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Charles Orgbon III, is a Consultant within Deloitte’s Risk ＆ Financial Advisory Services, where he specializes in environmental liability. Charles develops enterprise solutions for his Fortune 500 and public sector clients that improve business processes, maximize revenue, manage costs, address risks, strengthen relationships, and boost performance while also mitigating social and environmental impacts.
In this episode, recorded in 2019, Mr. Orgbon discusses the importance of “job-crafting our perceptions,” of working from within large organizations to make change, and of the myriad opportunities we have to cultivate a culture of stewardship and sustainability through our places of work. Working through vehicles such as the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), and NASDAQ’s Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) framework, Mr. Orgbon articulates the competitive advantage increasingly garnered by businesses focused on corporate social responsibility, and that change-making within such a context is key to happiness and satisfaction with one’s work.
Before joining Deloitte, Charles gained almost a decade of non-profit management and leadership experience with various environmental, philanthropy and youth volunteerism organizations. For example, Charles developed and led Greening Forward from 2008 to 2017, which became and continues to be a leading organization in the United States that’s devoted to training and funding student environmental leaders, ages 5-25. Leveraging this experience, Charles also served as a strategy consultant for numerous government agencies, foundations, and non-profits.
Charles’s work in the sustainability and non-profit leadership space is validated by over 31 local, national, and international awards, five book mentions, and over 100 speaking engagements since 2010.
He is currently writing a young adult memoir, “My Name Isn’t Charlie,” about his intersectional identity as a queer, black man. You can follow his journal at: charlesorgbon.com.
RESOURCES:charlesorgbon.comTwitter: @corgbon
Transcript
(Automatically generated transcript for search engine optimization and reference purposes – grammatical and spelling errors may exist.)
Hey friends, this next podcast episode is with Charles Orgbon from Deloitte.
We recorded this before the COVID outbreak, so I just want you to know that the pandemic
wasn’t yet on our radar at the time.
I hope you enjoy.
Welcome to the YonEarth Communities Stewardship and Sustainability Podcast Series.
Today, we are visiting with Charles Orgbon III.
Hi, Charles.
Hey!
How are you doing?
Good. It’s a pleasure to be on the show and talking about these important issues.
I’m really excited to have this opportunity to talk with you, Charles.
So Charles Orgbon III is a consultant with Deloitte’s risk and financial advisory services.
Where he specializes in environmental liability.
Charles develops enterprise solutions for his Fortune 500 and public sector clients that
improve business processes, maximize revenue, manage costs, address risks, strengthen relationships,
and boost performance while also mitigating social and environmental impacts.
Before joining Deloitte, Charles gained almost a decade of nonprofit management and leadership
experience with various environmental philanthropy and youth volunteerism organizations.
For example, Charles developed and led Greening Forward from 2008 to 2017, which became
and continues to be a leading organization in the United States that’s devoted to training
and funding student environmental leaders ages 5 to 25.
Leveraging this experience, Charles also served as a strategy consultant for numerous government
agencies, foundations, and nonprofits.
Charles’ work in the sustainability and nonprofit leadership space is validated by over 31
local national and international awards, five book mentions, and over 100 speaking engagements
since 2010.
And Charles is currently writing a young adult memoir called My Name Isn’t Charlie
about his intersectional identity as a queer black man.
You can follow his writing journal at Charleswardbond.com.
Charles, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show today, and I’m really excited to
dive into our conversation.
And I think to get started, I just want to ask what’s your connection to the environmental
movement and how did you get started with it?
Certainly.
In 2008, I was just 12 years old when I founded and led Greening Forward, which you mentioned
earlier, it’s an organization that has now grown to become one of the largest and longest
running youth-driven environmental organizations in the country, and Greening Forward is composed
of high school and college students, and we’re doing grassroots environmental activism.
I left the organization in 2017, but I continue to serve a new generation of leadership that’s
helping to guide things forward for the organization.
