Ranking: 39

Industry: Investment Advising

Mission: A venture capital firm that provides equity and debt financing to established and emerging companies located in communities underserved by conventional sources of capital. They invest in small businesses and help grow local economies. Have fostered over 780 companies across a diverse array of industry sectors, including manufacturing, technology and business services.

What 3 words best describe your company culture?

Collaborative, Entrepreneurial, Accountable

What quote best exemplifies your company?

“Through strategic investments in small businesses located in underserved communities — and by financing affordable housing in those same neighborhoods, along with access to renewable energy — our focus is on strengthening communities, equalizing opportunities for household financial security, and growing local economies.”

How is your product or service having a positive social and/or environmental impact?

Advantage Capital creates a platform for economic security in low-income communities across the county. We do so, in part, by investing in the growth of companies that can create and retain good-quality jobs. Through our investments and non-financial support and guidance, the companies in which we invest have largely expanded and prospered, supporting more than 60,000 jobs in low-income communities across the country. We also finance affordable housing in these same communities, creating even more positive and lasting change in neighborhoods, and for families and seniors. To further strengthen communities and equalize access to capital and growth, we finance renewable energy projects, for the benefit of planet, people and economic growth.

What is your company’s vision for the future?

We fundamentally believe that capital can change lives. We have infused investment capital into 244 highly distressed census tracts across the country. We see continued focus on strengthening communities, by staying true to our investment philosophy of delivering much-needed capital to small businesses that can create and preserve good jobs in some of the nation’s hardest-hit communities. We envision serving nearly 500 communities, more than doubling our footprint in historically distressed neighborhoods, erasing blight and chipping away at the factors which have led to their decline, neighbor by neighbor, family by family, block by block.

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Ranking: 71

Industry: Investment Management

Mission: A leader in global impact initiatives dedicated to the pursuit of financial return and social change. Their clients share a common conviction in sustainable enterprise and a commitment to ethical standards that carry from their missions to their investments. Aligned with 12 Sustainable Development Goals, with the largest contribution towards Climate Action.

What 3 words best describe your company culture?

Authentic, Inclusive, Engaged

What quote best exemplifies your company?

“We analyze opportunities from a wholistic perspective and activate capital with our investor voice, incorporating Environmental, Social, & Governance drivers to enhance traditional assessments of growth, competitiveness, and profitability.”

How is your product or service having a positive social and/or environmental impact?

We integrate Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) considerations into every step of our investment process. We seek leaders on ESG issues and avoid investing in companies with unsustainable business models. We look at areas such as the environment, employment practices and labor relations, human rights, and marketing safe and sustainable products and services. The result is portfolios of high-quality, long-term oriented companies with strong sustainability characteristics and significantly smaller portfolio carbon footprints versus respective benchmarks.

We have helped create industry standards in emerging ESG areas, such as climate risk in the financial sector, human rights, access to nutrition, Indigenous Peoples’ rights, access to medicines, human trafficking, renewable energy, hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas operations, and chemical safety. Through our active ownership and engagement initiatives, we seek to improve our portfolio companies’ financial performance and reputations by improving the long-term sustainability of their products, processes and policies. Leveraging our issue expertise and thoughtful engagement approach, we help build and lead investor coalitions engaging companies, industries, and policy makers on ESG issues. Ultimately, we seek to identify key ESG risks and best practices and then raise overall industry ESG practices and investor expectations.

What is your company’s vision for the future?

Boston Common is dedicated to the pursuit of financial returns and societal change, with a commitment to be an ESG/Impact firm where employees, clients, partners, and vendors are inspired to create social change through the deployment of capital, shareowner engagement, and forward-looking integration of ESG and activism.

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Ranking: 22

Industry: Environmental Services

Mission: Offers specialist grounds maintenance and commercial landscape services. They reduce the impact of human habitation while enhancing the human experience through designing, developing and maintaining beautiful, sustainable landscapes and environments for people, communities and wildlife to safely enjoy. Servicing over 45,000 commercial sites across the UK.

What 3 words best describe your company culture?

Family, Entrepreneurial, Inclusive

What quote best exemplifies your company?

“Caring for Our Environment.”

How is your product or service having a positive social and/or environmental impact?

Our service maintains the environment in which we live, and we try to do this in the most sustainable way possible; using battery tools and electric vehicles, using renewable energy, composting or reusing waste and maintaining rather than removing vegetation. We train our staff to educate and work with our landowning customers to create habitats which create a positive environmental impact.

We also contribute through the Evergreen Fund. Financed by five percent of Ground Control’s annual profits, the Evergreen Fund is an investment fund dedicated to sustainability and environmental initiatives that will specialize in providing seed and growth capital to early stage companies and social enterprises that are focused on delivering measurable, beneficial and sustainable environmental impact. Over the next five years, the fund will:

• Invest £5m in early stage environmental ventures
• Become a perpetual investment facility with profits reinvested into new sustainable ventures
• Dedicate £100,000 annually to finance the planning of one million new native trees to create protected areas of biodiversity

We also believe our field team model has a positive societal benefit, supporting micro-entrepreneurs around the UK to run and grow their businesses.

What is your company’s vision for the future?

We create and maintain external spaces that are safe and enjoyable for all. By growing in our core maintenance led markets, our aim is to continue on our ambitious growth trajectory by doubling in size over the next five years. As we grow in our core markets, we become stronger and more stable as a business, providing stability to all whom depend on Ground Control for their livelihoods. The sustainability this provides allows us to pursue our work in Caring for our Environment. Imagine that by 2025 our technology platforms support a happy workforce of more than 10,000 people. We will have planted over 1,000,000 trees, installed more than 10,000 EV chargers and, through our environmental initiatives and Evergreen Fund, we will have significantly contributed to helping the UK become a carbon neutral country by 2050.

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Ranking: 72

Industry: Medical/Tech

Mission: A women‘s health medical device company focused on minimally invasive applications. They develop and market differentiated surgical implants specifically for the treatment of Stress Urinary Incontinence and Pelvic Organ Prolapse. On a mission to alleviate 1 million women in underserved communities suffering from pelvic floor disorders by 2025. 

What quote best exemplifies your company?

“Caldera Medical is a unique company where the key to success is a Culture where the employees share an unwavering passion for the Mission to Improve the Quality of Life for Women over profit or individualistic gain.”

How is your product or service having a positive social and/or environmental impact?

Caldera Medical’s Mission is to Improve the Quality of Life for Women and everything we do is in support of this. Caldera launched a humanitarian effort in 2016 aptly named Women’s Health Initiative with a goal of ending the incapacitation and suffering of one million women with pelvic floor disorders in underserved populations around the world by 2025. Women in these developing countries have more advanced conditions due to decreased access to healthcare and are often ostracized from their communities because of these issues. In just the past couple of years Caldera has sponsored over 60 humanitarian trips globally to train local physicians in developing countries how to perform pelvic floor surgery that allows women to return to a normal life.

Caldera Medical and its employees also give back to our local communities in Los Angeles every quarter by donating our time and money to a local charity. Most recently we have worked with Habitat for Humanity and Manna Food Bank.

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Ranking: 62

Industry: Accounting

Mission: A public accounting firm offering holistic financial strategies to address clients’ financial goals and circumstances. They offer global expertise with a regional focus, helping people reach their goals and rest better knowing that they have someone on their side. Work with 20 partners and support global business needs in over 88 countries.  

What 3 words best describe your company culture?

Innovative, Inclusive, Supportive

What quote best exemplifies your company?

“At Sensiba San Filippo we believe that we should never lose focus on what is important in life. That’s why we believe in Family, Community, and Firm… in that order.”

How is your product or service having a positive social and/or environmental impact?

A good example of a positive social impact was our firm’s ability to quickly pivot to help small and medium size businesses navigate the Paycheck Protect Program. We provided our clients, and anyone who called for help, free consultations to help understand the PPP and if it was the right choice for the business to apply. We helped hundreds of business apply for the loan and are now helping hundreds more figure out if they should apply for forgiveness or not, based on their tax situation. This has helped many business be able to stay in business and pay their employees.

What is your company’s vision for the future?

We are very optimistic. We recently launched the beginnings of our Sensiba Center for Sustainability to help companies move to a purpose-driven, sustainable business model that includes social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. It is unlike any other accounting firm’s sustainability practice and offers services that are not just financial or compliance-driven and provide options of different ESG frameworks to find what best suits an organization.

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Ranking: 25

Industry: Beds/Consumer Goods

Mission: A sleep products manufacturer that produces eco-friendly mattresses to provide deeper rest for every body. Their products are made from natural and recycled materials, and meet the needs of almost everyone. For every ten mattresses sold, they donate one to a family in need, positively impacting over 37,000 families so far.

What quote best exemplifies your company?

“At Leesa, we make products for good-good sleep and more good mornings. Every Leesa purchase has a purpose. Not only do you get good, quality sleep, but every mattress purchase helps us donate another mattress to a child in need.”

How is your product or service having a positive social and/or environmental impact?

Since Day One, we set out to create a company for good. Every mattress purchase helps us donate another mattress to a child in need, with 36,000 mattresses donated to date. As a certified B Corporation, we also strive to meet the highest environmental standards through our business. Our products are shipped in boxes made from recycled cardboard, our pocket springs are made from recycled steel and we have a natural cover on our newest mattress, the Leesa Legend, made from organic cotton, merino wool and fiber made from recycled water bottles.

