Laurie Lane-Zucker, founder and CEO of Impact Entrepreneur, joins Kim Allchurch Flick.
Laurie Lane-Zucker, who coined “impact entrepreneur” and whose upcoming book, The Impact Entrepreneur Breakthrough: A Field Manual for the Regenerative Economy (Sept. 1, 2026), argues for transforming an extractive economy into a regenerative one. Lane-Zucker traces his systems-thinking roots to environmental writers and his work on place-based education, linking cultural foundations, economic architecture (including B Corps), and systemic infrastructure as three nested layers needed for change.
He frames today’s “polycrisis” as a single systems failure and introduces “real security” and the “prevention dividend,” citing returns from preventive investments like ecosystem restoration, hazard mitigation, and pandemic preparedness.
The conversation also covers language shifts from sustainability to regeneration, mission protection through ownership models, the impact of the attention economy on community and place, and resources available at impactentrepreneur.com/breakthrough.
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Time Stamps
00:00 Welcome and Guest Intro
01:48 Origins of Systems Thinking
05:30 Indigenous Wisdom and Regeneration
08:45 Polycrisis and Place Based Roots
12:11 Three Layers of Change
16:45 Real Security and Prevention Dividend
25:03 From Sustainability to Regeneration
27:50 Hope Through Certification and Ownership
32:33 Mission Locked Ownership
34:23 Berkshires Local Innovation
36:24 Triad Local Global Thinking
39:23 Attention Economy Threats
40:51 Book Resources Pathways
44:46 Starting The Impact Journey
46:51 Monarch Butterfly Metaphor
52:15 Grace Hope And Poetry
54:22 Dinner With Adam Smith
58:57 Closing Community Invitation
Kim Allchurch Flick: Good morning everyone. This is Kim Allchurch Flick with the Mighty Measure Podcast, and I’m delighted to be here today with Laurie Lane-Zucker.
Laurie Lane-Zucker is the founder and CEO of Impact Entrepreneur, PVCA global multimedia publishing platform serving more than 70,000 members across 200 plus countries in the impact economy.
He coined the term Impact entrepreneur in 2011 and in the mid 1990s working with the educator, John Elder at Middlebury College gave the name, place-based education to a pedagogy he had spent years building as founding director of the Orion Society in 1992 through 2004. Where he worked closely with Wendell Berry, Terry Tempest Williams, Barry Lopez, and David James Duncan.
He went on to found one of the earliest certified B Corporations and the Triad Institute. His new book, the Impact Entrepreneur Breakthrough, A Field Manual for the Regenerative Economy by Berrett-Koehler, September 1st, 2026 maps the architecture of an economy that builds value through regeneration rather than extraction.
Learn more at impactentrepreneur.com/breakthrough. I am absolutely so excited for you to be here. Thank you,
Laurie Lane-Zucker: Kim. Thanks for having me. I’m delighted.
Kim Allchurch Flick: And I will admit that I am about three quarters of the way through the audio book. I own the hard copy of it, and that is because I went to one of your Impact Entrepreneur webinars where you discussed this book, and I believe it was an our webinar that went well over because everyone was so enthusiastic and also very, very curious about how to move this movement forward.
So welcome.
Laurie Lane-Zucker: Thank you. Great to be here.
Kim Allchurch Flick: So what have been your inspirations and journeys to this point? You’ve got a, a marvelous history and a caring heart. What has moved you along the way?
Laurie Lane-Zucker: Oh, I’ve had so many inspirations. My book is filled with the voices and the examples of many of them.
And I think my acknowledgements of the book is maybe longer than, almost longer than the book itself. A little bit of an overstatement, but I have a lot of people to thank for my path, my tra career trajectory the way I think about the world. And, the book maps a lot of the kind of the key moments and insights from that 35 plus year professional trajectory.
It starts telling the story of one of my earliest, most formative experiences, which was a gathering in 1991. That I helped organize as a work study intern at Orion Magazine. It was the first gathering of leading environmental writers and nature writers. You name some of them, Wendell Berry. And although he was not in that particular gathering but Terry Tempus Williams and numerous other wonderful writers.
And what I talk about in the book as far as how formative that experience was, it was so powerful to be in a circle of about, I dunno, between 30 and 40 of the kind of finest narrative weavers around the relationship between people in nature that were alive at that time. What struck me most.
Was how they thought. They thought in systems. They, these are ecological thinkers and e ecology is systems. And that really and then having spent, then spending another, what, 13, 14 years, working closely with this community of writers, of scientists, of of policy experts who were and are focused on the relationship between people and nature and community that systems lens that is right at the core of so much of what they how they view the world, really impacted me so profoundly.
And when I moved on, started one of the first B corporations. Then started Impact Entrepreneur and have been at that now for 15 years. Systems mindedness is a term I use to describe what the impact entrepreneur how the impact entrepreneur thinks is and what that, what I felt was really missing from a lot of the conversation ar around business building and impact finance.