Students everywhere are witnessing the effects of climate change, such as our prolonged
fire seasons and melting primar floss and intensified storm seasons, and in the wake of
realizing what’s going on, students are also recognizing that our future is not secure.
So Greening Forward provides an opportunity and outlet for those young people to be a part
of the solution, not just the witnesses of our changing climate, but to actually be
solutionaries in creating a new possibility.
For the longest, I have thought that activism looks like Martin Luther King Jr., and Cesar
Chavez, and the Lorax, and that was the only way we could make a difference is through
grassroots organizing, but I also realized through working with Greening Forward and some
of our corporate partners, there’s also a lever to be examined at the corporate level
as well, that individuals working at the community level on behalf of people in opposition
of mass and systems are so important, but we also need people who understand these issues
in those massive systems to create change as well.
And so that’s when I started looking at making the transition to the corporate sector, to
scale the impact of my activism, and as activists, we must understand that that lever is available
to us as well, just like working in NGOs or philanthropy and government as well, it will
need to use all of these tools that are available to us and build as many partnerships and
coalitions as possible.
So now I’m making an impact in the corporate space as an environment.
It’s so exciting, and it’s such a positive and hopeful story and evolution in your career
pathway, and I have to admit, I love the Lorax and high school actually bit a paper on the
Lorax and Dr. Sousa’s writings related to environmental and social priorities in our time.
And I mean, it’s a huge shift that you made going from that NGO and philanthropic work
into your work with Deloitte, and I’m curious from your vantage point, do you think corporations
truly care about climate change?
Yeah, that’s such an important question to Aaron.
A lot of people in the nonprofit space now that I work in the corporate space, they find
clever ways of asking Charles, do you still believe in climate change?
It’s hard for them to imagine that corporations do care because I mean, we have to recognize
that corporations have been responsible for some terrible things that have largely affected
society such as Inron and the Deepwater, Verizon Olsville, and I’m just not a fan of the
puppy dog filter on social media either.
But at the same time, corporations can wield the power to also create social and environmental
change as well.
And that’s what we’re realizing that there’s greater importance on these kinds of conversations
in the corporate sector, and we can just look to, for example, the unprecedented shareholder
activity in the 2017 proxy season that set a clear message that shareholders want to fully
understand how climate change will impact their business.
We can look at the sustainability accounting standards board investor uptake, so our investors
are considering a board level risk if we don’t have a plan about climate change or we’re
not addressing our supply chain or we’re not trying to reduce our impacts on the environment.
Or the global reporting initiatives update standards is helping to give us some shared
language about how do we report sustainability and how do we talk about it or financial sustainability
boards task force on climate related financial disclosures, the TCFD, and their recommendations
or what the stock exchange is doing around NASDAQ ESG guidance.
So the reality is that corporations can’t afford to ignore what’s going on.
When a soda company, for example, thinks about its product strategy, it has to consider
that product is made up of 99% water, and the company can’t choose to ignore how climate
change will drastically change water availability around the globe in the coming decades.
So that’s a risk to business.
So corporations have to care.
It’s just amazing to hear some of the kind of perspectives and some of the drivers motivating
folks.
I would imagine a lot of our audience perhaps are familiar with things like the sustainability
accounting standards board, but probably a bunch of folks aren’t as familiar.
I’m curious, where are those mechanisms actually doing now and how is that changing the global
economy in a way that maybe we didn’t see five or ten years ago?
Sure.
These are all tools that corporations can use to help figure out what’s material for them.
What do they want to report on?
How do they think about their sustainability strategy?
When I say material, every company is making an impact in the environment in very different ways.
The way that a tech company impacts the environment and its people is very different than consumer goods
or hospitality and travel industry.
And so when we think about materiality, we must think about how do we create environmental
programs and solutions that are going to be addressing the biggest ways we’re contributing
to environmental degradation.
