Graça Fonseca

Talk about career moves: “I consider this to be the second season of my life. I wanted to leave the comfort zone and do something completely out of my usual scope of work, in an entirely different universe. It’s been a huge challenge, but I think I’m prepared and I really believe what we’re doing is important to our changing world.”

And it is! Graça Fonseca’s new business is a boutique consultancy firm named Because Impacts. As the name suggests, it’s dedicated to projects that create a positive environmental and social impact.

The Four Nights of the Apocalypse

Public and private organizations are under tremendous pressure to change.

For one, there’s pressure from EU environmental regulation, which is expected to grow exponentially in the next 5 years. Then there’s investment guidelines: more and more, all EU funding programmes and entities, such as Horizon Europe or European Investment Bank, require applicants to demonstrate Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) metrics and indicators. The third pressure point to consider is talent: Gen Z is proven to prioritize jobs and employers that give them a sense of purpose. Finally, there’s the citizens, who’ve been changing how they practice their citizenship and make consumption choices.

According to Graça, these 4 forces are pushing organizations not towards an apocalypse of doom and gloom, but towards action to increase their positive impact.

This means different things for different industries. For some it can be more about CO2 and biodiversity impact. For others it can be more about the well being of their workforce and communities around them. Or encouraging their suppliers and partners to address the same challenges.

Overall, it requires a change in mindset: looking at their core business, at internal processes, at regulations, at stakeholders, at the territory they occupy — and devising a strategy that turns the necessary investment into something that is good for business, for the people and for the planet. “That’s what positive impact looks like. That’s what I want to do from now on”, Graça admits.

"But this shift in mindset won’t happen unless organizations have an outside perspective on how they impact their human and non-human stakeholders and then develop a customized strategy to mitigate their negative impacts and to leverage new opportunities within the road to sustainability”, she adds. “Continuing on a negative impact path will generate a loss on consumers and users, difficulty to attract qualified people and overall disruption of activity”.

It’s the Impact, Stupid!

In 2021, adidas announced they had made the world’s lowest carbon footprint running shoe. Soon after, Nike started promoting sneakers made by a regenerative material that captures more emissions than it needs to be produced.

Nowadays communication is a huge challenge, especially in the corporate world. Our brains can only absorb and remember a small part of the 4.000 pieces of content that MIT estimates we are exposed to every day.

According to Graça, sustainability as a positioning statement for consumer brands has proven to offer a competitive advantage. “That’s one way organizations can turn the need for change into an opportunity, if they continually measure the results of their transformation and effectively communicate them. As workers and consumers become more and more educated about best practices, greenwashing starts to generate the opposite effect it was meant to. People reject brands with fake messages. Organizations need to be able to prove what they say is true. They need audited indicators, and that’s also part of what I’m working at Because Impacts”, Graça explains.

The firm targets both private corporations and public entities.

“Of course there are different challenges in the public and private sectors, but the mindset of innovation and transformation and the tools to go about it are not that different.”

The main challenge of the business, as Graça sees it, is changing mentalities. “Luckily many companies already did this shift. I spent the past few months talking to corporate top leaders, from CEO to shareholders, and I see some change. Of course it’s slow, like any other cultural change, but it’s happening”.

Season One

If starting a company is Season 2 in the life of Graça Fonseca, what about Season 1?

For 23 years, she worked in public service. She managed government agencies, then took on the lead for Economy, Innovation and Education at the Lisbon Mayor’s team, then accepted a posting in the Portuguese Government as Secretary of State for the Modernization of Public Administration, also implementing policies for Innovation, Technology and Citizen Participation, and finally, she was the Minister of Culture for 4 years, during the hard times of Covid.

While overseeing very large organizations, such as Social Security or the Tax Authority, she spent many years thinking about how public administration activities impact the people.

"My job was to make these organizations better interact and communicate with all stakeholders, use technology to improve quality of service, reduce bureaucracy and optimize processes, and keep the workers motivated. In Lisbon municipally, I undertook the reform of a structure with 11.000 people. All these experiences pushed me to develop a skill set that today allows me to look at an organization and understand how you can provide answers to organizational challenges, while improving overall impact. I believe everything I’ve learned working with such large organizations in the public sector — in all the innovation and transformation projects I’ve developed — is now a competitive advantage that I want to bring to the private organizations”.

While listening to Graça talk about her professional pathway, it becomes clear that there’s an underlying principle in all her projects. “No matter how many seasons I live, in everything I do, I will always look for transformation. We can go through life in so many ways. Many people just look for comfort, while managing their day to day. I look for problems to solve and try to imagine the best solutions. This is my way, it gives me a sense of purpose. When I get to a certain age and look back, I want to feel like I could contribute to change things for the better."

"If I ever have to be still in one place and just run my day to day, I won’t be a happy person. And I still want to be happy”.

Founder at Fifty

Graça started this business a few months ago, accompanied by one partner and a small team. They looked for a place to start and Hub Criativo do Beato made sense because Graça was still a Councilwoman when the idea of turning this old industrial part of town into a hub for innovation and creativity first started to be discussed.

“I always believed we could take this abandoned property, which belonged to the army, and transform it to attract new companies, create new jobs and benefit everyone around. It’s like a rough diamond. Speaking with Simon Schaefer [Founder of Factory], I couldn’t agree more with the current vision for the place. And it’s very in line with what I want to do with my company. Again: the idea of transformation as my lifeline.”

When we ask her about the challenges of becoming an entrepreneur in her fifties, she praises experience: “I went through the global financial crisis, while being a Councilwoman in Lisbon, and the Covid crisis while I was Minister of Culture. I think I’ve developed the ability to face present challenges, while always keeping an eye out for the future. The know-how and resilience you have at 50 are completely different from your version at 25.”

Another benefit she highlights is the strength of convictions. “After everything I’ve seen, today I’m totally convinced that this transformation will have to happen and that it can be good for business.”

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