Certified B Corporation Champions Retreat 2026 在密尔沃基 Baird Center 举办，主打可持续与社区化运营

At a cooking workshop at the Hunger Task Force kitchen, participants made pancakes using ingredients from B Corps including King Arthur Baking Company. Photo courtesy of B Lab U. S. & Canada.

One “pragmatic goal” drove Cricket Redman to attend the Certified B Corporation Champions Retreat 2026 at Milwaukee’s Baird Center in late April. Working toward B Corp recertification would be an arduous process for the design studio she founded, she wrote on her website, and she questioned whether the designation — which indicates that companies have met high, verified standards of social and environmental performance — “still held meaningful value.”

Given how DEI and climate-change action run counter to current U.S. administration policies, that question was likely on the minds of Redman’s 600 fellow B Corp Certified company event participants. And it factored heavily into the way B Lab U.S. & Canada, the nonprofit that certifies North American companies, planned the Champions Retreat, promising it would galvanize participants to advance a “shared vision of an inclusive, equitable, and regenerative economic system.”

Planned With Greater Intention

Karen Lickteig

Launched in 2008 by B Corps’ founders just a year after they began certifying companies in the U.S., the first gathering of Certified B Corporation pioneers was a small affair of around 30 participants. The annual event for B Corp Certified company leaders grew over the next 11 years, was skipped during COVID, was brought back in 2022, and has since been held biennially. “We just didn’t have the capacity to do it every single year, and it didn’t feel like it would have the intentionality that we needed it to have,” Karen Lickteig, senior manager of events and activations for B Lab U.S. & Canada, told Convene. The off years give B Lab the flexibility to support regional events that are more accessible for smaller companies and leave less of a carbon footprint. And the two-year Champions Retreat planning process allows Lickteig, her team, and Green Living Enterprises, their longtime event production partner, “to live into our values,” she said. “It’s not about pressing the ‘easy button’ on the caterer or the built-in experience but getting creative.” Not only does B Lab have high sustainability standards for the event — the entire menu is plant-based, for example — it is community-driven. That means deliberately working as much as possible with B Corp Certified suppliers, like Trip Zero, which does carbon offsetting for host hotels, and local B Corps venues, like Milwaukee’s Lakefront Brewery, where the closing evening event was held.

The Market Place is an example of B Lab’s custom approach to the standard exhibit hall: located in hallways outside of Champions Retreat session rooms for maximum networking and featuring pre-built sustainable displays for sponsors who offer B Corps resources for attendees. Organizers vet their swag to prevent waste and items given away are mostly consumable, like chocolates, or useful, such as branded socks.

Following Through on Feedback

“A very extensive feedback-gathering process” informs the conference program, Lickteig said. “A big part of putting on a great event is listening to your attendees and what they want. We don’t just do the survey at the end [of the event] as an exercise. We get dozens of pages of qualitative feedback, and we read every single comment and synthesize it and say, ‘Okay, what are the things that rose to the top? How are we going to do this differently next time?’ That process of continuous improvement — that really is the B Corps way as well. We have continuous improvement built into what it means to be a more sustainable business.”

B Lab incentivizes feedback surveys to boost participation. Over the past few years, Lickteig said, a B Corp Certified travel company has sponsored a trip for “one lucky respondent” who completes the questionnaire.

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Participant feedback from the 2024 Champions Retreat in Vancouver, Canada, indicated that this audience wanted “more actionable content with a business lens,” Lickteig said. So, B Lab worked with a 20-member advisory group — local Milwaukee businesspeople, nonprofits, and “volunteers from B Corps who were willing to spend a few hours looking at speaker proposals and scoring them” — to shape this year’s program, which featured 212 speakers and 36 breakout sessions.

She also leaned on the advisory group, along with B Local Wisconsin & B Local Illinois, for local tour and service-opportunity recommendations. An advisory member who works for the U.S. Green Building Council took participants on a custom, preconference tour of some of Milwaukee’s green-certified buildings, including the Baird Center, whose expansion earned LEED Gold in 2024.

Sorting food at local food bank Hunger Task Force was one of the volunteer opportunities organized for conference participants. But Lickteig didn’t stop there. “They have this amazing built-in kitchen on site where they have cooking classes, mostly for community members,” she said. “We said, ‘Hey, could we do a cooking class with some B Corps products and sponsors, and [talk about] how a business can work with a food bank to make meaningful donations and build a relationship?’” The custom approach resonated with participants and, like other initiatives throughout the retreat, helped foster a sense of community at a time when B Corps find their shared values marginalized or under attack.

“I walked away with a new connection” was a sentiment often shared by Champions Retreat participants — it was ranked 9.3 out of 10 on an NPS (net promoter score) feedback survey. In the end, it’s what won over Redman, who had a standout conversation with a fellow attendee that reminded her “the real value of gatherings like this often resides beneath the formal programming.”

Redman continued her post by quoting psychologist Carl Jung, who wrote about the difference between what he referred to as the “spirit of the times” and the “spirit of the depths.”

“The spirit of the times is reactive — shaped by headlines, trends, crises, markets and external pressures (of which there are many!),” Redman posted. “The spirit of the depths is something quieter. It connects to values, instincts, yearnings and shared humanity. The Champions Retreat felt deeply connected to the latter idea.”

What’s Greenshouting?

One of the byproducts of current U.S. administration policies is “greenhushing,” Lickteig said. It was only a few years ago that climate and net zero commitments were big, Lickteig said, but the tide has turned. Companies are now underreporting, minimizing, or hiding their genuine sustainability efforts to fly under the radar — the opposite of greenwashing, when companies exaggerate or fabricate eco-friendly efforts to shine their brand.

Lickteig said the “antidote” to greenhushing is greenshouting, to be “out there telling your climate story and talking about your work.” To aid that effort, B Lab co-created the “Greenshouting Guide” to “help brands, creatives, and communicators break the silence on sustainability and share their impact with courage and confidence.” The free guide can be downloaded here.

Michelle Russell is a freelance writer and Convene‘s former editor in chief.

Learn more about the Certified B Corporation Champions Retreat.