Julie Fahnestock

Julie Fahnestock
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/julie-fahnestock/42/352/957/
Julie is passionate about telling the story of where business meets good. She is the Founder of B Storytelling, a content development company specifically designed to help popularize the good happening through business. They do this by helping Benefit Corporations and other social enterprises identify, build and leverage their brands. Julie has an MBA in Managing for Sustainability from Marlboro Graduate School. She lives in West Palm Beach, Florida with her husband, Thomas. Website: www.bstorytelling.com

Posts by This Writer

1 week 3 days ago

(3BL Media and Just Means) — When’s the last time you walked into your yard or car park, looked up at the trees, and in the same thought, gave thanks for the education of your children?

It’s not a correlation I’ve ever made. But it is to Gustave, a smallholder farmer from Gonaïves, Haiti. Trees are sending his five kids to school. Three of the five are attending high school, analogous to attending Harvard in the United States. Only five percent of children attend high school in Haiti and Gustave’s three children are the first in his family to make it this far.  Trees are making...
1 month 4 days ago

(3BL Media/Justmeans ) - Environmental advocates: They are leaders in solar, wind and hydroelectric energies with 62 percent of their portfolio in renewables. Empowered employees: They were named one of the “Best Places to Work in Vermont.” Approachable leadership: Their CEO knows the names, partners’ names and pets’ names of 600+ employees.

Which company am I describing? You might have guessed I was referring to sustainable business poster children like Patagonia, Ben and Jerry’s or Cabot Creamery. Guess again and instead, think “monopoly.” I’m describing the first,...
1 month 1 week ago

(3BL Media and Just Means) - As you reflect on the year 2014 and begin thinking about 2015, don’t forget that your new, five-year goals are inclusive of the year 2020. What kind of impact do you hope to make by then? How about giving $1 billion to farmers, farm workers, factory workers, and fishermen in over 70 countries around the world? That’s the 2020 goal of Fair Trade USA. Since 1998 and the history of the Fair Trade USA label, Fair Trade USA claims to have helped farmers earn an additional $350,000,000, a combination of premiums and price above the market rates. Today,...
1 month 2 weeks ago

(3BL Media and Just Means) - I’m not going to lie. I never intended to use my sustainability, storytelling company to talk about one of world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, Glaxosmithkline (GSK). But, I found myself talking about their work with my husband, my mom and with my running partner. GSK's PULSE program is creating hope and change. PULSE connects GSK employees with the needs of NGOs to create long-term impact. They offer their business expertise, internal best practices and create shared value across organizational distinctions. It’s a story worth telling.

And here’...
1 month 3 weeks ago

(3BL Media and Just Means) - When the bottom fell out of the economy in 2008 and Scott Sadler found himself without a job, he seized the opportunity to make a shift in his career; a change he would not have considered previously. Sadler had developed a solid career in finance and had worked at the VP level with Wachovia Bank and more recently, with Goldman Sachs. But when Goldman Sachs laid off one-third of their staff in Atlanta, Sadler’s wife encouraged him to consider starting a social impact investing firm.

“My wife said, “Let’s do something we’d be proud of.” I told her, “if you mean social impact investing, well, that’s voodoo,” laughs Sadler...
2 months 2 days ago

(3BL Media and Just Means) - I’ve lived most of my life seeing the view from six feet, one inch. My mother swears I was born this tall. Balding heads, cracked ceilings and cobwebs are my normal view. I’ve had unwelcome nicknames like “Amazon,” “Flagpole” (the meaning of my German surname, Fahnestock), and daily I’m asked if I play for the WNBA. So, I’ve never thought about what it might be like to lack the ability to reach the tallest grocery shelf or be unable to sit at a bar with my friends or share direct eye contact with my husband. But this is the reality of the millions of people who use wheelchairs. Of...
2 months 1 week ago

(3BL Media and Just Means)--The time to engage across sectors is now. In fact, cross-sector collaboration is in the zeitgeist. Progressive thought leaders agree that to gain traction on complex problems, we need to convene broad-based coalitions of nontraditional partners. However, communicating across sectors can be really hard, as we run up against sector-specific argots, worldviews and unexamined biases. To work together well, we need to learn how to speak one another’s languages, analyze different financials, and understand cross-sector, value propositions. And it begins in academia. 

According to Sean Conley, Associate Dean...
2 months 1 week ago

(3BL Media and Just Means) - Business leaders often ask: “what’s the biggest benefit of joining the B Corp movement? If our company is already walking the talk, do we really need to pay for a certification?” I understand this skepticism. What can a certification offer if you already hold your company to rigorous environmental and social standards? The answer is simple: community. As I work through the B Lab Assessment for B Storytelling (coming your way soon: a blog series about my journey as a small company working to become a Certified B Corp!  I’m putting Ryan Honeyman’s B Corp Handbook to the test!), I’ve been connected to a global network of change agents...
2 months 2 weeks ago

(3BL Media and Just Means)- Go Green. Do Good and Do Well. Recycle, upcycle, fair trade, organic, carbon credits, conscious capitalism, slow living, the triple bottom line and corporate social responsibility. We’ve all heard these slogans, phrases and trendy words. They could all be summed up into one word: sustainababble. Sustainababble, according to Robert Engelman, President of the Worldwatch Institute, is defined as “a cacophonous profusion of uses of the word sustainable to mean anything from environmentally better to cool.”

Have we truly lost value in the way we talk about sustainability in business? What...
2 months 2 weeks ago

(3BL Media and Just Means) - Count to 120. Pause and give thanks for your partner, wife, mother or sister who survived childbirth. Every two minutes, around the world, a woman dies from complications experienced during pregnancy. The most horrific part about this current reality is that most of these deaths are preventable.

But have hope because doctors, hospitals, pharmacists and women are working together to change this. Merck for Mothers, a program started by the American-based, pharmaceutical company, Merck, has invested $500 million dollars over ten years in order to “create a world where no woman dies from giving life.”...

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