And that I felt was really essential for, to be right at the core of the conversation. So that’s some of, that’s some of my earliest and most lasting influence that I carry with me today.
Kim Allchurch Flick: I love that idea of systems and when you talk I’ve also read some Robin Wall Kimer and how even hundreds of years ago there, the people that were on the land that understood the systems and how to be reciprocal and not extractive and how you’re bringing that forward to the modern day. What are you seeing in the community you serve some of the responses and what are others doing and what do you think is happening out there these days?
Laurie Lane-Zucker: You mentioned Robin Walker Kimer. I’ve invoked Robin’s work at a couple different junctures in the book. I, I invoke indigenous. Knowledge systems regularly throughout the book because really what we’re, when we talk about regeneration, the regenerative economy impact, as I’ve seen it, I’ve al I’ve always through impact, entrepreneur defined the word impact as transformation.
We can go into that if you want later. But invoking the Hani seven seventh generation principles the work of Kimer and others reminds us that many of the principles behind regeneration are not new. They’re, in fact, that’s thousands of years old and they exist all over the world. Ubuntu is a African principle around regeneration.
So we’re in a sense, we’re remembering a forgotten way of thinking and. And, matching it to modern instruments.
Kim Allchurch Flick: That’s a beautiful way to put it. And because we are in a modern world, and yet these, these principles matter. They have worked.
Laurie Lane-Zucker: Yes, absolutely.
The book is, in part a. Deep and profound celebration of a global movement of what I would call practitioners or impact entrepreneurs. A term I coined back in 2011 to, to give expression to a type of work and a type of thinking that I was seeing emerging around the world.
And this is not simply entrepreneurs who are building enterprises, but people who are practitioners in transformation, so of the economy specifically. So entrepreneurs, investors, philanthropists, policy experts, academics. These are the people who are very much a part of our community at Impact Entrepreneur and are the ones who are bringing deep insight and an incredible amount of energy to what I feel is the greatest challenge of our day, which is to transform an extractive economic modality into a regenerative triple bottom line, impactful modality, however you want to discuss it.
Much of the book in the examples I give in the tools that I share are examples and tools that this community of people have been building in recent years. In recent decades. It’s very inspiring to see I offer in the book. Kind of ways of thinking about this work, frameworks to better understand it and to also understand something I feel quite passionately about, that the poly crisis that we’re facing of social and environmental challenges, including the authoritarian of fronts or attacks on democracy.
I consider that to be part of the poly crisis that includes climate change and wider ecological devastation. The brittle increasing brittleness of communities. This poly crisis is at its core a a systemic issue. It’s, and these are not separate problems. They are. Symptoms of a single systems failure, which is an economy that extracts rather than regenerate.
So that transformation from an extractive to regenerative economy is, I believe the one of the most important things that humanity can be doing and that this movement is doing, and that there are amazing examples of this work all over the world. Talking specifically about work that I’ve done in the past, you mentioned in my introduction the work that I and colleagues were doing in the year, in the 1990s to develop something called place-based education.
A form of e education, a pedagogy that uses the natural and cultural continuum of a place. For interdisciplinary learning to help get people to replace themselves in their homeland and become more deeper, more understanding participants in their places. Spent many years developing that. John Elder and I coined that term back in the nineties.
Something really interesting happened. I moved on after my work at Orion and started one of the first B Corps and then in the early teens of this century the term place-based started emerging in impact finance. We started hearing about place-based investing. And that very much has r you know, roots in the, the work that we were doing in place-based education.
But they are arose, out of the ground, at a distance from one, one another let’s just put it this way. Impact place-based education. Create cultivated soil that allowed place-based thinking to e eventually emerge into place-based investing, place-based funding and inform the community development, finance work that’s happening in many places around the world and through a lot of foundations.
I take a lot of humble satisfaction in the fact in that, how that early work seems to have seeded things that have, can intersected with my later work in my career.
Kim Allchurch Flick: And it sounds like the work and the way you see it is very multifaceted, which is good. It means there are support systems growing and the finance part, the ecological part, entrepreneurs, innovators it’s encouraging.
What are challenges and obstacles as you see them?
Laurie Lane-Zucker: I think one of the most important messages of my book, I’ve been a field builder, you could say, for much of my career, both at, at the work we were doing at Orion, we had a the Orion Grassroots Network and we’re doing a lot of network building, community building, and that’s followed me very much into the work I do in Impact Entrepreneur.
I believe that as a field builder, as somebody who spent much of his career building movements in the environmental and social justice realm and then moving in the second half of my career into a into, very much into the entrepreneurship, finance economic realm and thinking about things from a movement perspective because.
The transformation of the economy from an e a extractive and extractive to a regenerative state is take, will, takes a movement of people of practitioners, the types I’ve described earlier. What one of the most important messages of my book reinforces is the how important is to work across a number of different levels to have that transformation actually take and to have lasting effect. And that, and there are a number of frameworks I offer for that. One important one is to think about change in terms of three nested layers.
