Rebecca Dray, Executive Director of Purchasing With Purpose, joins Kim Allchurch Flick for a discussion about how spending can drive systemic change through impact-led purchasing.
Dray shares her journey from corporate hospitality to mental health advocacy to founding UK workforce social enterprises with open hiring, then moving to the US and launching Buy Social USA (later renamed Purchasing With Purpose) to simplify language and build a national network-of-networks connecting buyers to values-aligned suppliers.
They discuss the US “up-down” wealth gap, misconceptions that impact suppliers cost more or lack quality, and research suggesting most are cost-competitive with added benefits like talent retention and reputational value.
Dray describes tools and training to help organizations start small, improve supplier searchability, address logistics barriers, collaborate across networks, and support global verification via People and Planet First.
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Time Stamps
00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro
00:56 Rebecca’s Career Pivots
02:44 Building UK Social Enterprises
05:56 Moving to the US
08:39 Why Purchasing Matters
15:48 Misconceptions and Value
18:27 Tools and Training
21:16 Finding Suppliers and Logistics
24:02 Networks Working Together
25:53 Habit Change and Advocacy
31:36 Local vs Global Supply Chains
33:08 Global Collaboration Basics
34:05 People On Planet First Explained
36:07 Atlassian Perks Worldwide
38:08 Verification Growth Story
42:10 Directories And Search Tools
47:12 Optimism And 2027 Vision
51:06 Signposting Not Scaling
52:42 Verification Against Washing
54:00 Calling People In
55:47 Where To Find Them
57:01 Dinner With Loved Ones
59:49 Warm Farewell Signoff
Kim Allchurch Flick: Hello everyone. This is Kim Allchurch Flick. Welcome you all to the Binding Measure podcast. And today we have Rebecca Dray. Rebecca Dray is the executive Director of Purchasing With Purpose, a national network of membership networks, connecting buyers with values aligned impact LED suppliers across the United States.
Rebecca is a leading voice on impact led purchasing and believes that buying is one of the most powerful and underused tools that all of us have for driving real systemic change. She works with corporations, institutions, small businesses and individuals to help them see that where you spend is where you stand.
The topic today is your spending is a change tool. Are you using it? How we can all become intentional purpose-driven buyers? I love this topic and I’m so happy you’re here.
Rebecca Dray: Thank you, Kim. I’m happy to be here.
Kim Allchurch Flick: It’s good to have you. So what has been your journey to date and some of the interesting pivots or inspirations that have led you to this point?
Rebecca Dray: I, how did I get into the sort of social enterprise impact led purchasing space is a bit of a twisty journey. So I started many, many moons ago working in the hotel industry for some well-known big corporate hotel brands. And I didn’t feel completely like it was fulfilling me. And I decided to study mental health counseling as a completely random aside, and I ended up shifting into working in mental health advocacy.
And during that time. It was really obvious to me how many people were unemployed who had mental health problems, but they had nothing really stopping them from working now other than the fact that people wouldn’t give them a chance in employment. And so I decided to look more into how I could help people with mental health problems get employment.
And I was at a conference and this man started talking about the concept of social enterprise. So running a business, the business sells goods and services, but you use the profit from the business to fulfill a social or environmental mission. And. This was in 2005. And I just thought maybe this is my thing, right?
That I can use my corporate hospitality background and my mental health advocacy background and I can put the two together, so the sort of nonprofit and for-profit sectors together. And I set up a social enterprise with two other people. And we employed everybody and anybody who considered themselves disadvantaged in the labor market and had what we called an open door policy where we would basically say, if you feel that your, you have a barrier to being in work, then you can come and work for us and you’ll get a living wage and you will have support, and we will have wraparound services that will help you to work out why you are not able to hold down a job.
And I’ve told this story many times, but the funniest thing wa well, the sort of funny slash terrifying thing was that two days before we o we were going to open, we were going to do an open recruiting day, and I went on the local radio and started talking about this concept and about what we were going to do with this business.
And so then we get to the next day and we open up to start the open hiring and people were queued literally around two blocks. There were so many people waiting to come in to the open hiring session. We just thought, oh my God, what have we done right? Like this kind of terrifying, I think in our initial business plan, we said that we were gonna help 30 people.
I think 120 people came to the open day saying, I need a job. I have a struggle. I have this barrier. And they were people with all, from all walks of life. And anyway, really long story short we went on to open eight of these businesses across the uk helping people to turn their lives around and get back into work.
We were helping hundreds of people a year. And because the barrier for most people being in a job isn’t the job. It’s all of the things that happen in your life that stop you being able to hold down a job, right? Anyway, at the time I didn’t really know that the name of that would be Employment Social Enterprise or Workforce Social Enterprise.
But I had this idea and I wanted to, to do it. And we started starting new businesses when we could see that there was a demand and an interest in a different area or a different kind of business. So we were running all kinds of different businesses, cafes and cleaning companies and gift shops and tea rooms.
And we had a theater bar and all kinds of diverse things that employed people. And we also contracted a lot with local government and with local business in something that in the UK gets called social procurement. And so we had a lot of contracts. We actually were the preferential. Hiring support organization that actually took over the contracts that the local job centers had because we were so good at hiring and helping people retain employment who were considered like difficult to hire or difficult to place.
