Better Than Most is a regular feature of The Business of Giving examining the best places to work among social businesses and nonprofit organizations.
Denver: And this evening, we’re going to go up to Cambridge, Massachusetts and to the offices of a truly exceptional organization called Root Capital. They are an agricultural impact investor that grows real prosperity in poor environmentally vulnerable places in Africa and Latin America. And for this segment, in addition to the staff in Cambridge, we will be joined on the phone by team members from Senegal and Costa Rica.
Will: So our staff try to live by five principles of leadership which are empowerment, equity, transparency, integrity and service. And every month, the person who carries the leadership torch – so the person who was selected as exemplifying one of those five values – will pass the torch on to one of their co-workers in another region, so if you’re in Latin America, you’d pass it to someone in the United States or Africa who’s exemplified a different value and someone in a different department. So, it kind of fosters this culture of recognizing your fellow colleagues for their accomplishments, it bridges gaps between different departments, and it bridges gaps between different regions as well.
Briana: And I think we especially see that and maybe more so in the small ways, because I have a more back office type of function, where I’m not always in the field, I’m not always on the frontlines with our clients. But my team definitely has a–I feel that we always have a hand in making improvements for the better of the whole organization.
Claire: So we’ve setup an open floor plan. We have one standing desk that is available for use, and more on the way. We’re about to start a nap pod from recent research that I’ve been looking at that shows that if you can find a quiet, secluded space where people can go and just take 10-, 15-, 20 minutes and shut their eyes, that you actually increase productivity, so that’s an exciting thing on the way. We have a lounge area with the puzzle table that’s been getting a lot of great use. We started a little kitchen garden where we just grow sprouts and can add them into snacks and things that we have when we have communal meetings.
Laura: Like in Root Capital you can go whatever, you can visit any of our offices, and people actually care about who you are, what are you doing, how are you doing. That’s what makes Root Capital so special. It’s like a really big family spread all around the world, but all of us somehow make it to always being in contact, always care about others. We are always sharing news, sharing our efforts, sharing our challenges, sharing everything one to another, one country to another and one team to another. So that’s something that makes me really feel committed and feel that Root Capital is the place, the place to work in, in fact.
Salif: The organizational culture is an open one where people discuss ongoing work so that they can have better suits that the work everyone does with the open communication between people from different departments. We have, in my office, someone that will be in credit admin next to someone that will be in lending, writing, and someone that would be business development. So we sort of communicate right one next to the other about what are the present issues, what can we do to better service our clients.
Claire: And so we came together and just had about 10 minutes of singing songs of peace and freedom, and it made such a difference with how everybody felt. And I think really kind of showed that a lot of times when we sing together, it’s fun or even silly or just a nice icebreaker to having a serious meeting, but this was the time that just really pulled us all together and gave us a lot strength.
I think one thing about being an international organization that’s multilingual and there are some of us that can communicate very well in all the languages that we speak and others of us that are learning or maybe will never learn, but music is one thing that connects us all and I think that it’s a very powerful tool that has helped bring our Root Capital community together.
Will: And we’re multilingual. Multilingual in a sense that we’re operating in several different countries. Our staff speak probably a dozen languages between them, both here and the Cambridge headquarters, and in our regional offices in Latin America and Africa. But we’re also multilingual in the sense that we’re ideally just as comfortable communicating with our clients and the farmers we serve in whether it’s Nicaragua or Senegal or Kenya, as fluent communicating with them as we are in the boardrooms of a potential donor or investor’s office in New York or Washington D.C.
Denver: I want to thank all those who participated in this piece Will McAneny who also organized my visit, Briana Woods, Claire Kozower, Laura Ramirez and Salif Diop. Come to denverfrederick.wordpress.com for the podcast, the transcript and the pictures.
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