One, cultural foundations, the cultural foundations of change. Two, the economic architecture of change, B Corp. Certification could be is one of those. And thirdly, systemic infrastructure of change markets and market transformation. And you need to have all three working at a very sophisticated level.
If you’re missing any one of those, if you’re missing the cultural foundations, if you’re missing or forgetting the crucial importance of storytelling, then the you’re undermining the other two layers. So you need to have all three moving forward at the time. And I feel that that is a challenge.
It’s a problem for our space because it’s so easy to think about impact as just impact investing and impact investing as kind of an incremental shift on traditional. Extractive capitalism rather than something much deeper and more systemic.
Kim Allchurch Flick: You frame that so beautifully, and I think it’s important.
It also sounds like it’s important for you and us to reach policy makers as well, and legislators and bring that cultural storytelling into it. An example I’m lucky enough to live in the northwest. It’s not the only place that has some good things, that’s some bad things. But what’s happened recently, and it took years, is with tribal knowledge of the local tribes who were mostly the salmon fishery people, but also, they say that living on this land, not all tribes were salmon people. They weren’t all fishing people. They knew the land well. They knew how to trade well. They worked collaboratively. But there have been five dams taken down recently. One was in the news a lot, the Klamath system, which was four dams and one very close to where I live, called the Wild Boy Creek.
And how it took about 20 years of planting and working together. But the indigenous knowledge was a big part of it. And the replanting of riparian species of plants so that the, the fish would have cold enough water and shaded water. And with all that coming into play, when the dams opened, they said the salmon, DNA and small salmon were showing up in four to six weeks.
So for 60 years of degradation and ’cause dams are bad for a fish and they’re, therefore they’re bad for people. But it took that storytelling and that history and a lot of work and probably a lot of angst, but it actually happened and nature proves that healing and regeneration can happen really quickly if we just give it a chance.
Laurie Lane-Zucker: A absolutely. And if we think about prevention rather than reaction one of the deepest rabbit holes I went into when I was researching my book ended up being the middle part of the book, part three, which is on which answers for me, the, a question that kept arising and that really is, has shadowed my work for 35 years.
And that question is. What is real security? And as I looked into this from a kind of an impact economy with an impact economy lens, and I looked at research quite voluminous, research that exists across quite a few different sectors that we’re all looking at the value of in investing funding, preventative measures prevent rather than funding measures that would react to the inevitable disaster that’s going to come down the road.
What I found was that pretty much across institutions, not simply governments, although government, municipal governments, national governments certainly hold here, but. It’s foundations, corporations, almost every institution, if you look at their budgets and their investments in what would be considered security related are reactive in nature, not preventive.
And yet this, all this research that I was looking at, pointed to something that I call one of the greatest misallocations of funding on, on, on the planet, which is, a lack of funding of root causes and the dividend, the return on that investment if you invest in prevention. Some examples,
first of all, just get your mind around this global military spending alone is $2.8 trillion globally. Okay? Most of that is reactive spending. Okay. That’s a, a very graphic number to hold in mind. Now, think about pandemics. Think about the things that really in the last five years have harmed you, Kim, or threatened you.
It’s, in most cases, especially in, in the United States, it’s not the threat of a military invasion. Okay? It is a fi a wildfire. It’s a pandemic, okay? It’s a public health issue of some sort. It’s flooding. It’s, and these are the threats to real security. These are the pillars of real security.
I, one of the frameworks I offer in the book are the five pillars of real security. And those five pillars are, ecological stability, public health capacity, economic equity, democratic infrastructure, and community cohesion. And again, all of these together are the sources of real security, I would argue.
And that if you underfund or any, any one of these pillars is weak and potentially can crumble , it weakens the whole five pillars, all the other pillars together. Now, one of the, I wanted to make a financial argument around this, and I mentioned this term earlier, the prevention dividend. If one looks at ecosystem restoration, research shows that for every dollar invested in ecosystem restoration, again, preventative measures, you get a seven to $30 return on each dollar invested. FEMA hazard mitigation. Okay? Four to $7 of return for every dollar. So that’s $7 for every dollar for flood mitigation. Reinforcing building codes is you get $4 of return for every dollar invested.
Pandemic preparedness, we have these numbers. We just went through a pandemic, right? It, the Jamil Institute has outlined that for every dollar spent on pandemic preparedness, you get a $1,102 return by hitting, by, by addressing these things before they happen. Okay, so this is a, this discussion around real security, I feel is a new way of looking at the work we do in the impact space and can potentially really shift the narratives that entrepreneurs impact entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs who are developing solutions, often preventative solutions to social and environmental problems.
It offers a new lens and a new layer of narrative that makes a very clear financial argument to people who are allocating funding that preventive matters, impactful solutions and enterprises are actually have, have a tremendous dividend that comes from them. If you shift your thinking around that question of what is real security?
Kim Allchurch Flick: Wow. And of those five in the new standards of B Corp and others like benefit corporations for good, which is a verification, there is a way to measure impact in each of those. And it, the words might be different, climate, action environment you say ecology, but equity infrastructure could also be governance, health could be community and employees.