So sustainability accounting board standards and TRI are examples of giving us a framework
for thinking about how do we talk about sustainability and what’s important,
where do you want to see our impact as a company?
It’s really interesting to hear about.
You obviously have a role in helping corporations move the needle trials, but what about when you’re
dealing with companies and institutions where the employees themselves don’t have a clear sustainability
responsibility?
Sure. I would say that the biggest opportunity for any company that wants to be more sustainable
and think more about how it’s creating an impact in the lives of other people and the environment
is to first think about their company culture.
I feel like that is a missed opportunity if we’re not thinking first about company culture around.
These issues, because if the culture exists, I believe that the internal pressure can be exerted
to move the company further, to move the needle further on some of these issues.
And I like to tell employees in any organization whether you’re a non-profit organization or
you’re a for-profit organization or the government. The good news is you don’t need a formal title
such as Chief Sustainability Officer or Social Impact Manager to do good and drive good in your
company. Whether you care about transitioning the economy to adjust clean energy future or
creating transportation solutions that reduce our national depends on fossil fuels,
there are actually clever ways to hold those passions and still create impact no matter what you do
from 9 to 5. Every employee holds passions, values, beliefs, fears, and when we show up to work,
we’re allowed to bring our humanity with us. So if you’re an accountant, if you’re a janitor,
if you are the CEO or anyone in between, you can help create that culture within your company
to care about these things and start to identify opportunities internally that you can
projects that you can take on and drive that can help move your company forward.
Yeah, I love this. There’s such a strong message and narrative of empowerment in what I’m hearing.
I’m picturing this diagram, this image where you have a corporation and you have shareholders
on one end becoming even more concerned and active about what’s going on with the social
and environmental stewardship. And then on the other end, you have consumers, you have customers
increasingly paying attention to corporate practices. And then in the middle, within the organization,
you have employees increasingly taking on leadership roles to help make change from within.
It’s such an exciting dynamic and really a beautiful way of thinking about how those ecosystems
are working in those corporations. And I’m wondering what about when you’re encountering people
and employees who aren’t necessarily feeling activated around these issues or perhaps aren’t seeing
that they have a role to play or perhaps even don’t care much about that.
Sure.
So if you want to be happy in your work, there becomes a time where you can begin to examine
what power you have to change the things that you don’t like or to fill a greater connection
to your work as well. And so the term is called job crafting actually. When employees can
create their own work streams and follow their passion projects and their employees have either
asked for permission or simply volunteered anyways to lead campaigns that are changing the
purchasing behavior of their business units so that services and products, for example, are sourced
with a special emphasis on sustainably sourced or locally owned and minority owned businesses
or their companies that are phasing out plastic straws from their corporate cafeterias.
Or there are employee initiatives around investing 401k and pension plans from extractive
economies such as oil and gas. There are employees and who are encouraging meetings to be
vegetarian or vegan because annual agriculture has a significant impact on environmental quality.
Or they’re launching well-being and sustainably campaigns that encourage biking to work.
So these kinds of projects can really help someone who’s not feeling a strong connection to their
work or feel like they’re making a difference. These projects can help them begin to create new
possibilities for their work and their job. Yes, this is really cool. So what I’m hearing is that
as we at the individual level, you know, take more responsibility really for our own happiness
and well-being within the context of our corporate job. One of the ways we can cultivate that is
by becoming more engaged and active in some of these ways we can help to make a difference.
