Levi Strauss Foundation exec director on importance of backing social change

Raising awareness and confronting stigma surrounding HIV/AIDS: The
foundation has invested more than 76 million dollars in its global response
since 1983.

Working on advancing the rights and well-being of its workers: The foundation has invested 10 million dollars since
1997 in community organisations in key Levi Strauss & Co. sourcing
locations, and has spent 5.5 million dollars since 2011 to pilot, scale and
measure the impact of its Worker-Wellbeing Programme (WWB).

Pioneering social justice: The foundation has established a one
million dollar Rapid Response Fund to support the most vulnerable
communities, including immigrants, refugees, the transgender community and
ethnic and religious minorities.

Since it was founded, the foundation has provided around 330 million
dollars to its causes.

Daniel Lee is the executive director of the foundation and for the past
11 years has been at its forefront. He is also currently a board member on
the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy and was a founding board
member of the Massachusetts Asian AIDS Prevention Project. FashionUnited
spoke to Lee about his time at the Levi Strauss Foundation, the importance
of International Refugee Day, which took place on 20 June, and the need for
companies to back social change.

Why is World Refugee Day so important for Levi Strauss & Co. and the
wider fashion industry as a whole?

At Levi Strauss & Co. we’ve have had a long standing focus on those who
are most marginalised in society and I think that this global refugee
crisis has really activated the empathy and the activism of our own
employees, especially here in the Europe region.

For us it really comes down to our values. We were founded by a refugee:
Levi Strauss. He grew up in Buttenheim in Germany and when he left the
country, there were a lot of threats of persecution based on his religion
because he was Jewish. When he was 25 years old in 1853 he moved to San
Francisco where he started the West Coast division of his family’s dried
goods company.

This story of taking risks and going somewhere to start a better life –
that sense of possibility and sense of risk taking – is something that
really guides our ethos as a company. I think that being headquartered in
San Francisco bay area, we are deeply rooted in a place that is built by
immigrants and that continues to be nourished by them. For us it’s a matter
of standing up for those we care about.

What work is Levi Strauss & Co. currently doing to help refugees in the
Europe region?

We really have a three-pronged approach: The first involves employees
volunteering at local organisations that welcome and support refugees.
The second is philanthropy – we have donated one million dollars to an
array of organisations that are serving refugees. The third, because we’re
an apparel company, is about donating products. In the last three years we
have donated 80,000 units of first-rate quality products in several
countries around Europe.

Finding work for refugees is also a key focus of ours. In Europe, only
30 percent of refugees between 18-65 have steady work after five years of
settling here, and refugee populations take around 20-30 years to gain the
same levels of employment as other immigrants in Europe.

We partner with a startup called MicroStart which works with refugees
from the Middle East and Africa to create job possibilities. When you look
at the numbers I just told you, you can see that this is a real challenge –
to identify needs, person-by-person, and to find the right opportunities.
But these are the types of partnerships we’re looking for. It’s about
living our values of empathy.

When you talk about refugees, there’s naturally an overlap with the
topic of politics. Do you think companies need to be careful about the way
they address political issues?

It’s been fascinating to see how the ethos of how businesses step in on
social issues has changed. It used to be that politics was considered a
taboo topic but we are seeing inescapably that consumers are expecting
businesses to exercise leadership on the issues and events of the day. This
is the most disruptive political environment that most of us have faced in
our lifetime and I think it is in times of distribution and times of crisis
that we need to ask ourselves: do we continue what we’re doing, do more of
what we’re doing, or stop what we’re doing?

If we look back at the last presidential election in November 2016, we
had a town hall meeting about two days after and inevitably the election
results were brought up. The response from our CEO Chip Bergh was
unequivocal: He said this is the time, more than ever, to show the country
and the world what it is to be a value-faced institution.

We looked at the first month of this administration and realised that a
number of the communities that we had long cared about were facing a lot of
threats by the very policies of our own government. We realised that this
is the moment to step up and so we created our Rapid Response Fund. We saw
that this was such a disruptive environment where refugees, transgender
communities, muslims, immigrants and religious minorities were facing a lot
of threats so we provided a set of grants to organistations protecting
their liberties.

Business in times of crisis is about far more than delivering a profit
– it’s about taking responsibility and having the courage to take a stand
for issues we care about. Millenials in particular care more than ever
not just about what you stand for but what you stand up for. I think as an
American icon, we know that what we do and what we say about America really
matters.

What is Levi Strauss & Co. doing to ensure the best worker rights
across its supply chain?

