PURPOSE, INC.

‍Participants:

Michael Young

Meg Parker Young, Director of Impact Strategy and Development, Thomson Reuters

This is the final interview of Season One on the Purpose, Inc podcast. I’m coming back to a big topic and one I’ve touched on a few times with other guests, specifically the UN Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs. Today, we’re going to talk about SDG 16.

SDG 16, it is perhaps the most complicated of the sustainable development goals in the breadth of its reach.

“Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels.”

SDG 16 covers peace, justice, strong institutions, promoting the rule of law, ending trafficking and violence, control illegal weapons, corruption, bribery, which is in and of itself, a lot!

One of its core ideas is trusted information. Everything from birth records, tax records, public access to information and a free press. Things we don’t often think about in the US/West, but are vitally important. Because integrity of information allows for trust to emerge between groups, across sectors, across nations.

My guest today is Meg Parker Young, Director of Impact Strategy and Development, Thomson Reuters

In 2019, Meg was recognized by the United Nations as the UN Global Compact SDG Pioneer for Business Accountability and Transparency. Previously, Meg worked on international economic development covering China, West Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. Meg holds an MBA from Yale University and did her undergrad at Middlebury College. Meg is part of Thomson Reuters which is a 170-year old pioneer of timely, accurate, unbiased information for legal, tax and finance markets.

Reuters which a true gold standard in trust, integrity and independence in journalism and reporting.

On today’s episode, Meg and talk about UN SDG 16, about which Meg knows a ton. We talk about why trusted information is a core component of every aspect of a free society. Freedom of the press, legal community, justice community, tax collectors are using to make decisions that impact lives of people everywhere. Specifically, how SDG 16 informs corporate responsibly, ESG, CSR through us transparency across supply chains, tracking down human trafficking, about compliance and reporting.

SDG informs how corporations partner with communities to ensure that we are living up to our highest ideals. We get into why transparency and integrity of information is so vitally important—now more than ever. We talk about the “infodemic” and the attack on transparency and truth.

So without further ado, my conversation with Meg Parker Young of Thomson Reuters.

Michael Young:

Meg, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Meg Parker Young:

Hi, Michael. It's great to be here with you today.

Michael Young:

Thank you. So, a lot to talk about today, a very wide brief and I'm really interested in digging in with you about your role at Thomson Reuters obviously as the head of impact strategy there. But maybe pulling back a moment and talking about what you're doing with the UN SDG pioneer work around SDG 16 globally, you've got a wide brief and then we're going to drop into a much deeper conversation about accountability and transparency and misinformation. So, ton to talk about. But let's jump in.

Meg Parker Young:

Sounds great. We'll make a great use of these 20 minutes. Great. Well, thanks so much. It is an exciting time to work in the impact strategy space. I think that as your podcast has shown, businesses are thinking in new and really innovative ways about how it is that they can tie questions of greater social impact into the core of the ways that they go about doing business. And so, that has been the core thrust of my work at Thomson Reuters has been thinking through what are those core competencies that we have as an organization across the legal market, the tax market, our incredible media and journalism arm and how do we by virtue of doing this work have the ability to move the needle on some key societal issues. And just on the Thomson Reuters side, I realize a lot of people know us for the Reuters journalism brand which is Pulitzer Prize winning and absolutely incredible built on 170 years of trust and integrity and independence in reporting which is incredible and is also one part of what our organization does. We as a whole give people the information, expertise and tools that they need to generate insight and other businesses look to us for timely, accurate, unbiased information in the moments when they most need it across many, many industries.

So, it's an incredible space to work and I think that that platform that we operate from allows us to have a shared sense of purpose, that what we do helps support the very foundations of society, of our legal and justice systems, of the flow of funds across sectors and the role of a free press. So, it it's exciting to know that the work that we do, if we do it well, helps the world to work better. So, I feel that from that space, we have an opportunity to lead a bigger conversation in some spaces especially as it relates to questions of access to justice and transparency issues. And it was through that lens and the strategy work that I was able to support at Thompson Reuters these last few years that allowed me this year to be recognized with the UN as an SDG pioneer for business accountability and transparency. And I recognized that not everyone knows what SDG means. The UN few years back created 17 sustainable development goals that set out at an international level what might we need to do across all sectors in order to create a more sustainable world which is a really big question and one that governments are asking and answering, companies are asking and answering, individual communities and school groups are working with these. So, it's a really great, The Goals Act I think is a shared vocabulary across sectors and here at Thomson Reuters have been a wonderful space to focus in our efforts and understand the spaces where we think we can have sort of that most authentic voice.

