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A few weeks ago, I started sharing some thoughts about our perspective on profit. Last week, Levi chimed in with some of his own thoughts, which the Midtown Guru picked up on and expounded further. I thought I’d contribute a bit more to the dialogue by offering one recent example in our corner of the capitalist world.

Christmas Gifts: Standard Practice
Many companies, especially in our line of work, give gifts at this time of year—boxes of chocolates; baskets of wine, crackers, cheese spread; logo-stamped desk clocks and pens, etc.–to their external business associates each year. It’s a way of saying, “thanks for working with us” that accompanies the general “well-wishing” of the holiday season. It’s a nice gesture and comes appreciated, although my eco-urban heart always wishes the gifts showed off more of our local entrepreneurial flavor.

Christmas Giving, LJUrban-Style
So, we’ve got nothing against the tradition of gift-giving, whether from friends or from business colleagues. But last year, we decided to go a completely different route and re-interpret this particular tradition in light of one of our core values (which says, “we are motivated by generosity and the prospect of improving quality of life.”) We asked ourselves, how would this particular core value express itself best at a time like Christmas in the context of corporate gifts? What could we give that would mean something a bit more than comestibles or desk trophies that nobody really needs, especially considering the wealth of most of the people who would be receiving our gift?

Pooling Funds
And we found something that really worked. We pooled together the funds we would normally have spent on all these gifts, added a little to it for generosities’ sake, and donated that money in the name of all of our business colleagues to a very specific need, sending each person/organization a card letting them know the story behind our gift to them. Last year, we bought a Ger for a needy family in Mongolia. We get a big kick out of the fact that this was the first home we ever provided. This year, inspired by the life story of our newest employee, Scott, who was born with a cancer that resulted in an amputated arm, we bought 2 prosthetic limbs for children or adults in war-torn Bosnia- Herzegovina.

What I’m about to say will inevitably come across as hokey, but so be it. This kind of stuff makes all of us a bit giddy. Lives get changed: not only the lives of the people whose urgent need is met, but the lives of the people like us who are reminded that there are others out there with far less than ourselves, that we can actually do creative things that will make a difference, that we all have much to be grateful for, and that good business can indeed be a catalyst for change.

And, as our sphere of influence grows and the number of colleagues with it, we’ll keep giving more and more. We’re hoping someday we can provide a well for a whole village, which would transform the quality of life for an entire community, but that may require other companies jumping on board with us.

So What about Causes?
Midtown Guru rightfully questions the validity of “pet causes” that receive charitable donations once a year as a kind of goodwill gesture in the absence of doing business that benefits the community around us. Doing a lot of bad business and then using a smidgeon of profit to donate to a good cause does not negate the bad business. Ends do not justify means. A classic scenario in our industry is the large-scale land developer that generates enormous profits by exploiting natural resources and feeding a system that can’t sustain life and then donates money to a community enhancing cause, as a gesture of civic care. Not that the gesture isn’t appreciated—after all, the company could just skate away completely—however, accepting the gift inherently becomes something of a trap for the community. It doesn’t do to get on our high horse and say, “No, we don’t want your funds for our museum/public space/transit center/historical monument, etc; but it also feels a bit squeamish to know that by accepting the donation, we are, in a way, putting a stamp of endorsement on the bad business funding the donation.

Giving Back.
We want to do our best to do good work that benefits many others for a long time. Apart from this mindset, our little holiday tradition, while perhaps heart-felt, would indeed become one of the “pet causes,” that come across as a little disingenuous and not truly as an expression of one our core values. But within this mindset, I see this simple act as one illustration of our general perspective on profit–do good in what you do and do good with the money you make from doing good.

Midtown Guru has a good point about making giving back part of the business plan. For some, this could actually translate into a formula with specific projected outcomes and specifically targeted causes. For us, giving back takes on several forms: to start with, we take 15% of all of our pre-tax income and find needs that need filling. Sometimes, we’ve encountered needs that required more than the allocated 15% and we went with it. The percentage serves a good baseline of generosity but we also don’t want it to limit us either. Beyond this, we don’t have much of a methodology that would translate well into a business plan. We tend to jump in where we see need with as much as we can without disabling the mechanism that enables us to give (i.e. staying in business). Levi says, “Plan the next 2 months and no more. But set values that last a lifetime.” As hyperbolic as this statement may sound, it has played out truthfully for our first three and a half years and definitely informs on how we approach giving. The impulse-oriented “jump in where there’s need” approach applies to our perspective on giving back to the communities we are shaping with the projects we build. B Street West is a good illustration: the land we’re converting to single-family homes potentially could have been subdivided into 7 more lots than we’re actually building. Why? Because we saw an opportunity to give something to this community far more valuable than another 7 units–an oak preserve that would save some beautiful trees and enhance the entire community. This didn’t take long to decide (30 minutes, if I recall correctly); we didn’t have to run numbers or weigh a lot of pros and cons or throw it into a matrix of variables: based on our values, it was the right thing to do and we’d just have to figure out how to do it as we went along. Figuring it out hasn’t been easy, not by a long shot, but, regardless, if our giving decisions always come this easily and with this much intuitive conviction, we’ll really begin to see the kind of changes to our world that we envision.

Jason