Our workforce retention rate was the highest in the country. And so it was amazing, like our whole system of doing things and supporting people. So anyway, I, 12 years ago moved to the US and when I came here was to run a business in Florida originally. Which I still do, but when I got here I was curious about social procurement and I was like, why, what’s happening in this space in the us?
And I couldn’t find anything. There was just nothing that was talking about this concept. And I was having meetings with people to explore and find out what was going on. I had a meeting with the Social Enterprise Alliance and various others, and I actually joined and ran the chapter that was in Michigan and I just discovered that nobody was really talking about this topic and nobody wanted to work on it.
Social Enterprise Alliance actually said if you have skills and knowledge in this, maybe you should start something. And so I was like, okay, I will. So seven years ago, something like that, 2019, I think we started an organization called by Social USA and the whole point was to do social procurements across the us And nobody understood what on earth we were talking about.
They’d never heard of social procurement. Most of ’em hadn’t ever heard of social enterprise. It was a complete anomaly to people like trying to work out what this concept meant and what it was. So we’ve learned a lot over time. We’ve changed and pivoted and had to read the room a lot in terms of working out what fits here and what we can do and what does and doesn’t resonate with people.
And so three, four years ago we changed the name to Purchasing with Purpose. And funnily enough, just the simplification of the language helped people understand more. That they wanted to purchase intentionally and have impact in their purchasing. And so it’s helped us to change the language and to change the way that we were doing it as well.
So trying to bring together networks all over the country. But yeah, it was a very meandering strange beginning, which I think is often the case for people that end up in this field. It’s usually, they don’t come into it in a straight path.
Kim Allchurch Flick: I do think you’re right. I think that’s, it’s been that way for me as well.
And we actually met because of the Social Enterprise Alliance, or SEA Yeah. And I’m so appreciative. So while I’m still new to purchasing with Purpose as you know, my company is People and Planet First verified in a Purchasing with Purpose partner. And I wanna ask you what is your worldview and how is Purchase with purpose fitting into it now?
And what would you like to see?
Rebecca Dray: So I would say.
And I’m gonna say maybe let’s say US view for now. So I would say us view, we have a lot of people who feel really stuck and powerless and frustrated and like their lives aren’t really improving. And I guess a lot of the framing that we see around us tells us that that’s a left right problem, but I actually don’t think it is a left right problem.
I think it’s an up down problem. I think that there are. Too many extractive businesses and people who want to accumulate wealth at the top and don’t want it to cascade down to everybody. And I think that money isn’t circulating, it’s not creating resilient local economies like it used to. The idea of capitalism has become something more ugly instead of what its actual roots were.
And what the intention of it was right at the beginning, which was about building, strong resilient local economies and communities and having business that circulated money locally so that everybody could do well. And I think that’s, that has really significantly changed and is getting worse in many places.
And so the gap between up and down, top and bottom is widening. The place in the middle is becoming even harder for many people. And yeah, so I think that’s what we’re trying to tackle is you don’t actually have to run a business in that way. That isn’t actually what somebody spelled out.
And people like to talk about shareholder primacy and things like this, but it’s really a myth. It’s not actually the way that business has to be. Business can be good for people on planet, it can be good for everybody. It can reinvest in solving problems in its local community or for the planet.
And and so that’s where we’re trying to go, is we’re trying to help people to see that in the US and to think about the way they run their business, the way they buy. And our purchasing spend is. Absolutely the best way to do that because it is so much bigger in number than our donating dollars.
So what we buy versus what we donate is probably about some people say it’s 650 times more. I’ve seen other research that said it was even higher than that, right? So that the amount that we just purchase every year it’s in the trillions. And if we could just shift some of that to these businesses all over the country that have chosen to prioritize solving problems versus making two, three people richer, I think that society would be stronger from it.
And and so that’s what we’re trying to help people to do and to see. And it’s difficult in the US because, I came from the uk. The concept of this type of business model is much better known, right? The Scottish government, I dunno if you saw this, but the Scottish government passed a bill just I think last week, maybe the week before, called the Community Wealth Building bill, which talks about, money that’s spent, should stay local, should improve things, should be with businesses that reinvest and solve problems.
And and it’s all about, building this kind of social economy. But it’s much harder to find those organizations in the US because they call themselves tons of different things. So when we did some mapping research last year that I think you took part in, I think we had 30 different terminologies that people were using to describe their business.
They’re like, I’m a regenerative business. I’m a cooperative, I’m a steward owned company. I’m a B Corp. I’m a social enterprise. I’m a fair trade enterprise. I’m, I mean on and on and on was the terminology. And so we also don’t have a legal structure, a single legal structure that just would help people find that business model, right?
So you can really choose any legal structure in this country and then put protections in place to, to protect that long term. But people don’t really know how to do that. They don’t know, there’s not a lot of support out there for doing it. A lot of attorneys that help with business startup and so on don’t know about the different protections you can put in place.
And so I feel like the movement. It’s here, it’s big. We think from the research, it’s well over a million organizations in the us but it’s finding them and getting them to self select and say, that’s me, right? So that we can know that this is something huge and that it’s a strong, powerful force of business within our sector that people can be doing business with and that they sell just about everything, right?
So consulting services to toilet paper, right? And break room supplies through to T-shirts. So it’s everything and anything, but I think that the education piece in the US right now is it needs a lot more work and we need a lot more collaboration.
