Good Living, Together
The Human Flourishing Foundation nurtures individual vocation in the workplace and seeks to ensure that local communities thrive alongside businesses and investors where the Economics of Mutuality operating model is deployed.
OUR APPROACH
For Good Communities
By raising consciousness, empowering self-reflection, orchestrating stakeholders, and supporting enterprise, we get behind the left behind. We promote ‘Good Living, Together’ by enabling companies, investors, and the neighborhoods in which they have relationships to flourish in ways that are measurable, replicable, and scalable.
OUR APPROACH
Our Stakeholders
We work with business leaders, family offices, philanthropists, and other non-profits concerned with issues of equality of opportunity and social cohesion. We partner with other non-profits aligned with our mission to support community-based organizations and entrepreneurs who can make a difference on the ground.
OUR APPROACH
What We Do
We secure funding from our for-profit subsidiary investment firm, Mutual Value Investments, and from other sources to make a positive impact on communities that nurture human flourishing. Our interventions take the form of:
- Education: Raising consciousness among business leaders – building an understanding of how to reimagine their economic models and achieve positive measurable local impact.
- Vocation: Providing the means for people in business to explore and discover their vocations – and to live them out more fully in the workplace – to become more fulfilled personally and to contribute more meaningfully to the common good.
- Opportunity: Supporting entrepreneurs and organizations that lack access to the social and financial capital needed to unlock their potential and create value for their communities.
OUR APPROACH
What is Human Flourishing?
The nature and significance of ‘human flourishing’ have been discussed and debated for millennia. Aristotle defined it as the ability to live a good life – mankind’s highest goal. Thinkers down the generations have emphasized the importance of happiness, health, vocation, virtue, and close relationships.
The fact is that living well depends upon living well together and living out more of one’s individual vocation – your greater purpose for being. Furthermore, to sustain these dimensions of wellbeing, people and communities need access to financial, environmental, and other resources that are often unavailable to them in places of need.
Accordingly, we believe that human flourishing should be assessed using the concept of mutuality, which should be measured using Human and Social capital metrics as well as Financial capital metrics. We also draw upon learnings about human flourishing indicators offered by such organizations as Harvard University’s Human Flourishing Initiative.
OUR APPROACH
A Better Way to Live
By design, shareholder capitalism creates casualties through unintended consequences. For every winning business, there too often must be multiple losers. Not just competitors, but people, communities, and environments can suffer without regard to good intent. Blunt-force financial capitalism and a tide of globalization have washed away the aspirations, opportunities, and cohesion of many communities even while generating vast wealth for the few, leaving damage and deprivation in its wake.
Stakeholder capitalism offers a different paradigm. More just; more ethical; more sustainable. The Economics of Mutuality operating model can deliver a more complete and resilient form of capitalism by empowering businesses to create mutual value for the benefit of every stakeholder in the ecosystem.
The Economics of Mutuality enables us to rethink the way that business should be and ought to be—if we are to flourish as selves and societies, choosing a future that understands the grain of the universe."
Steven GarberHuman Flourishing Foundation Board Member;
Senior Fellow for Vocation and the Common Good, M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust
The Economics of Mutuality is more than just a good idea, it’s a totally new way of doing business. It exposes the serious shortcomings of ethical egoism and demonstrates the unquestioned benefits of virtuous capitalism."
Kenneth BarnesAuthor of Redeeming Capitalism and former senior international executive
Sustainable profit always follows value creation – voluntary exchange based upon mutual benefit. Shallow business education has in recent decades seen business and social impact as fundamentally at odds.”
Charles TappFormer Managing Director, Stand Together Trust
OUR APPROACH
A Better Way of Seeing and Doing Business
The Economics of Mutuality is a proven operating model that drives superior value creation through impact-led management practices.
Powered by digital tools, it equips companies to generate enduring mutual value for the benefit of multiple stakeholders by addressing societal and environmental challenges.
Practical and scalable, the model enhances business performance by embedding purpose-driven strategies and metrics into day-to-day operations.
OUR APPROACH
From Idea to Impact
The Economics of Mutuality operating model emerged from a multi-year business innovation program developed by Mars that engaged a range of cross-sector partners including Oxford University’s Saïd Business School. The program delivered proof of concept practical application across business units, sectors, and markets along with teaching curricula and case studies.
The team behind the program spun out of Mars in 2020 to advance and implement the operating model more widely. Under the independent brand of the Economics of Mutuality Alliance, a partnership of two non-profits and two for-profits, they now collaborate with companies, investors, universities, and NGOs around the world to serve the common good.
Let’s Discuss
If you’d like to explore how the Economics of Mutuality could drive transformation in your context, just reach out. We'd be delighted to start a conversation.
As the greatest engine of wealth creation in history, market economics can become so creatively destructive that it becomes its own worst enemy in spurring its own rivals— unless it is framed more positively and fruitfully as the Economics of Mutuality does.”
Os GuinnessAuthor, Theologian and Social Critic;
Member of the Guinness family
Businesses can be a force for good, and it’s clear from the research that companies working to deliver purpose and profitability do better. The businesses that thrive and succeed long-term will be the ones that create prosperity that is more widely shared.”
Stephen BadgerEconomics of Mutuality Foundation Chairman
Two-time Board Chairman and current Board Member, Mars Incorporated.
Fourth-generation Mars family member
Business leaders are increasingly interested in driving holistic impact, including not only financial results, but also human, social, and environmental factors. The Economics of Mutuality is the most practical means I’ve yet seen of figuring out how to do this, especially because of how it can translate this ideal into measurable outcomes.”
Michael BontragerFounder, Chatham Financial
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