'Rebuild the Block' Works to Break Down Social Inequalities

Rebuild the Block, a grassroots nonprofit organization, focuses its efforts towards granting monetary rewards to black-owned businesses to support their growth and reconstruction in response to the current spotlight on social inequality that burns throughout the United States. Given their new beginning, they have yet to develop a sustainability plan. Rebuild the Block falls into the research industry, under the nonprofit organization sector.  Although not uncommon for nonprofits to have sustainability frameworks or plans in place, Rebuild the Block was recently formed in June of 2020.  Therefore, they do not currently have a plan in place.  I believe it would be beneficial in gaining investors and continual support from the local communities by having a plan in place to protect their environmental endeavors, as well as their obvious social endeavors. 

A framework that I feel would be beneficial to supporting their sustainability effort would be participating in the Global Reporting Initiative, better known as the ‘GRI.’ The GRI standards provide a holistic framework that addresses the broad performance of an organization in areas such as social, environmental, and economic impacts generated by their efforts. The GRI can be seen as a way to report to stakeholders, or in Rebuild the Block’s case, generate stakeholders. The GRI will guide the organization’s approach to essentially ‘proving’ its impact.  Currently, there are more than 5,000 organizations worldwide that use the GRI as their framework, many of them being nonprofit organizations with similar goals to provide for the underrepresented and under-resourced groups. 

Rebuild the Block needs a framework that works with their type of nonprofit organization, rather than conforming their efforts to a framework structured for private and non-private organizations.  Therefore, the GRI is a perfect fit. I selected this framework because of its unique social and environmental issues it addresses: climate change, human rights, and corruption. Human rights and corruption is not a common reporting standard when compared to other frameworks.  With Rebuild the Block’s specifically designated grants for black-owned businesses only, there is a decent amount of room for corruption to occur. In addition to Rebuild the Block being formed so recently, their reporting techniques leave a significant amount of information to be interpreted. Thus, it is crucial to implement more reporting techniques to gather more investors and stakeholders, to truly grow the nonprofit organization.

Given the focused purpose of Rebuild the Block, there are not many organizations to compare it to when it comes to reporting statistics.  In a GRI perspective, the organization would perform fairly well, given it provides more standardized statistics.  In terms of environmental impact, Rebuild the Block has no significant environmental impact, other than their headquarters.  Given the headquarters sustainability index is not publicly available information, if it is provided in the future, they could promote in house programs to initiate recycling initiatives or small scale operations.  As for social impact, the organization is performing well given their motive behind the nonprofit is to support black-owned businesses. By engaging with owners that require economic support, they are giving back to the communities of which the black-owned businesses reside.  Not only is this a positive economic impact for the communities, it also provides more jobs, more education opportunities, and community building opportunities.

Rebuild the Block acknowledges the struggles of black business owners, given the inequality in the corporate world.  15% of businesses in the United States are owned by minorities, and even a smaller percentage of that is black-owned. Not only does Rebuild the Block present the challenge of financing the underrepresented populations’ business endeavors, it also challenges both public and private corporations to embrace their diversity.  I believe that Rebuild the Block calls the public to action to support not only small businesses, but their local neighbors rather than supporting aggressive, and unequal corporate dominators.