Kim Allchurch Flick: Indeed. And it sounds like things are really murky for people to grasp it all and that some organizations and others work in parallel, but they’re not crossing over and working together.
And what you say about the language is really true in terms like sustainability and impact becomes somewhat murky. And then I think, what do you think about this? I, there’s possibly another perception that doing something with businesses that are doing something as a force for good would also cost more.
And even though Nielsen says, I think it was 2014 and 2017 or so, this study said that two thirds of consumers globally are willing to pay more for products and services. When a company has good values, what if, but it doesn’t say that you have to pay more necessarily. Pricing can be in parity. It can be more, sometimes it, I think it all depends.
But do you think there’s an image that. Like organic used to be a lot more expensive. Now there’s a lot of leveling that’s happened over the years, but what do you think are the perceptions in the consumer’s mind about, even though two or thirds of the globe wants to buy from companies that have good values, what do you think are the obstacles and the challenges on their side, but also on the seller side?
And this is B2B and B2C.
Rebecca Dray: It’s really a complex mix of problems. I think so and we’re trying to look at within purchasing with purpose, we’re trying to look at multiple fronts that we see as missing puzzle pieces. And I see it like a big puzzle. You need to fix quite a few different things and have them all working in harmony for us to be able to change this.
So one thing would be, yes, a lot of perception, right? So the perception is they’re all tiny. The perception is that they all cost more. The perception is that they’re looking for a handout or, might not have a good quality product. They just are doing a nice thing. So therefore you should buy something from them and feel good.
And instead of realizing that these organizations are selling to corporate government, retail, et cetera, the same as any other business, they’re just choosing to do it differently and have their model be different. They’re choosing that the majority of their surplus gets re reinvested into the mission they’re trying to solve, rather than going to a few shareholders or an owner.
But it also doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t. Pay the owner, right? Or that you can’t make a salary or the, so there are lots of those misconceptions. We don’t have enough research in the US about some of those topics too, so that’s difficult. But I know that so the software company, SAP, that they’ve always been a really strong supporter globally of this type of procurement.
They did a piece of research or they were involved in a piece of research in Europe a number of years ago, and I think they said that sometimes the cost was maybe 1% or 2% higher than another supplier. But the knock on impact for their company as a whole of doing this type of procurement actually more than negated the additional cost if there was one.
So this research, I think, found that. In general, something like 95% were cost competitive or lower in cost. And that where it was hiring cost, just the fact that the company was doing this kind of procurement in the first place made the company itself better able to hire top talent, retain its staff, make its shareholders and customers happier.
So there were all of these additional benefits that, that they were getting from doing this type of purchasing, which is why they were doing it. Interestingly one of our team, Jared who works for Purchasing of Purpose has created, and we are beta testing this tool called three T, which is helping a company to see the additional value that is created when they buy in this way, because I think it’s one of the missing pieces.
So that for us is another missing piece, right? Is. Give somebody the data to be able to go to their boss and say, this is the value we create. Because it’s all of these things that you wouldn’t think of, right? If you are just talking, I want to buy this paper or this paper, and this one comes from Staples or any big box store, right?
And this one comes from one of these businesses, these impact businesses, like generally speaking, you have to have the reason why behind it. And I think those are some of the tools we’ve been missing. And so we’re beta testing this new tool and I’m hopeful that that’s gonna help. We’re doing a lot of training.
We’re actually just about to launch a series of 10 self-paced training classes to help people learn the essentials of how to do this type of purchasing. Why, how to talk to your boss about it or your colleagues about it. ’cause the other thing is that. You need to involve more than just the purchasing department, right?
You, if you’re a bigger organization, you probably want to also involve PR and marketing and CSR and all of these other people in other departments that will have a knock on benefit from you doing this type of purchasing. So teaching people how to structure this, how to talk about it internally, how to put their foot in the water and get started, right?
And another misconception, I have to make a billion dollar commitment. That’s like ridiculous and often fails, right? There’ve been multiple big companies that have made billion dollar commitments and then they just slowly stop talking about them because they can’t achieve them. And so we encourage people, no, start small, right?
So buy one thing in one product category. Change out some break room supplies, change out, get the next time you’re doing an event, have your printing done by a social enterprise, right? So things like that that are small, incremental steps that you can take. And then you feel out the relationship with this new supplier, right?
And you see, oh it’s amazing quality. It costs the same, it was delivered on time and we helped all of these people, for example, to get a job or to come out of poverty or homelessness or whatever. And so small steps is another piece. I’d say that the piece around not being able to find them is huge, huge barrier.
The reason that people go on places like Amazon and that isn’t. B2C anymore, right? Amazon is used by schools and colleges and during COVID, Amazon’s B2B sales went through the roof, right? Because they were able to force discounts onto sellers. They were able to do all of this sort of, huge scale purchasing that was easy for the buyer.
We don’t have something comparable to that. And part of the reason we don’t is logistics. So we’re trying to work on, and we have been for many years on a national logistics cooperative that could have warehousing, fulfillment services delivery and last mile delivery in a number of hubs around the country so that all of the social enterprises could buy their logistics services from this one huge cooperative.