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Ranking: 41

Industry: Financial Services

Mission: A community development lender that finances impactful projects to benefit underserved communities in the American Southwest. They are helping to bridge the gap between conventional lending standards and the needs of low-income and distressed communities. Have financed over 1,800 community projects that retain more than 16,500 jobs and benefit over 1.9 million individuals.

What 3 words best describe your company culture?

Family-Oriented, Purpose-Driven, Innovative

What quote best exemplifies your company?

“At Clearinghouse CDFI, we believe in people. We are bound by the core value that individuals in low-income, distressed communities deserve access to affordable capital. The resulting economic opportunity provides both a greater quality of life and hope for future generations.”

How is your product or service having a positive social and/or environmental impact?

Clearinghouse CDFI finances projects that create jobs and services to help people work, live, dream, grow, and thrive in healthy communities. We are also a Benefit Corporation (B Corp)—a company that meets rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability, and uses business as a force for good. Since inception in 1996, we have funded $1.9 billion in total loans for over 1,900 projects promoting community and economic development. These projects have created or retained 21,500 jobs and benefit over 1.9 million individuals.

What is your company’s vision for the future?

Since inception, the belief that making a difference is equally as important as making a profit has defined Clearinghouse CDFI as a company. This core value has cemented our reputation as a unique and caring financial institution and continues to help us raise equity capital from investors at a rate that is unprecedented in this industry. Today, with two decades of profitability and over $590 million in total assets, we remain one of the strongest and fasting growing CDFIs in the nation. Through all of our growth and geographic expansion, we hold strongly to the notion that the most important asset we have is our reputation.

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Ranking: 27

Industry: Investment Management

Mission: Arowana is an award winning global B Corporation that has a number of operating companies and investments, including in electric vehicles, renewable energy, vocational education, technology and software venture capital, and impact asset management.They invest in, and operate enterprises that serve a real purpose–working directly with companies that have a positive impact on all stakeholders. They do not critique from the sidelines, nor do they disengage from the businesses they invest in when the going gets tough. Instead, they tackle challenges alongside founders and management teams, with an understanding that growth follows a non-linear trajectory.

What 3 words best describe your company culture?

Humility, Solidarity, Tenacity

How is your product or service having a positive social and/or environmental impact?

We have a long-term commitment to building strong, sustainable businesses that will have a positive impact on economies, industries, and the people they employ.

What is your company’s vision for the future?

We grow people, companies, and value.

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Ranking: 43

Industry: Personal Care

Mission: A manufacturer of personal care products made with active botanicals and scented with pure essential oils. They use ethically sourced ingredients in a certified organic, zero-waste facility and push sustainability initiatives in their industry. Offering affordable products at over 6,000 stores in the U.S., and in 11 more countries around the world. 

What 3 words best describe your company culture?

Good Intentions, Hard Work, Changing

What quote best exemplifies your company?

“Work is love made visible.”

How is your product or service having a positive social and/or environmental impact?

Founded in 1995, EO Products is a certified B Corporation, and makes all decisions in respect of its customers, its employees, and the planet, and imagines and manufactures products in a zero-waste, certified green facility in California. The EO Products factory is a solar-powered, certified organic plant that utilizes post-consumer recycled packaging and an environmentally preferred supply chain policy to honor the well-being of people and the planet we share. EO Products uses non-GMO ingredients and infuses its products with the best-quality, pure essential oils and food-grade extracts that are available while never using parabens, sodium lauryl sulfate, synthetic fragrances, aluminum, propylene glycol, polysorbates, phthalates, or artificial colors and dyes.

What is your company’s vision for the future?

A unified sense of belonging, internally and with our community at large.

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Ranking: 42

Industry: Furniture

Mission: A furniture manufacturer that produces standing desks, chairs, and ergonomic furniture to keep people moving, engaged, and loving how they feel at work. Their furniture helps create a healthy, supportive workplace and incorporates sustainability into the design, manufacturing, packaging, and shipping of all products. Keeping people moving, minds engaged, and energy flowing.

What quote best exemplifies your company?

“When we feel better in our bodies, we feel more connected to ourselves, to our work, and to the people and world around us.” — David Kahl, Founder

How is your product or service having a positive social and/or environmental impact?

At Fully our work is about being better at being human. We know that the divide between “work” and “life” is an illusion, and that healthy living depends on a healthy workspace. We believe this should be available to every person, from the basement studio to the downtown office. We understand the connection between healthy body, healthy mind, healthy business and a healthy world.

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