There’s so many ways that I can see where this could intersect and interact.
Laurie Lane-Zucker: I gave a talk to the Super Crowd conference that Devon Thorpe put on a couple weeks ago. And it was about the prevention dividend. And I, when I was preparing that talk, I was looking through the other speakers and the topics of the conference, an impact conference of different solutions.
And I look at it and I say, I could put every single one of those solutions into one of these five pillars of real security. And what I ended up realizing was what you’re, what that is, what that conference is, is a prevention portfolio for investors. And I just I’m just very excited about this, the reframing of the impact work because.
If we can shift what I call the prevention ratio. So most institutions, when they do an audit of where their security related spending goes, they realize that between, usually between 10 and 20% of their spending goes to prevention. And about 80 to 90% goes to reaction if once you realize, or you do your audit and you find what your ratio is, let’s just say it’s 0.12, okay?
Then you can start to measure what if we shifted that to 0.2 or 0.25? And then you can measure, because we have all this data on, ecosystem restoration, returning seven to $30 per dollar early childhood education, 17 to 13% annual rate of return you can match the increase in ratio.
And actually. Numbers to, to what the dividend will be by shifting some of the security related, spending away from reaction to prevention. I think this, this is a game changer for the impact investing space and the impact entrepreneur space more broadly. More broadly.
Kim Allchurch Flick: Indeed. And so then helping you and helping us as B Corps companies and others who are interested in or have specific areas in the space is how to get this message across.
And I have a question about words. ’cause we talked in the beginning about how framing words and ideas matter and that words like sustainability
Have become so broad that maybe the potential meaning might be lost. And we also talked about how sometimes we think we’re doing something good, but haven’t thought past that first initial step and.
One might be recycling. Yeah. And but recent data, even not so recent data says that recycling is not a panacea. That perhaps thinking in ways of how not to recycle at all by going back and saying, how can I not use anything that needs to be recycled? What are some of the switches? How could that be better?
What do you think about in these circles that you’re in, in these conferences? How the words matter and how do people perceive what we’re getting to, which is how do we get to that prevention? Not just stopping something and thinking we were doing well, but really asking ourselves the question, how could we do better?
How could we be literally more preventive?
Laurie Lane-Zucker: You mentioned the word sustainable sustainability, which is a, yeah. A term that’s been at the core of our space for so long. Sustainability really is about accepting the di decay state of the natural world and the existing state of our social situation and trying not to make it worse.
Okay. Regeneration is very different. It’s about saying no. We, the, the existing state is not at all satisfactory. In fact, on so many levels. It’s not looking very good at all for human prospects. And so we need to heal. Regeneration is about healing. It’s about using business, using levers of finance, using policy.
Using education to heal, to make things better. That’s what this work is about. And so while I believe the word sustainable has been a useful term and has helped create a shift in thinking it’s still not anywhere near where we need to be given the reality of the world. And so that’s why the subtitle of my book is A Field Manual for The Regenerative Economy, not a Sustainable Economy.
Kim Allchurch Flick: And One Reason I’d love the book so much what makes you optimistic?
Laurie Lane-Zucker: All the work I see. I’m a journalist at heart and an editor and I, with Impact Entrepreneur Magazine, with the other work I’ve done in journalism in the past, I’ve had the. Great benefit of being able to see work that’s happening and emerging all over the world.
And our magazine tells those stories every, every week. And our community is filled with people who are innovating and supporting the development of those solutions. Again, all over the world. That is hopeful work. That’s hope. I don’t know of much more hope than that. Your work, I know as you’ve said, is very much in, in B Corp certifications.
The sophisticate increasing sophistication of certification systems B Corp, first and foremost among them is a tremendous source of hope. But we can’t stop there either. This is a point I make. Throughout the book, especially in part two where I talk about enterprises that heal and where I talk about capitalist custodian and markets that reflect what matters that certifications are raise the floor, right?
That we need to have every, every business needs to have this kind of rigorous assessment of practices and baseline for them to shoot for more. But another thing that we have to keep in mind, and I have a whole chapter on this subject, is that much of the success, the near term success of a business resides with the current owners and managers of a business.
But that can always change and that will change when a business is exited. When the owners sell or retire, we see this. So in so many ways, Ben and Jerry’s, lots of different things. And then reactions to that to the problems such as what Ben and Jerry’s has been going through for decades now that have been emerged with things like what Patagonia has done with creating a purpose trust in a nonprofit organization to secure mission.
My point here, and again, I have a whole chapter on this chapter, is on ownership. Ownership and the questions of ownership. Who owns the business? And how do you secure mission as ownership shifts? When original founders and managers shift, Paul Pullman was a wonderful CEO impact wise for Unilever, but then he left and things changed, right?
So certification is essential. It’s a floor, but ownership and questions of ownership and all the legal innovation that’s happening around ownership that is really exciting to see is everything above that floor.