Because right now, how are you gonna. Compete with the buying power that Amazon has, right? There’s just no way. And or you’re going to buy things from like our directory or marketplace, but each vendor or seller that you’re buying from is gonna package things individually and ship them individually to you because they’re not all sitting in a huge warehouse that you know is owned by Amazon, just down the street from you, right?
So there’s all sorts of different barriers that we are incrementally trying to work on, and I think helping the enterprises to do things collaboratively and collectively, helping them to get collective visibility and for people to understand what they are and what they do and why should I make this switch.
But also helping them with all of that reduced overhead that a lot of these huge, they’re not monopolies, but they might as well be right. A lot of these bigger companies. Who are purely making Jeff richer, right? Is essentially they’re buying power. They’re storing power. Their delivery power is, you can’t compete right now if you are, if you’re not in that space.
And so a lot of these enterprises end up selling on these marketplaces and losing 30, 40% of their sale. It’s huge, right? If you are already have got an additional overhead because you chose to solve a problem in the world that we are facing in our society or in your community, you don’t need that additional overhead of the 30% of your profit going out the window, right?
So I think there’s so many different facets. The other thing is around getting all of these different networks of enterprises to work together. So the reason we became purchasing with purpose instead of by social USA, was as by social USA. We were going out and searching for sellers, suppliers for individual buyers, and quite often we would find them through networks, right?
So like Kim you are part of several networks. You mentioned Social Enterprise Alliance. You’re a big part of the B Corps space. You are part of all sorts of different networks, right? But the networks weren’t necessarily working with each other again, because of terminology. Oh, you are different from us, right?
You are B Corps and we are social enterprise. Okay, we have more in common than we have a part, right? And so if we have similar values, if we have similar way of looking at the world, we should be working together, not apart. And I understand why it happens, but I think there needs to be a tide turning of all of these similarly values aligned organizations coming together and collaborating.
And that’s essentially what we’re trying to build with purchasing with purpose. And we have about. 30 something networks now who are part of the collective, but we’ve found more than 250 across the country. So it takes time to get people to work together, trust each other, want to collaborate.
Kim Allchurch Flick: It does.
And I also heard a statistic, and it was around COVID when the B Corps applications exploded, but also the shift went from B2C business to consumer approvals to more B2B business to business. So we found that very interesting and that hopefully lends something that more people can learn to work with purchasing with purpose.
And the other thing, and this is just personal, I notice how hard, maybe not hard, but slow it can be to change a habit. And my purchasing just personally has been one of, and it took a. A while, but I wanna eliminate plastic as much as I can, or at least not buy with plastic. So an example is with cleaning and laundry, I managed to completely eliminate plastic packaging From those two things.
Those two things, yes. Not just items, but the whole idea of cleaning and laundry. No more plastic, but it takes a while. But when, as a consumer going into a grocery store, it used to be, I want this. I want my favorite peanut butter, or I want this. And now I look at it and it took some brain training, like several repeats to say, I want the best packaging and I will find the product.
But the first decision point is the packaging, not the product itself. So for instance, one of them is, I love peanut butter. I love a certain brand. They used to be in glass, now they’re in plastic. I don’t buy it anymore. I look for the plastic ones. Yeah. But it takes some time. So I want to give people grace, including myself, that it is a habit forming idea.
But leading the decision point with something different than the product itself is training the brain. But I find it really liberating once I get there because it, it narrows the scope of how many choices there are to pick the one that fits everything I wanna do and my values and my lifestyle.
Rebecca Dray: Yeah I think that’s really interesting and it’s something that. We’ve been taught that we need everything now as well, right? So we’ve been taught I need it tomorrow, right? I want it to come overnight. But we don’t think about the cost of that. And I say we, lots of people do think about that, right?
Lots and lots and lots of people do think about it. However, the system for choosing something different is not yet developed enough to be able to compete and make it easy. And so I do think there are lots of people, particularly younger generation, my kids’ age, in their twenties, really care about this topic and as they should, because we are, as the older generation messing up the planet that they’re gonna try and live in, right?
And so it’s thinking ahead for what we’re leaving behind and what do we want? I say vote with your wallet, right? It’s like what do you want the world to look like? And if you’re not going to help create it, then you are essentially voting in the other direction, right? Because you have to make choices.
And so the other thing, people might say to me that’s easy for you to say, right? You can afford to make the choice between this thing and this thing. And I would say, yep, that’s very true in parts of my life, I have disposable income where I can think about making a choice to buy something different, to wait for it three days, whatever.
But I think the thing that everybody can do is be an advocate, right? So if you can’t do it yourself, think about all of the places you touch, where you could. Impart the knowledge and ask people to do better. What about your kids’ school? What about colleges or hospitals in your local area? What about your place of worship?
What about your workplace? What about your local government office? There are all of these different places where any of us, what about other people you meet and your friend circle and your family circle? Can we just help each other to see what’s out there, to learn to share this knowledge?
Funny, strange story, but I was sitting in the at a hotel lounge last night waiting for my partner to come in on a plane that was delayed and he got chatting to this man opposite me who’s in a completely different field of work for me and. We start talking and eventually I start talking about social enterprise.
’cause that’s my favorite topic and and purchasing. And he was just like, this is so fascinating. I never thought about it. And then he starts telling me things that his company is doing. He’s like, wow, we have a special program where we support veterans, for example. I’m like, fantastic.
