As many of you know, PICnet is a B Corporation, a socially responsible business with the triple bottom line of people, planet and profit. We're grateful to be a part of an amazing group of businesses who are similar-minded.

One of those businesses is PICnet-client Back to the Roots (BTTR). Back to the Roots was founded by two UC Berkeley students, Alejandro Velez & Nikhil Arora, who were inspired to make a product from used coffee grounds. What they came up with was a mushroom kit where, in as little as 10 days, you can grow your own mushrooms from your kitchen windowsill! Skeptical? I was too…until we experimented in the DC office and got fabulous results. I even made myself a mushroom and cheese omelet with mushrooms from the kit!

Benefit Corporations are no stranger to being ahead of the curve, and that especially true for B Lab’s new website that spotlights these trailblazing organizations. For those of you who haven’t heard the word about Benefit Corporations, they are a “new class” of corporation that are re-imagining the way that business does business in order to affect positive change in the world.

If you’d like to see a list of this growing community of socially responsible businesses, the new BenefitCorp.net website will grant that wish. And given that their Benefit Corp search directory is fed live from B Lab’s CRM database—Salesforce.com— you’ll be able to see the list automagically grow almost before your eyes as more and more organizations join the ranks.

As a B Corp, PICnet puts an emphasis on people, environment, and then profits.  We have higher legal standards and must meet comprehensive social and environmental standards.  For many businesses, this school of thinking might be backward, but for B Corps, it’s a part of our vision and goals. There are more than 450 B Corporations in 60 various industries across the United States and Europe.  PICnet was proud to become a B Corp in April of 2010.

So it makes perfect sense that as a B Corp, we support other B Corporations whose similarly-minded business models fit in so perfectly with ours. When I learned about Give Something Back, a fellow B Corporation that offers office supplies at a cheaper rate than the average office supply chain, I jumped at the chance to purchase and help support a fellow B Corp. What I found is that the products were not only much cheaper, but I also received free shipping AND had them delivered next day.

Sounds great so far, right? Here's the kicker: Give Something Back donates 75% of their profits to their community; that is 75x the national corporate giving average! They've been changing the game since 1991 and were one of the founding B Corps.