Dispatches from the B Corp Champions Retreat in Milwaukee

Milwaukee skyline with the Certified B Corp logo emblazoned over it

There’s a moment early in Dr. Michael McAfee’s keynote at the B Corp Champions Retreat that I keep returning to. The PolicyLink CEO looked out at a room full of certified B Corps – companies that had already done the work, already passed the bar – and asked us to think bigger. Not about compliance or certification cycles, but about founding something.

“See yourself as a founder,” he said, “not of the nation that was, but of the nation yet to be realized.”

Being at the B Corp Champions Retreat in Milwaukee on Earth Day felt like kismet. Whether we were standing in a mass timber high-rise, collaborating and learning from fellow B Corps, or wandering through glass domes at dusk, we were making connections with other organizations driven to be better companies.

Dr. Michael McAfee’s Keynote at the B Corp Champions Retreat 2026

The buildings told the sustainability story first

Before the sessions even started, the U.S. Green Building Council’s Korinne Haeffel took our group on a tour that reframed what a “sustainable built environment” looks like in practice.

We started at Ascent, the world’s tallest mass timber building and the first LEED v5 certified project in the country. Twenty-five stories of glue-laminated timber rising out of downtown Milwaukee, sequestering approximately 7,200 metric tons of CO2. The volume of timber used takes an estimated 25 minutes to regrow in North American forests. Creating this building was a challenge; the development team had to complete the world’s first 3-hour glulam fire test just to prove the building was safe. That success has since prompted Wisconsin to update its statewide building code to favor mass timber over steel and concrete.

Ascent, the first LEED v5 certified project in the US

The conference venue itself, Baird Center, is LEED Gold; one of only a handful of convention centers in the country to hold that distinction. Ninety percent of the steel used in construction was recycled. Food waste is processed on-site by an ORCA digester that can divert up to 438 tons from landfills per year, in partnership with Compost Crusaders, a local women-owned business.

Then we went to the Fiserv Forum. Beyond the arena, we were able to enter the mechanical systems, the locker rooms, and onto the court itself. The Bucks’ home achieved LEED Platinum in May 2025, making it one of only two NBA arenas at this level in the country. The O&M staff at Fiserv told us how each transition of the building was designed to minimize waste, from an ice rink to a basketball court to a dirt floor for monster truck rallies. Their willingness to go deep on the mechanical and operational details made our visit feel like a genuine education on sustainable built environments.

Jess and Colin at the Fiserv Forum

The new V2 standards 

The sessions I find myself thinking about most are the ones that felt truly honest. The “Ripples to Roadmaps” panel brought together four B Corps at very different stages of navigating the new V2 standards, and what emerged was less a highlight reel than a collective exhale. The attendees resonated with the tensions identified by the panelists: resource constraints, internal buy-in challenges, and the gap between what the standards ask for and what a small team can realistically execute in a given year.

The V2 shift is a huge change. Under V1, you earned points. Under V2, you meet requirements – and then you keep improving. It’s a fundamentally different relationship with the work. The “From Compliance to Competitive Advantage” workshop made the case that this is good news: B Lab went beyond updating its social/environmental framework by building an entirely new framework for growth and resilience. The companies struggling most with V2 are the ones still running two separate tracks – business challenges on one side, B Corp compliance on the other. The companies doing it well have stopped pretending those are different conversations.

The Climate Action deep-dive was where I picked up the most actionable detail. The requirements are tiered by company size in ways that surprised people in the room — smaller companies have more runway than many assume, while larger ones face more requirements out of the gate. But the need for continued improvement is no less prevalent across the board. The message was clear: build a Climate Action Plan that’s smart rather than perfect, lean on your community, and don’t try to do it alone. Watching my colleague Colin field question after question from the room was its own kind of affirmation — this is the work Verdis was built for.

The city, the people, the joy

Tuesday evening, we were welcomed into the Mitchell Park Domes – three iconic beehive-shaped glass conservatories dating back to 1967, housing over 1,800 plant species from across the globe. We experienced live music at dusk in the tropical dome and a sound bath in the desert dome. The next day, we visited Lakefront Brewery, one of Milwaukee’s original craft breweries, housed in a restored former city power plant on the Milwaukee River. Rob Knapp & The Soul Patrol kept the floor moving. By that point in the week, the connections we’d built over shared sessions and late conversations made the party feel less like networking and more like a reunion.

Mitchell Park Domes

And then, completely off-script, a tip from our amazing LEED tour guide, Korinne, led a small group of us to the Milwaukee Art Museum. Inside, I discovered that one of my favorite artists, Gertrude Abercrombie, had a major retrospective running. Nearly 80 paintings, the most comprehensive presentation of her work ever organized. Milwaukee had no idea it was delivering a full-circle moment for me. 

Milwaukee Art Museum

What I’m bringing back to Verdis Group

Dr. McAfee named six leadership capacities he asked the room to embody: foresight, radical imagination, audacity, belief in the collective, love for people and planet, and self-renewal. Wawa Gatheru, founder of Black Girl Environmentalist, framed the stakes plainly: climate action that doesn’t center the most affected communities is incomplete.

Neither of those ideas is new. What felt different was the space and the people who gathered together. We were in a room full of people who had already made hard choices, were about to make harder ones, and were doing it together.

My biggest takeaway from this year’s sessions? Intention is not enough. The work is in the doing, the iterating, the showing up again after the certification cycle closes and the next one opens. We are the founders, and our work to improve never stops.

Learn more about our efforts as a B Corp at our Impact Dashboard!

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