Judy Kuszewski and Dunstan Allison-Hope
Founding Partners
It has been a tumultuous time in the world of sustainable business in recent years, a fact that hardly needs saying, but which affects the whole business environment. We’ve whiplashed away from what looked like widespread mainstream consensus a few years ago – that successful business means serving a social purpose; that companies play a vital role in delivering justice, securing human rights and equality; that bold climate action is necessary, inevitable, and just around the corner ahead. Today, by contrast, you’d be likely to believe the very opposite: climate action has fallen so far down the list that we are now paying utilities to scrap wind energy in favour of coal; the apparent backlash against DEI initiatives has dismantled decades of progress virtually overnight; and legions of businesses that once proudly announced their sustainability achievements have taken instead to silence and opacity.
Great time to start a sustainability collaborative, then, right? At a time when the weakening or elimination of regulatory mandates has caused the bottom to fall out of the sustainability services market; when corporate budgets have been cut to the bone; and when a year of devastating climate-induced weather catastrophes have seemingly no impact on endlessly-rallying financial markets – surely, not now?
Look, we get it. The financial conditions are hard going, if nothing else, and we’ve all grown weary of the excesses of what you might call the sustainability-industrial complex.
And yet, this is exactly why we’ve started Evermore – to offer a different kind of relationship with our clients, one that respects what matters most to them, and is designed to deliver impact and value in the real world.
We are launching Evermore to provide a new thought leadership platform in just and sustainable business, embodying several core beliefs that underlie the work we do:
- Knowing what needs to be done and being able to do it are two fundamentally different things. In so many instances, there is really no doubt about what needs to be achieved, but the political, economic, and organisational levers aren’t positioned to help us do this. We’re not in the business of persuading companies to care about responsible business. The leaders and teams we work with already care. What they really need is help removing the barriers that prevent action today.
- Sustainable business is hard work, and no one should pretend otherwise. The many decades of advocating for win-win solutions have frankly produced very few of them, and we have to ask why. We also have to ask whether the solutions that our industry offers are really capable of addressing the climate crisis and ecological decline; whether they have any answers for the tough questions about the future of equity, wealth, work, and power that are being surfaced by the rise of transformative technologies. We reject the overstated claims, overblown marketing hype, and failure to evolve that our industry has indulged in, which has alienated people who may otherwise have become allies in business transformation.
- Every business is part of a whole array of systems. From supply chains to national, international and local communities and from customers’ lives to the capital markets, these systems are where social and environmental challenges are most salient and sustained. We want to help our clients understand and use their influence to change the system for the better – to expand their impact beyond their own perimeters, for lasting, positive change.
- The power of experience is often cited, but rarely delivered to clients in practice. Working with Evermore means working with us, a unique collective of senior-level experts in our fields, practiced and skilled advisors and champions, and the architects of sustainable business in our own right. We don’t operate a pyramid of junior consultants, and we won’t waste time on unnecessary make-work.
- The future of just and sustainable business still needs to be written. Whether it is emerging regulation in the EU, urgent questions about the impact of technology on society, or the need for a just climate transition, an expansive agenda remains to be shaped. No outcomes are inevitable, and we need to continue advancing a vision grounded in international standards of responsible business conduct, effective multilateral governance, and a sustainable future for everyone.
The story of Evermore is a belief that we all have power to change the future, but this won’t happen by itself. Real change requires honesty, discipline, accountability, and the willingness to engage with the hardest questions rather than manage around them.
Evermore is what you say when you intend to keep going – because the destination is worth it, even when the journey is difficult.