As a B-Corporation, Catalyst strives to meet the highest standards of social and environmental performance, to balance profit and purpose. We envision a global economy that uses business as a force for good. As leaders of this emerging economy, we believe:

Above all else, we plan to pursue our shared mission with a primary focus on sustainability. To us, this means protecting, conserving, growing, and enhancing the resources that we depend on to pursue our shared mission.

Resources come in many forms: personal, professional, organizational, community, environmental, cultural, financial, and many more. All of these resources are vulnerable to depletion and destruction and therefore require substantial individualized attention in order to determine whether our ongoing use of them is sustainable.

As a result, it is critical for us to learn to recognize and humbly respect various limits: in ourselves, our colleagues, our business organization, our broader community and our environment. This means that we should never place excessive demands on any of the above, and yet at the same time we should be ambitiously working to continuously improve ourselves, our colleagues, our business organization, our broader community and our environment. We believe that both activities – observing limits and working to expand them – can and should be pursued simultaneously with dedication, commitment and perseverance.

As an organization dedicated to positive change, we commit ourselves to acting as if such change is genuinely possible. If our mission statement and this code of ethics are treated as nothing more than aspirational marketing, then we are all destined to fail.

We do not expect anyone to trust either our business organization or anyone else naively, but we do expect each other to cultivate an open mind and to periodically be willing to take constructive risks with the expectation that new positive experiences are possible.

We dedicate ourselves to making our work enjoyable for ourselves and for each other. While our work may be difficult at times, we plan to treat such difficulties as temporary setbacks on the journey to a more pleasant and fulfilling future.

We believe that we can do serious work without taking ourselves too seriously, that our work ought to make us laugh more than it makes us cry, and that the personal happiness and satisfaction of our employees are meaningful and significant measures of our overall performance as an organization.

We are dedicated to pursuing equity and justice through careful consideration, planning, and integration of stakeholder feedback in regard to all critical business decisions. When asked, we plan to provide honest and constructive feedback about business plans and outcomes as well.

We acknowledge that we may not always achieve equity and justice in all circumstances, but we plan to always be working to approximate it better in the future. We also plan to demonstrate patience and optimism, with the expectation that imperfectly just or imperfectly equitable outcomes will be gradually improved and corrected over time.

As an organization, we aim to remain decentralized by empowering employees to control and direct as much of their local day-to-day work experience as possible. We strongly believe that businesses and industries function best when power is distributed and shared widely.

We consequently aim to avoid monopolizing or unduly dominating the markets that we operate in as well. Instead, we are committed to supporting locally-owned and small businesses, whether such businesses may be competitors in own industry or unrelated businesses in other industries. When we grow as an organization, we also aim to do so organically and sustainably, with a focus on getting local employees involved in ownership and management of the sites they operate.

Catalyst is a proudly boot-strapped business, financed exclusively by its own employees, and we plan to keep it that way. We have a strong commitment to avoiding passive or silent investors, and we intend for our ownership to always remain exclusively in the hands of active employees.

We plan to treat our clients, our colleagues, ourselves, and everyone that we interact with in the community on behalf of Catalyst with compassion. This should be reflected in our actions, our communication, and our professional behavior. Any kind of violence, bullying, discrimination, or verbal, physical, or sexual harassment is therefore strictly prohibited and we believe that it should result in immediate disciplinary action.

Compassion for others demands more than mere respect as well; it requires a leap of empathic imagination into the experiences, feelings, and desires of people who might be very different from ourselves. When compassion is found to be difficult, we will consequently work to educate ourselves on the differences between ourselves and others so that bridging such experiential gaps might become more feasible in the future.

At the same time, we do not expect our compassion for others to lead to universal agreement, harmony, or freedom from social friction. We view a diversity of life experiences and beliefs as an asset, and some experiential gaps may always remain too large to fully bridge. In such circumstances, we will recognize the limits of compassion and rely on other tools such as our shared mission and values to determine appropriate actions instead.

As an organization, we are dedicated to recruiting, hiring, supporting, and retaining a diverse group of employees. Diversity comes in many forms, and we believe that all of them can enhance the knowledge, skills, abilities, and overall resilience of our organization.

Diversity alone, however, is not enough. Diversity derives its strength from inclusion, when people with different life experiences and ideas start to interact. This means that we must be willing to spend time with and to get to know others who might have life experiences, ideas, and beliefs that may be very different from their own.

At the same time, we should remain free to exclude ourselves from interactions or activities that make us uncomfortable. Inclusion should be always remain an option, not a requirement.

Teamwork and collaboration should be viewed as essential to both our goals and our values. We consequently plan to make a strong effort to take advantage of opportunities to interact with other Catalyst team members, whether that may be through consultation, supervision, continuing education, clubs, staff meetings, social events, or other group activities.

Interactions with other Catalyst team members not only provide opportunities for support, but also opportunities for professional and personal enrichment. We believe that if we invest time, energy, and effort in each other, that the returns on such investments will be immeasurable.

We agree to hold ourselves accountable to each other, to the clients we serve, and to the communities that we operate in. Such accountability requires sufficient transparency to facilitate independent evaluations of our performance and an ongoing investment in evaluation processes and procedures. We acknowledge and accept that our performance may not always be optimal, and we are committed to continuously improving our performance over time.