Our Theory of Change
A rising tide lifts all boats.
We are the kind that rise together, accountable, leaving no one behind.
Before you read our Theory of Change (ToC), a quick note on what a ToC actually is. It is not a mission statement or a marketing document. It is a hypothesis about how change happens, who it needs to reach, and what has to be true for it to stick. We believe every impact business should have one.
OUR BELIEF
Extraction is a design choice.
The economy we live in was built by human decisions, and it can be rebuilt by human decisions.
We choose to orient our work toward regeneration:
Toward a world where business owners, workers, communities, and the planet can all thrive together.
Where no one is left behind on the journey to a better future, and where the measure of a successful business is not how much it accumulates but how much it contributes.
THE PROBLEM
We are living through the consequences of an economic system designed to extract. For centuries, capitalism has generated profit by underpricing labor, externalizing environmental costs, and concentrating wealth at the top. This is not a story about a few bad actors. It is a story about a system built this way, that rewards this behavior, and that penalizes those who try to operate differently.
The scale of this extraction has not been equal. It was built on the stolen labor of enslaved Black people, on the displacement of Indigenous communities, on the systematic exclusion of women, immigrants, disabled people, and queer people from economic participation and ownership. The wounds of that history are not abstract. They live in wage gaps, wealth gaps, health gaps, and the everyday reality of who gets to build a business, who gets to own one, and whose work gets counted.
And yet the problem is not only structural. It is also cultural. An entire apparatus of advertising and marketing exists to convince people that what they have is never enough, that happiness is always one more purchase away. Manufactured dissatisfaction drives excessive consumption. Excessive consumption drives extraction. The result is a cycle that leaves people, of every background and every ideology, feeling less secure, less connected, and less at home in their own lives than the accumulation of things promises they will be.
Mission-driven business owners feel this acutely. Even owners who want to do the right thing, pay people well, and operate with integrity face a system that makes those choices hard. Paying living wages while a competitor does not is a structural disadvantage. Accounting for environmental impact while the market does not require it costs money. Taking on a client whose values are misaligned just to keep the lights on is a compromise that slowly erodes what you set out to build. This is not weakness. It is the predictable result of trying to do good in a system designed to reward extraction.
Root Causes
Underpriced Labor
Profit margins across the economy are built, in part, on workers not being fully compensated for the value they generate. This has roots in slavery, in union suppression, and in globalized supply chains that move production to wherever workers have the least power to negotiate.
Externalized costs
Businesses rarely pay the true cost of the environmental damage they cause. Carbon emissions, water pollution, and ecosystem degradation get transferred to communities, governments, and future generations. What looks like profit is often a cost that has been successfully offloaded onto someone else.
Misaligned incentives
The rules of the market reward extraction and penalize responsibility. Competitive pressure creates conditions where compromising your values can feel like survival rather than a choice, whether that means adopting a technology you distrust, taking a client you would rather not, or cutting a cost that matters.
Concentrated ownership
Wealth generated by businesses flows disproportionately to owners and investors rather than to the workers, communities, and ecosystems that make it possible. As a historic generational wealth transfer unfolds, with trillions of dollars in small business assets changing hands, the default path is acquisition and consolidation, not shared ownership.
Scarcity as operating system
Extractive capitalism runs on manufactured scarcity. The belief that there is not enough, that you must take more than your share before someone else does, is both produced by the system and used to justify it. It keeps working people fragmented and focused on each other rather than on the conditions that shape their lives.
Weak accountability
Even where good laws and policies exist, enforcement is uneven and often inadequate. Real accountability depends not just on rules but on culture, on who has the power to demand it, and on whether the communities most harmed have genuine access to justice. A policy or law unobserved or unenforced changes nothing.
WHO THIS AFFECTS & WHO WE WORK WITH
The impact of extractive capitalism has not been distributed equally. Disabled people, people of color, queer people, queer people of color, immigrants, and people living in poverty, particularly those at the intersection of these identities, have borne the greatest weight of a system designed to exclude them from ownership, wealth-building, and economic dignity. The cycles of poverty created by this exclusion are not only material. They are traumatic and intergenerational, shaping health, opportunity, and belonging across generations.
At the same time, poor and working-class white communities have also been left behind by extractive capitalism. Their labor has been extracted, their towns hollowed out by the same capital flight and corporate consolidation, and their pain has been weaponized by the very system that caused it, used to divide them from people who share their material interests. A vision of a regenerative economy has to be large enough that everyone, across race, ethnicity, class, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, and immigration status, can see themselves thriving in it. That means naming targeted injustice with specificity while building something wide enough to include everyone the system has failed.
