If the inevitable rehashing of the vice presidential debate makes you want to curl up in a ball and dip a spoon into a gallon of creamy, cold comfort, Ben & Jerry’s hopes you’ll pause on your way to the freezer to do something good for your country.
The feel good, hippy-dippy brand of ice cream, long known for its outspoken support of progressive causes, has been championing voting rights access for the last eighteen months. And now, they want your vote, too.
“We spent the better part of 2014 and 2015 on climate change,” says Chris Miller, Ben & Jerry’s Social Mission Activism Manager, preparing to deliver signatures in the run-up to the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference held last November. “After that, it became clear to us that systemic racism is the defining civil rights issue of our time. And we saw the election as a chance to begin to focus on those issues.”
In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down a key part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the landmark ruling which outlawed racist tactics like literacy tests and other Jim Crow shenanigans. After that, new legislation began popping up all over the country that made it more difficult for millions of voters to cast a ballot—disproportionately young, African Americans and Latinos, people with disabilities, low-income earners, and senior citizens. It became the focal point for the activism team.
“We get that this issue – and talking about race – is controversial stuff,” he said. And has nothing to do with ice cream. “But we’ve always been willing to do things that many in the corporate world would reel from.”
The campaign has three elements: To register people to vote, to get registered voters to sign cards pledging to vote and – the big ask – to get voters to contact Congress and ask them to restore the Voting Rights Act. Where their climate change petition exceeded their hopes – they collected 350,000 signatures, some 10% of all signatures worldwide – this campaign has been tougher.
“We had hoped to get about 150,000 people to sign the VRA petition, and we hit about a third of that,” says Miller. “There’s been a fair bit of blow back. Reasonable people have different views on this issue. And there’s always, like, why don’t you just make ice cream?”
Ben & Jerry’s is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the consumer goods giant, Unilever (UL), which has been fully supportive of the ice cream maker’s decisions around advocacy. “This is not a cause-related marketing thing,” says Miller. “This really is our values and who we are as a brand.” Miller works with a cross-functional team that offers input on marketing, strategy, and execution, and stays close to the CEO and board – which is independent of Unilever by design. “But, Unilever has been great, even when we get whacked in the head.”
To be clear, Unilever is no shrinking violet when it comes to causes. Paul Polman, the CEO, has set and met audacious goals to reduce the company’s environmental footprint, among many other accomplishments.
Despite the mixed results of the VRA campaign, Miller says they’ll be building on their successes and redoubling their efforts in 2017. “We had one piece of content, “Seven Reasons We Know Systemic Racism is Real,” that beat out everything – including pumpkin spice ice cream recipes. That’s a good sign.”
To his corporate brothers and sisters who work on race and inclusion, Miller says to be bold, brave and authentic and willing to take a little bit of flack. Controversial positions can be scary in the business world, but they don’t have to be. “It lifts people up,” he says. “You retain your credibility when you’re authentic, even if you’re working on issues that are disconnected – like ice cream and voting.”
On Point
| The Pence/Kaine match up also got heated on the subject of race |
| The two candidates may have come prepared with pre-loaded zingers, but when it came to their exchange on police and police violence, they both went off script. At issue was whether implicit bias in policing is the problem, or whether the conversation itself signals a lack of respect for law enforcement. |
| Vanity Fair |
| NASCAR hit with a suit for racial discrimination |
| Terrance Cox, the CEO of Diversity Motorsports, is claiming in a new lawsuit that NASCAR refuses to work with him and is thwarting his efforts to increase the number of African Americans who participate in the sport. "In 2016, motorsports remain the most racially-segregated sport in the United States," he said in his complaint. NASCAR announced that it would pursue action against Cox for defamation. |
| CNN Money |
| How to talk about race at work |
| Sherrell Dorsey, a social impact storyteller and entrepreneur, has some straightforward advice for leaders who want to open a dialogue about race in the workplace: Get educated, give people space, and keep an eye on your own intentions. There’s a lot at stake. Silence, she says, is potentially damaging to the employees of color who don’t have the luxury of starting the conversation for fear of being ostracized. |
| Triple Pundit |
| Not one NYC police officer has a body camera |
| After a 2013 federal judge ruled stop-and-frisk tactics unconstitutional, the NYPD were slated to be early adopters of the new technology. Instead, some three years later, not one of the department’s 35,800 police officers has been outfitted with a body camera. |
| New York Times |
| Sacramento DA to investigate police who appeared to try to hit a homeless man with their car |
| It’s a particularly ugly story: Police officers were recorded discussing running over the homeless man –described by family members as mentally ill - and later shot him 14 times in an encounter that was captured on dashboard cameras. His family has asked for a federal investigation and for murder charges to be filed against the two officers. |
| New York Times |
| National Museum of African American History gets a $2 million gift |
| The Carnival Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the cruise giant, Carnival Corp., has donated $ 2 million to the new museum, making it a founding donor. "The organizations that Carnival Corporation supports through Carnival Foundation reflect the great value the company places on diversity and inclusion in the communities that we touch,” said the foundation’s director. |
| Electronic Urban Report |
The Woke Leader
| How Serena succeeded |
| This long-form profile offers one of the most comprehensive interviews the tennis star has given in a while. It also feels like a victory lap for a woman who’s never gotten the respect or money she deserved until recently. Says Serena: “I was not born with anything more special than anyone else. I wasn’t born with an extra arm. I wasn’t born super tall. I’m here — a lot of hard work, a lot of dedication, a lot of commitment. And I’ve had a lot of people that didn’t believe in me, so I had to develop a lot of self-belief.” |
| The Fader |
| A new art project comments on gentrification in NY’s Chinatown |
| Three artists and activists, Betty Yu, Tomie Arai, and ManSee Kong, started the Chinatown Art Brigade to protest the treatment of working class Chinese immigrants who are increasingly being pushed from their homes by real estate developers. Their work, part public art, and part social activism, literally unfolds on the streets of New York. |
| Bowery Boogie |
| A spate of racist photos alarm university officials across the country |
| At least five universities have been forced to publicly deal with racist photos - typically of students mocking their black counterparts, often in blackface, and using racial slurs – that have been posted on social media. One expert sees it as a direct result of life in America. “Students [are] coming from places that are segregated, so this type of behavior is as consistent as anything for them." |
| NBC |
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