Where does corporate hesitancy to speak up about environmental values actually come from?

In this episode, we sit down with Paul Hendricks, Executive Director of The Conservation Alliance, a coalition of more than 270 businesses, from outdoor brands to brewers to banks, that pool their money and their voices to protect wild places across North America. Paul knows the work from both sides of the table, spending eight years leading social and environmental impact at Patagonia, then building advocacy and philanthropic programs at Rivian, where he brought the company into the Alliance as a member before stepping in to lead it.

Neil and Paul get into why the outdoor economy rarely shows up on a balance sheet, even though it shows up on the balance sheets of every brand that depends on public lands.

Dive into the episode to hear Paul make the case that mission-driven companies talk too much about impact and not enough about economics, and explain why brands that go quiet on their values during a political moment pay for it later.

CONNECT WITH PAUL & THE CONSERVATION ALLIANCE

The Conservation Alliance: https://conservationalliance.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/conservationalliance

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-conservation-alliance
Paul on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-hendricks-14a8563/

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Save Public Lands: https://www.savepubliclands.us

Cherry Republic:https://www.cherryrepublic.com

The River of Doubt by Candice Millard: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/114422/the-river-of-doubt-by-candice-millard/9780307575081/

Bonfire Burritos, Golden, CO.: https://bonfireburritos.com

For our 2nd episode of Season 2, Neil is joined by Austin Whitman, CEO and co-founder of The Change Climate Project, the nonprofit behind The Climate Label and the Business Emissions Evaluator.

Austin has spent more than two decades building markets for clean energy and carbon, including a stint selling carbon credits to spring breakers in grad school. He co-founded the organization in 2019 as Climate Neutral, alongside Jonathan Cedar of BioLite and Peter Dering of Peak Design (who joined us in Season 1). They dive into why Austin’s team doesn’t certify “hopes and dreams,” and what it means to measure money already spent instead of a pledge for 2050.

Take a listen to learn what most brands get wrong when marketing their climate impact, plus what gets lost between a sustainability team doing excellent work and a marketing team that never hears about it.

Follow Austin & The Climate Change Project

• The Change Climate Project: https://www.changeclimate.org
• On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/changeclimate

Austin’s Mentions & Recs

• The Climate Claims Checker: https://www.changeclimate.org/climate-claims-checker
• How Climate Label certification works: https://www.changeclimate.org/how-it-works
• BioLite, co-founded by Jonathan Cedar: https://www.bioliteenergy.com
• Peak Design, co-founded by Peter Dering: https://www.peakdesign.com
• Festool: https://www.festoolusa.com
• Lodge Cast Iron: https://www.lodgecastiron.com
• The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-light-eaters-zoe-schlanger
• Shift Key from Heatmap News, hosted by Robinson Meyer: https://shows.acast.com/shift-key
• Parish Café, Boston: https://parishcafe.com/

We’re diving into season 2 with guest Adam Hiner, CEO and co-founder of Pacha, an organic, gluten-free bakery making bread and tortillas from just two simple ingredients: sprouted buckwheat and sea salt. Adam takes us through his unique serial entrepreneurship journey across San Diego's food scene—from pioneering organic catering and farm-to-table dining to founding Boochcraft, California’s first hard kombucha brand.

Neil and Adam get into the realities of modern brand building, discussing how to balance various stakeholders without sacrificing mission or commercial growth. Adam also shares how Pacha utilizes the Purpose Pledge framework to operationalize company-wide strategy, and why purpose serves as the ultimate internal fire that sustains an entrepreneur through the darkest challenges of business.

Links & Resources

• Follow Adam and Pacha
  • Pacha Website: https://livepacha.com
  • Pacha Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/livepacha
  • Adam Hiner LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamhiner/

• Adam's recs & mentions
  • Boochcraft: https://boochcraft.com
  • Trilogy Sanctuary: https://www.trilogysanctuary.com
  • One Step Closer (OSC): https://osc2.org
  • The Purpose Pledge: https://www.purposepledge.org
  • Soil Carbon Initiative (SCI): https://www.soilcarboninitiative.org
  • This Is Strategy by Seth Godin: https://sethgodin.com
  • The Future is Peace by Aziz Abu-Sarah and Maoz Inon: https://www.azizabusarah.com
  • GOODONYA Cafe: 1051 S Coast Hwy 101, Encinitas, CA 92024

Values drive value. That's the claim at the center of this compilation, and these conversations from Season 1 put numbers behind it. The “Halo Effect” is something our team spent real time trying to prove: how advocacy work lifts everything around it, including the commercial stuff it has nothing to do with.

Chris Miller was a big part of pushing us to investigate it, and he opens the episode with what Ben & Jerry's saw when it put several million dollars into low-propensity voter turnout in Georgia. Work with nothing to do with ice cream, outperforming an ice cream ad on short-term sales ROI. His read on why: if they'd designed the campaign to sell ice cream, it would have failed at both.

Jay Tandan explains the same effect at the post level, where advocacy content reliably outperforms product content and leaves algorithmic reach behind it that the next post inherits.

Alan Mahon and James Hughes describe what happened when Brewgooder stopped staying quiet and launched Sun & Stone with Palestinian brewery Taybeh—highest online sales they'd ever seen, inbound from 16 countries, and a decision they weren't sure they'd survive commercially.

Peter Dering closes it out with the version that shows up on an actual balance sheet: goodwill, built over 16 years, and the people who stop him in airports to talk about a backpack.

