Can This Wayne Entrepreneur Save The NFL From Itself?

Can This Wayne Entrepreneur Relieve The NFL From Itself?

Information technology's harder than ever to be a sports fan and socially conscious. Hither'due south a way to render to the days when watching a game felt wholesome.

Can This Wayne Entrepreneur Salvage The NFL From Itself?

It'due south harder than ever to be a sports fan and socially conscious. Here'south a way to return to the days when watching a game felt wholesome.

Aug. 27, 2015

Ed. Note: It's August. We're hard at piece of work trying to get our website ready to launch after Labor Twenty-four hours. So we're re-running and updating some of the ideas and people we introduced you lot to over the last eight months on The Citizen blog.

[UPDATE: Last November, noting that watching a football game game was increasingly feeling like rooting for big tobacco, we suggested that the NFL align itself with socially conscious values by requiring that each team go through the B Lab certification process. Wayne-based B Lab is the non-profit backside the international B Corp motion, in which the fiduciary responsibleness of fellow member companies extends across shareholders to include community, environment and employees. At the time, the league was reeling from star running back Ray Rice'southward domestic violence. Well, as Deflategate has raged this off-season, there are other signs that the league is still in need of some social touch training. At its almanac rookie symposium, former Eagles wide receiver and ESPN commentator Cris Carter offered some sage advice, telling a roomful of jocks to take a "autumn guy" take the blame when they institute themselves in legal trouble. Commish, nosotros renew our advice: You really demand to call B-Lab's Jay Coen-Gilbert.]

He doesn't look similar the guy who can salvage Roger Goodell's chore. He looks more similar an crumbling hipster, with his goatee and old-school sneakers. Just, every bit Jay Coen-Gilbert, 48, sits outside Teresa's café in Wayne, pulling on a beer, the words come fast, like the intense true laic he is: "Sports teams punch to a higher place their weight class," he says. "Y'all get just 1 to brand a stand for progressivism and the affect tin be enormous."

Coen-Gilbert knows affect. His Wayne-based nonprofit B Lab has jumpstarted the international "B Corp" motion. B Lab's insignia—the B stands for Do good—confers a blazon of Proficient Housekeeping Seal of Approval when information technology comes to social responsibility for over 1,000 companies, including well-known brands such as Patagonia and Revolution Foods. B Lab has created a new blazon of company, the B Corp, which extends members' fiduciary responsibility across just shareholders, to stakeholders such as employees, the environs and the surrounding customs.

At present, as the NFL tries to dodge PR storms of its own making in the Ray Rice and Adrian Petersen cases, Coen-Gilbert and I are commiserating on only how hard it is to be a sports fan with a social censor these days—you sit down to sentry a football game game and it feels like you're rooting for Big Tobacco. It'due south all well and skillful that the NFL has named 3 domestic violence experts—all women—equally senior advisers and that, in the backwash of Donald Sterling's racist comments, the NBA is beingness advised by Dr. Richard Lapchick of the University of Central Florida'due south Institute for Diverseness and Ideals in Sport. Merely don't these moves smack of after-the-fact PR moves? I'm still waiting for the answer to the most pressing question: Moving forward, how do we find out if our sports teams—beneficiaries of antitrust exemptions and taxpayer subsidies for their deluxe stadia—actually share our values?

Information technology's hard to be a sports fan with a social censor. You sit down down to watch an NFL game and information technology's like you're rooting for Large Tobacco.

That's the question that drove the founding of B Lab eight years ago. "Many companies say they're socially responsible," says Coen-Gilbert, who was ane of the founders of AND1, the groundbreaking basketball apparel company that had $250 1000000 in sales at its top and appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated in 2005. "But how exercise y'all know if that's just marketing? A company could be in a LEED certified building, but if they're not paying their employees a living wage, are they actually socially responsible?"

At present, in the fallout over the NFL's recent troubles, the time has come to enquire the same of our sports teams and leagues. As a effect of all the bad press populating the sports pages these days, Senator Cory Booker has introduced a pecker that would punish pro sports leagues by prohibiting them from claiming tax-exempt condition. Others have talked about rescinding leagues' antitrust exemptions. Here'southward a simpler thought: Equally a condition of ownership, require all teams to become through the B Lab process.

In the Ray Rice case, that might have meant that, upon his arrest, nosotros'd already accept known merely how much of an epidemic domestic violence is in the NFL considering each team would regularly have had to written report all its employees' transgressions. (There have been 56 NFL players charged with domestic violence since 2000). In the instance of Donald Sterling, fans and sponsors wouldn't accept had to rely on a TMZ study to ultimately learn about housing discrimination lawsuits filed against Sterling in the by, because B Lab certification would have required total disclosure of all litigation. Or have another contempo case: Had NFL teams been required to undergo B Lab certification, it wouldn't have required an Oakland Raiders cheerleader whistleblower for us to larn that, of 26 teams that employ cheerleaders, precisely one—the Seattle Seahawks—pays its cheer team a minimum wage in a league that generates $9 billion in revenue per twelvemonth and pays its commissioner $44 million.

"B Lab doesn't look at governance and make a determination on legality or illegality," says Coen-Gilbert. "We lay out the facts and make up one's mind what the right thing to practise is, for the company and for its stakeholders." To appointment, it'south working: B Lab members were 63 percent more likely to accept emerged intact and relatively unscathed from the Great Recession than other companies.

Now, in the aftermath of the recent spate of sports scandals, the narrative has turned to punishment. Punishment for Rice, Petersen, Sterling, and let's non forget Goodell: The calls for his resignation take gotten louder and louder.

It'due south not likewise late for Eagles' owner Jeffrey Lurie to interruption the silence of NFL buying and make articulate, once and for all, what his squad's values are.

Penalisation is warranted, aye, but information technology's also reactive. For a league or squad, the proactive stand up would exist to go the first to be a B Lab fellow member. Note to Jeffrey Lurie—a political progressive whose team has led the way in greening the NFL: Becoming the first B Lab sports team would say that your squad—a de facto public trust—aligns itself with the values of its fans and business communities. Yeah, the real test of leadership comes at present, after the crises, when the challenge is for our monopolistic sports leagues to finally be transparent with their stakeholders. Information technology may exist too late for Roger Goodell to salvage his job, but information technology's non too late for Jeffrey Lurie to intermission the silence of NFL ownership and make articulate, one time and for all, what his team'southward values are. He tin can do that by making one phone phone call to a guy in Wayne.

This originally ran on The Citizen on 11.12.14

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Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/can-this-wayne-entrepreneur-save-the-nfl-from-itself/

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