And I think it’s a wonderful message. I have to give one quick shout out to some of our friends
doing work in the regenerative ag arena with responsible regenerative animal husbandry and that
when we’re talking about veganism and vegetarianism, it’s so important to have this robust dialogue
around some of these other dietary choices and clearly all of our food and beverage choices are
having tremendous impacts on soil, on water, on the health and well-being of communities all around
the planet. And so it’s I think really important that we’re really cultivating an informed,
sophisticated conversation around this thing. So I just have to give that kind of shout out as
we work with so many regenerative farmers throughout the country and really
we’ll provide working on those issues. It is maybe one of the easiest things that we can do
to make a difference in the environment is reduce our meat consumption. And one of the things
that we’re working on in the Deloitte office is piloting ways, a project to encourage
people to not order beef, essentially, distance and device people from ordering beef for
meetings. And we’re calculating the impact of that because beef of all of the meats are the
most land intensive in water and energy intensive. Yeah, I so appreciate that and I know also that
a lot of our friends that are doing the soil building work are actually working with
sustainably managed cattle and that sort of thing. So it’s a big conversation and obviously we
won’t dive deeply into that right now, but I think it’s amazing that you’re helping to push
the envelope and have these change making options and activities available to your colleagues.
And I’m wondering at your work at the Deloitte office in San Francisco,
what would have been some of the most interesting job crafting tasks that you have helped to bring
to the company, Charles? Sure. Yeah, so there’s in my role a client-facing aspect and then an
internal aspect. So client-facing is how do we think about sustainability and environmental
challenges within our clients? And then internally our Deloitte practitioners, how do we make sure
that our business operations are as sustainable as possible? And part of it is this in the San Francisco
office is me and another colleague and I came together and we created the Sustainability
Business Resource Group for the San Francisco Bay Area and all of the offices that are around
San Francisco where we’re helping to influence practices and attitudes within our office.
But we first actually realized that we needed to build our community. So we got the proof of
to send out a comprehensive survey and the survey allowed us to understand what the practitioners
already understand that Deloitte was doing and what could we do more and who wanted to be involved
and helping Deloitte move forward. And so that allowed us to identify a few people too who
became some of our first members and now we’re driving work streams that are looking at how can we
reduce our energy consumption in the office? I can re-make sure people know how to compost,
you know, that’s actually going to challenge for us how to compost in San Francisco and so our
role as a business resource group is to teach our practitioners what that means. We’ve brought in
some pretty cool dynamic speakers to also engage our Deloitte community around ways that they can
be more sustainable at home as well as in the office and soon we’ll be diving more into community
engagement as well. That is so exciting and I love the focus on the compost and that’s one of the
big focal points for our work through the Winers community for community mobilization, climate
action, soil regeneration and it’s really interesting especially in the urban environment that,
you know, composting is more easily done in some settings than in others and we’re as we’re
recording this we’re writing the holiday season in my daughter and her boyfriend asked actually
for a worm composting bin for their urban apartments in St. Louis and it’s so cool that that’s
one of the strategies that we can deploy in the more urban settings where maybe we don’t have
access to the yard or the land that we might find in the other settings and it’s obviously
such an important day-to-day thing we can all be doing to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions,
methane emissions from landfills, while also contributing to the soil building that helps draw
down carbon from the atmosphere and I love hearing that you guys are focused on that as well.
