Listening to the news can make one lose hope in our future. I actually have been limiting my news consumption this year to save my sanity. There were two books that recently renewed my faith in the power of people to make an impact.

The Secret History of the American Empire by New York Times bestseller, John Perkins, gave an example of how the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) lobbied Mitsubishi USA to change its manufacturing processes to make them more environmentally friendly. RAN had protests in front of Mitsubishi shareholders meetings with large posters exposing the companies destructive environmental policies. The shareholders were ashamed of all the bad press they were getting and agreed to change. Prior to that, Mitsubishi executives wanted to make the company “greener” but the shareholders opposed anything that would reduce the amount of profits the company would receive. Perkins wrote that RAN realized that corporations were not the enemy, they needed to be approached as human beings. The people who ran corporations had children and were also worried about their children’s future. When appealing to the humanity of the corporation’s leaders, RAN and other non profits could be powerful change agents.

Now, I am listening to the audiobook version of Nobel Prize Winner Muhammed Yunus’ Creating a World Without Poverty about his microfinance institution the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. He explains how the head of Dannon approached him about setting up a social business model in Bangladesh to provide affordable and nutritious food to poor Bangladeshis. The company agreed to a 1% profit dividend, much lower than multinational companies ever agree to in a contract. Dannon’s leaders were sincere in their desire to see how they could collaborate with the Grameen Bank and worked hard to convince their shareholders to allow them to go into a low-profit venture. The company even created a social business mutual fund to sell to French investors to promote the idea of social businesses.

Both books made me realize that we can’t think of corporations as villains. They are led by humans with a heart. We have to appeal to each other’s humanity. —-

Susanna Zaraysky blogs about global citizen iissues. She’s the author of two books, Language is Music and Travel Happy, Budget Low about easy foreign language learning and budget travel. (www.createyourworldbooks.com)