Impact Statement

It has become next to impossible to speak about business in North America today without talking about corporate social impact. It’s also sometimes called corporate social responsibility; shared value; corporate purpose; environmental, social, and corporate governance; or the triple bottom line. Despite some differences between terms, the basic premise of them all is the same: companies must serve more than their shareholders. They are accountable to a range of stakeholders, including their employees, their suppliers and distributors, their consumers, and the communities in which they live. They must, in other words, have a positive impact on society at large — on the world beyond the balance sheet.

“Increasing numbers of social entrepreneurs all over the world are using business to help tackle social problems,” the Thomson Reuters Foundation observed in a 2019 study on the leading countries for social impact work. Canada was ranked at the very top that year, and the...