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From: r3.0 <hello@r3-0.org>
Date: Tue, Dec 22, 2020 at 7:58 PM
Subject: [r3.0 Newsletter] RIP Steering Board Member Brendan LeBlanc / Multicapitalism White Paper Released
To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004@gmail.com>

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Dear Michel,

Just when we thought 2020 couldn't take anything more from us, we get news that it has shuffled off the mortal coil of our beloved Steering Board Member Brendan LeBlanc. Our sadness is compounded by the intense irony that he passed away only a week before we now release our first White Paper, From Monocapitalism to Multicapitalism: 21st Century System Value Creation, which he played an instrumental role in seeding. We consider this White Paper a gift to Brendan's memory, and a holiday gift to you, our community.

This season also invites reflections on the year past and the year to come, so we bring you our latest Medium article, which reviews 2020 and previews 2021.

Since the last newsletter earlier this month, we kicked off the Thresholds of Transformation Project to pilot test the UNRISD Sustainable Development Performance Indicators, and we have a few final slots remaining for this Project before the training in early January.

Our ecosystem of Partners have been very active in recent weeks, so this newsletter documents r3.0-related activity by Academic Alliance Member Delphine Gibassier and Advocation Partners Daniel Christian Wahl and Mark McElroy.

Finally, we add one new Steering Board Member and one new Advocation Partner. Now, the bullets:

RIP Steering Board Member Brendan LeBlanc
Multicapitalism White Paper Released
r3.0 2020 Reveiw / 2021 Preview
UNRISD Thresholds of Transformation Pilot Project Kickoff
Partner News
New Steering Board Member & Advocation Partner

We wish you all a relaxing, connective, and safe holiday season!

The r3.0 Operations Team

Alexandra, Bill, Cleophea, Peter & Ralph

RIP Steering Board Member Brendan LeBlanc

As you can see from these pictures with Bill & Ralph, Brendan was a consummate joker whose humor slyly invited us to laugh at our humanity -- both our shortcomings and our potential. Here's how we memorialized Brendan in the dedication to the MulticapitalismWhite Paper:

Dedicated to Brendan LeBlanc, who passed away unexpectedly just before this White Paper was released. Brendan was a close friend and colleague who we remember for his keen intelligence and wicked good sense of humor. As a r3.0 Steering Board Member, he championed this White Paper in particular (you wouldn’t have it in your hands now without Brendan’s tireless advocacy) and the work of r3.0 more broadly — particularly our work on Sustainability Context and the Carrying Capacities of the Capitals. Brendan’s fingerprints are all over the famous Paragraph 58 in the International Integrated Reporting Council’s Background Paper on Value Creation, which integrates carrying capacity and thresholds & allocations prominently, and we remember him for his most memorable quote: “The only thing more dangerous than no progress is the illusion of progress.” But ultimately, we remember Brendan for the deep belly laughter he inspired every time we were together. The world is a much better place for his having been here.

Multicapitalism White Paper Released

"It's been a long time coming," writes Bill in the Author's Foreword (quoting David Crosby) about this, our first White Paper: From Monocapitalism to Multicapitalism: 21st Century System Value Creation. More than three years, to be precise. But we think it's worth the wait -- and hope you agree! The project started as a partnership with the International Integrated Reporting Council; when we delivered the final draft, they considered it an "important and provocative paper."

So provocative, in fact, that IIRC recognized they would need to request significant changes to be able to publish it under their name, and they showed respect by refraining from asking us to dilute the message to satisfy their more conservative base, and instead invited us to publish it solo.

We believe this is an integral part of the story of this paper: Multicapitalism, the concept conceived by our Advocation Partner Mark McElroy (and his partner Martin Thomas) predicated on the fact that the multiple capitals all have carrying capacities, is an inherently provocative notion that challenges the core underpinnings of status quo Monocapitalism, with its commitment to shareholder primacy, perpetual growth, and privatization of value.

We believe that if political expedience requires us to disregard the carrying capacities of the capitals, then we must reject this "political world" (to quote Bob Dylan, as the White Paper does), and instead embrace the "material world" (more like George Harrison's than Madonna's) that reconciles thermodynamic realities with ethical imperatives -- as this Multicapitalism White Paper does. Enjoy!

r3.0 2020 Review / 2021 Preview

We believe that, in retrospect, we will look back on 2020 as a pivotal year, when the concept of carrying capacity thresholds finally took hold (almost a half-century after Limits to Growth popularized the idea, and almost two decades after the Global Reporting Initiative codified it via the Sustainability Context Principle.) Unfortunately, it took Covid-19, with its "flatten the curve" meme (that embeds the dotted line of healthcare system capacity), to finally drive the point home.

Read our full review of 2020 here, and see what we have to say about 2021!

UNRISD Thresholds of Transformation Pilot Project Kickoff

Last week, we launched the “Thresholds of Transformation” project for pilot testing the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development’s Sustainable Development Performance Indicators (see here for our article on the project). More the 40 partners joined us from over 20 organizations in our Kickoff Meeting for piloting the Three Tiered set of Indicators (Tier One = Incrementalist; Tier Two = Contextualized / Thresholds-Based; Tier Three = Transformational).

There are still a few slots open in the project, for which the training starts in early January, so please reach out to Bill and/or Ralph if you wish to reserve a seat at the table.

Partner News

r3.0 Academic Alliance Member Delphine Gibassier of Audencia Business School prominently cited r3.0's Integral Materiality Process in her paper for the French Government, Materiality assessment: contribution to single or double materiality debate. We encourage you to read this excellent paper!

Speaking of Delphine, she directs a new Chief Value Officer MBA program at Audencia Business School where Bill and Ralph will be teaching the Transformation Journey Program curriculum in 2022. See a video of Bill discussing the Program and r3.0's course here.

The Journal Solutions, which served as a Media Sponsor of the r3.0 Conference, has published an important article by r3.0 Advocation Partner Mark McElroy and his MultiCapital Scorecard co-author Martin Thomas, entitled "Time to Declare a Planetary Accounting Emergency." McElroy & Thomas apply the MCS to 5 prominent companies to illustrate the strengths of multicapital accounting, and the shortcomings of monocapital financial accounting.

r3.0 Advocation Partner Daniel Christian Wahl posted an article on Medium recently on Bioregional Regeneration that mentioned the Connecticut River Valley Bioregional Collaborative that r3.0 is hosting in the northeast of the US, with Bill serving as the co-convener. The Collaborative, which is part of Capital Institute's Regenerative Communities Network, is celebrating its one-year anniversary right about now!

New r3.0 Steering Board Member

Will Szal
President of the Board of Regen Development, Inc. and of Regen Foundation

“r3.0 is the premier forum for discourse and research on the nestedness of living systems; its frameworks enable nuanced understanding of how an entity relates with its environment, a foundational capability in the 21st century.”

New Advocation Partners

HumanYo+Impact is a boutique strategic design firm that aspires to contribute and create a positive inflection point in the sustainable development trajectory.

"What a great way to finish this special year ! By searching for a way to disrupt the revenue model of our consulting business from hourly rate to value-based pricing, I first discover the notion of Impact Evaluation with our friends from MetaIntegral with MetaImpact Framework and then find myself and our team involved in the cutting-edge innovation for the new economy with r3.0 and the amazing network of Advocation Partners that I proudly join today! Happy to change the world, together."

Ghani Kolli
Founder & CEO HumanYo+Impact