I’m wondering what, go ahead Charles. Well in San Francisco the city makes it super easy for
us because composting is the law so in some respects being an environmentalist in San Francisco is
easy but we’re you know Deloitte works around the world Deloitte works all across the United States
and what we’re doing in San Francisco can also be replicated in other cities as well and
so we’re seeing that like our idea with the survey and helping to first establish a baseline
level of like awareness has already been replicated in several offices and folks have asked
to say oh how how did you get those folks to come into your office and talk to your
talk to the Deloitteers about sustainability and so that’s something else that’s really cool
about starting these kind of grassroots internal grassroots internally campaigns is that you can
then collaborate with other people if your company has other offices and spread what you’ve learned
in your resources and the materials you’ve built and so that helps make that helps build the culture
right that helps send a message to the leadership that folks care about this and this needs to be
something that we as a company need to be thinking about and so again the importance of all of that
is that corporations wield a lot of power to create change and again I think the missed opportunity
is how individuals in that company who may not who may not clearly see themselves as a sustainability
person can still make a huge difference like the people who are on our business resource group
do not have a client-facing role in in this topic like I do but they’re still making an impact
yeah that’s so beautiful well and I love the the message around the collaboration with other
organizations and of course that is the 17th and final of the United Nations the global
communities sustainable development goals collaborating with other organizations and that’s
probably a good segue to remind our audience that this is the YonEarthcommunities stewardship
and sustainability podcast series and today we are visiting with Charles Wardbone III from Deloitte
from their San Francisco office where he’s in the risk and financial advisory services and
want to give a quick shout out to some of our sponsors and partners who make this series possible
that includes Patagonia, Purium, Earth Coast productions, Waylay Waters, Equal Exchange,
Delig Family Foundation and Alpine Botanical so a huge thanks to all of you for your support of
our work both the podcast, digital media resources and the on-the-ground in-person community
mobilization activities that we’re bringing to communities all around the country and I also
want to give a huge shout out to all those individuals out there who have joined our monthly giving
program and if you haven’t yet joined and you want to you can join at any level you just go to
whyunder.org, click on the donate or support links and you’ll get to the spot where you can select
the amount you’d like to give on a monthly basis. If you want to give at certain levels to get
some of the rewards just give me a holler and I’ll make sure you know all about the programs that
we have there for you and Charles it’s just wonderful to hear about the leadership that you
and that Deloitte are deploying throughout the world with all of these different corporate and
organizational connections that you all have and I’m wondering when you’re thinking about
employees at other firms who may also want to establish similar programs to what you’ve established
at Deloitte what advice would you have for them? Well first you need a senior leadership ally
and this is someone who can work with you to remove real blogs and identify firm funding sources
and just help make appropriate connections and we’re lucky to have found a partner in our firm
Kevin Fried who works to make sure that we’re moving things for he’s our champion but second you
must build your community of like-minded professionals for us the starting point there was
using the survey like we like I mentioned earlier and that worked well because it was sent to
everyone in the office and got lots of responses but whatever you do you will need others across
other departments to join you in making impact they’ll bring important perspectives to the
opportunities and you can help and they can also help add just context to the challenges within
company as well. It’s so cool and there are two key terms in our discussion today that I just
love and I’m starting to hear more and more one being solutionaries and the other being job
crafting and I’m wondering what are some of the other levers of job crafting that you’re seeing
and that you’ve utilized? Yeah so job crafting could be thinking about your role and differently
and so the examples before of like taking on this project or using your power maybe you’re
already creating a catering order but like using your power to choose a caterer that sources
their products locally right or like these are ways that we can also job job craft and just
thinking about our role differently and the resources and helping to use the resources of our
company to make an impact but also you could job craft your relationships you can change
the nature or extent of your interaction with other people I mean by that is when we
build deeper intentional relationships with it with our colleagues we can learn and grow while
also deepening our sense of greater purpose so this is really I think that’s really important too
is like before we can create change within corporations we have to actually know who we’re working with
so I think building those meaningful relationships is really important and then we also can job craft
our perceptions you know now that I work at Deloitte I find myself in rooms with many
accountants and I’m this old person with a sustainability background and naturally accountants
have expressed their happiness to me especially around busy season of course such a such a wild
time of the year for an accountant and an account at a large firm for instance might choose to think
