In this episode, we are headed to West Virginia to flip the script on what we know about the energy business in the heart of coal country.  We introduce you to a new type of energy and a new type of business.  Meet Solar Holler, the “benefit corporation” that addresses some of the toughest economic issues in West Virginia. 

Joseph “Joe” and Elizabeth Opoke are father-and-daughter descendants of miners who came to Marion County, WV in the turn of the 20th century. Their immigrant kin came from Hungary to work in the West Virginia coal mines. Family is important in a place like West Virginia. Joe and Elizabeth tell us about what the coal industry has meant to West Virginia and what headwinds are faced when trying to imagine a new kind of economy and a safer and healthier way of life.

One of those creative West Virginia dreamers facing these challenges is Dan Conant, the founder and CEO of Solar Holler. Dan uses the tool of a benefit corporation to create a business that seeks profit while at its core focusing on its social purpose.  Dan’s vision for the social purpose of Solar Holler is creating (1) affordable energy and (2) facilitating good-paying career jobs that are safe for workers and protect West Virginia’s natural environment.

Dan tells the rough and rocky story of how Solar Holler made this happen.  This episode will inspire us all to find new ways to “power our lives.”

Learn more about benefit corporations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporations and about Solar Holler: https://www.solarholler.com/

What Does It Profit is powered by the Solidary Economy Workshop at Georgetown University. Our host and executive producer is Dr. Dawn Carpenter. Our senior producer is Jordan Gass-Poore’, and our engineer and sound designer is Mark Bush. Music for WDIP was composed by Nick Pennington. Season 3 researchers and assistant producers are Sofia Chen, Hannah Woodford, and Andy Feng. Our intern is Abby Trepacz.

Special thanks on this episode to our friends at Heartland Capital Strategies: https://www.heartlandnetwork.org/

In this episode, we head to Crete, Nebraska, America's heartland, in our quest to gain insight into the human cost of the meat we eat. We tell the extraordinary story of the "Children of Smithfield," the adult children of meatpacking workers at Smithfield Foods who stood up to Big Meat, the governor, and others in positions of power and authority to proclaim that their parents were not "expendable." These brave children stood up to meat producers whose callus and irresponsible response to COVID-19 was unacceptable. We then introduce you to the exploitive use of child labor in these same plants. 

This is a story that at first is sad, but then it is a source of frustration and anger. The meat industry in the US and around the world is extremely powerful and stands to continue to profit from the labor of some of the most vulnerable. Meatpacking is one of the most dangerous jobs in our economy, and the true cost of meat is not the price printed on the label.

What Does It Profit is powered by the Solidarity Economy Workshop at Georgetown University. 

In this episode, we tell an almost surreal story. It is the origin story of “union busting” at Starbucks, one of the country’s best-known progressive and socially-conscious companies, and the highest ranking food service company on the list of  Fortune’s Most Admired Companies.

Our host Dr. Dawn Carpenter, a Starbucks shareholder, is encouraged by activist shareholder efforts to seek intervention at the board-level to remedy what a New York administrative law judge recently ruled to be “egregious and widespread misconduct” in the union organizing campaign that started in 2019.

Wanting to get to the root of things, we take you to Buffalo, New York to introduce you to Michelle Eisen, a Starbucks barista, and Will Westlake, a former barista with the company. We learn why they embarked on the epic journey to unionize their stores. 

We hear support from folk singer-songwriter Billy Bragg who played for the campaigners in the first elections. We also get insight from Lynne Fox, the international president of Workers United, the group helping Starbucks stores unionize. And, of course, we bring you some of the misguided musings of Starbucks CEO Howard Shultz, whose own words galvanized the campaigners in the first election.

At the release date of this episode, we learn that there are over 270 unionized Starbucks locations – but not one contract. This is a long, challenging process. To assist the efforts of the baristas and activist shareholders, on March 29, 2023, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee will question Starbucks CEO Howard Shultz, hoping for a commitment for free and fair elections that comply with the law.

Should listeners want to engage, you can (1) offer your support for the Starbucks Worker United campaign, and/or (2) join the Twitter support network using #NoContractNoCoffee, #DearHoward, and #wdip. 

Take a listen and subscribe. Don't miss the rest of Season 3 – now powered by the Solidarity Economy Workshop at Georgetown University. Visit our website to learn more.

In our Season 3 kickoff, we celebrate the resiliency of the human spirit. We step into the psyche of Gina Schaefer, the founder and CEO of A Few Cool Hardware Stores in-and-around Washington, DC. 

Gina combined her entrepreneurial spirit and love of community into a space for people recovering from substance use disorder to rebuild their lives. 

One of Gina’s former employees, Shane, shares a deeply personal story of being the gay son of a Pentecostal minister with broken dreams and a heart full of grief. For years, Shane used drugs and alcohol to mask the pain. He had a difficult time finding a job, until one of his friends suggested he talk to Gina about working at her hardware store down the street from the clinic where he was getting treatment for his substance use disorder. That experience changed both of their lives. 

By hiring Shane, Gina’s employment practices changed for the better. She hopes her stores can be used as a model for small businesses everywhere.  

And 20 years after Shane was hired by Gina, he is now the owner of Crazy Aunt Helen's, a hip restaurant in Washington, DC, where all are welcome and community is served up, one dish at a time.  

Gina says, "You can make an impact on one person's life and maybe not even know about it, and it doesn't take a lot to make that impact."  

