Presenting to Mentor’s Class
Author: Ella Claborn | Major: Finance | Semester: Fall 2024
In the spring semester of my junior year, I enrolled in an Honors College Colloquium called Consulting for Social Impact, taught by Dr. Rogelio Garcia Contreras. The course focused on helping students apply academic knowledge to real-world sustainability challenges. Our class was assigned to work with the Green Business Guidelines (GBG) which is a tool developed through a collaboration between P4: People, Planet, and Profit (a graduate student consultancy team) and the City of Fayetteville.
The GBG is designed to bring global sustainability concepts, like the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the B Impact Assessment (used by B Lab for B Corp certification), into a local, practical framework. Our job was to pilot-test this tool with a local business and provide feedback on the structure, clarity, and feasibility of the guidelines.
My team partnered with the Bank of Fayetteville, which was a natural fit given my interest in banking and my connection to the bank’s Market President at the time. As we guided the bank through the GBG process, I noticed an overlap between the community section of the guidelines and certain regulatory expectations for banks under the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). This observation planted the seed for what would become my Honors research project. I reached out to Dr. Rogelio at the end of the semester to ask if he would be willing to mentor me. I didn’t yet have a polished thesis idea, but I knew I wanted to compare the CRA, an established piece of legislation requiring banks to serve all community members, with the B Impact Assessment, a modern tool used by companies to self-report and improve their impact.
With Dr. Rogelio’s help, I refined my topic into a focused and researchable project titled: A Comparative Analysis of the Community Reinvestment Act and the B Impact Assessment. We worked together to develop a framework for comparing the two systems by examining their missions, success metrics, transparency requirements, and costs.
One of the biggest challenges I faced was narrowing my thesis topic. I initially had a wide ranging interest in corporate social responsibility and sustainability, which made it difficult to define the scope of my work. Dr. Rogelio encouraged me to focus on just two accountability systems, which helped me manage my timeline and produce a deeper analysis.
Ultimately, my research revealed that while the CRA and BIA come from different sectors, one public and one private, they aim to achieve similar outcomes: stronger, more equitable communities and more transparent, responsible businesses. The CRA uses regulatory enforcement to achieve these goals, whereas the BIA offers a voluntary, points-based certification. Both, however, require companies to measure and publicly report their performance, which builds trust with stakeholders and incentivizes ethical behavior.
The Honors College grant allowed me to dedicate focused time to this project. I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity to explore a topic that matters deeply to me, both intellectually and personally, and to contribute in some small way to conversations about equity, sustainability, and accountability in business.