Kim Allchurch Flick: And as you’re speaking, it also strikes me that we have maybe a responsibility, but at least should have a curiosity as consumers and stakeholders to question that sometimes and say.
We love Ben and Jerry’s during this ownership. Now, this new ownership, it seems that things are changing. That’s not to our liking. What could we do about it? We could also vote with our wallets, which is an another way of doing things. And I’m in a position now where my bank which is a small regional bank and is a benefit corporation, and it’s intimate enough that I’ve met employees who work there and it’s been great.
Was just merged or bought out by a much larger bank. And one of my first questions is, will the benefit corporation status remain? And they don’t know yet. So part of that I’m thinking is, I don’t wanna give up on ’em yet, but also ask the questions along the way and say, what are your values?
As you’re bringing this up it seems as, as we move forward and we’re optimistic and people are doing amazing things, there’s some winds of change along the way and. And we should probably question that or be aware or at least think along those lines and say, okay how do we encourage people to keep going down that path of regenerative economy or say, can’t support you anymore.
There’s somebody else that I will go to.
Laurie Lane-Zucker: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Consumer pressure is always gonna be an important dynamic and change. I think that the, my chapter on ownership explores various different models of ownership where that are aimed at protecting mission over time and through the new eventual or possibility of mission dilution through exits and, new funders coming in and new board members coming in. Things like, cooperative ownership, employee ownership, as we mentioned with Patagonia, the purpose trust model. There are really interesting examples, not simply in the United States, but around in different parts of the world.
Monon in Spain is a great example of a cooperative that’s been running for decades, very successfully. Nova Vita in Latin America. Another example there, there are a lot of examples of ways to lock in mission and so that it takes the, a question of future dilution out. It, you don’t have that.
I think that this is really crucial. You can’t, certification is essential. Questions of ownership are foundational. And the earlier a business takes those up, ideally at formation the better,
Kim Allchurch Flick: it sounds like the business equivalent of having a conservation easement on a piece of land to protect it.
Yeah.
Laurie Lane-Zucker: Community land trust. Another example of that I give in the ownership section, where the community owns the land and individuals own the buildings on the land. Yeah. Again there’s, and community Land trusts have been around for quite a long time. We have one of the, the first community land trust here in the Berkshires where I’m at.
And yeah, the first community supported agriculture farm is based down the road from me here. Lot, lot, a lot of amazing work has happened in our very rural, beautiful area of the Berkshires. And I write about that in the book as well. One of my favorite narratives in the book is telling about this place a conference impact economy conference that we hosted here with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors back in 2018. But it gave me a chance to talk about the amazing history from the legacy that w Webe Du Bois who grew up down the road here and went to the public schools and called the Berkshires, his ground of consciousness and as well as some of the other innovation Berkshires, the local currency that the Schumacher Center for New Economics developed also just down the road a lot of really forward thinking innovations have emerged from this little part of the world that I inhabit.
Kim Allchurch Flick: And you’re also doing something which I think about a lot local is emphasized in the
The impacts sphere and B Corps encourages us to support local stakeholders, and yet the world is global trade is global and you cover both local and global in such a beautiful way. And I love how you’re speaking about your local economy and where you live.
I’m really encouraged by some of the things happening here where I live, which is we’re in the same latitude, but different sides of the us. But could you speak a little bit to that acknowledgement or understanding of your global viewpoint and gets protecting and helping people regenerate there, but also protecting and encouraging support of local.
Yeah. How does that work in, in. Your thought process with impact entrepreneurs? Yeah.
Laurie Lane-Zucker: In the introduction you gave or my bio, you mentioned that I founded some years ago, something called the Triad Institute which was a think tank. And the, the triad refers to a triad, what I call tatic thinking, which is a way of thinking that is simultaneously deeply local or place-based, national and global.
So three levels, and with all each informing the other, that to me is the most productive form of citizen engagement that we can have. Where you’re, you are. Sophisticated in all, all three levels. But it comes again with that, just as I was talking about the three nested layers of change for to the regenerative economy and the cultural foundations, the economic architecture and the systemic infrastructure.
Just as cultural foundations are foundational, so is place, so is home, so is locality. And so much of the globalized economy that we do exist in has had a negative impact on not only local economies but our understanding of our, literally our place in the world. Our place in the world.
And so place-based education is a pedagogy as I was, we’ve discussed. That’s in part aimed at revivifying, that connection, that relationship, that understanding that the continuum of nature and culture that defines each place is essential to our own self, our own identity our own wellbeing.
You have to have that foundation and it really needs to be a deep one. Otherwise you’re just displaced from the world. Yes. From reality.
Kim Allchurch Flick: Oh. And like I said. It really needs to be a deep one, and that means getting to know local shopkeepers and thinking about school boards are one of the most local things that we could think about. And I admit to not considering things like that, but yet it’s become really important, all these intersectionalities of community and what it means.