You could buy from this social enterprise that’s in Detroit that employs homeless veterans, right? And he’s like, no way that exists. It’s like, just, it’s a conversation, right? I wasn’t making him buy something, but he’s now aware and he’s like, my wife’s gonna love this. And, and so that’s how you spread the word you, if you are not able to do the purchase yourself for whatever reason.
You can tell somebody else that can do it, and so that is something that every one of us can do that’s free. Is inspire change in others. Talk about this because we want money to circulate in our community. We don’t want it to flow straight out the door again. That’s one of the divisive things that’s happening in this country right now.
And it’s not about politics, right? It’s about this massive wealth gap and this sort of extractive behavior rather than regenerative behavior that we want to see more of in the world.
Kim Allchurch Flick: Indeed. And also we all think, a lot of us think about purchasing local. The world is beyond local. And the way I look at it is, yes, supporting local companies is very, very important and keeping money where it can be and build a local economy.
And yet even local companies that have usually have a product wine might be one of ’em. It’s the grapes are grown locally, the people are hired locally, but the corks and the barrels are in France or Portugal. So there’s still this interconnectivity that is international as well. The supply chain for a lot of us is still global and even when they’re, we’re choosing to purchase local, there’s usually a tentacle or some kind of a web that is international.
It’s the world we live in. And how do you speak to that with purchasing with purpose?
Rebecca Dray: We work alongside organizations like ours all over the world all the time. I spend a lot of time on calls and emails and WhatsApp messages and so on with colleagues in so many different countries. Interestingly, this whole topic of impact led purchasing is much, much bigger outside the US than in the US right?
I was talking earlier about how we called ourselves bi social USA. One of the reasons we chose that is because there’s a bi social Canada right across the border, right? I’m 45 minutes from Canada. And but the name didn’t track here in the US it totally tracks in Canada, right?
They’re very successful doing what they’re doing. And working with, for example, local government on when new construction happens, making sure that the purchasing for that, those construction projects happens with these social enterprises So internationally. We have to and want to, help each other learn, share knowledge trade that, that’s how we all thrive, right?
I think at the moment we’re not particularly a popular destination for a lot of people. And so that’s, that’s fair. So I don’t see us doing as much of that right this moment, but I think even, so I was on a call yesterday with colleagues who were in Brazil and we were talking about working across, from Brazil and the US and Canada.
And so that stuff is happening all the time. We briefly touched on the verification people and Planet First and Europe people and Planet First verified organization. There are, multiple organizations all over the world who are getting verified. The reason that people on Planet first started as a global participatory verification system was because of this issue of not being able to see these organizations easily globally.
So the motivation behind it came from consultations with network leaders in, I think 35 countries or something like that, saying, is there a minimum standard that we could all agree to across the world that is, you might call social enterprise and I might call the social and solidarity economy and somebody else might call a fair trade enterprise and et cetera, et cetera.
Is there a standard that we could all agree is the minimum bar for that and could we then. Offer a super affordable way of verifying those organizations that literally just covered its own cost, right? It’s not there to extract money from the system. It’s not there to become prohibitively expensive, and that can work across any legal structure or lack of legal structure in many countries, right?
So many, many countries don’t have, the US doesn’t have a legal structure that exactly fits all of the criteria. So that’s how people on Planet First came about. And purchasing the purposes, one of the three steward organizations that ensures that the standards are being upheld globally and we donate a lot of people time and money to help build it and grow it and expand it, but.
But yeah, that has 85 partners, I think across 132 countries now working together on trying to get these enterprises visible, verified, and work on things, benefits for them. So Atlassian software company just acknowledged that if your people on Planet first verified, you can have free Atlassian software.
That’s amazing. That’s like such an amazing win. If you are any verified enterprise that uses Jira or, I’m trying to remember the name of all of their different products, right? But Trello.
Kim Allchurch Flick: Trello is one
Rebecca Dray: of the Mio, I think. Yep. So yeah, so there’s, that’s an example of collaboration internationally.
The conversation with Atlassian was started by one of our partner organizations in Australia. And they said, we want to offer this in Australia. And we said could we offer it everywhere? Because these enterprises are everywhere. And they’re like, yeah, that’d be great. And so here they are.
Now they’re listed in the supporter directory for people and Planet first supporters that want to offer things of benefit to verified enterprises globally. That’s a great example of participation across multiple networks all over the world working together. And it doesn’t always have to be about trade.
Sometimes it’s about opening up a benefit or an opportunity or visibility for enterprises in a way that doesn’t exist right now.
Kim Allchurch Flick: And people in planet first verification, at least in my small worldview, is becoming. Increasingly noticeable. People are recognizing that beautiful logo, and I see more and more companies that are going for that first, they may verify as other things as well.
And the other beautiful thing I believe about people in Planet First is that it can organizations can get that as well. Like nonprofits absolutely can do it.
Rebecca Dray: Yep.
Kim Allchurch Flick: And the environmental climate piece is included as well, because I don’t think we can separate social and environmental very much because it, everything environmental affects us and it can affect economies and vice versa.
So I’m glad that that’s there as well. But what has been the people in Planet First verification growth? ’cause it seems like it’s a reasonably new verification among many certifications. It is verifications.
Rebecca Dray: It is. So it came out in 2019, but as a sort of not a test case, but almost, we were running it to see how it would go.
