The Company

From time to time we look carefully at the statement of our mission, goals, and principles that we first created in 1993. A few years ago, the mission statement changed, but by-and-large the goals and principles have endured, nearly intact, for more than two decades.

Mission

To uplift our community and environment by designing and building for a just future

Triple bottom line practice is woven into our business plan, our structure, and our DNA. It always has been, even before we knew what to call it.

We are a certified Beneficial Corporation (“B corp”) and our business practices have earned us awards from Business Ethics Magazine, B-Lab (Best for the World Overall, Best for Environment, Best for Workers, and Best for Governance) and Great Places to Work.

In our work, we emphasize continuous improvement in our ability to deliver the best in renewable energy production and low energy building. We strive to continuously improve our buildings, our processes, and our service to community, planet, and each other.

We are serious about our responsibility to make the community that sustains us a better place for all. We designate 10% of our profits to charitable contributions, mostly local, and another 10% to pro-bono work. As a company, we express ourselves about important local issues. We hire locally as much as we can and we create good jobs that become careers, with true living wages and great benefits that help families have good lives. We devote ourselves, in many ways, to helping to solve our local affordable housing crisis and to spread the use of renewable energy.

Our owners and employees, in a broad variety of ways, serve the community that serves us so well. Many of us are on municipal boards, school committees, non-profit boards, the Martha’s Vineyard Commission, and serve in many other community service roles.

South Mountain began as a partnership in 1975, became a sole proprietorship in 1984, and re-structured as a worker cooperative in 1987. The transition to worker ownership was a dramatic hinge point in the history of the company. Ownership became available to all employees, enabling people to own and guide their workplace. The responsibility, the power, and the profits all belong to the group of owners. There are no outside investors and no non-employee owners. We decide what kind of business ours will be. The decisions are partly economic and partly philosophical. (Part head, part heart.)

Tremendous rewards and benefits derived from the conversion. As CEO and Founder John Abrams says,

Recently at South Mountain, we have developed an important internal method of measuring our environmental progress. While we are working so hard to make zero energy buildings, how are we doing with energy and waste within our company? Despite our efforts to build durable, high performance buildings with low environmental impacts, we recognize that all of our buildings have significant impacts, as do our operations as a company.

Our ultimate goal is to become a zero net energy, zero waste company. Our carbon footprint analysis is one formal step in a continuing effort which may take decades to complete.

What is the current size of our carbon footprint?

We didn’t know, so we set out to find out – to learn where our impacts are greatest, and where the opportunities exist to reduce those impacts. We developed a methodology, gathered the data, and produced the first phase of our carbon footprint assessment. This work has inspired new carbon footprint reduction initiatives. By gathering baseline data and measuring impacts, we began to track our progress over time.

In January 2017, we completed our 5th Annual Carbon Footprint Report.

We are currently engaged in developing a long-term Environmental Management Plan to address all of our ecological impacts.

We are often asked for company governance and policy documents. We share them here to make them available to anyone who may find them useful.