I just realized I never published our 2012 B Corp Annual Report. I started creating these reports in 2011, and I actually wrote this up in April but neglected to post it.
As many of you know, since 2010 Azavea has been a B Corporation. That means we are a for-profit corporation that operates with a social mission. Azavea was founded with a public service mission, and this continues to motivate much of our work; the B Corporation designation has enables us to both emphasize and articulate this mission-focused approach.
The idea behind B Corporations is revolutionary: apply the power of business to solve social and civic problems. To become certified, B Corporations must meet comprehensive and transparent social and environmental performance standards, and amend their corporate by-laws to incorporate the interests of employees, community, and the environment. They also agree to contribute a portion of their revenue (based on the company’s size) each year to B Lab to support the program, and to undergo an audit of their business practices once every 2 years to ensure that their business practices continue to align with the B Corporation’s principles.
Azavea’s social mission is:
Apply geospatial technology to create more sustainable, vital and livable communities, while advancing the state-of-the-art through research.
As part of our policy of financial transparency with our staff, Azavea prepares an annual report. Beginning last year, we also began preparing an annual report to all of you, our community, on the various ways in which we are fulfilling our social enterprise commitment.
Some highlights of our 2012 B Corp Annual Report include:
- Increased investment in open source geospatial projects, including significant contributions to supporting raster data and analysis in the PostGIS
- Launch of the Azavea Summer of Maps Program cultivate advanced spatial analysis work in the non-profit sector
- Organized the Hacks for Democracy hackathon and supported other local civic hacking events
- Pro Bono services to several non-profit organizations
- Continued to innovate around open source civic software, including:
- GeoTrellis – low latency geoprocessing
- OpenTreeMap – collaborative data management tools for managing the urban forest
- DistrictBuilder – open, online legislative redistricting tools
- Time To Give Back program whereby at least 2% of our profits are donated to non-profit organizations in each of five categories:
- Local Arts and Culture
- Local Technology and Education
- Ecosystems
- Open Government, Open Data, Open Source
- Sustainable Transportation
Check out the full report.