And it actually had a different name, it had a different badge. It, and interestingly in the US I said I don’t think this is gonna work in the us. For a start, it used the word social enterprise in the badge. And so I said, yeah, what we are finding here in the US is people don’t know what that is, so we’re going to lose all of these people that, that sort of would love the concept, but they don’t know the wording, the terminology.
And we actually brought in branding firm in the US and said, can you help us to create a brand for this that, that we can move to just in the US And originally and they came up with. Through lots of consultation with us, what’s important? What are you doing? What’s the, and we said essentially we had come up with the name of Will.
All of these businesses put people on planet first. They put people on planet before profit, right? So they make a profit, but they all put it first. It’s not an afterthought. They’re not just considering it, it is central to their existence. And they came up with the badge for us, with the word first, slightly to the left and first, and it was great.
And now we’re seeing about 20 to 25 organizations verified every month, which which is great because, I think when the B Corps badge started. I remember somebody told me a statistic that was like, after five years there were 75 B Corps certified. And I was like, okay, so we’re in year three and we’ve got over a thousand.
And that’s amazing, right? We’re doing really well. And I think, so I think it’s resonating with a lot of people from a lot of different backgrounds. And partly because it doesn’t use any one terminology, it just talks about what we try to do. It does have a catchy badge that I have stamp all over just about everything that I wear and walk around with and have on my water bottle and my laptop and my t-shirt and, things like that because I love the logo and people actually often ask me about it.
What does that mean? What is it? And they’re always curious. So yes, I think it’s getting good pickup and the more partners and networks we can get involved in promoting it and supporting it, the more it’ll grow, I think.
Kim Allchurch Flick: I believe so as well. And some companies have one certification or verification.
Some have many
Rebecca Dray: Multiple.
Kim Allchurch Flick: Yeah. And yeah and I just don’t always know how people prioritize or what to think. But the fact that it is possible to have many, and maybe that’s one of the things that will bring people together more is recognition of what these verifications are doing for companies, but even more importantly, what they’re doing to the networks or for the networks, for the consumers, for the partners who are buying for the supply chains.
And the more recognition, the better, so that people can think, I need to have something printed. I will only print from a verified.
Rebecca Dray: Yeah.
Kim Allchurch Flick: Company that cares about the planet and people, however they talk about that, whether it’s social enterprise or not, but putting that choice first. It’s not that the printing is needed first because printing is ubiquitous.
We could get it anywhere. Yeah. But putting the value of the type of company from which we will purchase that first, that could catch fire and make a big difference. Yeah. But I still think the terminology gets a little bit tricky and the lack of searchability for things is an, it’s just something that is still tricky.
So one of the things I would dream of is what’s a great online directory where somebody could just go in and search? And what do you think are possibilities of that, of improved searchability?
Rebecca Dray: So we’re building directories now. We have a Purchasing with purpose has a marketplace and a directory.
Of the enterprises that we work with in the US Good Market Global has the has a much bigger directory and marketplace of organizations all over the world. The People On Planet First website has a directory of all of the verified enterprises around the world, but I think it will become more and more, and more.
I think it needs to like that visibility piece is really important. One of the things I love about what we do is we’re not asking people to move away from a network. We’re asking the whole network to join and be part of this collaborative, right? So we’re not, we are not Purchasing with Purpose is not a membership organization.
It’s just a collaborative of people who want to work together on purchasing opportunities and visibility. So we are terminology agnostic. We’re network of not agnostic. We’re not saying this one’s better than this one. We’re saying these are all values aligned. And I think the more we build that trust base with people within different networks, and that could be local, right?
It could be a city directory. It doesn’t have to be something national or international or statewide or whatever. It can be small. The other thing that we are doing this year is we’re changing our website and our searchability functions so that not only could you look at going back to this discussion we had earlier, right?
Where are all of the places that I spend money or make choices about what I buy? We’re going to change our search tools so that. You can find a map in the place where you are, but you can search under multiple categories. So not just what are the goods and services I can buy? Who am I hiring? There’s tons of enterprises across this country that focus on workforce development. Back to my story of what I did in the UK 20 years ago, right? 25 years ago, we were in considered a employment social enterprise, right? There were loads of these organizations in the US particularly that focus on supported employment for people with disadvantaged.
Mental health challenges, physical disabilities, learning difficulties homeless people, people who’ve been previously incarcerated, PE people who have been trafficked or, had domestic violence and things like that. There’s so many workforce focused social enterprises that sell amazing goods and services.
But they also have people who are learning to get their confidence back and their skills back, who then move on into other employment. So many of them broker hiring. What if you can search for your next hire from one, from this directory as well? What if I can find a restaurant or a bar or an art exhibition or a piece of music I want to listen to that’s within this values, right?
That’s reinforcing and helping me feel attached to this community of value. And I think there’s more and more of that. So we’re gonna build out that functionality and we’re also gonna have a recommendation tool so that you could be out and about in your community and maybe you end up somewhere.
I remember Danielle who works in our team. Text me one day and was like, I’m in this different city and I just went in this cafe and it turns out that it’s a social enterprise and they’re working with women who have been being trafficked, right? And being victims of abuse.
