Code For Australia is working towards a government that is built by and made for everyone. We spoke with Code for Australia to learn a little more about the newest addition to the B Corp community!
Please describe in a few lines what your company does.
We’re a non-profit civic-tech organisation that works to build government made by, and for, everyone. We help governments increase their digital fluency and create services that are grounded in the needs of people, by bringing the public and private sectors to learn and make together.
What motivated you to pursue B Corp certification?
We wanted to prove our dedication not only to meaningful, impactful work with government, but to our teams, community and the environment too. We were inspired to pursue B Corp certification by many good organisations around us.
How do you plan to celebrate your B Corp certification?
We celebrated by releasing our first ever impact report! It was amazing to reflect on how far we’ve come as an organisation. We’re also excited to continue sharing our journey, learnings and resources with our community of new B Corporation friends and other organisations.
Can you share some of the initiatives or impact areas you do really well in, that qualify you as a B Corp?
- We open-sourced our organisational handbook and created many new policies such as our Environmental Care Policy, Transgender Policy, and Hiring Policy and Supplier Policy.
- We updated our Leave Policy to include more flexible definitions of family for our Carer’s and Bereavement Leave, codified our Community Service Leave and Birthday Leave (yes, that’s officially a thing).
- We’ve codified the process and made it easier for new team members to let us know what days they want us to celebrate with them, or what days they might celebrate that are different to Australian public holidays. We created an open-source Carbon Calculator to understand how our core activities impact the environment, and we’re looking into offsetting 100% of them on an annual basis.
- We’ve made all of our events vegetarian by default to make them more welcoming, and to have a lower impact on the environment.
- We’ve also introduced Net Promoter Scoring across our programs with many in-depth more evaluation and improvement processes codified and underway.
Do you have any tips for aspiring B Corps about the certification process?
The certification process is pretty rigorous. A healthy dose of patience and a flexible allowance of team time to act on requests was required throughout the process.
A big congratulations to Code for Australia for achieving B Corp certification!
