2024 Annual Business Sustainability Awards

Seating is limited so please register as soon as possible.

General Information

EVENT: 7th Annual Business Sustainability Awards Luncheon
HOST: North Carolina Sustainable Business Council
HOST LOCATION: New Belgium Brewing, near Downtown Asheville
DATE/TIME: Friday, January 26, 2024 - 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM
SPECIAL MESSAGE FROM: Governor Roy Cooper

North Carolina Sustainable Business Council invites you to our 7th Annual Business Sustainability Awards Luncheon at the New Belgium Brewing, near Downtown Asheville.

Join us in person as we celebrate business leaders who are paving the way to Transforming How We Do Business For Good! You will hear innovative entrepreneurs tell how their sustainable and multiple bottom-line business practices have propelled them to success while enhancing our communities and protecting our environment.

This year's Theme is: Strong Local Businesses = Strong Communities, How Local Companies help to Dive our Economy Forward

Here are Three reasons why this is true:

● Small businesses have generated 12.9 million new jobs during the last 25 years, accounting for two out of every three jobs added to the economy

● Local businesses contribute to 44% of US economic activity, roughly $10 trillion

● On average, local retailers recirculate 48% of their revenue back into the local economy, compared to only 14% for chain retailers

Join us and our co-sponsors: New Belgium Brewing, JB Media Group, and Dig Local as we bring together more than100 business leaders and entrepreneurs to celebrate how they are making an impact on our communities, environment, and local economy.

See the list of previous award nominees HERE.

Speaker

Our Keynote Speaker will be Kevin Jones, co-founder of SOCAP and Neighborhood Economics.

Kevin Jones, working with his wife and business partner, the Rev. Rosa Lee Harden, has been a successful startup in the media, information, and events businesses. Starting as a country weekly newspaper editor in the poorest country in Mississippi, his reporting put a sheriff in prison on 53 counts of fraud. He went on to write for the New York Times and was a columnist for Forbes.

They sold their dotcom business and co-created SOCAP, the world’s largest impact investing and social enterprise conference. He is the co-creator of the Community Equity Fund, which solves the problem of friends and family funding for Black and brown sole proprietors.

He works with his business partner wife and a team on Neighborhood Economics, a conference business focused on highlighting innovative funding solutions that deliver economic power to neighborhoods usually left behind as well as helping local economies to thrive everywhere. Their next conference is February 26-28  February, 2024 in San Antonio. neighborhoodeconomics.org 

For his topic, Kevin will be discussing three economic financial models that are being implemented to grow and sustain local businesses: 

1. Diversified Community Investment Fund - (Builds an investment fund comprising 60% Real Estate and 40% Small Business assets.)

2. Just Accounting model - (Demonstrates how local governments prosper by implementing fair taxation.)

3. Deerfield Fund model - (Creates a fund to assist the workforce with down payment for affordable housing in areas close to their workplace.)

Find Kevin on LinkedIn

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