And she’s like, that’s amazing, right? And so she’s sending me a photo of them and it made me think we want everyone to be able to send us a photo and say, here’s one, right? Here’s this organization. So that you can recommend, because I think word of mouth and recommendation it gives people agency to take action and to be an advocate for what it is we’re trying to see in the world.
So yeah more ways to have that happening and then connecting that to others globally doing the same thing.
Kim Allchurch Flick: As a visual thinker, I can just see MindMeister maps in my head. Yeah. But some people aren’t always that visual. But you’ve said advocacy twice, and I love that word. Especially when it, we really feel it.
Advocacy is a force of nature. It can be so amazing. And the other thing is, it sounds like this is bringing you full circle back to some of your origin story about originally helping people who weren’t considered hireable and showing that Absolutely. They have, they are. And what a wonderful thing to do.
So what makes you optimistic at this point?
Rebecca Dray: I think people make me optimistic. Generally speaking. I think most people are good people and they want to do good things. I think many people feel scared, frustrated, stuck, unsure. Uncertain, so what I am seeing is that we’re offering tools, right?
Tools for people to be able to take that and take a little piece of power back and have a pocket of positivity in their day where they can feel like they’re helping and they’re contributing and so on. Doesn’t have to be financially, it can just be in spreading the word in advocating and talking and sharing.
So I feel really positive that people want this. I’ve seen more networks wanting to work together than ever before which is fantastic. Actually. I don’t even know if I should tell you this, but we’ve been talking about, the idea of maybe doing a collaborative conference in 2027 or like a conference of conferences, right?
So like all of the values aligned networks coming together in one place, probably a convention center, having an expo of all of the different types of businesses, no matter what they call themselves, but they’re all values aligned, right? All the buyers that buy from all of these organizations cross populating across all of the other organizations.
Like to me I put an email out into our networks and said, what do you think? Is this a good idea or a bad idea? And I was shocked at how many networks thought it was great idea. And we’re having a meeting next week to start seeing if we can work it out. And so that makes me optimistic that people want this and they’re looking for what they can hold onto and affect change with.
And I think that’s what we’re building.
Kim Allchurch Flick: Count me and I’m excited about that too. And it also. It’s important to recognize that this is across so many sectors. It isn’t just consumer goods. This is big. How the consumer goods get to us. It’s also about services. It’s about support. It’s about so many things.
And I think that the thing that, as you’re talking also gives me optimism is there are many people who are doing this under the radar, but knowing that there’s such a large quantity of people who care makes me really optimistic and not feel so alone. And
Rebecca Dray: yes,
Kim Allchurch Flick: And I actually don’t feel alone because I’m in groups that are like valued.
But I also have a lot of optimism in the innovators because there were changes we couldn’t have made maybe 20, 30, 50 years ago. Because the innovation wasn’t there yet. But sometimes solving a problem creates an innovation. Like somebody solved my laundry and cleaning problem by doing something with no plastic and all plant-based, and it works.
It wasn’t, those things weren’t there before, except, in my grandmother’s time with, with inconvenient things. And I think that’s another thing is answering things in a way that people, the uptake will be good because I think people still need some convenience in their lives, and I’m willing to make changes that are inconvenient.
Yeah. But maybe not across everything, every day, all the time. And. But giving ourselves the opportunity to find, and I think this is something that you’re solving with purchasing, with purpose and people in planet first, is making the searchability easier. Because if we want to do good, but we can’t find a way to do it, that becomes very frustrating.
It’s a roadblock we give up and people have lives to lead, but there’s other things we have to do. But to make it searchable is such a gift. Yes,
Rebecca Dray: It is. I think. So I’m sure that the people that work for me at purchasing Rep Purpose find it very strange in that I say to them all the time, I don’t want us to grow.
I really don’t like genuinely, we’re currently a team of four. We may at some point become a team of five. That’s plenty. What I want to grow is all of these grassroots networks that are working on the ground with people. What I want to grow are the enterprises themselves, right? Everything we do, and I always talk about this, we should be signposting, we should be connecting dots.
We should be listening to people and going, oh, I know somebody else whose needs to work on that or is interested in this thing, or, and connecting people together. So I see purchasing with purpose as more of a sign poster. Making things visible, connecting dots, just sharing knowledge, getting people to share with each other.
That’s genuinely where I want us to be. Because it doesn’t exist right now in the way that it should. And actually that makes us. Weak and less powerful than I think we really are as a sort of movement of movements or a, network of networks or whatever you want to call it. I think there are tons of values aligned people out there.
So how do we connect them all together is the piece that I would love us to be able to solve and I don’t need that to make our organization bigger. I need it to make those organizations bigger and those enterprises bigger.
Kim Allchurch Flick: Yeah, I love that. I also love that people in Planet First is a verification.
It is third party because there’s something really good about verifying what someone says and as a company owner. Yeah. And my company has verifications. It’s that proof point that I am doing what I say I’m doing and somebody else verified it and said yes. And it also gives us a chance to really think about how to improve.
Yes.
Rebecca Dray: And
Kim Allchurch Flick: how to demonstrate, because the last thing we want do really
Rebecca Dray: important.
Kim Allchurch Flick: Yeah. Yeah. The thing, the last thing we want in these networks of networks is a lot of greenwashing is things Yeah. And whitewashing.
Rebecca Dray: Absolutely.
