Dr. Kristin Joys is an Impact Strategist with over 25 years of experience educating & empowering changemakers. Kristin founded do good well consulting in 2002 (and became a certified B Corp in 2018, winning “Best for the World” Awards from B Lab in 2019 and again in 2022), to help businesses, organizations, and individuals create strategic impact (strategic career plans, strategic venture plans, strategic philanthropy & giving plans) to connect their values & practices around issues related to sustainability, social & environmental impact, ESG, CSR, JEDI, impact investing, and high impact philanthropy/effective altruism/strategic giving.
For the first decade, do good well helped changemakers find & create impact careers. More recently, their work has been focused on empowering business leaders to walk their talk around being values-aligned, mission driven, and leading with purpose by leveraging the power of business as a force for good and becoming certified B Corporations. do good well also specializes in creating actionable strategic impact plans to help ventures be more innovative, sustainable, inclusive, resilient, and impactful.
Kristin’s “day job” involves teaching courses on Social Entrepreneurship & Sustainable Business at the University of Florida. In 2005, she brought Social Entrepreneurship to UF where she co-founded and directs the Social Impact & Sustainability Initiative in the Entrepreneurship & Innovation Center.
Kristin is passionate about teaching students to leverage the skills, strategies, mindsets, and competencies of entrepreneurship to create innovative, sustainable, regenerative, inclusive, resilient, and impactful solutions to social, environmental, and economic problems locally and around the world. In 2019 she launched the UF Business for Good Lab: Sustainable Business Consulting course where teams of students work as consultants, helping companies to walk their talk around sustainability, track their progress towards the UN SDGs, and apply to become certified B Corporations.
Kristin has been a pioneer in the field of Social Entrepreneurship education. Everyone a Changemaker written in 2005 by Bill Drayton, the founder of Ashoka, helped catalyze her career. While attending both the NetImpact conference at Stanford in 2005 & 2006 and the Skoll World Forum at Oxford in 2006 & 2007, she connected with the small handful of faculty who were part of the Ashoka-Skoll University Network for Social Entrepreneurship; at the time, Social Entrepreneurship was being taught at fewer than 12 colleges and universities around the world. She had the opportunity to develop relationships and learn from others who were creating courses, programs, and centers in Social Entrepreneurship, as well as make connections with folks at the major foundations for Social Entrepreneurship, like Ashoka, Skoll, and Echoing Green… and when AshokaU launched in 2008, she was among the first faculty invited to participate, she was asked to present at their first AshokaU Exchange in 2011. In 2013 she was invited to author the chapter on Teaching Social Entrepreneurship in the Annals of Entrepreneurship Education, and to contribute a chapter titled “Key Mindsets & Competencies of Social Entrepreneurs & Changemakers (Learning Outcomes Framework)” in AshokaU’s 2019 publication, Preparing Students for a Rapidly Changing World: Learning Outcomes for Social Innovation, Social Entrepreneurship, and Changemaker Education.
Kristin was one of the first faculty to teach about certified B Corporations after learning about the founding of B Lab in 2006. In 2012 teams of students from her Intro to Social Entrepreneurship class helped two companies complete the BIA, and one of her former student’s ventures, NobleHour, was among the first 10 certified B Corps in Florida. In 2013 she wrote a Post Doc paper titled “Social Entrepreneurship & the Rise of For-Profit Social Ventures: A Transformative Consumer Research examination of B-Corporations.” The following year she launched a course focused entirely on the B Corp movement & stakeholder capitalism, called “Innovation & Sustainability: Business doing Good” which she taught from 2014-2018. In summer 2015 Kristin studied with Ryan Honeyman, the author of The B Corp Handbook, as part of the first cohort of five students to complete his B Corp Certification Consulting course. In 2018 she joined B Academics, there she learned of the B Impact Team model introduced by faculty at UNC & NC State. And, as mentioned above, in 2019 Kristin pivoted her course on B Corporations & stakeholder/rightsholder/inclusive/regenerative capitalism to focus on providing hands-on experiential learning opportunities for students, helping companies to complete the BIA, in the four years since, nearly 200 students have volunteered nearly 10,000 hours helping 48 companies work towards B Corporation certification. In 2020 Kristin was elected Chair of Teaching & Curriculum Innovation for B Academics. In 2022 she was invited to partner with AACSB as a member of their inaugural Societal Impact Accelerator, redefining the future of business school education, defining the competencies needed to empower business students to become future societal impact leaders.
Kristin believes community service can be transformative and loves partnering with Echoing Green, B Lab (the organization behind both Public Benefit Corporations & certified B Corporations), Florida for Good, We are Neutral, Rise Collective, and the Greater Sum Foundation to create opportunities for students. She is a member of the For Good Movement (where she serves as Director of Impact Strategy & Senior Advisor for Academic Partners), B Academics (where she serves as Chair of Teaching & Curriculum Innovation), the American Sustainable Business Council, and the Academy of Management. She shares B Lab’s vision of building an inclusive, equitable, and regenerative economic system for all people and the planet.
After finishing her Ph.D. in 2003 and earning a Postdoc in Marketing & Management from the University of Florida in 2013, Kristin earned a certificate in Social Entrepreneurship from the INSEAD School of Business in France and in 2014 she was awarded a scholarship to attend the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, earning an executive certificate in Social Entrepreneurship. In October 2018 she graduated from the Strategic Communications Academy for UF Leaders & Scholars where she learned & practiced the power of storytelling to engage influencers (policy-makers, funders, and the media). In March 2019 she earned a certificate from the Social Entrepreneurship Bootcamp from the Stanford Center for Social Innovation at the Graduate School of Business. She was recently accepted to study Sustainable Business Strategy at Harvard Business School in June-July 2022.
In 2019 Kristin trained with Dr. Brené Brown to become a Certified Dare to Lead™ Facilitator and re-certified in Summer 2020 with a focus on justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging. An understanding from Erik Erikson’s research, that humans need a sense of belonging, identity, purpose, and meaning has been central to all of her endeavors since she was a teenager; Kristin often speculates that perhaps what matters most in life is our ability to practice courage, kindness, gratitude, and hope.
Kristin believes “we learn courage by couraging” (as Mary Daly said, quoted by Brené Brown in Daring Greatly). Kristin loves cheering people on; given the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, she began offering Courage & Confidence Coaching. She graduated from the Optimize Coach program with Heroic (a certified B Corporation & Public Benefit Corporation) in January 2022 and is now participating in the Advance Coach program. One of her many favorite quotes is this line from Maya Angelou, “Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. You can’t be consistently fair or kind or generous or forgiving any of those without courage.
More information about Kristin’s experience & expertise can be found here: https://linktr.ee/kristinjoys