Featured in this episode

• Christopher Miller, SVP of Sustainability and Advocacy at Aspen One: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopher-miller-7b733668
• Jay Tandan, former Global Digital Lead at Ben & Jerry's, now at Protect Our Winters: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jay-tandan-21017592
• Alan Mahon and James Hughes, co-founders of Brewgooder:
  https://www.linkedin.com/in/alan-mahon-7659b15a
  https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-hughes-80bb5b55
• Peter Dering, founder and CEO of Peak Design: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-dering-54760718

Links & Resources

• Ben & Jerry's: https://www.benjerry.com
• Protect Our Winters: https://protectourwinters.org
• Brewgooder: https://www.brewgooder.com
• Taybeh Brewery: https://www.taybehbeer.com
• Peak Design: https://www.peakdesign.com
• The Change Climate Project: https://www.changeclimate.org
• LooseGrip: https://loosegrip.net
• The GRASP Impact Framework: https://www.graspyourimpact.com

In preparation for Season 2, we're sharing conversations where host Neil Callanan takes the guest chair.

This bonus episode comes from The New Mainstream Podcast with Mario Carrasco, Co-Founder of ThinkNow. Brands are under real pressure to say where they stand on social, political, and environmental issues, and the ground keeps moving underneath them. Consumer behavior has shifted, and so has what people expect from the companies they buy from.

Neil and Mario get into what that means for purpose-driven brands trying to stay credible in a polarized moment, and how advocacy work holds up when the cultural context won't sit still.

Links & Resources

• The New Mainstream Podcast: http://www.newmainstreampodcast.com
• ThinkNow: https://thinknow.com
• Mario Carrasco's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marioxcarrasco
• LooseGrip: https://loosegrip.net
• Neil's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neilcallanan/

• • The GRASP Impact Framework: https://www.graspyourimpact.com

In preparation for Season 2, we're sharing conversations where host Neil Callanan takes the guest chair. This one's from Can Marketing Save the Planet? Where Neil makes the case that values-led brands hold their impact work to a lower standard than their sales numbers—and that purpose and performance feed each other rather than compete.

He walks through the GRASP Framework, which sorts content goals into discover, engage, and convert before anyone opens a dashboard (and away from misleading glamour metrics.)

Links & Resources

• Can Marketing Save the Planet? (Original episode): https://www.canmarketingsavetheplanet.com/podcasts/episode-123-data-driven-insights-for-purpose-driven-marketing-neil-callanan-loose-grip
• LooseGrip: https://loosegrip.net
• Michelle Carvill's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michellecarvill/
• Gemma Butler's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/butlergemma/
• Neil's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neilcallanan/
• The GRASP Impact Framework: https://www.graspyourimpact.com
• The GRASP Your Impact Podcast: https://graspyourimpact.com/podcast/

As we prep Season 2, we're sharing conversations where host Neil Callanan took the guest chair. This episode comes from The Resilience Report, where Neil joins host Lauren Scott to dig into the gap between caring about impact and being able to prove it. He walks through what actually happens to most ESG reports: thousands of hours in, a collective exhale when it ships, and almost no one checking whether it worked—and makes the case for treating impact content as always-on storytelling rather than an annual sprint.

Neil breaks down the two mistakes he sees most (too many data points, too many dashboards), why he pushes clients to demote views and page views in favor of consumption metrics, and how the HiPPO problem quietly pulls teams back toward big meaningless numbers. He also shares the "halo effect" study with a longtime client—tracking what a high-engagement values post does to the traditional post that follows it.

Links & Resources

• The Resilience Report: https://www.theresiliencereport.ca
• Lauren Scott's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurenscott514/
• LooseGrip: https://loosegrip.net
• The GRASP Impact Framework: https://www.graspyourimpact.com
• Neil's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neilcallanan/
• Mentioned in this episode:
  • IM ABLE Foundation: https://imablefoundation.org
  • MeasureCamp: https://measurecamp.org
  • Iron Viz (Tableau): https://www.tableau.com/community/iron-viz
  • Traction / EOS: https://www.eosworldwide.com
  • Stefan Sagmeister, "The power of time off" (TED): https://www.ted.com/talks/stefan_sagmeister_the_power_of_time_off
  • Patagonia Worn Wear: https://www.patagonia.com/worn-wear/

For our season 1 finale, the tables turn as host Neil Callanan steps into the guest seat to be interviewed by critically acclaimed host, Senior Producer, and CEO at ohitsBigRon Studios LLC, Ronald Young Jr. Neil shares the story behind LooseGrip, his 17+ year digital agency that evolved from general marketing services to a specialized focus on data storytelling for purpose-driven brands.

He opens up about his personal journey, detailing how experiencing the profound personal tragedy of losing his four-year-old son, Shea, transformed not only his family and his world, but also how he leads his business, interacts with clients, and embraces authentic human connection.

Neil and Ronald dive deep into everything from activism and data to how bold, progressive messaging and commercial performance aren’t mutually exclusive. The conversation concludes with a candid reflection on intentionality, grief, building strong teams, and the essential freedom to "f**k around" in pursuit of doing great work.

Follow & Connect:

• LooseGrip: https://loosegrip.net/
• LooseGrip LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/loosegrip/
• Neil Callanan LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neilcallanan/
• Ronald Young Jr. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronaldyoungjr/
• Ronald Young Jr.: https://www.ohitsbigronstudios.com/big-ron

Neil & Ron’s Recs:

• Rob Delaney: https://www.robdelaney.com
• The Art of Non-Conformity by Chris Guillebeau: https://chrisguillebeau.com/
• Capo Italian Deli: https://capodeli.com
• Ben's Chili Bowl: https://www.benschilibowl.com/