Michael Young:

That's great. And as you were talking, I was obviously, we all know that a free press is part of the undercarriage of a free society and a democratic society and I've looked at SDG 16 quite a bit and prior to this and really connecting these things as they're so vital. We took them for granted I think for a long time in this country and they're so vital. Freedom of information, transparency and the support that information either has or doesn't have to broader institutions and indeed, these all roll up into human rights. Right?

Meg Parker Young:

Absolutely.

Michael Young:

I mean that's really the point of this is that these are not nice-to-haves.

Meg Parker Young:

Exactly. I think you're making a great point. As you look at SDG 16, it's a funny one when you compare it to the other SDGs where life on land or life under water or the others I think tend to have some verbs and nouns that are while the goal itself is not easy to get to, it's pretty easy to wrap our heads around what is the goal that we're driving towards. Within SDG 16, it is the most complicated of the sustainable development goals in the breadth of its reach. So, at a high level, it talks about peace, justice and strong institutions which is first of all, it's a mouthful but second of all, it's a huge writ for a single goal. And as we think about it, I think you hit the nail on the head, within each one of those, that question of a shared set of trusted information and the integrity of that information that allows for trust and trust of decision making to emerge between groups across sectors, across nations, that is fundamental for our capacity to achieve this goal over time. So, we take our role within that community focusing on SDG 16 very seriously and you're right, especially with the human rights angle, the question of access to information, this is not theoretical. This is related to questions of transparency across supply chains, tracking down human trafficking rings, thinking about how it is that we have the ability to partner with communities, with corporations, with governments to best both protect one another and also ensure that we are living up to our highest ideals. And I think that shared information is a core component within that whether you're talking about the freedom of the press itself or around the critical information that our legal community, our justice community, our tax collectors are using to make decisions that impact at the end of the day families’ lives and an individuals' lives.

Michael Young:

Yeah. And even within SDG 16, there are things like birth records and I don't know if property rights. But many, many, many people worldwide, millions are born every year and have no birth record. There's property that is not legally recorded. So, all of this again, it's stacks and layers up, up, up and information is really right at the core of it. And it speaks to government accountability, right?

Meg Parker Young:

Absolutely, absolutely. And frankly, corporate accountability. And I think that's a space that is exciting to see in this moment. It’s tripe but we’re in a moment of absolute global upheaval across multiple parts of our society and I think that a trend that we've seen these last few years has been corporations considering the changing shape that their role might take on as they respond to those questions and I'm excited to see what that means particularly in the fact it doesn't make sense for corporations to do this work in a vacuum. It must be done in a way that reaches across sectors and integrates the understanding and true collaboration with our public sector counterparts, with civil society, with nonprofit groups. And it's my pleasure within my role at Thomson Reuters to have that capacity to act as that extended arm in many cases across to those groups and to consider where and how can we show up together to further questions of access to justice, how are we pushing for more transparency in the midst of the broad moment we live in or in reaction to an individual crisis, for instance, with COVID-19.

Michael Young:

Yeah, yeah. In fact, Meg, I think you were the first person I heard utter the word infodemic.

Meg Parker Young:

Yes.

Michael Young:

Yeah. And maybe we could talk a little bit about the connection and the correlation between information, misinformation. We've all been introduced to the notion of fake news which again, corporate accountability, transparency, responsibility is what we talk about here on this podcast primarily. So, I'd love to hear some of your thoughts and your thinking and the work you're doing particularly around the media literacy project. How is this all playing out now? Because in a best-of world, these are hard things to stay up on. As we've seen COVID and most recently George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests, this this has all become much more, it's become crystallized in terms of information, quality of information, etc. So, again, amazing times, interesting times, dangerous times, maybe hopeful times. How are you thinking about all of this right now from your standpoint?

