How Corporate Leaders Can Effectively Give Back After COVID-19 Emily Kane Miller, Founder & CEO, Ethos Giving

// HOW CORPORATE LEADERS CAN EFFECTIVELY GIVE BACK AFTER COVID-19

Emily Kane Miller, Founder & CEO, Ethos Giving

How should business leaders, who haven’t historically been civically engaged, think differently about their role in this time of crisis?

I think businesses have been giving back since commerce was created. It’s not a new idea that a baker would give bread to somebody who was hungry at a very fundamental level. But corporate social responsibility as a concept came about in the 1950s. And since then, businesses have taken that mantle in big ways and in less dynamic ways. And I think we really saw it up until this moment as a nice to have. People needed to say what we did to give back to the community and it was, for many organizations, a check-the-box moment.

I have been advocating for the decade and a half that I’ve been doing this work that that is not the right approach, that this is not a check-the-box effort. This is something that society needs corporate leaders to really take on and to be thoughtful about. And overnight with COVID coming to our shores, I think CSR shifted from a “nice-to-have” to a “need-to-have.” And with the social unrest that we’re seeing in our country, that is even more true today.

What would your advice be as a first step to get involved?

It seems like a really obvious answer but it’s something that most people don’t start with: check in with your people! I think each organization, whether you have a CSR team or not, you have people within your team that I dub your “chief soul officers,” the people who are engaged in their communities, care about their fellow workers, come to you when there’s a problem that needs to be answered. Bring that team together today on Zoom, but hopefully soon in person. And start by setting the table, saying nothing is off the table. We really want to hear from you all how you feel this organization that you’re dedicated to, that you helped to make better already, how we can answer the call to be of service right now to our employees and to our communities.

For most organizations, starting with asking that question internally takes you 80% of the way there. From there, I think the most important thing is knowing that you don’t have all the answers.

The last piece of advice that I would say here is identify something that is ambitious but realistic that you can live with and love as an organization for years. Social change doesn’t happen on a quarter-by-quarter basis. Tell me about some of the work Ethos did in response to the pandemic.

There was this lack of personal protective equipment right when COVID came. As it happens, my sister is a doctor at a local county hospital and so I was very interested in trying to come up with a solution. I started asking some questions and saying how can we quickly and easily deploy philanthropic capital to get the needed PPE to hospitals across L.A. County. We didn’t have an easy mechanism to get to all 43 COVID treating hospitals and so we built it.

Much like a wedding registry, we identified that we needed a registry where hospitals could go and register for the PPE that they needed. And if we could put money on doctor’s faces, we actually in the early moments of COVID would have had enough in L.A. But that wasn’t practical. We needed to put PPE on their faces. And so we also developed quick relationships with suppliers that were trusted and vetted, and worked collectively with government at the city, county, and state levels to build communications channels so folks knew that our lights were on.

We deployed hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of PPE thanks to HSAC, and Peter, and other leaders throughout Los Angeles. And we built a mechanism to make this possible, not just through COVID but potentially longer-term by saying something doesn’t exist. It needs to exist. Let’s build it. And what was so amazing about this was that nobody stopped and said, well, this isn’t the way that things are done. We have lanes. Stay in these lanes. Everybody said, “That’s a great idea. Let’s do it. You have our support.”