Transforming business: With Chris Gale

I was part of the October 2013 cohort which seems like a long time ago now but I still feel the impact of my On Purpose year in everything I do in my career.

I joined the Associate Programme having worked primarily in international development and came on to the programme really wanting to understand how business could drive impact.

My two placements were Ben & Jerry’s and M&S, two very different businesses. I learnt a lot at both but I absolutely loved my time at Ben & Jerry’s. The concept of corporate activism was completely new to me and although, at the time, I was really looking to see how supply chains could drive impact, this new approach really blew my mind.

I subsequently returned to Ben & Jerry’s for +5 years after my placement and led the social mission work around Europe. At the heart of that was building a strategy for the business to focus efforts across Europe on supporting refugee and asylum rights and I’m really proud that they continue to focus efforts today on a challenge that most businesses won’t go anywhere near.

I left Ben & Jerry’s to set up a new social impact team at eBay and was there for around 4 years, moving in the last year into a new role leading circular innovation. I left eBay at the start of this year and am now splitting my time between two fantastic organisations, both very different to where I spent my last 10 years.

The first is a climate tech platform called Unibloom that helps businesses move from carbon reporting into developing fully fledged and embedded climate action plans. The founder is an ex Ben & Jerry’s colleague. The second is an organisation called Purchasing with Purpose which is seeking to expand social enterprise procurement at scale in the US. This is an area that has huge potential and with the new People & Planet First verification making it much easier to identify social enterprises and for corporates to feel confident trusting their impact claims, the opportunity is really exciting.