Meg Parker Young:

I think you're absolutely right that we're seeing a crystallization of what before we might have seen as themes or a growing sense that this might be important. When we were talking about media literacy last year which within Thomson Reuters, media literacy has been a passion especially within the Reuters Group for a while. We think it is critical to build media literacy skills around the world to support our societies at an individual level, deciphering fact from fiction and being able to understand sourcing and the importance of digging into the source of the information that you are making decisions about that impact your health, your well-being, your community. So, we have taken that seriously for a long time but this year, where last year might have been a broad conversation of media literacy, in the midst of COVID-19, we saw the speed and pace of misinformation pick up in an extraordinary way and a lot of this was coming out of the desk of Hazel Baker who is the head of user generated content news gathering at Reuters as well as the head of a fact-checking unit there.

And their work in the last few months in helping to identify and combat this misinformation has just been extraordinary and we saw an opportunity there to partner with the National Association for Media Literacy Education who is again, a longtime beloved partner to think about how is it that we pull together these skill sets and rather than having a heavy conversation about why this matters, we within the course of weeks turned around a suite of tools and materials that could be shared broadly to help at an individual level as well as for teachers and students to combat basically the infodemic which the UN I think was the first one I heard to coin that term that was compounding the issue of the pandemic. We saw that just as there was a, where we had worked towards flattening the curve of COVID-19, we know that a huge part of that is individual, community, corporate and governmental understanding of what this disease is and how we might combat it. And the only way that there's a fighting chance of the best scientific opinion to get out there and inform individual decision making is if our consumers of news have an understanding of how to again, decipher fact from fiction within that. So, it was a really, really rapid and scrappy group that pulled together this the suite of tools. But really again, it went from theory to action in a matter of basically two and a half weeks. And anyone who's interested, you can find that suite of materials on ThomsonReuters.com. Please feel free to engage, use, share. Talk to us if you have ideas of how you'd like to see that move further. But there's just so, so much to do within that space.

Michael Young:

Yeah. We'll link to that in the show notes for sure. Maybe just picking up on the infodemic and I mean it feels like a concerted effort on the part of some to demolish the notion of objective reality. I think I first started to read about that in light of what I think is now known as the Putin Playbook. We don't have to go too far into whether that is a thing or not. And I'll bring it up to date. Sunday I was talking to somebody and saying with all of the sort of social unrest and change and indeed protest and demonstration for change, I said I'm buoyed up by Gen Z and intergenerational change and this person said to me yes, but remember Gen Z is probably, they have grown up in a post-truth world, right? In a world that has been flooded with memes and misinformation. So, what is the responsibility? How do we turn the tide I guess if you have an answer to the demolition of objective reality and the attack on media scientists, academia, even the role of government but certainly the media from the organization that you're a part of? How do we turn that around and what are the actions that organizations, people, individuals can take? And obviously getting educated is what you just said, right?

Meg Parker Young:

There’s the corporate angle to that too. I think that if you’re like me sitting in an impact or ESG focused world within an organization and thinking about how does this impact my work, I’ll say from where we sit that that question of the integrity of information being fundamental to actually the operations of our business, we take that very seriously in that we as a business are built on trust and that trust in unbiased objective information that we provide to business professionals across sectors as well as to consumers of news, that is an absolutely bedrock of our ability to do business and is a bedrock of our ability to support these necessary, fundamental elements of peace, justice and strong institutions. So, they’re tied together and there is from a corporate perspective frankly, we for better or for worse, our focus there is continuing to deliver objective unbiased information with that bedrock of fact in every single instance in which we do business. I think that it also lends itself, that same question can lend itself to a different perspective when you’re looking within an organization from that ESG lens of great, so we know this about our own business but what do we know about our supply chain and how much can we trust the information that we are getting about our supply chain? What questions are we asking that? And similarly and thinking about that again, looking further down the value chain into how is that we’re delivering the information we need to and building that trust with our customers, with our communities, with our employees who frankly, we have around 25,000 employees around the world that the trust with that group in particular I’d say is critical to being able to do our work and again, to be able to expand our impact worldwide.

And I think we take for as long as I’ve been at Thomson Reuters and much longer before that, we’ve had an extraordinary culture of employee engagement and really a purpose driven group of individuals that come to work at Thomson Reuters and stay because of that culture. And so, as we consider how is it that we work on these issues, we’re not just thinking about products, we’re not just thinking about customers or even these international organization partnerships, we’re often thinking first about these employees. For instance, in these last few weeks in the aftermath of the tragic death of George Floyd, we have seen a just huge response from our 6,000 employees based in Minneapolis who are deeply connected to their communities and deeply connected to the questions that are being brought up right now. And so, our diversity and inclusion team, our community impact team and our special impact institute have teamed up to develop a $1 million response fund to rebuild in Minneapolis but more importantly within that, there was an immediate doubling of volunteer hours for all staff internationally but specifically noting that that creates the opportunity for more than 90,000 hours of volunteer work directly within the Twin Cities in addition to the 20 hours per person of pro bono legal support that our thousands of lawyers on staff have the ability to bring to these questions. So, I think there’s a lot of power in empowering our employees to be able to take their own action directly on combating these issues.

Michael Young:

Yeah, yeah. Integrity begins at home, right?

Meg Parker Young:

Exactly.

Michael Young:

Right. That’s great. And I was not aware that you had such a large footprint in the Twin Cities and that’s very exciting to hear that your people are playing a role in helping rebuilt that community. And I maybe wanted to come back to again because I do tend to focus on the role of business and corporations and corporate purpose on this podcast, why I’m perhaps hopeful about combating disinformation is organizations, corporations have a vested interest in information integrity. Right? You just think about the market, the market or price signals, that’s information. So, the economics while on one hand are driving the Facebook rage machine and I will not go too far down that road but there are economic models that are benefitting from disinformation and rage. I think at the same time and why I’m perhaps somewhat hopeful is organizations, corporations, lawyers in particular—thank you very much, lawyers—are absolutely categorically concerned with facts and truth and data. And so, I think not to say that corporations are our only hope but it is interesting when you step back and look broadly defined individuals may be challenged with their media literacy and understanding and fact checking but corporations certainly are putting in the duty cycles to ensure that they have access to good information, that it’s accurate and they can act on it. And so, that’s part of why I remain interested and hopeful in the role of corporations in being productive social actors. That was a little bit of a sermon.

Meg Parker Young:

I love it. And I agree with you. I think that we absolutely have an opportunity and an obligation to have this bigger conversation and to think about how this next generation of solutions can reimagine how people are working, how they connecting and how we make the information, news and software they’re relying on more relevant, interconnected and trustworthy. And especially to your point on justice, we fundamentally believe that societies can’t thrive without justice and transparency and that trust information is a necessary component and you also need actors who are ready to defend that. And every day around the world made me see affronts to this from disinformation campaigns or from questions of shifting spaces for moral authority, for instance, with society. I think in the midst of that, I am excited by the questions that people are asking right now and I also believe so firmly in ensuring that in the midst of this, there are foundational voices that continue to operate with that authenticate trusted unbiased approach for over a hundred and seventy years that allow a shared conversation to emerge and that allow groups to be able to come together around a shared set of questions, a shared set of information and to be able to move further and faster because of that.

Michael Young:

Yeah. And I think what is very apparent is that the gap between what organizations say and what they do has collapsed for the better and I think then just speaks to more transparency, more accountability, more action on a host of issues and whether that—we didn’t even get into ESG, right?—but whether that is saying one thing in your ESG disclosures and lobbying for another, those gaps are now narrowing and tightening and I think we’re seeing this on the board governance side and every board governance expert will say yes, we want cognitive diversity. Well, show us a picture of your board and we’ll just tell you right off the top if you’ve got cognitive diversity. So, these are big, big, big questions that underlay a lot of systemic issues.

Meg Parker Young:

Absolutely. And I think it’s something that we all have to approach with a combination of hope and humility. I think it’s easy especially for a large multinational with a big history to let the perfect be the enemy of the good here. And so, sitting in the small but mighty team that I do with some extraordinary team members, we take it really seriously to both work externally in partnership towards these bigger questions but consistently to take those same things we’re learning, turn around and reflect them internally and consider as we’re talking about this large issue out in the marketplace, how is that that is impacting the way that we’re setting, for instance, our sourcing and procurement practices? How is that influencing our conversations with our finance team as we look at our own carbon targets in the coming years which we aligned this year to the 1.5 degree science based target. I’m very excited about that. So, I think again that being able to approach it with that big aspiration but a continuous learning mindset on the part of the corporation to know that we are here to both learn and lead and our job in both will never be done.

Michael Young:

That’s great, that’s great. Meg, this has been a fantastic half hour nearly and I am incredibly grateful to you for coming on the podcast and talking about these absolutely pivotal issues of transparency and accountability and access. So, I thank you.

Meg Parker Young:

Absolutely. Thanks so much, Michael. It’s been a pleasure.

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