10 Year Anniversary, About, News

10 Year Anniversary Interview #4: Building a Membership

Reflect on the milestones, memories, and best moments as we celebrate our 10 year anniversary!

Interview: Maria Ballesteros-Sola, founding board member & Chair of Membership

Reflect on the milestones, memories, and best moments as we celebrate our 10 year anniversary! Hear from one of the B Academics founding board members and chair of membership, Maria Ballesteros-Sola, about building a membership base at B Academics. Stay tuned for a new article each month for the remainder of the year as we celebrate our journey together.

Read 10 Year Anniversary Interview #1: The Founding of B Academics for the beginning of the B Academics story.

In 2021 a major key to B Academics growth was launching the individual membership. What role did you play in that initiative and how did it impact the communication strategy of B Academics? Would you change or do something different? What are the most memorable moments of 2022 for you as part of B Academics? How did the Institutional Support Program and the expansion to all continents change the game for B Academics? Was your involvement important to that end?

My first contact with B Academics was in early 2017, when I applied and received an award to attend the B Academics 2017 Roundtable in Toronto, Canada. I assumed I was joining a well-established, well-funded academic association. Instead, I discovered something far more inspiring: an incredibly passionate, resourceful, caring, and intellectually curious group of scholars who were generously volunteering their time to advance research and teaching around an idea I had been exploring since I heard Professor Yunus talking back in 2010 at my own campus, Cal State Channel Islands—business as a force for good. What a simple but powerful idea! I immediately rolled up my sleeves and committed myself to the movement. As a lawyer by training, helping think through B Academics’ organizational structure felt like a natural way to contribute. Around the same time, my own research was focused on nonprofit financial sustainability and earned-income strategies. Those two interests soon converged.

One question kept surfacing: How could B Academics build a more sustainable financial future while preserving its collaborative and community-driven spirit? A membership model emerged as a promising solution. Membership dues could provide a predictable source of revenue to support the organization’s growth while strengthening members’ sense of ownership and engagement. But there was an important question we needed to answer: Would academics who had enthusiastically participated in B Academics’ events and activities also be willing to invest financially in the organization’s future?

Designing the membership program became much more than setting a price. Like any membership-based organization, we needed to think carefully about the value proposition. What benefits would members truly value? How could we create opportunities for deeper engagement while remaining true to our mission of advancing research, teaching, and practice around business as a force for good?

Those conversations ultimately led to the launch of the B Academics Individual Membership Program in 2021. Looking back, it was an important milestone—not simply because it created a new revenue stream, but because it represented the confidence of our community. Members chose to invest not only in the benefits they received but also in the long-term future of B Academics.

As we explored individual memberships, we also began thinking about another important question: Could universities themselves become partners in sustaining B Academics? Many institutions were already benefiting from faculty participation in our community, and several had been supporting our work since the organization’s early days as Founding University Members. We extend our gratitude to:

This led to the development of our Institutional Support program, which provided universities with a formal way to invest in and engage with B Academics. More than a financial contribution, institutional support reflected a shared commitment to advancing research, teaching, and practice focused on business as a force for good. It also strengthened connections between B Academics and universities that were embedding responsible business, stakeholder governance, and sustainability into their curricula and research agendas.

Today, institutional support represents a significant portion of B Academics’ annual operating budget. Their support has enabled us to expand our programming, launch new initiatives, and continue building a vibrant global community while maintaining the collaborative spirit that has defined B Academics since its founding. About that time, we also spearheaded the creation of B Academics’ first impact report in 2021. Our first Annual Report served as an opportunity to reflect on our collective wins and share the progress with our community. In 2021 we hosted both the Teaching & Roundtable online, which allowed us to reach a broader audience, launched and grew our B Academics membership global network and B Academics Spain, and we hosted our first open elections for the board of directors, welcoming new board members.

I am very proud of our collective achievements in the last 10 years. What started as a community of practice has evolved into a global organization that is still member-centered and driven by the simple but powerful idea that business can (and should!) be a force for good.

Stay tuned for article #5.