How Business For Good did more good in 2024
Since our founding in 2017, Business For Good has gone from being a small alliance of businesses to a vibrant, growing organization with a serious voice in San Diego.
2024 was a year of sharpening our advocacy efforts, expanding our events, and growing our membership.
Before we turn our calendars to 2025, we’d like to savor the big and small moments that mattered most to Business For Good and our members.
First, our Business For Good 2024 award winners!
Every year at our End of Year Social Event, Business For Good honors a handful of BFG members and community partners who went above and beyond to help drive impact within BFG and in San Diego County.
We are proud to announce this year’s award recipients, who we honored in person at our End of Year Event on December 4:
Most Passionate About Doing Good: Lori Thiel
BFG member Lori Thiel shows a remarkable steadfast consistency and an objective approach to advocacy. As Vice President of The League of Women Voters San Diego, Lori has deep expertise in regional public policy. In the advocacy space, Lori sets herself apart by listening more than she pontificates—a quality that is both rare and powerful. Her dedication to thoughtful, impactful action makes her an invaluable advocate and an inspiration to us all.
Most Likely to Lead With Love: Shine Blume Creative
Shine Blume Creative sets the gold standard for prioritizing a healthy and happy work-life balance, proving that when people thrive, great work follows. This commitment is personified by their amazing team and reflected in the outstanding quality of everything they do. As BFG members, Shine Blume shows us that caring for people isn’t just the right thing—it’s the smart thing, too.
Most Community Spirit: Dr. Bronner’s
Our community partner Dr. Bronner’s redefines what it means to lead with integrity, linking executive pay to their lowest-paid fully vested employee—a public commitment that ensures no one earns more than five times the lowest-paid team member. This remarkable policy proves there is a better way to define success, and it challenges all of us to think bigger and bolder about equity in business.
Most Likely to Get Sh*t Done: Emily Renda
Emily Renda is the total package: consistent, reliable, talented, smart, and joyful. As our BFG Board Secretary and co-chair of the BFG Member Engagement Committee, in just a short time, Emily has risen to a leadership role at Business For Good by leading with heart and always showing up for the team. Emily’s dedication and example make her a cornerstone of our community.
Business For Good 2024 organizational wins
Business For Good reached some impressive organizational milestones in 2024. Take a look at how we’ve grown as a group this year.
- Added 48 new members from organizations of every size. A significant number of new businesses joined as Business For Good members in 2024. Everyone had different reasons for joining, from wanting to align with like-minded organizations on policy priorities, to finding resources for entrepreneurship, to learning more about how to run a socially conscious business—but we all share the common goal of doing better for San Diego.
- Returned to monthly in-person member meetings with influential guest speakers. 2024 marked our official return to monthly, in-person general member meetings. This year, we hosted 10 in-person meetings, each of which featured a number of prominent guest speakers, including San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria; Genevieve Jones-Wright, activist, mayoral candidate, and former San Diego County Public Defender; Mitchelle Woodson, Legal Director of Pillars of the Community; Ashley Rodriguez, League of Women Voters San Diego board member; and Ramla Sahid, Founder and Executive Director of The Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans (PANA).
- Hosted our biggest (Doing) Business For Good Summit yet. Many BFG members throughout our organization, in different capacities, volunteered their time and hard work to make our 3rd Annual (Doing) Business For Good Summit a huge success. Notably, this year’s event attracted 200 attendees and received high praise. As one attendee shared, “It was one of the best gatherings of awesome people with a shared mission that I have attended here in San Diego!”
- Hired a social media strategy firm for the first time. In 2024, we hired Shine Blume Creative as our organization’s social media strategists, content creators, and community engagers. Shine Blume has helped us grow our social media presence organically across all platforms by 50%+.
- Received the Neighborhood House Association’s Unsung Hero’s Award. On November 23, representatives from Business For Good had the privilege of attending the Neighborhood House Association (NHA)’s annual gala, where BFG was honored with one of the organization’s Unsung Hero’s Awards. NHA is one of the largest, oldest social services nonprofits in the region, and has supported immigrant communities in San Diego with essential services since 1914. The organization chose to recognize BFG for its grassroots advocacy work in San Diego County.
- Hosted a series of high-quality business training workshops. We hosted our Business Basics series of eight business training workshops (which includes Websites 101, Legal 101, Marketing 101, and Bookkeeping 101), as part of the multi-year SEED grant funding BFG was awarded in 2022. These BFG workshops and one-on-one “office hours” with workshop leaders were offered free of charge to BFG members and all participants in the SEED Program itself.