Back in 1991, we became the first company to have a code of conduct – a
set of labour, social and environmental standards that governed all the
contracted factories that we worked with. Many of our competitors initially
thought we were loony and that we would miss out on price and cost and that
it wouldn’t be pragmatic but it ended up catching on. It’s called ‘the code
that launched a thousand codes’ and it became the standard that governed
the industry. We evaluated this and realised that we could go one step
further and so five years ago we launched our Worker Well-being (WWB) programme.

We believe it’s not enough just to have a set of rules that govern
social and environmental labour practices; we are actually now calling upon
all of our suppliers that we do business with to survey workers about their
health and their well-being and to roll out programmes that directly address
them. By rolling out sustainable programmes we can ensure that it’s not
just another ‘one off’ thing – we can really build systems around them.

We commissioned a return on investment study which looked at women’s
health programmes and the results were really striking. It showed that for
every one dollar that is invested in a woman’s health programme it yields
three or four dollars of return in terms of reduced abscenties, turnover
and sick fees. The insight is quite simple: 70-80 percent of all makers in
the apparel industry are young women aged 18-25 and the research shows that
many women were simply missing work during their monthly menstrual
cycle.

What we did was open up a space for education and learning which
provided access to sanitary napkins and painkillers. It produced really
dramatic results and we found that in factories in Egypt and Pakistan where
we carried out this return on investment, the percentage of women taking
the maximum number of sick days plummeted by 45 percent and one factory
actually gained 615 work days. It proved that women’s health is a win both
for workers as well as for factories. Two thirds of our supply chain has
implemented this and by 2020 we aim to get that to 80 percent. We hope that
this becomes a new standard that goes beyond compliance to really improve
the lives of workers.

The fashion industry is becoming increasingly less siloed. How
important do you think it is for companies to share their progress and
targets?

It’s quite rare in the world of public responsibility for folks to
actually share their tools or their approaches with others and someone like
myself who came for the social sector, I feel like that’s the key to
scaling. We really believe that this is not something that ought to be
proprietary. One way we create impact is to create that chain of teaching
and learning. We worked with Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), for
example, to create a health curriculum that is tailored to the needs of
apparel workers and can be used on factory floors.

We have other tools also which we share with our suppliers and with
other brands and we look forward to working with others in our industry
collaboratively so that wellbeing will be the new goal, to improve the
lives of workers both on and off the factory floor.

What role do you think NGOs play in improving the fashion industry?

Before I came to Levi Strauss & Co. I came from the NGO world. I worked
in human rights and particularly in LGBT rights. The organisation I was
working at was actually funded by the Levi Strauss Foundation. When I
started in the company 15 years ago, the ethos then was that NGOs were something
that you should run away from, that they were there to cause trouble.

We now realise that NGOs can be very important and powerful partners. As
businesses it’s important to identify NGOs which are really able to assess
the needs of workers and improve them, but also ones that are able to speak
to factory managers in ways they can understand, to be able to clearly say:
“here are the business values that this initiative offers.”

I think the best changemakers are those able to work across sectors and
do that translation – that code-switching – and are able to see what social
value is as well as what business value is.

How do you see corporate philanthropy evolving in the next 5 to 10
years?

There is no more consequential backdrop than this current political
moment for corporate philanthropy to live its promise. Much of the
corporate sector in philanthropy gets a bad rap and is met with raised
eyebrows. When I speak to millennial consumers they can really sniff out
authenticity and a lot of corporate philanthropy is focused on reputation
or PR.
But I think the corporate sector has the ability to really use its dollars,
profits and influence to take on the social issues of the day.

We have 68 million people who are displaced all around the world at the
moment, either refugees who have crossed borders or internally displaced
people. That’s more than any time since World War II. That’s forty-four
thousand people daily who are forced to leave their homes for fear of
persecution, 50 percent of which are children. So I think this has been a
moment where we have seen our employees demonstrating their activism and
their empathy, especially here in Europe, in our offices in Belgium, France
and Germany. I don’t feel like I know anyone who isn’t concerned about the
world we’re living in at the moment, especially with this refugee
crisis.

What is your highlight from working at the Levi Strauss Foundation?

I think my proudest moment is knowing that in this moment of crisis –
domestically in the US and globally as far as this refugee crisis is
concerned – as an organisation we’re living our values, we’re using our
voice, we’re using our influence, and we’re using the sweat equity of our
employees to really address the issues in front of us.

We have to ask ourselves, are we creating a world built around the
protection of those most marginal; or around vilification, blame and
exclusion? I think that as a company that is built on empathy, courage,
integrity and originality, we’re not afraid to speak out and use every tool
at our disposal.

When I wake up everyday and think about what it is that I can do that
actually has an impact – a question we ask ourselves everyday at Levi
Strauss & Co. – I think the answer is that we’re really staking our claim
in a world that is more inclusive and one that is built on social
justice.