Enjoy the episode and check out Gina's book Recovery Hardware for more inspiring stories. Spoiler: Gina sells her stores to her employees. Take a listen and subscribe. Don't miss Season 3 – now powered by the Solidarity Economy Workshop at Georgetown University. Visit our website to learn more.

To the loyal WDIP tribe, welcome back! We've missed you. Thanks for your patience as we re-vamped the show. We hope you like the changes. For those who are just finding us, thanks for giving us a listen. We're the podcast for those who think that there is a social and moral value in economic life. We believe in the power of the human spirit. Ultimately, we believe that each of us has choices to make. And we think one question can help. In the work we do, in the things we buy, in the investments that we make... What Does It Profit? (Spoiler Alert: You decide.)

Powered by the Solidarity Economy Workshop, WDIP brings the stories of those who believe that conscious economic activity can lift us up. To learn more, check out our website and subscribe to the show! 

In this episode, Dr. Dawn is in conversation with Dr. Elisabeth Bik and Dr. Ivan Oransky. Dr. Elisabeth Bik is a microbiologist and scientific integrity consultant who has worked to call out fraudulent scientific papers. She became renowned in her fight against the bad science behind hydroxychloroquine as an effective therapy against COVID-19 that resulted in a global Twitter assault.

Dr. Ivan Oransky is an accomplished journalist, editor, and educator who founded Retraction Watch, the world’s only aggregated database of scientific retraction. In this episode, our guests take a moral stance on science - and tell us… What Does It Profit?

This episode has been produced as part of "Whistling at the Fake: The Crucial Role of Whistleblowers in Countering Disinformation," a global business ethics research project funded by NATO's Public Diplomacy Division as part of its resilience projects. The project aims at addressing the gap of citizen comprehension of the forms, means, and impacts of misinformation and disinformation, and empowering the general public with the tools through which to identify fake news, including appropriate responses to such behaviors. The project focuses on the crucial role whistleblowers and other knowledgeable insiders play in exposing misleading and hostile information activities and increasing public resilience to acts of this nature. The project is managed by Manchester Metropolitan University and coordinated by the Principal Investigator Dr. Costantino Grasso, who serves as Associate Professor in Business and Law at Manchester Law School.

As we head into the 4th of July holiday weekend, we dig into the WDIP back catalog to revisit a conversation from October 2020 with The Assassin, famed short-seller Fahmi Quadir. 

Now that meme stocks are a thing and short-selling and hedge funds have made their way into social media lexicon, we thought it was time to take another listen.  

We'll be back in two weeks to share with you a conversation with Dr. Dawn and the folks at Hustlers for a Cause-- talking entrepreneurship and the soul of What Does It Profit, contributive justice.  In the meantime, Happy Birthday, America, from all of us at What Does It Profit!

In this off-season episode, we dig into the WDIP back catalog to revisit a conversation with Opportunity Finance Network (OFN) CEO, Lisa Mensah where we talked about the idea of "finance justice." The original conversation was released in December 2020. The work keeps pressing forward as OFN seeks to build coalitions of investors that believe that investing in people pays rich dividends by building lives of greater economic success.

Special thanks to Peter Collins for sharing his soulful rendition of the Gospel classic "I Don't Feel Noways Tired" that provides a special kind of mojo for this episode.

For those interested in joining this movement, OFN invites WDIP listeners to join them virtually at their annual conference in October 2021.

Stay tuned. We will be back with you in two week when we talk about the big, bad "H" word:  "hedge" funds and revisit a conversation with the "Assassin," famed short-seller Fahmi Quadir. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss a thing.  

This weekend is Memorial Day weekend-- the unofficial start of summer... at last!  At What Does It Profit, we are officially in the "Off-Season" and busy cleaning house, tuning up, and otherwise getting ready for Season 3.

During the off-season, we wanted you to get to know more about our host and the ethics work behind the show.  We also want to introduce new listeners to insights from our back catalog in mini-episodes beginning in June.

This week, we introduce you to our friends, Adaam and Vanessa of Uncertain Things.  Their social-commentary podcast is what our friends in Boston call "wicked-awesome."  Our host, Dr. Dawn, sat down during Season 2 to talk all things WDIP and the work of storytelling in finance and investment. We hope you enjoy the conversation.

We’ve reached the end of our second season.  This is the time when we take a pause and look back. In today’s episode, it means looking back to our pilot episode about shareholder activism and our Season 1 bonus episode called The Price of the Ecuadorian Chernobyl. This is the story of Chevron and the decades of oil dumping in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

In this episode, we jump back into this epic David and Goliath story and get to know Steven Donziger, the human rights lawyer at the center of all of it.

Why are we having this conversation now?  After losing its case, Chevron is seeking to hinder the collection of the judgment by filing a retaliatory lawsuit meant to silence and bankrupt the lawyer representing the Ecuadorians. It’s almost unbelievable.  Do the math. Chevron owes the Ecuadorians $9.5 billion, and it’s now demanding $60 billion from Steven.

As bankers, we are trained to follow the money. And we suspect that there’s more to the story.  We have a lot we could talk to Steven about. But in this episode, we’ll try to get to know Steven and find out how he managed to turn the tables and use the tools of capitalism in service to human rights. Maybe this is what’s really spooking Chevron, and dare we suggest might be spooking the entire petrochemical industry.