And I really appreciate how you bring that out in the book. And, but a lot of it just has to be about support. And I do find it interesting that there are some neighborhoods, even apartment buildings, where people might live next to each other and not know each other’s names. And yet in other places, community is neighborhood and isn’t it wonderful when people know each other’s neighbors and the kids grow up in that kind of environment?
And that’s, that’s what a lot of historically. People knew each other very well. They were working together. And with other groups as well. And I just love the way you frame that. Sounds
Laurie Lane-Zucker: like you
Kim Allchurch Flick: Yeah.
Laurie Lane-Zucker: It reminds me of another part of the book that I explore in the cultural foundations aspect of the book, which is part four which is focusing in on the attention economy and how algorithmic takeover, the indefinfinite scrolling that so much of our social media, of our just online existence is aimed at at preserving, just keep you online, keep you looking at things that 10 minutes later you’re gonna forget you even looked at.
But still it’s gonna, it’s gonna put money in the pockets of. Yeah, tech companies, so much of this draws so much of this so much of our attention is drawn away from place, from relationships, from communities. And that in, when you’re thinking of the movement from a re extractive to regenerative economy, caretaking our own attention, our attention spans is an essential piece of this.
And I go deeply into that in the book and or try to articulate why we have to be very conscious of the the threats to our attention,
Kim Allchurch Flick: caretaking our own attention.
Laurie Lane-Zucker: Yeah.
Kim Allchurch Flick: That’s one to sit with.
Laurie Lane-Zucker: Yeah.
Kim Allchurch Flick: That’s super important. What would you more, would you like to share and how can we, the audience help you?
Laurie Lane-Zucker: I’ll share my book. It’s out in the world. It’s really 35 plus years of my experiences, my insights and my connections with people who are doing wonderful work. That, can be, I think you’re gonna you’ll share that in the information, but impact entrepreneur.com/breakthrough is where you can find all the information.
It’s not simply the book though. I I finished writing the book over a year ago. That’s how long the publishing process takes with a publisher to, and that’s ex they expedited it. But I gave BA basically that gave me a year to develop a whole slew of resources around the book to support the book.
So at impact Entrepreneur. Dot com slash breakthrough. There are, there’s a reader’s companion there for those teaching the courses. There’s a lot of different resources there. There’s the instructor’s guide. There are framework canvases that people can print out and use as they go through each chapter of the book to examine where they are in the work, in, in the transition, and and that, and those are directly linked to the toolkits that are exist at the, in the book, at the end of each chapter.
The, so there’s just a lot of supplementary resources that exist to support the book. There’s so many tools in the book, so many examples that I felt the need to create a, a pathways section of the book, which is upfront, which. Tells depending on where, what kind of work you’re doing, whether you’re an entrepreneur, you’re an investor, you’re working in policy, you’re an educator, you’re a student.
There are articulated pathways or suggested pathways through the book. Entrepreneurs definitely, you can start with page one, but if you wanna skip to certain parts of it for entrepreneurs, focus on the enterprises that heal, focus on the capitals in the market section.
For those who are cultural workers, parts four and five of the book are very much supportive of that work. If you are a funder, of course, the capital, the work the chapter and work on capitals and markets is really important. So this book is not made. Simply for entrepreneurs, enterprise builders, it’s made for practitioners in the impact economy, and I’ve done as much as I can to make it as usable a resource as possible.
Kim Allchurch Flick: And in my work, I see this book as a tremendous resource that I can offer to others and helps improve. Because another thing I see is entrepreneurs are busy and sometimes it’s head down, and this sounds wonderful. And they’d love to be able to focus on ideas, and yet they’re working long hours running the business.
And like part of the work that I love is helping people see that you can do the good values work as well, make the impacts and make it, it doesn’t have to feel like a second job. That there’s ways to in incorporate and create systems that help and innovators like you, this book is innovative and some practicality of it can help that future journey be a little bit easier.
And that recognizing that running a company is hard work and being impact driven is work. It’s also joy and yeah, that we can make that trajectory more meaningful and that these, these helpful ways of doing it can actually be supportive. So I, that’s why I love sharing ideas like this that sometimes then it’s an aha moment where somebody says, oh, I could, if I incorporate this, it might actually make the rest of the work easier.
The systems matter too.
Laurie Lane-Zucker: Yeah. You talk about, you mentioned journey and it is a journey life’s journey of course but entrepreneurship is a journey and any activity within the impact space is such an important journey to be taken for those who are not yet on on a journey in the space.
It can sometimes be intimidating. Where do I start? This is not a simple challenge. We’re taking ourselves to, moving from a quote unquote single bottom line to a triple bottom line operating system, find impact investing speak here is adding two more bottom lines. It’s adding complexity to it, to, to the process.
And everything we’ve been talking about in this conversation is really suggests added. Complexity. The world is complex. We’re no longer going to be shunting off things like environmental degradation as an quote unquote externality. We’re going to internalize these things and we’re going to accept that is the proper moral role of enterprise.
