Outsourcing impact

I’ve read a lot of parenting books lately, so I can’t remember which on to attribute this to…

But in one of them, I read that if you’re not willing to spend time teaching your kids about how the world works – values, treating people, manners etc – you’re basically outsourcing that teaching to Disney and Netflix.

It’s a comment that really landed with me, and it’s a trap I’m now terrified of falling into.

More recently, I was having a discussion with a friend about the various ways a handful of businesses we know create positive impact. Some things that came up were:

• Installing renewable energy capabilities
• Using only recycled or recyclable materials
• Rescuing plastic from the ocean and turning it into raw material
• Shifting from an overseas team in an opaque workplace, to a local team in a transparent workplace
• Switching to an all-electric vehicle fleet
• Buying offsets

In all of those scenarios bar one, the business owns the transformation.

Buying offsets is effectively outsourcing your impact.

It’s is trusting that the program you buy through is creating high quality offsets to ensure your impact is what they say it will be, but this has been the problem with offset schemes from the beginning.