Vancouver-based responsible business consultancy Decade Impact Strategy & Activation is rolling out its Getting to 80 corporate training program in Atlantic Canada.

The course’s new East Coast iteration is recruiting applicants and will hold its first session on June 24. Like the West Coast version, it will help participants prepare to apply for the internationally noted B Corporation ethical company certification from Pennsylvania non-profit B Lab.

Decade is the new name of a division of insurance firm Cove Continuity Advisors, which was purchased and relaunched by former employees Kristy O’Leary and Brianna Brown in January.

“We’re radical generalists,” said O’Leary in an interview, explaining that she and Brown personally serve as instructors for Getting to 80. “We really understand the landscape of impact business.”

By impact business, O’Leary means companies that consider people and the environment just as important as profit.  .

O’Leary, who previously worked with impact businesses in Halifax, said she and Brown have a strong history of helping customers secure B Corp status.

“We have a proven track record of getting companies over the line,” she said. “We have a very high ratio of companies that work with us in the program and actually complete the certification -- and that’s very rare.”

Getting to 80 emphasises tracking participant companies’ impact via concrete metrics, O’Leary said.

“Ours is very, very heavy on how we actually quantify operation impact in a company. When our companies say they’re a good company, they have the numbers to back it up.”

Decade also partners with specialists who work in areas such as carbon-offsetting, and diversity and inclusion to deliver certain aspects of its programming.

Getting to 80 includes six full-day sessions, held every two weeks. The name refers to B Lab’s requirement that B Corp applicants achieve a score of at least 80 on its assessment process, which is designed to measure companies’ environmental impacts and levels of social responsibility.

In addition to preparing executives to apply for B Corp certification, Getting to 80 includes content focused on helping executives work toward the United Nations’ 17 sustainable development goals as well as American non-profit Project Drawdown’s goal of creating a carbon-negative society.

In April, Getting to 80 moved online because of COVID-19, but sessions continue to be centred on real-time instruction, delivered via Zoom and whiteboarding software Miro, rather than pre-packaged content.

Decade originally planned to launch its programming in central Canada before the Atlantic provinces, but O’Leary said Nova Scotia’s recent social challenges inspired her to focus efforts here.

“Nova Scotia does feel like my home, and so I really wanted to give back,” she said. “Just based on everything that’s happened in Nova Scotia in the last few months, I wanted to work with Nova Scotia companies.”

Eventually, O’Leary and Brown aim to grow Decade into a global business. In the meantime, the Atlantic cohort will be held separately from the B.C. offering to allow for region-specific content.

O’Leary said she considers community-building between participants to be a central aspect of Getting to 80’s value proposition, with that goal being best achieved among companies that are geographically close to each other.

With COVID-19 forcing many firms to reassess their previous growth strategies, she said she believes the coming economic recovery presents an opportunity to shift social norms around for-profit business in a more sustainable and community-minded direction.

“We knew the economy wasn’t working. We knew climate change was coming,” she said. “We needed this global pause to position us to rebuild the economy. And that objection that everybody in a changemaking space – like myself, for over a decade – has heard over and over again is that we can’t change. But in four weeks, the whole world changed.”

You can apply for Getting to 80 here.