About BEN Our mission is to help transform the role of corporations in society by building the capacity of our members in their corporate campaign work, by providing education, facilitating collaboration, and increasing recognition of their campaign successes with the funding community and the public.
For our Fifth Annual Activist Conference, the Business Ethics Network
hosted a bi-coastal conference linked together via video and
telephone-conferencing. This exciting new approach enabled more BEN
members from both coasts to attend.
BEN activists engaged in thoughtful and
dynamic dialogue throughout the course of the conference, and the net result
was a thorough list of themes and action items for 2010.
New and
veteran campaigners alike were alternately challenged and inspired by
the scope of the work ahead, and left the day renewed and re-focused
for another year of creative campaigning and successful legislative
strategies.
2009 BENNY
Awards
BEN organizes the awards to celebrate
the victories and achievements of corporate campaign activists.
Activists
who are Members of BEN nominate and vote on campaigns for the BENNY
and Path to Victory Awards. BEN Advisory Committee and staff choose
recipients of the Individual Achievement Award. BEN is pleased to have
awarded the following recipients for their outstanding work in 2009.
Individual Achievement Award:
Leslie Lowe is the Director of ICCR’s program on Energy
and the Environment. The Interfaith
Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR)
builds a more just and sustainable world by integrating social values
into corporate and investor actions.
Leslie serves
on the Boards of Directors of the Jessie Smith Noyes
Foundation,
Environmental Advocates of New York, the Center for
Economic
and Environmental Partnership, Housing Works, Inc.,
and is
a Trustee of The Weeksville Society. She introduced her colleague and winner of the Individual Achievement Award, Sister Pat Daly (Tri-State Coalition
for Responsible Investment).
The TRI-State Coalition for Responsible Investment (CRI) is an alliance of Roman Catholic institutional investors primarily located throughout the New York metropolitan area. Members utilize their power as shareholders to hold corporations accountable to social and environmental concerns. In making decisions about managing resources and investments, Coalition members view local and global economies not only in terms of production and distribution, but also by their effects on the environment and the dignity of the human person.
Lead Groups: Coalition of Immokalee
Workers,
Founding Members of the Alliance for Fair Food (Presbyterian Church
(USA), National Economic and Social Rights Initiative,
Student/Farmworker
Alliance, Interfaith Action), Just Harvest USA
The logic behind the Campaign for Fair Food is simple. Major corporate
buyers -- companies such as Wal-Mart, Kroger, Aramark, and Sodexo --
purchase a tremendous volume of fruits and vegetables, leveraging their
buying power to demand the lowest possible prices from their
suppliers. This, in turn, exerts a powerful downward pressure on wages
and working conditions in these suppliers' operations.
Our online campaign called on General Mills, the manufacturer of Yoplait
to “put a lid” on rBGH, and gave activists the tools to send that
message directly to the CEO. Working with many partners dedicated to ridding the world of rBGH, BCA
activists persuaded General Mills to do the right thing. As a result,
Yoplait is now rBGH free.
CELDF was formed to
provide free and affordable legal services to community based groups and
local governments working to protect their quality of life and the
natural environment through building sustainable communities.
Corporations have devastated
Ecuador's
environment. The drafters of their new constitution recognized
that they needed to do something fundamentally different to protect
nature. In the new constitution, nature is no longer treated as
"property" under the law, and instead is recognized as having
the inalienable right to exist and flourish.
CELDF
assisted the Ecuador Constitutional
Assembly to draft Rights of Nature provisions. Ecuador is the
first country in the world to codify a system of environmental
protection
based on rights.
Coal plants are a leading cause
of respiratory illness and account for over 30% of our nation's global
warming pollution. The Campaign is working to stop the construction
of the more than 150 financially risky new coal plants that have been
proposed and reduce our over-dependence on dirty, destructive coal.
The Campaign helped stop 27 coal
plants during this period, the global warming pollution equivalent of
taking more than 15 million cars off the road.
The Safe Cleaning Products
Initiative
is a national campaign that aims to reduce women’s exposure to toxic
chemicals in household
cleaning products. WVE’s goal is to establish new policies to
require manufacturers to fully disclose ingredients and remove toxic
chemicals from their cleaning products through market-based and
legislative
initiatives.
SC Johnson & Son, Inc.
announced
they will disclose all ingredients in their household cleaning products,
including fragrances, and will remove phthalates.
The Rainforest Agribusiness
Campaign is working to stop the conversion of tropical rainforests into
soy and palm plantations in order to protect forests, communities and
our climate. We are calling on Cargill, the #1 supplier of palm oil
into the U.S., to adopt and implement a comprehensive global forest
policy.
40
retailers, including Whole
Foods and L’occitane, have signed our pledge to protect forests,
communities
and the climate and agreed to take steps to improve the destructive palm
oil industry.