The Rising Kind works primarily with small and mid-size mission-driven businesses: founders who want their operations to reflect their values, established companies deepening their social and environmental commitments, and business owners navigating transitions to ownership structures that protect their mission, including worker-owned cooperatives and employee stock ownership plans. We are also building toward a community of practice that includes workers, advocates, and organizing voices alongside entrepreneurs, because the change we are working toward requires all of us.
Where we are in the arc of change
This is not day one. The B Corp movement is twenty years old and approaching 11,000 certified companies globally. It has already proven the most important thing: that businesses can do well by doing good, that swimming upstream against extractive incentives is possible, and that consumers, workers, and communities will respond when a business genuinely operates with integrity.
That proof of concept is now the foundation for something larger. The B Lab Standards v2.2 reflect this shift directly. The new Government Affairs and Collective Action requirements, known as GACA, now require certified B Corps to take a responsible, transparent approach to lobbying, to work collaboratively to advance collective social and environmental impacts, and to act beyond their own interest toward systemic change. This is not a box to check. It is a recognition by the B Corp community itself that individual business transformation is not enough, and that the next phase of this work is political.
Many businesses find these requirements intimidating. They are not sure what it means to have a policy agenda, how to engage with public policy, or what collective action actually looks like in practice. That is exactly the gap The Rising Kind is here to close. We are approaching an inflection point where the question is no longer whether regenerative business is possible. It is whether it can reach the scale and political coherence needed to change the rules of the game itself.
HOW CHANGE HAPPENS
Change moves in three directions at once. The Rising Kind works at the intersection of all three.
↓ Top-down: Regulation, certification standards, pay ratio policy, living wage requirements, carbon pricing, and ESG disclosure requirements create structural accountability. They level the playing field for businesses already choosing to operate responsibly and make extraction harder to sustain.
↑ Bottom-up: Educated consumers, organized workers, engaged communities, and people with lived experience of exclusion hold businesses accountable from the ground up. They vote with their wallets, their labor, their ballots, and their voices, and build the cultural conditions that make accountability real rather than performative.
→ Inside-out: Mission-driven business owners, given the right framework, community, and support, choose to close the distance between their values and their operations. In doing so, they model a different way of doing business for their industries and prepare themselves to be held accountable by the people around them.
The Intervention Logic
From activities to outputs to outcomes to impact.
ACTIVITIES
WHAT WE DO
Strategic consulting through the Values to Impact framework: values clarification and theory of change development, B Corp certification and re-certification support, systems and governance design, workplace policy and culture work, leadership development, ownership transition support including worker cooperatives and ESOPs, and impact communications.
Fractional government affairs support: helping businesses develop a policy identity, define their advocacy priorities, build a responsible lobbying policy that meets GACA standards, identify opportunities to engage in public processes, draft testimony, and step into collective action with intention.
Community of practice building: convening mission-driven business leaders alongside workers, nonprofit partners, and advocacy organizations to build the collective voice needed for systemic change.
OUTPUTS
WHAT WE PRODUCE
Businesses with documented values, theories of change, and operational systems that reflect them.
B Corp certifications and re-certifications. GACA-compliant lobbying policies and public policy agendas. Governance structures, codes of ethics, and workplace policies. Workers in better-compensated, more humane workplaces.
Business owners with the language, strategy, and community to sustain their impact work.
Ownership transitions that keep wealth circulating in the hands of the people who built it.
Businesses stepping into public policy processes, submitting testimony, and lending their voices to the issues that matter to their workers and communities.
Stronger more resilient businesses where success is measured by impact and action.
OUTCOMES
WHAT CHANGES
Workers experience greater financial security, dignity, and sense of contribution.
Business owners find that regenerative practice is financially sustainable and that doing well and doing good are not in tension.
Communities develop deeper trust in and loyalty to businesses operating with genuine accountability.
A cohort of businesses models regenerative practice visibly enough that others in their industries take notice.
Businesses that once found collective action and public policy intimidating become active, confident participants in shaping the policies that govern them.
A community of practice develops the collective voice and political coherence needed to advocate for structural change.
IMPACT
THE LONG TERM CHANGE WE ARE WORKING TOWARD
An economy where the dignity and material wellbeing of every person, across race, ethnicity, class, disability, immigration status, gender identity, and sexual orientation, is non-negotiable.
Where the ratio between the highest and lowest-paid person in a company is narrow enough that raising worker wages becomes an incentive rather than a sacrifice.
Where environmental costs are priced into business decisions rather than transferred to communities.
