ED Letter

Dear friend,

When I think back over the last fiscal year, I think about the ways we stayed connected. The months between July 2020 and June 2021 were deeply challenging. But in this time of contraction and struggle, Corporate Accountability expanded our connections and our impact. Faced with the ongoing need to stay physically distant from each other, we found ways to creatively adapt. We prioritized the need to maintain and deepen our relationships with donors and activists like you, allies, and people all over the world working toward justice. I believe it was these connections that got us through.

Let’s be clear: it was a hard twelve months, full of suffering and harm. To varying degrees we individually and collectively dealt with the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, the crushing impact of late-stage racial capitalism, and the worsening climate crisis.

We at Corporate Accountability put our relationships at the front and center of our work. Relationship-building has always been a key part of our work to curb corporate power so the world that we all need and deserve can take root. But this past year called on us to lean in even further. We examined the ways in which we have built authentic, trusting relationships and the ways in which we have caused harm by operating within white supremacy culture. With honesty, creativity, and grit, we committed to expanding what we have done well and doing better where we have failed. I’m grateful to all of the staff and board who are putting in the work to shift and deepen our practices, and particularly to our Black staff and staff of color whose brilliant leadership I am honored to follow.

In a year when corporations attempted to exploit multiple crises and people’s suffering to grow their profits and consolidate their power, we centered humanity. We recognized the toll this moment was taking on our staff and allies. And we implemented policies and practices that centered all our humanity. We sought and found ways to flourish—from navigating an all-remote working environment, to deepening our race equity work, to creatively campaigning under difficult conditions.

And the successes we achieved were remarkable. As you browse this report, I hope you’ll feel the power that your support fueled. We organized to keep corporations out of policymaking, to hold them liable for the harms they have caused, and to disrupt their ability to rebrand themselves when their abuses were exposed. From employing innovative solutions to hold a regional strategy meeting on challenging water privatization in Africa, to co-launching the Liability Roadmap to make Big Polluters pay, to meeting with hundreds of members like you, we built connections, went deep, and creatively leveraged technology toward impact. We’ve captured just a snapshot of all our work last year in this graphic. I invite you to dive in and see the impact you’ve made!

For more than 20 years, I have been practicing hope as a strategy, inspired by a long line of freedom fighters including Nelson Mandela. And when I look out to the next phase of work, I am clear that we—you, me, our allies, all of us—are part of a massive movement for transformation. Collectively, we have been envisioning, acting, and moving toward this moment for a long time. And now is the time for us to do all that we can to bring a creative, joyful, equitable world into being. I’m grateful for your partnership in this visionary work. And I hope you take inspiration from all the relationships and the victories you are helping make possible. We are building another world, together.

Onward,

Patti Lynn,
Executive Director