Giving Compass' Take:

• B the Change invited winners of the Best For The World: Governance designation to share how they turn their values and missions into everyday practices. 

• How can social enterprises emulate these models? WHere is their room for improvement in these governance structures? 

• Find out why family foundations should consider impact investing. 

To ensure long-term mission alignment—a necessary goal of any social enterprise or purpose-driven business—a company must address its governance. The companies shared here are Best For The World: Governance, which is evaluated based on a company’s overall mission, ethics, accountability and transparency; measures whether the company has adopted a social or environmental mission, and how it engages its employees, board members and the community to achieve that mission; and more.

OMISTA Credit Union:

OMISTA tracks our progress on defined social and environmental metrics annually. We use this to help us determine if we are delivering on our objectives for the year and as benchmarks for stretch goals for future years.

We set quantifiable measurable targets, including the amount of volunteer hours contributed in total, by branch/employee, and by cause area in our communities. We also measure corporate and employee contributions to environmental organizations. This information is shared publicly.

Grassroots Capital Management Corp.:

Grassroots Capital has been committed to preserving the distinctive double bottom line character of these business models. This requires a constant balancing act: ensuring that profitability is sufficient to satisfactorily remunerate investors, while ensuring that financial returns do not become the default priority in all business and strategic decisions.

Grassroots Capital includes our stakeholders — our investors, the mission-driven businesses we finance, and the vulnerable clients they support — by increasing transparency and accountability in the industry, improving and disseminating business practices in financial inclusion and other social impact sectors based on bottom-up product design and continuous product evaluation and refinement.

Read the full article about building values and mission into daily practices at B the Change.