Interview: Summer Brown, founding board member & President
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 President, Summer Brown, 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.
How did you initially get involved with B Academics?
My first interaction with B Academics, at the time called the B Corp Academic Community Network, was in late 2016. The Institute for Business and Professional Ethics at DePaul University, where I am the Executive Director, had recently launched an online article repository called the Benefit Corporation Gateway and we had been doing quite a bit of research in the B Corp and benefit corporation space. Through the author of an article in our repository, Professor Joe Sprangel, we were referred to Jessica Yinka Thomas at NC State and her fledgling B Corp network. At the time, we had monthly conference calls to discuss the efforts of academics working in the B Corp arena. My DePaul colleague, Scott Arakawa, and I joined the 2017 Roundtable in Toronto to share more about our repository and some short case studies we had created around benefit corporations. I met Jessica, Joel Gehman, Maria Ballesteros-Sola, Rosana Garcia, Fiona Wilson, and many more of the original organizers of the group. It was a small, but mighty gathering of really motivated, smart, passionate and kind people. I remember feeling invigorated by the group and wanting to become more involved. We eventually transitioned our online Benefit Corporation Repository to B Academics permanently and I helped to navigate the legal and formal organization of the non-profit. I was elected Secretary and remember drafting the bylaws in my hotel room at the 2019 Roundtable in Los Angeles. In my Secretary role, I helped to build out our first website, set up our membership management system and our legal domicile, filed our annual reports, and managed our initial elections.
Much was accomplished in 2023 by hiring B Academics first staff members. How did you come to that decision?
The organization grew pretty rapidly and we began to need more consistent support than our volunteer board could provide and maintain. The idea was floated to hire Jessica Thomas as an Executive Director, after her tenure as Board President concluded and to hire her new program manager at the NC State Business Sustainability Collaborative, Rachel Haynes, as our Operations Director, in 2023. Rachel had worked with us the prior year in a limited term student capacity and we were really impressed by her dedication and skillset. I was elected President of B Academics in 2023 and formalized our operations team with Jessica and Rachel. This decision allowed Jessica to pivot to fundraising and Rachel to take over the day to day management of the financial and administrative operations of B Academics. This has allowed us to build important relationships, deepen our financial stability, and bring more academics under our umbrella from around the world. Our hope is to the get to the place we can hire and financially support a full time staff member.
What did the first Fuqua on Board students, and earning the prestigious 2023 Candid Gold Certification mean for you and how did it contribute to the strategic plan at the time? What were your challenges at that point?
Because Jessica had more capacity in her staff role, she was able to leverage her relationship with the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University to put B Academics in the application pool for Board support from Fuqua MBA students. This program at Duke chose nonprofit Boards to partner two Fuqua students for a year to work on a specific Board project or need. Our selection and subsequent support from three different pairs of impressive students over three years has been incredibly helpful in allowing us to deep dive into membership analysis, student engagement, and fundraising strategy in ways that we simply didn’t have the capacity to do ourselves.
Additionally, at the same time as our hiring of staff in 2023, we felt our organization had grown in strength and diligence to apply for the Candid certification. I’m incredibly proud that we received the Candid Gold Certification for our organizational commitment to transparency, diversity, and strong corporate governance, and have maintained that status for the past three years.
You had grown in membership and global reach, what was next? How was communication with the B Corp Movement? Is there something you regret, or you would do differently?
Once we had grown out of our initial “start up” phase of development, we could really take a moment to sit back and consider the type of impact we wanted to have and how we could ensure the longevity and sustainability of our organization. We launched another 5 year strategic planning session in 2025 with support from Paradox Consulting, a certified B Corp, and have laid out a plan that covers four major pillars focused on global, teaching, and research engagement, plus financial and operational sustainability. We have ambitious goals to build curricular materials and training programs that can help us financially support our non-profit, while launching more regional based B Academics groups to better support academics in those areas in their own language and with more accessible programming for their communities. We hope to continue to maintain and build upon our positive relationship with B Lab by offering high quality research about the efficacy and impact of the certification, while also providing guidance and support to existing and aspiring B corps through our B Impact Teams programming. While we have come a long way in getting the word out about business as a force for good, I feel we still have work to do to ensure the B movement becomes part of our broader vernacular in business schools and boardrooms. This will require us to show universities the importance of investment in this kind of education, training, and research. We have the tools, now we just have to leverage and scale them.
Stay tuned for article #6.
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