Progress, challenges, and how feedback is shaping our sustainable investing research project

We are at the halfway point of our project, and our recent interim presentation to the client and class provided a valuable opportunity to reflect on our progress. This phase has allowed us to gather important feedback, review key success factors, address challenges, and refine our strategy for the next steps. By evaluating our achievements and identifying areas for improvement, we can ensure our project remains aligned with its goals and continues moving forward toward successful outcomes.

Progress: 

Our team has made steady progress toward meeting our project deliverables. The initial phase of the project focused primarily on conducting extensive research. As a result, we have now finalized the definition of regenerative agriculture, outlining its key principles and desired outcomes. This work was informed by insights from four major stakeholder groups: the Scientific Community, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Farmers, and Companies. After refining our approach and methodology, we are now focusing on two key stakeholders: farmers and companies. For farmers, we are profiling farm workers, owners, and corporate farms, analyzing their practices and challenges. For companies, we are evaluating leaders in Just Transition, looking at costs, benefits, and long-term risks. This will help us refine our recommendations to support the client's goal of the transition toward regenerative agriculture, addressing both portfolio- and system-level objectives across environmental and social dimensions.

Feedback:

Receiving feedback from our client has been extremely valuable in helping us fine-tune our research and next steps. Specifically, for farmers' profiles, they advised us to include a more comprehensive demographic overview that highlights race, ethnicity, and indigenous status, focusing on equity and inclusion. This is particularly important when examining the experiences of farm workers, who are often immigrants. We need to consider how these demographics influence issues like power and equity, and how they affect workers’ ability to address wage violations, harassment, and discrimination, or to advocate for a fair transition to regenerative agriculture. By understanding these barriers, we can ensure that our solutions are more inclusive and targeted.

The client also provided feedback on our commentary regarding project goals. They suggested we strengthen it by ensuring a balance between social and environmental goals, both at the system and portfolio levels. They appreciated our approach of aligning companies’ current actions with established frameworks like GRI and IRIS+. For our next presentation, we need to further refine the goals by introducing sub-goals with clear timelines and developing a comprehensive list of metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be applied to both farmers and companies.

The client advised us to clearly define the types of companies we're analyzing, especially in the food and beverage sector, considering the entire value chain. They suggested looking at both current portfolio companies and those with future potential.

This feedback is crucial for ensuring our project stays both inclusive and actionable as we progress. It will help us better address the complexities of the just transition and regenerative agriculture, while also aligning with our client’s goals.

Critical Success Elements:

1. Team Cohesion and Workflow Management:

It has been great working with the team and I am learning of each and everyone of them as they bring such a wide range of skills and perspectives. This has very much fostered an environment of collaboration and creativity and each team member is encouraged to voice their ideas, leading to a dynamic exchange of insights and strategies. This culture of inclusivity has not only strengthened our analysis but has also promoted continuous learning for everyone involved. Effective workflow management has been equally crucial to our work in this project. Regular check-ins and open communication have allowed us to adapt quickly to changes, ensuring that we stay on track and aligned with our objectives.

2. Client Correspondence and Connection 

In our team we have taken the time to understand our client’s objectives, needs, and concerns, we have been able to tailor our approach to ensure that our work is fully aligned with their expectations. For us our regular client meetings have very valuable opportunities to check in, gather feedback, and adjust our strategy as needed to reflect evolving priorities.

3. Big Picture: High quality deliverables that align with the client's needs and expectations

Delivering high-quality outcomes that meet the client’s needs has been central to our project. We’ve consistently ensured that our research, analysis, and reporting are thorough and aligned with the client’s objectives. The strongest midterm presentations, as I noticed, clearly showed alignment with client objectives. By regularly refining our work based on feedback and new insights, we make sure our deliverables are strong and contribute meaningful value to the project.

Challenges: 

Despite the progress we've achieved, we’ve encountered some challenges. Throughout the research process, we have continuously refined our methodology, uncovering new areas for exploration that have expanded our research questions. Given the limited time frame, presenting a holistic view of the entire value chain and market has proven difficult and to address this we narrowed our focus to two key stakeholders and adjusted our research questions accordingly. Ensuring our research is original and innovative has been challenging, as much of it still relies on secondary sources, despite our outreach for primary interviews. We are now more assertively reaching out to secure these firsthand insights. By addressing these challenges and narrowing our focus, we aim to produce more refined, actionable insights.

Next Steps:

As we move into the next phase of the project, we will continue reviewing both system- and portfolio-level goals, identifying key metrics and data sources to evaluate sub-goals for potential portfolio companies, and developing due diligence questions to guide our assessments. We will also suggest questions to evaluate the integration of regenerative agriculture within the two major stakeholder companies & farmers.

In conclusion, this midpoint reflection highlights our progress and remaining challenges. Moving forward, we will build on our work, address obstacles, and apply lessons learned to make meaningful contributions with our project.