Now, that can be very intimidating for people who don’t know where to start and what, but, and the way I answer that is a couple different ways. One is by one of the companies I talk about regularly in the book is Patagonia, which made, a lot of headway news a few years ago when it could preserved its mission for eternity by transferring ownership to a purpose trust in a nonprofit organization.
But it didn’t just happen. Overnight. I chart in the book 30 years of in incremental changes to make their mission more and more embedded over time. Becoming a B Corp, 10, 15 years ago was an important step in that and a step toward this. So iteration over time is very much a part of this work.
Don’t expect you can do everything. No one’s perfect. We’re all going and everything has flaws and we’ll always have flaws, but we can improve, we can embed mission more deeply, more structurally as we go along. The other way I answer this question is through the last section last piece narrative in the book.
It’s the code of the book. It’s called Breakthrough picking up the name from the title of the book, the Impact Entrepreneur Breakthrough. And it tells the story of going with a group of environmental writers. This is back 25 years ago or so to Michoacan Mexico to honor one of the great Mexican poets and conservationists, Omero URIs.
And he took us to the Monarch Butterfly wintering grounds. I don’t know if you’re familiar with these, this utterly extraordinary natural phenomenon where most of the north American monarch butterflies travel to this few ac few acres in Michoacan, Mexico to winter. And you walk into this grove with not thousands of butterflies, not millions of butterflies, but, and not even tens of millions, but hundreds of millions of butterflies, all in a few acres hanging on trees so that they sway they bend almost to breaking and.
I talk about the monarch butterfly, not simply about how collective these, these light, almost feathery creatures can create enough weight collectively to bend branches of trees, almost to breaking, but about their journey itself. That the journey that they take when the light shifts and the temperature changes and they feel it’s time to move.
They start going north and they migrate all the way up to Canada and then they come back. But here’s the thing, they don’t all, no, no one butterfly makes that whole journey. It takes three to four generations of monarchs to create that journey. Somehow they know they’re coded to take that journey and to follow that journey.
And when one dies and the new one is born, somewhere along that journey, somewhere along that. Distance. They know where to go, so it’s encoded into them. For me, this is a very powerful statement and works on many actual metaphorical levels for the path and the journey of the entrepreneur who doesn’t know where to start.
It doesn’t matter. Find your starting point. Know there’s a community behind you with you and follow it and know that at some point you’re gonna pass it on to someone else or somebody else will pick it up. And that’s how I end the book.
Kim Allchurch Flick: That’s beautiful and thank you I think it encourages all of us to think, yes, it’s okay to start anytime and it’s okay to keep going. It’s okay to stumble. It’s okay to ask for help. It’s okay to be in community.
Laurie Lane-Zucker: Yeah.
Kim Allchurch Flick: And it’s okay to keep going, which is. A really important part.
Laurie Lane-Zucker: Yeah. And to understand this is a multi-generational shift that we are a part of, and that none of us will see the end of it.
It goes, flat in the face of the traditional extractive capitalist, entrepreneur hero story. This is heroic. But the timeline, the perspective on what the task is at hand is very different than, start a business, sell it for a, a trillion dollars, and and you’re successful.
Kim Allchurch Flick: Indeed. You’ve added beautiful words to this podcast series. The Mighty Measure and the innovators that have been on before, everything you’ve said encapsulates part of their journey and a thing that they are doing that. Helps create this whole system. And one of the ones I immediately started thinking of, particularly since the Monarch butterflies actually die and regenerate, is there is a shift in our system of funerals, burials, things of that nature, which is a very big industry, makes a lot of money, and has been relatively toxic for, at least for western culture.
And yet there’s an innovator named Katrina Spade who created recompose, which is human soil transformation, human composting. And there’s another company called Earth Funeral. And it’s the, it’s non-toxic. And what it gives back is like three cubic feet of soil that is being donated to land trusts and put in people’s gardens and literally.
Trees are being planted. And
Laurie Lane-Zucker: yeah.
Kim Allchurch Flick: And it’s almost like that, that forward journey of the Monarch, and hopefully these kind of ideas can inspire us in our business too. How we have to think beyond our own future and what a handoff looks like and shifting an entire industry. And it takes a lot, it takes a lot of effort to do that, but people are catching on.
Laurie Lane-Zucker: Yeah.
Kim Allchurch Flick: And that’s just one, one example of one industry and what you’re talking about is multiplicity of industry’s ideas, how to finance it, how to support it.
Laurie Lane-Zucker: Yeah. We published an article on one or two of these new funeral companies compostable funeral companies in the magazine, a few, a couple years ago now.
It makes me, I’ve had this poem on my mind that’s been very meaningful to me and many others in the last week or so because the person who wrote it just passed away. Wendell Berry. It’s called The Piece of Wild Things. I don’t know if you know it, but it, what we were talking about, what we were just talking about, brings a new lens for me on that.
