This interview first appeared on the Social Entrepreneur podcast in August 2018 and is featured on Tony Lloyd’s website here.

Blackbaud is a technology company that powers the social good community. Rachel Hutchisson is Blackbaud’s VP, corporate citizenship & philanthropy, and a thought leader on corporate social responsibility. Rachel believes that ‘good is for everyone.’ She teaches companies to embrace what she calls ‘human social responsibility’, putting people at the centre of their strategies.

Rachel was born into a family of college professors. ‘My grandfather, father, aunts and uncles were all professors…and my mother was a teacher,’ she describes. ‘That meant I also grew up around a lot of books, conversations and ideas.’

When Rachel was five years old, her family moved to England. She points to this as ‘hugely formative for me and my sisters.’ Rachel’s family traveled throughout Europe, camping along the way and seeing the world as it was in the 1970s. Remember that this was during the cold war with hardened borders, different currencies in each country and widely varying food and ideas. She says of this time, ‘At a very young age, I knew there was much to see of the world and that we weren’t all the same.’

Rachel learned about social responsibility at an early age. ‘I didn’t know it then, but I realise looking back that I was raised in a household that believed in giving back,’ she explains. ‘It’s less that we talked about it and more that my parents simply modelled it. Both of my parents were active on nonprofit boards (although I didn’t know the word nonprofit then) – the Literacy Council, the public library, the senior citizen’s centre. And I knew they gave charitable contributions to those organisations and the colleges they attended. We didn’t have a lot of money, but that didn’t get in the way of supporting causes that were important.’

Over time, Rachel developed a sense of personal mission. ‘I am fundamentally bothered by the lack of equity in our world – whether you are looking at this through a gender lens or a racial lens or another lens entirely.’

Rachel joined Blackbaud more than 20 years ago. Blackbaud is a publicly-traded, cloud-based technology company offering technology, data and expertise that powers social good people and organisations. Rachel joined Blackbaud when there were 100 employees. Today, they have over 3,300. Blackbaud works with about 40,000 organisations around the world. Rachel says of Blackbaud, ‘We are a shared-value company with economic and societal benefit combined at our core.’

Rachel grew Blackbaud’s corporate social responsibility from the ground, up. She had developed a model known as ‘human social responsibility’. She recently wrote about human social responsibility in the white paper, CSR 2020: Experts Look Ahead.

Some important tweets from Rachel: