On Saturday April 4th at 6:30p.m. I rang Ali Matalon for our Carib Voxx phone interview, nervous my chancy Wifi would cut connection during. In addition to my prior research, I’ve heard lots of good things about Matalon and her knack for social justice. Our 40-minute phone call was informative and educational, to say the least – making it particularly difficult to pick and choose what to share with you all. We chatted about her love for writing, policy, and CorpCare – her Corporate Social Responsibility strategy and execution firm. Whether you’re an expert in business, or a novice like me, there is something to take from our conversation.
CARIB VOXX: Many people know you for your words, including myself. What is your relationship with poetry right now? Do you still write?
MATALON: Since grad school I started writing less and less, but I started doing spoken word in college. I attended different poetry nights at my university, and I performed slam once at the Nuyorican Poets Café. Poetry has always been a hobby, a creative outlet. I love to write, writing really helps me process how I feel. It was something I never really planned to do seriously.
CARIB VOXX: As an artist myself I know it’s sometimes unlikely that individuals have such strong artistic sensibilities and business acumen that harvest congruently. How have you been able to create such a balance in your life?
MATALON: At my core I love work of advocacy, which I could do in my spoken word. Advocacy is what allowed me to feel it was necessary to explore different ways of being an advocate. The reason that I even did a business degree in my undergrad was because I was primarily international affairs and I couldn’t read a balance sheet. I felt like I couldn’t make any meaningful recommendations to the Development Bank of Jamaica (where I worked for a semester in college) regarding the systems that control and often suppress and leave people out because I didn’t speak the language, which is what pushed me to learn it. I don’t love business, but I feel like business has a lot of power which I want to have access to harness for social good.
CARIB VOXX: Social entrepreneurship is a novel concept to many. Can you elaborate exactly on what it means to be a social entrepreneur?
MATALON: Broadly, I like to think that a social entrepreneur is a person who starts a business in which they care about the people that the business is designed to service. What it means for me personally is that whatever business I start or profit I earn from doing business is; means being focused on Triple Bottom Line (TBL or 3BL) accounting versus regular accounting. Regular accounting looks at profit, TBL accounting looks at profit, people, and the planet. It’s important that however I conduct business is not solely about the product or service offering, but how it affects people positively and negatively, and the environment positively and negatively. When I talk about the environment I talk about everything. For me I don’t think I could be an entrepreneur had I not known about social entrepreneurship, because I would’ve seen business as a part of the problem rather than the solution to it.
CARIB VOXX: What’s the story behind CorpCare? Why did you choose this route and what factors contributed?
MATALON: After I graduated from Northeastern University in 2016, I went on to work as an advocacy support specialist at the UN Secretariat for the Secretary General’s High Level Panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment. I really got to touch and feel policy in a way that I hadn’t before, and exist in what I consider the world’s largest government system. The UN is an intensely political organisation.
I like to advocate within the framework that governs society (or through policy) so that organisations like J-FLAG can carry out their work without being inhibited by laws that are outdated (i.e. the Buggery Law). My boss knew that I really love policy so she took me under her wing and allowed me to take notes in meetings. I applied for one university for undergrad and decided if not I’ll take a gap year. I applied to two grad schools in New York, I wanted to stay close to the UN and I had fallen in love with New York; I felt like our relationship was just beginning. I got into NYU and Columbia, and found that Columbia had more international students and could offer me an experience which may better serve me in returning home to Jamaica. I pursued that route and got a lot of exposure – I was a big part of the Kavanaugh protests at Columbia, as well as, student groups that exposed me to perspectives which were critical to my personal and professional growth.
After I graduated with a MPA in Urban and Social Policy, I moved back to Kingston, Jamaica. I then started volunteering with a woman named Simone Brown, who runs 876volunteer (@876volunteer). I really wanted to get further in the space of how private sector organisations engage with the public, whether it be independent non profit organisations or public sector organisations. I felt it was really necessary for me, whatever work I took on, to understand those dynamics because in Jamaica the public and private sectors work quite closely together. I felt like I had a lot more work to do in the private sector before entering the public sector work, or engaging in politics but I can’t hide the fact that politics is a pathway to policy, which is my truest passion because I believe if done effectively, policy should translate advocacy into solutions for citizens.
CARIB VOXX: Tell us about CorpCare. What do you guys do? Why should companies look into your services?
MATALON: CorpCare was designed to assist companies in developing their corporate social responsibility policies. Our mission is to bolster the corporate social responsibility landscape in Jamaica, and our slogan is to connect corporate citizens with their communities. Our vision is of a corporate Jamaica that serves all Jamaicans.
I thought about company policies and how companies can design corporate social responsibility policies to meet the needs of their own staff internally and meet the needs of the communities that they operate in externally. And by way of these CSR policies how could CorpCare assist these companies in becoming closer to social businesses? And how can we create an environment in which social businesses see it as a positive for business as well as a positive for community and not just seeing giving back as a hindrance to earning profit? Those are the questions we want to answer.
Corpcare was designed to assist companies in developing those strategies and executing on them. This execution can mean a multitude of things; it can mean partnering with someone like Simone who is doing a lot of that work already with entertainment organisations and helping to build up the capacity of non profit organisations so she can do things like volunteer training for staff, she can also connect those companies to organisations that need their help. On top of that companies can start giving paid volunteering days off, even seven per year will make a huge difference. Companies can also start allowing their employees to give a percentage of their salary per annum to a cause that the company gives to, or a cause that the individual employee believes in. Companies can also do things like provide sanitary products in womens bathrooms because a woman shouldn’t have to leave work and her productivity be disrupted because she gets her period. And companies need to start having conversations about periods! Let’s start having uncomfortable conversations, and CorpCare is happy to facilitate those.
CARIB VOXX: What are some of the systematic ways that you can facilitate community development through CorpCare?
MATALON: We can show you the numbers of why this is going to benefit you at the end of the day. If you invest X amount with us, it’s going to be 2X in Y field. I don’t care if you want to get PR from the “do gooding” that you do by working with us but what I do care about is that you’re measuring and evaluating the impact that your social investment dollars have, and you’re reinvesting only in systems and organisations that benefit the people who exist in them.
It’s awesome that employers like to give to local fish fries or, a lot of employers in Jamaica give to political organisations, this is not a secret in the private sector of Jamaica. But maybe instead of giving 25% of your yearly allowance of social investment dollars to those things you give 5-10% and we work out a strategy on how that remaining 10-15% can be added to the rest of your budget to invest in projects that produce measurable impact, and projects that are aligned with your companies mission and vision. The goal of giving back should operate in the same way a financial investment does. The more I put in, the more I get out. And social investments should turn over to do MORE SOCIAL GOOD.
For example, it’s really important for a health insurance company to be investing in healthcare systems or healthcare related non-profits. It’s really important for companies like Nike or Adidas to invest in sports education and sports foundations, not just in terms of giving resources, but in allocating resources to develop the next generation of athletes who are going to wear their clothes, which ends up benefiting their business in the long run, which is the whole science behind corporate social responsibility. If it didn’t positively impact the bottom line, businesses wouldn’t do it – so I want to help them understand that it will. Hopefully along the way when they’re doing it it makes them feel good enough to continue to do it for the duration of their company’s lifespans. And even more so, become a standard culture of doing business.
CARIB VOXX: The CorpCare team seems to be a diverse one in regards to the plethora of skill sets possessed by each member. Tell us about your team and the role each person plays.
MATALON: Mostly everyone on the team has a day job except for me, and I think that actually lends to their technical expertise because all of them perform a function within CorpCare that is reflective of their dayjob. Jomarie Malcom is the communications director of CorpCare, and is the only other director of the company other than me right now. She runs Malcolm Mavericks which is a brand strategy and PR firm. Dominic Summers who is our technical and service design specialist, also runs Khord Collaborative which is a web solutions company. Kemesha Swaby who is a lecturer of International Relations at the University of the West Indies, is our strategy and monitoring and evaluations expert. Leah Goldson is serving as a research assistant and Alexandra Shaw has been on the team since the beginning as a project manager and overall helping with the direction of the business. I have a really awesome team.
