By Susan Fairchild | Director of Investor Relations & Impact | Green Canopy
Those who visit the Green Canopy Headquarters will find, in our entryway, a reminder handed down by our CEO’s father. It’s a framed quote by the baseball legend Yogi Berra, reading— “If you aim for nothing, you’ll hit it.”
At Green Canopy, we’re always looking to identify and clearly articulate the direction we’re headed. By doing this, our team and stakeholders come to a shared understanding of goals. We can all take ownership of these goals, and then create a plan of action to make them happen. One way we’ve done this in the past year, is by mapping out our specific “Theory of Change”. A Theory of Change provides a visual roadmap to creating the change we want to see in the world, and provides a target through which we align our strategies, outcomes, and goals.
Green Canopy began this process with the guidance from Jane Reisman, a Social Impact Advisor with over 29 years of experience in strategy and evaluation. Jane has dedicated her life to empowering non-profits, foundations, and systems thinkers with the tools to significantly increase the probability of achieving their desired impact.
As we embraced doing the deep work* with Jane, the benefits to engaging in the process of developing Green Canopy’s Theory of Change became quite clear:
Impact Alignment: Key stakeholders buy into and align towards our shared purpose and desired impact.
Shared Language: Shared language enables key stakeholders – employees, board members, investors, vendors, homeowners, and others to speak with a common voice.
Metric Alignment: Provides additional structure to which we can align our impact metrics to measure our progress, and learn from both our successes and shortcomings.
We are pleased to share Green Canopy’s Theory of Change publicly for the first time. We believe in a better future. We invite you to be a part of it.
Aaron Fairchild, Green Canopy’s CEO recently detailed the Theory of Change at an Empower Happy Hour. Watch Aaron’s presentation here.
*“Deep Work” is a concept written about by Cal Newport that he describes as the ability to focus without distraction, master complicated information and produce better results in less time— providing the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftmanship.