B Local Triangle is a nonprofit community of passionate people in the Research Triangle region of North Carolina who are interested in social enterprises and using business as a force for good.

Jennifer Stucko, the Founder and CEO of Prota Fiori shares about the process, saying, “Thank you to dear Svetlana Geshtovt and NC State B Corp Clinic and Jessica Yinka Thomas for believing in PROTA FIORI in our earliest days and taking us on when we launched the Company in April 2020. I will never forget your support and generosity.”

Read the full article on Forbes.

Creating a handcrafted luxury shoe brand sourced and made in Italy in a highly competitive market is tough enough. Finding a way to do so sustainably is even harder.

Luckily, Jennifer Stucko has never been one to turn down a challenge. While she had a background working for top fashion brands Giorgio Armani, Ralph Lauren and Valentino, it was during Stucko’s time serving as General Manager of U.S. subsidiary for A.Testoni where her love and appreciation of Italian shoemaking began.

“I had the magical experience of visiting their family-owned factory in Bologna, Italy and learned the 100-year-old craft of shoemaking they had applied to making the most elegant, high-quality footwear,” Stucko says. “Around the same time, I was studying the huge impact of the fashion industry on climate change,” Stucko explains. “My work and values were not aligned. I wanted to marry my passion for beautiful luxury footwear sourced and made in Italy while preserving our planet.”

She decided to tap into her powerful network, niche expertise and understanding of the Italian luxury footwear industry to create the highest quality women’s shoes fully sourced through the Italian supply chain using sustainable materials such as apple skins, grape skins and upcycled materials. In April 2019, Prota Fiori was born.

Stucko partnered with a third-generation factory in Le Marche, Italy, a region known for making the best luxury women’s shoes, and also the oldest region in Italy for making footwear. The family behind the factory was equally committed to operating under strict sustainability guidelines – recognizing this was the future of luxury footwear.

“No one in this space has started a business from the ground up with sustainability in mind while also preserving the incredible craftsmanship that comes with Italian shoemaking,” Stucko says. “Prota Fiori was born with a purpose to be a leader in sustainable luxury footwear.”

Becoming a B Corp

From the start, Stucko wanted Prota Fiori to become B Corporation certified. To her, the certification is simply an additional step of accountability for the sustainable practices she felt called to pursue. After learning about Poole College of Management’s B Corp Clinic, she jumped at the opportunity to participate. Not only does the college provide expertise in sustainability and supply chain management, but it’s Global Luxury and Management (GLAM) program provides a unique understanding of the luxury market.

“You know when the feeling of excitement and determination when you apply for college and you really wish to get accepted into your top target? That’s how it felt applying for Prota Fiori to be a part of the clinic.” Stucko laughs.

Sustainability hasn’t always been inherent in the luxury industry, particularly within the apparel and footwear markets, explains GLAM program director Kristie McGowan. “Many luxury companies develop sustainability practices that fit within their existing corporate framework rather than sustainability being something that is fundamentally at the core of the values of their company and products. As the luxury consumer evolves and their expectations regarding corporate and product transparency grow, we are going to see companies emerge who are truly guided by an ethos of sustainability. Prota Fiori and other sustainability minded companies are an integral part of the future of the business of luxury,” McGowan says.

This spring, the B Corp Clinic will wrap up its 10th semester. Over the past five years, the clinic has matched teams of students across various colleges and disciplines with more than 50 companies to go through the assessment process and identify strategies they can take to improve their B Corp scores. Students apply to participate in one of the teams – a highly competitive process, despite the fact students do not receive course credit nor compensation.

“In terms of students, we really do attract the best and the brightest. They value this opportunity to gain real-world business experience,” explains Jessica Thomas, director of the B Corp Clinic. “Students are doing real work that will be utilized by these companies – writing policies, identifying community partnerships and more in real-time. That experience is invaluable.”

While most of the companies selected to participate in the B Corp Clinic are further along in business operations, Thomas knew she wanted to make an exception for Prota Fiori. “Jennifer was so engaged with our students and committed to the process,” she says.

