Employees trust their employer more than any other institution on earth — twenty-five points ahead of government.
2026 Edelman Trust Barometer · 34,000 respondents across 28 countries
For boards, executive teams, corporate community-investment arms, foundations, and mission-driven nonprofits.
Foundations and corporate giving programs are adopting AI in grantmaking and evaluation faster than their boards can govern it. What belongs in policy, what a program officer should never decide alone, and where oversight is a fiduciary duty like any other.
How the board oversees social impact and sustainability: committee structure, director education, and governance built to last.
Your people already trust you more than they trust any institution. This is the work of deserving it: coaching senior leaders, building sponsorship into how advancement actually happens, and engagement you can see in employee retention and satisfaction.
Where to act and what to fund: corporate foundation strategy, public-private partnerships, and sustainability tied to the business rather than bolted on — built to produce results you can report, not press releases.
Patrick has spent more than twenty-five years leading community investment and social impact work at scale. Until 2020 he chaired the board of Bed Bath & Beyond, a $12 billion public company, where he led a transformation of board governance and the appointment of ten new independent directors. Before that he was President of the Verizon Foundation, President of the Western Union Foundation, and Senior Advisor to the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund.
He is the author of Why Not Black Men?, on the structural and cultural forces that decide who advances in corporate America — and on the sponsorship and relationships that move a career in practice.
A social entrepreneur in mission-driven brand management, Cristin has led social impact training, multi-stakeholder programs, and community projects across the globe — from youth programs in Brazil to livelihood work in Mozambique.
She founded BSC Group in 2010 and leads it today — a fractional-CMO consortium working in brand management, customer experience, and social impact for financial, education, construction, health care, hospitality, and nonprofit organizations. She also teaches marketing at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business, where she is section lead for marketing in the MBA@Denver program.
Nearly thirty years ago she co-founded the Denver chapter of CISV International and has stayed with it since, growing it from a three-person steering committee and a $500 annual budget into an organization that has reached thousands of young people around the world.
Executive MBA, Daniels College of Business, University of Denver · Executive Certificate in Global Corporate Social Responsibility, Thunderbird School of Global Management
A Fortune 500 board had not seated a new independent director in six years. Its largest shareholder had begun asking why in public.
We audited the board’s skills against the company’s own five-year strategy, rebuilt the nominating process around the gaps that exposed, and recruited past the directors’ existing networks.
A corporate foundation was moving multi-millions a year across hundreds of grantees, and could not tell its board what any of it had changed.
We cut the portfolio to three areas tied to the company’s own operating footprint, and agreed shared measures with the grantees who remained.
A group of NGOs was losing its most promising senior managers faster than it could replace them. Exit interviews said the same thing every time: no visible path.
Working directly with their senior executives, we built a sponsorship program rather than a mentorship one — high-potential managers matched to leaders who were accountable for their advancement, not merely available to them.