I heard a provocative statement a few days ago: “Your organization’s budget is a moral document.” There’s plenty of nuance to unpack here, but put another way, money = morals. Every great detective novel or spy movie encourages us to “follow the money” when searching out evil, but what if there’s another way to interpret this phrase – one with a fully hopeful and altruistic intent?
What if we redefined what it means to be profitable as a business? What if instead of “profit” equating strictly to dollars, we broadened the definition to include a measure of the health, happiness, and stability we make possible in our community? Certainly, this is talked about regularly through job growth numbers to cost of living calculations, but those all lack a distinctly human component. They’re fully quantitative which makes it easier to ignore whatever might feel troubling in the world, along with our role (or lack thereof) in it.
I know I’m not alone in my thinking, as several mega corporations have stepped up pledging financial support for employees and their families to access medical care. These companies (and countless small businesses not large enough to make headlines) are taking stock of the resources and power they hold to manifest the future they want live in, and Botany is proud to stand with them.
From the beginning of Botany, I’ve described us as a for-profit business with a non-profit heart. In hindsight, I’ve always seen our budget as a moral document, I’ve just never said those exact words out loud before and *really* felt them like I have these last few days.
In this spirit, here’s a few things we’re doing in the immediate future:
We’ll be creating a sick leave accrual policy, so our team has greater flexibility to care for themselves whenever and however they need to. This may seem like an insignificant thing if you work for an established organization and you’ve always enjoyed this benefit, but for such a young and small business as Botany, this is an early step toward offering our team the full healthcare and lifestyle benefits we’ll provide someday.
We’ll continue hosting free community events and gatherings to help our neighbors get to know one another better and continue partnering with the League of Women Voters to promote voter registration at these events.
We’ll be asking you to nominate (and then vote on) a non-profit organization who you feel deserves an extra boost right now. There are a lot of worthy causes out there, and we know we don’t know them all. We’ll be donating 3% of our Shop sales in July to the organization you choose. Nomination form coming soon.
We’re going to actively cultivate our own community of people-forward plant shop owners. (Yes, there’s a lot of us, believe it or not!) These fellow plant lovers are harnessing the power of plants and their respective platforms to build bridges and cultivate safe, inclusive spaces within their communities. Since launching Botany, we’ve been craving a community of our own for businesses who share our work and our values. We’ll begin exploring what this could look like more intentionally in the days ahead.
At one point I wondered if “responding” is the wrong way to think about this moment, because responding means something has already happened that could have been avoided. This can begin to feel a lot like regret or shame, which forces us to live in the past rather than the future. I believe the act of responding isn’t the issue so much as the intention behind it, and how you follow-through in the long-term. What we do with the “in between” time is the difference between resilient, hopeful, rested, and balanced vs. precarious, fragile, and worn-down. Hope of a better future leads us forward.
Think of it like joining a gym: you won’t reach your fitness goals in the first week, or even the first month. Consistency matters, and every time we repeat an action or thought or belief or value, we get better, stronger, faster, and wiser. This becomes particularly important as we recognize what happened in Uvalde, Texas or the Supreme Court are not the last time these things will happen. We’ll be back here again, sharing the choices we’re making and the actions we’re taking because we want to live in a world where *all* business, no matter their size, value the health and happiness of people as their true profit.
Every choice we make brings us one step closer to the future we’ll one day occupy. So long as there’s violence, hate, mistrust, and divisiveness in our world, we’ll always have work to do.
Plants remind us we’re connected, and they help us to connect. Plant lovers can and will save the world.
Period.
We’ll be back in a few days to share Part Two, because there’s more to this story for Botany.