Proto Fiori’s team was coached by Svetlana Geshtovt (NC State) and Bonny Moellenbrock (Millbrook Impact), led by NC State Jenkins MBA student Mariam Diallo and included student consultants Rachel Mahr (Campbell University – MBA), Cameron Hawkins (Duke University – Masters in Engineering Management (MEM)/MBA), Lily Wherry (Duke University – MEM), Jacqueline Martinez-Romo (NC State – environmental sciences) and Michelle Kerstein (NC State – fashion and textile management).

The team’s initial B-Impact Assessment (BIA) led them to recommend changes in the focus areas of community, environment and workers. Key parts of the project included building a solid foundation for Prota Fiori to start gaining points in target areas, creating documentation to help track BIA progress, as well as drafting policies and procedures to help the company meet short, mid and long-term goals for sustainable best practices.

“Virtually collaborating with students from across the Triangle area in an interdisciplinary effort really sets the tone for how businesses can and should operate in this day and age,” says team lead Mariam Diallo. “This was a great opportunity for us all, as students, to engage with the B Corp Clinic and support the needs of Prota Fiori, two entities that work hard to do good.”

Suggestions the team provided based on their research in included incorporating diversity, equity and inclusion language into job descriptions, developing a supplier survey and tracking framework, incorporating charitable giving, developing a green office policy and environmentally preferred vendor list, as well as creating an employee handbook with recommendations that will maximize Prota Fiori’s BIA scores.

And to Stucko, who went into the process without knowing exactly how the semester would unfold, came away with more than she could have imagined.

“My team left me with a structured and applicable framework of what I need to put in place to achieve B Corp certification,” Stucko says. “Not only that, but five of the students on my team volunteered to continue working with me through the summer. This was not just a project to them – they are personally invested in my business.”

As for Prota Fiori, the New York City-based company quietly launched pre-orders for its first three designs in April amid a worldwide pandemic. To celebrate the company’s launch, Prota Fiori will plant 100 orange and pomegranate trees in the Prota Fiori Garden located in the Province of Syracuse in Sicily in honor of the first 100 customers – part of the company’s commitment to combat climate change by offsetting carbon emissions. Not only that, but up to 10 percent of pre-orders will support NYU Langone Health (NYC) and The Hospital of Northern Marches’s (Italy) COVID-19 relief funds.

“I truly believe this is the future of fashion and I’m looking forward to making a difference,” Stucko says.

The competition is composed of two tracks – the student track, where solo-preneurs or teams can compete, and the Daugherty Endowment track, available to university spin-out companies. Student teams can compete across five different categories: Arts Venture, IBM Built on Cloud, Social and Environmental Impact, Design and Prototype and New Venture. The Social and Environmental Impact category, is hosted by the Poole College of Management’s Business Sustainability Collaborative. The category is for student ventures that are using the power of business to solve social and environmental issues.

First-round participants are required to submit a robust application, covering 15 aspects of their business, along with a video pitch. After a round of deliberation, teams are selected to advance to the final round. Finalists are then evaluated on their business plan and final pitch they historically deliver in front of live judges and a live audience at Stewart Theater in Talley Student Union. However, this year, things were far from normal.

About 3 weeks shy of the live competition, the university released a memo in response to COVID-19,  closing or significantly limiting core services and facilities at the university and limiting the amount of students on campus. This meant there were only two options for this year’s event – cancel the competition or prepare a virtual “plan B”. But canceling the competition was not an option for NC State Entrepreneurship.

“We felt that it was important to think creatively and come up with a way to complete the competition and reward the students who had worked so hard to prepare,” said Tom Miller, senior vice provost and executive director of NC State Entrepreneurship.  “We also thought that announcing the winners via Facebook Live would provide a welcome respite to the Wolfpack community, which was reeling with difficult impacts of the pandemic.”

This is why it is more important than ever to support our student entrepreneurs and award their innovation and creativity. “Think and do, that’s what NC State is all about” said Miller, and the eGames are a perfect example of how students are fulfilling that motto.