of her job as two separate parts one not particularly enjoyable like staring at hundreds of pages
of documentation dealing with hospital clients or one very meaningful part creating a more responsible
business climate for which our entire economy is based upon like an accountant is so necessary
so I think that how we perceive the work is also really important too even when I was running
greeting for and I was working in a nonprofit space there were certainly times where I did not feel like
I was making impacts because doing work still means that people are going to say no or that some
people are very difficult to work with and it doesn’t matter if you’re in the nonprofit space
working with kids to make a difference or you’re working with billionaires to help them figure out
how can they reduce their environmental impact right so there’s still going to be challenges with
every job and so thinking about the percept how we perceive the work is really important as well
because it’s likely that everyone’s job is making impact it’s just something you have to
and it may not be clear it took us all the time well so you’re I mean you’re really working in a
lot of different channels and you’re up to so much and on top of all this you’re also writing a
memoir right and as I mentioned earlier it’s called my name isn’t Charlie and does the memoir have
the connection to sustainability um sort of the the memoir manuscript is already written but
writers are in the business obviously of like constantly rewriting then writing so I’m currently
looking for a literary agent yes you’re you’re also an author as well so I make it relate to that
the memoir discusses my coming of age as a poor black man in the south and it finds comedy and
what was actually a pretty difficult childhood it’s a story that discusses my mom’s mental illness
and poverty and bullying racism and how that all affected me and ultimately the mission is that
we can save a young person’s life who’s contemplating suicide like I once did when I was a teen
who will read it and discover that there are other options in the future so much brighter
my dad actually read the manuscript and it was so powerful to him that he was once super homophobic
and since lightened up and it’s finally began to accept me for my complete identity so I think
that that’s a really great sign I’m really happy in what the writing has already done
I’m also looking for literary agent representation at the same time and hopefully we’ll be
I’m sure it will catch the interest of a publisher and we’ll be traditionally published
yeah that’s that’s really wonderful to hear and certainly as a fellow writer I can appreciate
the process it takes a lot to create and share a book and you know I’m just I’m just struck I know
a handful of white folks from the south who really struggled with that culture growing up and of
course to be a person of color from the south that’s a whole nother level of challenge and struggle
that I think a lot of Americans perhaps don’t fully appreciate Charles and to also be a person
with a queer identity on top of that I mean it’s clearly I would imagine that in the memoir
you’re sharing that there were a number of times that were extremely painful for you and
I think it’s so important for that kind of story to be shared with the broader world and here you
are despite all of those challenges with an amazing career doing all kinds of great work with all
kinds of different people throughout the country and in worldwide and they’re such a hopefulness
in that message and in that story Charles I’m just really grateful you’re sharing that with folks
thank you but actually to answer your earlier question about the connection to sustainability
I think my path into sustainability and a writer are both expressions of my activism
they’re both things that need to be addressed the inequality that exists in our world that he
spoke of and then also that we need to work together to really create a more sustainable solution
for a lot of the problems that we’re facing so I like to think my life is more meaningful when
I’m devoted to a cause through passionate activism and I look to Alice Walker’s quote where she says
activism is my rent for living on the planner yeah so I love that quote I’m um
bear with me I’m gonna try to write it down so that we can put in your show notes
using my own version of shorthand here
cool I’ve got it well I imagine two Charles that the title my name isn’t Charlie I guess
we’ll have to read the book to find out why it’s called that yeah yeah and so folks just to remind
me yeah yeah it’s catchy and I want to keep I want to keep the Ben Trieg there yeah and I just
I want to remind our audience they can go to CharlesOrgbon.com to follow with your writing journal and
then people can also connect with you on twitter at sea orgwam it’s a c-o-r-g-e-b-o-n and of course
this this will be in the show notes and Charles it’s such a joy speaking with you today and thank
you so much for sharing your insights and the work you’re doing at Deloitte with our audience and
before we sign off is there anything else you’d like to share any final message you’d like to
convey to our audience no I think you think you think you I think you took the the my last words
from me when you encourage people to check out the website or just connect with me on twitter those
are good ways to stay in touch and I look forward to continuing to engage with the why on earth
community and and hosting you whenever you come to San Francisco and thanks Charles yeah really
looking forward to that visit sometime in 2020 we’ll be following up on some of those details
in the coming weeks and it’s going to be a lot of fun connecting again in person after sharing
this conversation with our audience sweet thank you yeah thanks Charles have a wonderful day
all right take care the YonEarth community stewardship and sustainability podcast series
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