Happy 2023!

What it means: Acknowledging and working to reverse those consequences. Place-based thinking requires careful and critical evaluation of the well-being of the communities where our businesses and partners are based and operating, and how our practices affect the lives in communities along our supply chains and any consequences they experience. It’s important to think deeply about where our partners are situated when designing, sourcing, and producing products and specifically assessing who, what, and where will be affected – and why.

Once you consider and assess these consequences, place-based thinking seeks to improve the quality of life for those people and places, and commits resources so they can make change and improvement happen. This type of strategic thinking makes your business a vibrant part of the community and one that causes no harm to people or the environment with its practices.

How to achieve it: Try shifting your mindset by listening to the places where you produce. Give this place-based exercise a shot when deciding on your next supplier: 

• Have all sourcing and purchasing team members plus three additional people at the table (whether virtual or physical).  
• Assign the following roles: factory worker; resident living near the factory; fish who swims in a waterway near the factory (or a cow, dog – you get it!). These are your place-based meeting members.
• Make sure every person (or fish, cow, tree) gets to speak at the table, and ensure all viewpoints are heard.
• Ask each person how sourcing from this supplier will affect them: How will they benefit? What disadvantages, if any, will they experience? How, if your company decides to do business at <fill-in-the-blank with supplier name> with <fill-in-the-blank with materials they will use> will it affect their lives now and in the future?
• List the responses on a whiteboard. Re-read them.
• Evaluate all viewpoints. Consider what surprises you about what might happen in a community that you or your contractors do business in and what you may be unaware of.
• If this is a supplier or region you want to work with, what actions can you take that will help reverse any disadvantages the factory worker, neighbor, or fish mentioned.
• Implement one of those actions.

Which materials get you there: Select factories and suppliers with community initiatives in place and, if they don’t have any, ask if you can partner together on a social, labor, or environmental community project with them. Choose materials which are locally and regionally made in order to reduce fuel use and transport emissions. And consider insetting projects where you invest in clean energy along your company’s supply chain. This is a super example of place-based thinking when working to burn less fossil fuels in a community and neutralize your company’s Scope 3 carbon emissions.