The
Russell Corporation closed a garment factory in Honduras because
workers tried to exercise their right to unionize and collectively
bargain. USAS is pressuring the Russell Corporation to reopen the
factory in order to remediate its violations of Honduran law and
university labor codes of conduct.
Sixty
universities cut business ties with Russell. USAS involved student
groups in the UK, different Russell retail customers, and the US
Congress.
Click on the image to play through the full slideshow of 2009 BENNY Nominees!
Conference
Format - Instead of multiple concurrent
panels,
BEN opted for three focused, consecutive panels on three of our hot
legislative and corporate campaign subjects: (1) EFCA, the Employee
Free Choice Act, (2) Climate and Energy, and (3) Healthcare. After
45 minutes on each subject, we broke into three sessions to delve
further
into each one to identify lessons learned, practical take-aways and
recommendations for moving forward successfully. These breakouts
were well attended, intent, and deep with reflections and ideas.
We came back together after 30 minutes to share conclusions and hear
from both west and east-coasters. We then wrapped up the conference
portion of the day with “Identified Themes” and “To Do Lists”.
Panels
EFCA: John Logan, Facilitator.
Panelists: Fred Azcarate, AFL-CIO, Jane Norman, American Rights
at Work, Peter Olney, International
Longshore and Warehouse Union, Oliver Gottfried, SEIU
Climate & Energy: Michael
Marx, Facilitator. Panelists: Rose Braz, Center for Biological
Diversity, Alex Levinson, Sierra Club, Damon Moglen, Greenpeace, Matteo
Colombi, Teamsters, Jason Kawolski, 1Sky
Healthcare: Ken Jacobs,
Facilitator.
Panelists: DeAnn Friedholm,
Consumers
Union, David Kieffer, Service Employees
International
Union, Michael Lighty, California Nurses Association/ National Nurses
Organizing Committee, Anthony Wright, Health Access
Themes, Take-Aways and Priority
Action
Items
BEN Activists made the following
distinctions
and are committed to action on these points.
Infrastructure, Messaging and Allies:
Supporting campaign infrastructure
in order to build a movement
Creating a unified and well-framed
message for success
Cultivating and supporting
a strong and diverse coalition of natural allies
Getting out of the beltway
and seeking local and regional players and solutions in central states
and swing districts
Values, Stories and the Grassroots:
Putting a human face on our
issues and campaigns and telling real stories about and from
the grassroots
Claiming the higher moral
ground and making our work be about values
Explaining the science and
educating the grassroots
Creative Corporate Campaigns and
Legislative
Strategies:
Targeting the opposition,
preparing early to isolate them, reducing them to bring them in;
dividing
and conquering
Always going after the corporations
to change policy and hold them accountable
Expanding the breadth of our
corporate work by leveraging our experience with legislative efforts,
and targeting previously targeted corporations to get them to
challenge
their peers
Addressing the constitutional
issue of the “corporate person” with human rights
Funding,
Funders, and Our Approach:
Getting funded to study and
build a framework that allows us to apply the tactics & lessons
learned from our corporate campaigning to our legislative efforts
Developing a coordinated approach
to encourage funders to prioritize our issues and projects.
Proposing smaller pieces of
legislation instead of trying to advance an omnibus bill
Conference
Participants work with the following organizations:
1Sky, AFL-CIO, Amazon Watch, Alliance
for Fair Food, American Rights at Work, As You Sow, Breast Cancer
Action,
Breast Cancer Fund/Campaign For Safe Cosmetics, California Nurses
Association/
National Nurses Organizing Committee, Care2, Center for Biological
Diversity,
Center For Corporate Policy, Center For Global Peace & Democracy,
Center for the Working Poor, CISPES, Consumers Union, CorpWatch,
Corporate
Accountability International, Countercorp, Dooda (No) Rock Desert,
Earthworks,
Food First, ForestEthics, Friends Of The Earth, Future 500, General
Service Foundation, Global Alliance For Incinerator Alternatives, Global
Community Monitor, Good Jobs First, Green America, Green Café Network,
Green Century Capital Management, Greenpeace, Global Exchange, Health
Access, Institute for Policy Studies, Interfaith Center on Corporate
Responsibility, International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF), ILWU Lead
Organizer
on the Blue Diamond campaign, International Campaign For Justice In
Bhopal, International Longshore and Warehouse Union, Just Harvest USA,
Labor Education Foundation, Pakistan, Oceana, Pacific Environment,
Pesticide
Watch Education Fund, Rafi-USA, Rainforest Action Network (RAN), Robert
F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, SEIU, Sierra Club, Student
Action with Farmworkers, Teamsters, Transition Town West Marin and
Rising
Tide North America, U.C. Berkeley Labor Center, Ultimate Civics, Earth
Island Institute, The Humane Society Of The United States, Tri-State
Coalition for Responsible Investment, United Food & Commercial
Workers
Union, United Students Against Sweatshops, Women's Voices for the Earth,
World Future Council
Click Below to Listen to the Presentation 