- Launched a Chef’s Dinner series for fundraising. This year, in order to bolster our fundraising efforts, we partnered with the local chefs behind Cellar Door and Two Ducks to host two separate five-course, wine-paired Business For Good Chef’s Dinners in the upstairs private space at Lion’s Share. BFG member Heidi Greenwood of Esquina Wine Shop served as sommelier and introduced attendees to sustainable wine brands, many from female vintners.
Business For Good 2024 policy wins
A core part of our mission at Business For Good is to ensure that local business owners and professionals are educated and capable of sharing their position on policies that affect our ability to do business well while allowing our community to thrive.
Check out how we empowered our members this year to advocate for equitable, sustainable policies throughout our region.
- Combined all our advocacy efforts into the new Advocacy Committee. After the COVID-19 pandemic slowed our group’s advocacy efforts, we needed a way to pick up where we left off with our robust policy work in 2019. Previously, we had four advocacy-focused committees within BFG: Housing & Homelessness, Environmental Health, Immigration, and Business Resources. The first three, which are still BFG’s main policy priorities, are contained under the powerful new Advocacy Committee, which is chaired by Mikey Knab. This allows our collective voices to be hyper-focused on the policies we advocate for.
- Bolstered our Member Engagement Committee. Our Member Engagement Committee did an amazing job implementing programs to grow and engage our membership. Recently, we rolled our Business Resources advocacy and education work into our Member Engagement Committee, which is co-chaired by Alexis Piotrowski and Emily Renda. By combining these forces, the Member Engagement Committee can provide more value for every BFG member, no matter the size of their business.
- Formed the San Diego Business Impact Alliance. In 2024, we aligned with B Local San Diego, Conscious Capitalism San Diego, the Better Business Bureau, and Cause San Diego to launch a unified coalition of nonprofit groups working in sync to strengthen our communities. The thing all of our groups have in common is using business as the driving force of positive change in our communities. We believe that together, we can be even more effective and efficient forces for good in San Diego.
- Saw BFG community members appointed to influential policymaking positions. BFG board member Dr. Cindy Lin now sits on the City of San Diego’s Climate Advisory Board, serves as an advisory body to the Mayor and the City Council on policies and issues related to climate, environment environmental justice, energy justice, climate equity, sustainability, and energy policy. And on February 20, BFG Board Vice Chair Sid Voorakkara was sworn in as the seventh commissioner of the San Diego Port Authority’s Board of Port Commissioners. Sid is a widely recognized public affairs expert in San Diego, and will be dedicated to driving more equitable, sustainable district policy, and providing inclusive opportunities for more organizations to do business with the Port.
- Supported local legislation against employment discrimination. This year saw the passage of the San Diego County Fair Chance Ordinance, a local extension of California’s Fair Chance Act. San Diego County employers are now forbidden from asking applicants about their conviction history until they have a conditional job offer. This will help employers consider a candidate’s experience and skills before potentially discriminating against them based on past convictions unrelated to the work they would be doing.
Our goals for 2025
The chief goal for Business For Good is always to unite local business owners to drive policy that improves San Diego for all.
Next year, we’d like to build on this by focusing even more on shoring up our resources so we can continue our impactful work.
The reality is, our City and County grant funding has been cut by over 50% for 2025. We anticipate facing more challenges in the year ahead.
This translates into three specific goals.
- Continue to grow our membership. BFG membership dues are significantly lower than other business alliances, because we are dedicated to equity and accessibility. However, this means we need more members in order to do the work we do. Right now, less than 30% of our funding comes from dues. We aim to become more self-sustaining by growing BFG membership in 2025. Our goal is to be at least 50% funded by membership dues alone.
- Make even more connections with larger values-aligned businesses and organizations. We believe that inviting larger organizations into the Business For Good mission will benefit everyone – we provide them with valuable insight into the sustainability of their business practices and resources for meaningful community engagement, and they help us form new connections that can help us continue to provide value for our smaller and newer business members.
- Grow our organization’s leadership talent pool. In 2025, we have a cohort of talented new board members joining us. We want to keep that momentum going and grow our bench of future board members and leaders. We believe that an organization needs to refresh its leadership and perspectives in order to grow and thrive long-term!
Our group was founded seven years ago when many of us in San Diego felt that positive change was going to be even more difficult to enact, and wanted to provide an alternate “voice of business” in our community to impact policy.
Now that we are larger, more established, and better connected as an organization, we are ready to keep the momentum up and continue our commitment to making San Diego a better place to live, work, and do business.
Thank you for continuing to support BFG, and doing the hard work to run purposeful businesses that help drive positive change in San Diego year after year.
