Mindbody Sustain: How Mindbody Is Investing In Our Planet
Happy Earth Day! In honor of this year’s celebration, we’re highlighting the Mindbody Sustain Employee Resource Group (ERG)—a collective of employees that care deeply about the health and wellness of the local environment and planet. Their goal? Equip the Mindbody + ClassPass team with education, support, and resources to inspire action that impacts our planet in a positive way.
We sat down with Mindbody Senior Vice President, General Counsel & Corporate Secretary—and the executive sponsor of Mindbody Sustain—Doug Johnston to learn more about his passion for the environment and the group’s growing list of initiatives.
Let's dig in (pun intended).
Mindbody: Doug, talk to us about the Mindbody Sustain Employee Resource Group (ERG). Why is it so important to support these initiatives?
Doug Johnston: Developing strong Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) practices is vital to improving business performance, stakeholder engagement, and regulatory compliance, so we have several practices at Mindbody that support the ESG effort. For example, we evaluate our ESG maturity annually and compare our efforts to industry standards to identify areas of opportunity to ensure we're a leader amongst our peers. Areas we review include: our talent strategy, greenhouse gas (GHG) measurements, training programs, supply chain risk, and checking for potential biases in artificial intelligent/machine learning (AI/ML) amongst many other areas.
Mindbody: Can you share some of the group’s current initiatives?
DJ: MB Sustain’s main initiatives include creating and hosting educational events for our employees, generating community involvement with collective volunteer days in Mindbody hubs, and supporting local environmental organizations. We also help support Mindbody’s Climate Pledge. Through the Climate Pledge, Mindbody has committed to measuring our greenhouse gases (GHG) annually, offsetting those emissions, and reducing our GHG by 33.6% for Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions and by 44% for Scope 3 emissions by the end of 2027.
Mindbody: Tell us a little bit about Mindbody’s Climate Pledge.
DJ: Last year, we signed the Mindbody Climate Pledge. The pledge commits us to measuring GHG emissions, offsetting those emissions annually, setting long-term reduction targets, and tracking towards those targets. While Vista has been really supportive of these efforts and provides a lot of expertise and resources to help us and other portfolio companies meet similar goals, these are our goals.
Mindbody: How are our company’s carbon credits calculated? What’s included?
DJ: Accurate measurement is a key component of the Climate Pledge and it’s not an easy task. We rely on a lot of stakeholders to help us pull the information we need, including team members from Workplace Services, Corporate IT, Accounting, People & Culture, and many others. We then submit this information to a GHG measuring tool to provide us with our results. Anything connected to GHG emissions, whether directly or indirectly, is collected. Generally, these fall into three buckets, or “Scopes.” Scope 1 refers to direct emissions from company-owned or controlled resources, including emissions from vehicles owned by the company, from refrigeration or air conditioning units, and related to industrial processes. Unsurprisingly, our Scope 1 emissions are minimal. Scope 2 are indirect emissions from utility providers related to electricity, heat, and cooling. Scope 3 are all other indirect emissions not included in Scope 2 that occur in the value chain of our products and business, including travel, waste generation, and shipping costs.
Mindbody: What measures does our company take to reduce these carbon emissions?
DJ: One of the recent challenges we’ve faced in measuring GHG and determining areas of opportunity for reduction is inconsistent data stemming from the pandemic. Since 2019, we haven’t had a normal year measurement to identify typical behaviors to act on. The COVID data issue is compounded by our focus on growth, with multiple acquisitions across both Mindbody and ClassPass over the years. As a result, our GHG measurements in 2019, 2020, and 2021 are all dramatically different. I’m looking forward to our 2022 data to help us identify what a more typical year looks like.
All that said, we’ve still been able to make significant strides in reducing our company emissions. For example, the migration of Mindbody and Booker to Amazon Web Services (AWS) saved significant energy costs between 2019 and 2021. Similarly, reimagining our office footprint and adopting remote and hybrid work-from-home options for employees has resulted in reduced GHG emissions. While we do measure the GHG impacts of our remote workforce, the move has still resulted in significant net savings.
Mindbody: So, how are we offsetting carbon emissions?
DJ: We’re offsetting our carbon emissions annually by purchasing carbon credits with the help of tools like Patch.
Mindbody: Tell us more about purchasing those credits. How are those investments chosen?
DJ: To select our 2021 GHG offsets, Mindbody Sustain established a selection criterion based on our company core values. This meant identifying offset projects with a “bias for action,” that valued “impact over effort,” and were committed to inclusion. The team also identified projects with proximity to regions where we have a large workforce. Once identified, the Mindbody Sustain team met, evaluated each project, and selected our top choices.
I really appreciate the thoughtfulness of everyone on the Mindbody Sustain team who helped make our selections. For 2021, the carbon offset projects we supported included:
Vesta Coastal Carbon Capture: Works to reduce climate change and ocean acidification through coastal carbon capture projects
Grassroots Carbon Regenerative Grazing: Incentivizes ranchers who create healthier soil to capture up to 25% of all US CO2 emissions each year
Clearloop Panola County Solar: Invests in clean energy projects and the transition to clean energy in underserved communities in the southern United States
Mindbody: What’s next for MB Sustain and the Mindbody Climate Pledge?
Our 2022 measurement is underway and, once completed, we'll analyze areas of opportunity on our reduction targets. In the fall, we’ll identify our scope of GHG offsets and work as a Mindbody Sustain team to identify what programs we want to support.
If you’d like to learn more about our Mindbody Sustainability Employee Resource Group, our efforts, and how diversity, equity, and inclusivity come to life at Mindbody, visit the DEIB Resource Center.