Ritika Shamdasani, Co-Founder of Sani, a sister-owned South Asian fashion label focused on South Asian American women and this year’s grand prize winner of $15,000 stated, “we are so grateful that eGames continued to host the competition despite the uncertainty right now. As a small business, we have been hit hard by the pandemic like many others. This eGames award has made it possible for us to still push forward in many ways so that we can bounce back stronger than ever.”

Social and Environmental Impact Winners 

1st place – $5,000 | Summit Kinetics: Giving the freedom of movement back to those in need via a passive lower-body exoskeleton.

Team members: Alyssa Cox, Amy Hogan, Ethan Eldridge, Jennifer Lo, Jacob Harris

2nd place – $3,000 | Sani: A South Asian fashion label focused on South Asian American women.

Team member: Ritika Shamdasani

3rd place – $2,000 | Kalia Health: A biotech startup dedicated to improving women’s health in low-resource settings.

Team member: Denali Dahl

Social and Environmental Impact Category Sponsors

Many thanks to the Social and Environmental Impact category sponsors, local B Corporations:

• Chiesi
• HQ Raleigh
• Murphy’s Naturals
• Rockridge Venture Law

Adapted from “Innovation and Creativity are Rewarded at the 2020 Lulu eGames.”

Article excerpt:

Read the full B the Change article.

Jessica Yinka Thomas was born in Miami to an American mother and Nigerian father. When she was quite young, they moved to Nigeria so her father could be an Economics Professor. After three years, they moved to Senegal. They spent school years in West Africa and summers in the US — two completely different worlds that she learned to reconcile as a child and young adult, two worlds that mirror those of social good and capitalism.

She has described being keenly aware of the dichotomy: one place where people needed so much, in contrast with one place where people had so much. I suspect she was viewing this through her incredibly talented STEM brain and the critical thinking skills of an Economics Professor father when she said, “I always knew I’d do something to help bridge that gap.”

In some ways, it reminds me of a time when I lived in Texas and we hadn’t had rain in months. The news was showing flooding someplace that was so horrible. People were losing everything. I wondered out loud why (with all of our modern technologies), we couldn’t get some of that excess rain to Texas.

These are the kinds of questions that Thomas has been asking and answering for the same 22 years. She got a degree in engineering from Stanford (she could literally be a bridge-builder) and has been building bridges ever since. Some examples: LeapFrog, combining play, music, and math to an interdisciplinary business plan competition to commercialize a technology specifically for use in developing countries at Duke; UNC to build and run BASE (business accelerator for sustainable entrepreneurship); North Carolina State launching the globally renowned first-of-its-kind B Corp Clinic, which led her to the position of Director of the Business Sustainability Collaborative; and eventually, the creation of B Academics, the global B Corp Academic Community, working to advance the state of academic study into business as a force for good.

And Thomas is so much more than all of that.

She expands when people’s lives change. I read an interview where she said one of her favorite moments was in 1999, when Oprah chose a LeapFrog toy for her Oprah’s Favorite Things episode. “The camera zoomed in on this young black girl who was just bopping along to this toy where you twist a dial,” Thomas says. “She was just doing multiplication tables, jamming away.”

She engages the youthful energy of her students. Her hope is that by influencing them while they are still trying to figure out where they fit, she can inspire them to use business as a force for good. She works with hundreds of students a year through teaching, running programs, and speaker events. B Academics is now over 1,900 people strong and has the collective potential to engage over one million students each year.

She elevates her understanding of the world and its problems continuously. Once overwhelmed by understanding the challenges of the world at a young age, she is now inspired by the innovative solutions and creative collaboration that she sees.

She examines, educates, encourages, and excites. She is equal parts engineer and equilibrium. She is also every bit human. And, she is a woman. A woman who is keenly aware of the important role women have always played in community building and ensuring long-term stability — a woman who knows that academics is one of many pieces of this puzzle that must come together to solidify the Meaning Economy.