The poem is a beautiful one. It is again called The Piece of Wild Things. And it goes I want to tell, no, that’s not it. When de it goes, when despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound. In fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood Drake rests in his beauty on the water and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water and feel above me. The day blind stars waiting with their light for a time. I rest in the grace of the world and I’m free.
Kim Allchurch Flick: Oh, thank you.
Laurie Lane-Zucker: And when you know that lying down where the wood Drake rests and the thought of, we were just talking about where we want our final resting place to be and how we want to get there.
Of course he’s talking about a living person, but it connects right? It’s it’s beautiful and I believe ultimately that this work that people who are building. Enterprises, funding enterprises and teaching how to do this is our ultimately it’s a work of grace, a work of great hope,
Kim Allchurch Flick: a work of grace, and great hope.
I love that so much. I’m writing it down. Great. I concur because sometimes you, we can feel down and things are, can be stressful and yet the optimism and the people like you that are constantly forging ahead and encouraging others, that makes me so optimistic. Thank you. For the final question, this is the one that has nothing to do with any of the others unless you want it to, is if you could have dinner with up to three other people living or deceased, who would they be and why?
Laurie Lane-Zucker: I guess there’d be two. I’m going to break the rules of your question a little bit here. The first is, I mentioned earlier in the conversation that one of the most formative experiences was a, a gathering in Cape Cod in 1991 that I helped organize as a 26-year-old work study intern of an a gathering of environmental writers who had such great influence over my thinking for the rest of my life.
I would love to have, go back and do that again now. Now some of them have passed, some of them are still around, but, decades on to have that gathering again, to have dinner with them and to share my, what I’ve learned and how I’ve taken their inspiration into the work that I do and the and to.
Share thinking of the book and to hear what they’re thinking about. So that would be one. And the other one would be to have dinner with Adam Smith. The father of capitalism who lived in the late mid to late 18th century 17 hundreds, wrote The Wealth of Nations. Which many consider the founding document for capitalism who has been considered by most people through the centuries.
And today as this, paragon of self-interest and the invisible hand of the markets and, one of the, my favorite narratives of my book is the earliest story I tell of being a college student studying at Edinburgh University in Scotland, and taking the train to Aldi, Scotland, which is where Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations living in his mother with his mother.
And I tell the story of that trip and how something I brought to that trip, a general understanding or conventional understanding of Adam Smith and his role in self-interest and in starting extract, what it became, extractive capitalism. But the what I talk about is how different.
What I was experiencing in Scotland at that time in ality, which had a really strong communitarian streak to it that was very different than what I was hear. What I understood Adam Smith was writing about, and it was years later that I came, I was pointed to an earlier book that he wrote called The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
He wrote this 17 years before The Wealth of Nations, and it is about sympathy and puts the whole discussion of markets and marketplace within a moral framework. And that is one of the, the main emphases of the book is that you cannot have suce successful markets if they don’t live within a framework of human sympathy for others.
This was completely lost. I argue that it was hijacked. In favor of those who wanted profit to be the main message of his work. And that is a real important what finding for me in the book was that, so much of what we think about is capitalism and its origins is wrong, is misplaced.
So dinner with him, I’d like to talk to him about that.
Kim Allchurch Flick: Oh, I’d love to be a fly on the wall. I would love to be the server in the room. That is fascinating. And I think it brings us back to words matter. It’s important to not always accept the first framing of an idea that Adams Smith had something behind that.
And that money’s important, but. With empathy and with sympathy, we could do some wonderful things.
I love that. Oh, that must have been amazing. Is there anything else you’d like to say before we, we close up?
Laurie Lane-Zucker: I would love to if and when any of the audience has a chance to spend time with my book and they have thoughts, feedback, ideas that it might have inspired in them, I would love to hear about them.
And so just reach out through Impact Entrepreneur, become a member of Impact Entrepreneur. We have a, a wonderful community all over the world. We have a lot of resources including like 150 webinar program archive with many, many of the leading lights and impact investing and B Corps and so forth.
Just connect with Impact Entrepreneur and me and let’s start a conversation.
Kim Allchurch Flick: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much. I enjoy being a member. This is Kim Allchurch Flick of the Mighty Measure Podcast. Thank you so much. Take care. Have a wonderful day.
This Episode’s Guest: Laurie Lane-Zucker
Laurie Lane-Zucker is the founder and CEO of Impact Entrepreneur, PBC, a global multimedia publishing platform serving more than 70,000 members across 200+ countries in the impact economy.
He coined the term “impact entrepreneur” in 2011 and, in the mid-1990s, working with the educator John Elder at Middlebury College, gave the name “place-based education” to a pedagogy he had spent years building as founding director of The Orion Society (1992–2004), where he worked closely with Wendell Berry, Terry Tempest Williams, Barry Lopez, and David James Duncan.
He went on to found one of the earliest Certified B Corporations and the Triad Institute.
His new book, The Impact Entrepreneur Breakthrough: A Field Manual for the Regenerative Economy (Berrett-Koehler, September 1, 2026), maps the architecture of an economy that builds value through regeneration rather than extraction.
