To Our Stakeholders

Our work over the past several years, and in particular in view of the recession, has given me two important insights, both of which inform not only our client work but also the strategic direction of our firm.

The first is that sustainability is not for wimps; it’s hard work, and results are often slow to reveal themselves. Rather than discourage us, however, that knowledge has instilled in us a strong desire to tackle the challenges that sustainability poses on as many fronts as we can.

The second lesson is that while our work with clients is rewarding and challenging in many ways, client work alone is insufficient to advance our mission to promote sustainability. And so we have begun to work in ways that go well beyond traditional client work to promote sustainability leadership. These include

conducting research that helps corporate practitioners advance sustainability in their companies;
collaborating with the Yale Center for Business and the Environment to promote sustainability education for the next generation of business leaders;
launching a local Net Impact Professional chapter; and
forming alliances with like-minded people and firms and working with them to better understand how, together, we can promote and facilitate sustainability leadership.

These efforts serve two important goals: to further our mission and to broaden our reach and visibility in the field.

As a result, despite a dismal economic environment, millions of job losses nationwide, and severe budget cuts within both current and prospective clients, Framework’s business continued to grow during 2008. Revenue increased 74 percent over that of 2007 and, as I projected in my 2007 letter to stakeholders, 2.8 times that of 2006. Some of that growth was due to project work that began in 2007, and much of it came from clients with which we have worked for two, three, and in some cases as many as ten years. What this result also tells me is that while the economic crisis and the recession that began, by most accounts, late in 2007 continues today, interest in sustainability continues unabated. Our job is to cultivate that interest and facilitate sustainable business practices.

Toward those ends, we conducted a strategic review of our business in August 2008 and, from that work, developed our mission statement (see below), which informs and guides every decision we make. We continued that conversation during a December retreat and refined our strategic direction and goals in May. During that process, we found that the strategic priorities we outlined in our first report, published in 2007, help us to further our mission, which is:

to promote sustainability
to consciously evolve for the benefit of our clients, partners, and selves
to build strong, lasting partnerships
to be bold, thoughtful, and responsive in all that we do

Each of the strategic priorities we outlined in our 2006 report helps us to support and further our mission. We have updated the language and reiterate them here:

To facilitate integration of sustainability principles into business strategy and sustainable business practices into operations.
To cultivate new relationships with clients, emerging leaders, and peers each year and to strengthen the ones we have.
To remain at the forefront of our industry in our ideas and our work.
To provide a work environment that facilitates responsive, top-quality service and encourages the pursuit of personal interests.

We fully accomplished all but three of the goals that we had set for 2008. We established our environmental policy before year-end 2008 and, in August of this year, established a procurement policy. As with many sustainability challenges, however, the devil is in the details, and best intentions often collide with reality. As a small business with limited bargaining power, we are particularly challenged to carry out our policy or even to obtain the information we need to make informed decisions. We are working on ways to meet this challenge for us and for other small businesses.

We support the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) and the Calvert Women’s Principles. We continue to support the ten principles of the UNGC mainly through our work with clients, and with the release of this report we are pleased to announce our support of the Calvert Women’s Principles (CWP). We will promote the CWP by encouraging our clients and other companies to adopt them in their own organizations and, to the extent feasible, will implement them in our own operations.

We have so many ideas and aspirations for how we can move the needle and simply not enough hours in each day. I am ever grateful for the members of this firm who work so hard to make the most of each hour and the relationships that come from our work. And I am grateful for our clients, who allow us to participate in conversations that will, we hope, lead to important action.

Sincerely,

Kathee Rebernak

Founder and CEO

To Our Stakeholders

Reports