Where businesses are accountable partners in a just and sustainable future, not the primary drivers of it, but no longer obstacles to it either.
Where the rules of the game themselves have been changed by the collective voice of the businesses, workers, and communities who refused to accept extraction as the only option.
WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE
NEAR-TERM
Individual businesses close the gap between values and operations. Workers are paid well and feel it. Owners sleep at night knowing they are not extractive. Leaders have a policy identity and know how to use it. Businesses meet GACA requirements with confidence rather than anxiety.
MID-TERM
A growing, diverse cohort of certified, accountable businesses models regenerative practice in their industries. Ownership transitions keep wealth in communities. A community of practice sustains, accelerates, and politicizes the work. Businesses are showing up in public policy spaces and being heard.
LONG-TERM
Market norms, policy, and culture shift. Doing the right thing is no longer swimming upstream. Accountability is the baseline. The rising kind, businesses, workers, communities, and advocates rising together, helped make that possible.
OUR ASSUMPTIONS
A theory of change is a hypothesis, not a guarantee. These are the assumptions ours rests on. We name them honestly so they can be tested, challenged, and revised as we learn.
Business owners can and will choose differently
Given the right framework, community, and support, enough mission-driven business owners will choose to close the distance between their values and their operations, even within a system that makes that choice hard.
The B Corp movement is twenty years of evidence that this is possible. We are not yet certain it is possible at the scale needed to change the rules of the game.
Regenerative business is financially sustainable
You do not have to choose between doing good and making a good living. The symbiosis model, where the health of the business, the worker, the community, and the planet are genuinely interdependent, works in practice and not just in theory.
The evidence is growing. But this assumption is harder to hold in a downturn, in a highly competitive industry, or for a business owner already operating on thin margins. We hold it honestly.
Cultural conditions are shifting
Consumers, workers, and communities are increasingly hungry for the alternative and willing to reward businesses that offer it. People are finding that richness in relationship, presence, and contribution is more sustaining than material accumulation.
This is happening unevenly, and it is contested. The forces of manufactured dissatisfaction are not going quietly.
Structural change is both necessary and achievable
Individual business transformation is not enough. The rules of the game have to change through pay ratio standards, living wage requirements, carbon pricing, and other accountability mechanisms that match the scale of business influence. A growing coalition of values-aligned businesses has the collective voice to help make that happen.
Policy change is necessary but not sufficient. A law unobserved or unenforced changes nothing. Real change requires the alignment of values, systems, culture, and enforcement. This is a long arc, and we are honest about that.
The vision is large enough for everyone
A regenerative economy has to be one where everyone, across race, ethnicity, class, ability, gender identity, sexual orientation, and immigration status, can see themselves thriving. That includes communities most harmed by extraction and poor and working-class people of all backgrounds who have been left behind and whose pain has too often been turned against their own interests.
We do not yet have all the answers for how to hold this fully. Naming it is not the same as doing it. We are committed to finding the stakeholders who need to be at the table, to listening before we lead, and to revising this theory as we learn from people whose experience we do not yet fully understand.
Certification is a milestone, not a destination
B Corp certification is a valuable and rigorous tool. It is also a starting point. The risk of any certification is that it becomes a credential rather than a commitment. The businesses we work with are oriented toward ongoing transformation, not toward checking a box.
We have seen certification used as a marketing exercise. Part of our role is to hold the line on the difference between performing accountability and practicing it.
Our Positionality
The Rising Kind is founded and led by Benn Marine, a trans person who has spent a career helping organizations and social movements turn values into real-world impact. This is not incidental to the work. It shapes who Benn notices, which questions get asked, who is centered, and what a genuinely inclusive table looks like.
A theory of change written by someone who has experienced what it means to exist outside the systems that were built to exclude is a different theory of change than one written from inside them. We name this not as a credential but as a commitment: to bring that perspective into every engagement and to keep building the kind of work that makes room for everyone who has been left out.
The Rising Kind’s Role
We walk alongside mission-driven business owners as a strategic guide, framework provider, policy partner, and community anchor, from purpose clarity to collective action. We help businesses find their voice in public policy, meet the new demands of B Corp's GACA standards, and step into the larger movement of which they are already a part.
Business does not need to save the world. It needs to stop extracting from it, so that everyone and the planet can thrive together. We are working to shift our systems and culture to deliver that just future.
We believe that when businesses, workers, communities, and the planet are in right relationship with one another, everyone rises. That is not idealism. It is a design choice. And we are here to help you make it.
The rising tide we are a part of is not a metaphor. It is a movement. And it has room for you.