She is a woman who envisions a world where every student, consumer, policy maker, investor, entrepreneur, and community member understands the power they hold to address the world’s greatest challenges by making purposeful decisions about where we work, how we spend our money, how we engage in our community and how we build businesses.

And is making it happen one bridge at a time.

BSC Director along with ERM Director and Professor of Accounting Mark Beasley were among the 12 faculty and staff members honored at the 2019 Outstanding Extension and Outstanding Engagement Awards Celebration held on April 16. Beasley also was one of three university professors inducted into the Academy of Outstanding Faculty in Extension and Engagement this year.

These awards encourage and recognize outstanding extension, engagement, and economic development activities by faculty and EHRA employees of NC State University. They reflect the individual’s activities and achievements in the previous five years, and are directly parallel in intent to the University’s Outstanding Teaching Awards.

Both Beasley and Thomas have created initiatives that reflect the university’s land-grant mission. Through ERM and the BSC, they assess needs, develop appropriate programs to address those needs, and often work outside the traditional classroom to provide education and assistance that helps individuals in business and industry to make decisions and solve problems, engaging students and other faculty members in the process.

Thomas joined Poole College in 2014 to establish what is now the Business Sustainability Collaborative. The vision of BSC since its beginning has been to solve businesses’ greatest social, environmental and economic challenges. BSC connects students, faculty, and the business community through experiential learning, career development, academic and applied research, and partnership opportunities.

“As founding director of BSC, I have worked to assess the needs of our NC State community as well as the local and global business community to develop programs inside and outside the classroom focused on using business as a force for good,” she said.

The Collaborative works with faculty to integrate environmental, social and financial responsibility into curricula throughout Poole College. It also engages industry to advance and share innovative sustainability practices that lead to positive business results, and engages students from area universities in its programs.

Most recently, Thomas’s work with the BSC has focused on B Corporations – businesses that meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose. “B Corps like Patagonia and Ben & Jerry’s – and close to 3000 other companies around the world – form a community of leaders and drive a global movement of people using business as a force for good,” Thomas said.

NC State is now recognized as one of the academic leaders in studying and teaching about B Corps, she said. Thomas recently collaborated with the authors of The B Corp Handbook to develop an Instructor’s Guide – a roadmap for faculty to use the B Corp Handbook in the classroom. The second edition of The B Corp Handbook and the Instructor’s Guide will be published on April 23.

Students engaged with BSC gain hands-on consulting experience and the chance to learn about social and environmental impact assessment and sustainable business models. They have come from across NC State and participating academic institutions, including Duke University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Elon University, Wake Tech Community College, NC Central University, North Carolina A&T University, and Appalachian State University. Over the last two semesters, 83% of the team leads for the B Corp Clinic project teams were women.

BSC’s B Corp Clinic, launched in 2014, connects students with local and global for profit businesses to help them improve their environmental and social impact. Companies are matched with a team of students from multiple schools and disciplines to go through an assessment process and identify strategies they can take to improve the company’s impact. The B Corp Clinic thus far has worked on 42 semester-long projects with companies that range from start-ups to multinationals, from a broad range of industries, local and as far away as California and Australia. “Students and companies can participate from anywhere in the world via an innovative virtual platform,” Thomas said.

The Clinic is currently being replicated at six academic institutions across the US and Canada, Thomas said.

“I’m excited to continue to grow the Global B Corp Academic Network (B Academics), which I helped to found in 2014,” Thomas said. “B Academics will soon be a network of over 1,500 educators and researchers from around the world who are committed to accelerating the sustainable business movement by studying the global movement of B Corporation certification and benefit corporations. They work with each other, the global B Lab network, and the B Corp community to share best practices and identify opportunities for collaboration with regard to research, teaching, and experiential learning. The networks host monthly video conference calls and an annual academic roundtable focused on sharing best practices and identifying opportunities for collaboration,” she said.

“The work of BSC would not be possible without the major gift from Lonnie Poole, administrative and faculty support from across campus, extensive student engagement as well as collaboration with the local business community, particularly our NC B Corp leaders,” Thomas said.