Kim Allchurch Flick: Whatever, washing, because there’s been so much of that in the past. So I look at it as a good gateway, not a negative.
To think about having a verification really does help us get past any thought barriers to a point where everyone in these organ, in these networks of networks together understands that they’ve all crossed the same bridge. And that is that somebody says, yes, you are doing what you said you were doing.
You are making a case. You are making a claim. Yes, you are doing what you said and you’re proving it. I personally, I think that’s great.
Rebecca Dray: Yeah. No I agree with you. And I think that not only is it a way of. Proving something and showing something and being validated. I think it also calls people in on the journey and it shows them what good looks like.
And so for me, we talk about this a lot in terms of the verification. We never say to somebody, you don’t qualify. You are not verified right in that way. What we say is, at this time, you don’t meet all five of the standards, but we encourage you to read the review guide, to read the documentation, to read what the standards say, and we are more than happy to help signpost you to how to improve.
People ask us for improvement points all the time, and I think that’s fantastic. We should be calling people in, not calling them out for what they haven’t done yet. And I think we need more of that in society. To me, this is a journey, right? It’s like when you were talking earlier about buy local is great, but what about, and I remember hearing somebody once talk about this as concentric circles.
So yes, if the gold standard is right in the center, there are all of these ripples and concentric circles coming out from that of good, right? And so how do we pull people towards the middle rather than pushing them outta the circle? I think that’s really, really important and part of the mission of what we’re trying to do is educate, bring people along, call ’em in, show them what’s possible.
So the verification really does that, and it’s being used more and more now by networks globally who want to educate others and say this is what good looks like for your business. Which is fantastic.
Kim Allchurch Flick: Yes. And how can people find you and join.
Rebecca Dray: Purchasing with purpose.org people and planet first.org.
So very simple. Both of those if they want to email me personally, Rebecca, at one of those two it’s very simple. As I say, with a really small team, we can have a very simple email address, which is our first name, and then the name of the organization. But yeah, there’s, there’s directories and things on our website.
There’s, we haven’t even touched on all the other things that we do around local place-based buying initiatives and things like that. Some of the things that we’re building out this year, which are gonna be really exciting around shifting spend, but I think a lot of it’s on our website, the same with people on Planet First.
It’s got a quick links page that has the answer to just about any question anybody might ever ask you about the verification. And we add to it and improve it all the time. So if people want to know more. It’s easy to find a lot of information on the people on Planet First website.
Kim Allchurch Flick: And I second that because I do support other companies that are seeking to do it and
Rebecca Dray: yeah,
Kim Allchurch Flick: and help them along with that.
And everything is in the show notes. So if you’re ready. The final question is the one that has nothing to do with what we just talked about, but that is if you could have dinner with up to three more people, so a table of four living or deceased, who would they be and why?
Rebecca Dray: So my answer’s probably going to be a little bit pedestrian and sentimental, but actually it would be three people who have passed who I really care about and and all of them died quite suddenly.
And I think, so one of the things I try to do now in life is. Tell people that I love them. Tell them that I care about them. Explain how I feel. Give somebody a hug. Things like that. I think we need more of that in our daily lives. And there are three people in my life who passed very suddenly.
And one of them was my father-in-law and we were politically about as opposite as you could get, but we cared about each other really deeply. And he was a very caring, loving person who I would have amazing debate with about the state of the world and so on. But he really, really paired and he had this sort of graph exterior, but he was a teddy bear really on the inside.
And I miss him greatly. And he died very suddenly. And the same with. One of my really, really close friends. It was actually his birthday yesterday. And it’s not quite a year since he passed, but I didn’t get to say goodbye to him. And I have another friend as well that that happened to. And I think when somebody, I can think from a sort of nice, cuddly perspective, either these authors or famous people or, whatever that I might want to talk to and Sure.
I love talking to people. I love the sociology and the psychology of people and learning how they got into things and why they do them and so on. But there’s something to be said about having that last bit of time back with somebody that was taken from you really quickly and that you didn’t get to say goodbye to.
That I think is very important. And, whenever I am away from my son or my partner or people I love, I always say, I love you as the last thing. I was telling somebody the other day, an unsolicited I love you from my child is probably the most amazing thing in the world. You can’t explain that, explain unless you’ve felt it.
But when your kids go through like teenage years, and they don’t really need you as much and stuff, but then just outta the blue you get, and I love you mom. Oh, I, it’s just so special. I really, really value those moments. So yeah, that’s who I would sit down with.
Kim Allchurch Flick: Oh, that’s so beautiful.
I thank you. I can’t wait to see you in person and give you a hug. I love you. I love what you’re doing and I think you’re a blessing in the world. So thank you very much. Thank
Rebecca Dray: you.
Kim Allchurch Flick: And everyone says, oh, I really
Rebecca Dray: enjoyed chatting to you.
Kim Allchurch Flick: Oh, you’re so full of amazing ideas and making the world a better place.
Thank you so much everyone. This is Kim Allchurch Flick with Mighty Measure. Signing off.
This Episode’s Guest: Rebecca Dray
Dedicated to creating visibility, opportunities and awareness for enterprises that put people and planet first. Proving that impact procurement improves society alongside corporate sustainability, shareholder and customer satisfaction & employee retention. Rebecca Dray is creator of the Purchasing with Purpose movement, and engaged with the People + Planet First verification.
