On August 24, Liesl Clark, co-founder and partner at 5 Lakes Energy, spoke at a Southeast Michigan Sustainable Business Forum (SMSBF) event entitled “Being the Change.” The member event focused on B-Corps — their history, how B-Corp certification works and how Michigan businesses can benefit from this emerging model.
Liesl presented along with Elissa Hillary, president of Local First in Grand Rapids. Several years ago, in collaboration with B Lab, Local First developed a short version of the B Impact Assessment. This tool can be a valuable first step for a business that is exploring a possible B Corp certification or wants to start to measure their impact.
Liesl shared 5 Lakes Energy’s experiences with the group of business leaders — from the assessment process, to the creation of documentation, to ongoing metric development and tracking. We’ve used the B Corps assessment process to develop metrics to track the things we’re already doing and begin to quantify our impact on our clients, society, and the environment.
We were happy to talk with such an engaged group of Michigan business leaders! We hope to see many of them start their B Corps journey and look forward to helping out however we can.