did I learn a tremendous amount, but the respect everyone showed for wide-ranging, diverse opinions is such a model for today’s world of constant polarities. And of course, TVA’s hospitality was perfectly and graciously Southern.”  - Ben Bolton, Tennessee Department of Environment & Conservation

Comments like this are why the F500 team loves what we do. We strive to provide strategic conduits, pathways, and convenings that open doors for people to connect when they otherwise wouldn’t because they place their trust in us.

It is an honor and privilege to earn that trust. But it’s even more important to build that trust between companies and their stakeholders because that is where the humanization, reconciliation, and harmonization occurs that can lead to impactful change.

To learn more about our stakeholder forum work, contact us at info@future500.org, and someone on our team will contact you.

Summer Action

A picture is worth a thousand words!

Enjoying nature at this year’s Future 500 Board Retreat in Union, WA

Our Corporate Affinity Network (CAN)

Our July Virtual Gathering on critical minerals with Abby Wulf

July 20th, we convened a virtual gathering of our CAN network with Abby Wulf, VP & Director of the Ambassador Alfred Hoffman Jr. Center for Critical Minerals Strategy at SAFE (Securing America's Future Energy), a nonprofit advancing transformative transportation technology to enhance energy security. 

It was a highly illuminating and interactive discussion moderated by our newest staffer, Phoebe Fu. Abby outlined in clear but complex detail the threats and opportunities of energy and critical mineral security to ensure America’s economic, ecological, and military competitiveness.  Her message? Amidst the most significant geopolitical realignment since the end of the Cold War, the rapidly evolving relations between China, Russia, the Middle East, and the West will shape business market access and ESG strategy for years to come.

Upcoming:

CAN Corporate Working Group: September 6 & 7, Seattle WA

Our next Corporate Affinity Network gathering in Seattle, September 6-7 will focus on corporate best practices in operationalizing Environmental Justice and Just Transition considerations in their efforts to accelerate the energy transition. We have a terrific slate of speakers from the worlds of NGO corporate campaigning, environmental justice, and business sustainability, including Microsoft, Stand.Earth, AEP, The Just Transition Alliance, The Embedding Project, and Until Justice Data Partners. These events embody a core aspect of Future 500’s mission: getting corporate and NGO leaders out of their echo chambers and engaging each other in person to foster mutual understanding. You can view our agenda here. 

Above left: Dr. YaVonda M Ulfig, Energy Transition & Sustainability Manager at American Electric Power

Above right: Ananda Lee Tan, Strategy Advisor at Just Transition Alliance

CAN Virtual: Carbon Capture with Ashleigh Ross, October 5th

Join us for our next virtual CAN meeting on October 5 at 1:00 pm ET with Ashleigh Ross, VP, Strategic Engagements & Policy, Carbon America. She will share with us her insights from two decades in the carbon capture space—including the major stakeholder issues, how companies can adopt a community-centric approach that speaks to environmental justice (and what happens when they don’t), the role of innovation and technology, and what opportunities as well as risks she sees in coming years.

Ashleigh Ross has 21 years of dedication to CCS across a broad range including strategy, technology, policy, economics, commercial and project development, and deep subsurface expertise, and was recently appointed to the White House Council on Environmental Quality’s CCS permitting task force.  With Carbon America, she is leading internal and industry-wide policy and advocacy efforts to ensure a robust, effective, and efficient landscape for CCS deployment. In previous roles, she was responsible for the development of BP’s CCUS strategy and portfolio and serves as CCS expert and reservoir engineer at ConocoPhillips. Ashleigh has a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Oklahoma State University, ans M.S. degrees in Chemical Engineering and Technology and Policy from M.I.T. focused on techno-economic based deployment strategies for CCS, along with a M.Phil. in Environmental Policy from the University of Cambridge where she was a Gates scholar. Phew, she’s academically and professionally accomplished!

If you wish to learn more about how to participate in our corporate network, please email Future 500 Director Brendon Steele at bsteele@future500.org.

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