Core Values of SHI
By Ann Armbrecht, SHI Founder and Director
At the March SHI Monthly meeting, Andy Thornton, Jessie Dean, Zacharia Levine, and I shared key takeaways from our Expo Panel, Intertwined Roots: Building Resilient, Regenerative Supply Networks. After that, six of us who participated in the first SHI Wilderness Immersion in the Anza Borrego desert shared some about our experience.
Below are some themes that emerged.
Showing Up as People First
The panel centered on two questions: how do supplier relationships build resilience, and what has SHI actually changed on the ground? During the meeting, we didn’t repeat what we shared on the panel (available to watch for registered Expo attendees here) and instead reflected on ideas that arose from our preparation and discussion.
Andy opened by saying that SHI is a place where people show up first as people, not in their work roles — where we bring our whole selves. That, he said, creates a different quality of connection.
This makes a difference in concrete ways in terms of new sourcing partnerships, support for Asheville Tea Company during Hurricane Helene, and also in what we each bring to our work: more openness, more honesty, more courage because we are in a community where that is what others do as well.
Zacharia said that SHI sits at the interface between values based relationships and those that are considered more transactional, but it isn’t such a black and white divide. And he suggested that we need to get clearer and crisper at articulating and realizing the return on the investment of the time, energy, and personal capital that it takes to invest in values based relationships within a hyper competitive industry.
SHI Values
Jessie then added to Zacharia’s comments by spelling out the values we embrace at SHI – qualities which I think are central to establishing and maintaining values based relationships.
- Courage – the courage to address challenges as they arise and the courage to name those challenges.
- Openness and vulnerability – “Everyone is so courageous and brave in their willingness to be vulnerable,” Jessie said.
- Authenticity and transparency: If we want authentic relationships with our suppliers, we need to have them with each other.
- Leaning into the kindred spiritedness that we uncover by implementing these values.
- Collaboration – As we document the importance and value of collaboration in product development, sourcing, mapping Scope 3 emissions, we begin to see a strong business case for working in this way, as all of our companies grow together in tandem.
“All of these things are words,” Jessie added. “But they are representative of the real work and action that is being done.”
Into the Desert
A year and a half ago, Tyler Wauters from Banyan Botanicals asked if I was interested in offering Wilderness Immersions for SHI. Yes, I said immediately. And so after Expo, 7 of us headed to the Anza Borrego in southern California where we camped for 3 nights.
Our time in the desert was spacious. We had a loose structure that guided our days, shared meal preparation, a walk or a plant sit with one of us offering the invitation into that plant sit. We’d return, share what we each noticed, then sometimes head out again — a longer walk, a drive to somewhere nearby, equally unhurried, before returning for meal preparation, cleaning, and conversation around the fire.
While Tyler was definitely our guide in being in the desert, we all showed up equally in creating the container of how to spend our time together. The central frame was listening to the land and to the plants. Each day, we would walk into the desert, find a plant or a series of plants and ask: What is it you would like to tell me? Then we would just listen. And then we would come back and share what we heard.
Guido Masé said that one of the most powerful take aways for him was how we all came with different intentions and experiences, but our experiences were deeply resonant and overlapping. To him that reinforced that there is something beyond him as a person, that when we can take the trappings off, we can really feel and hear what the landscape is saying.
The panel asked how we articulate what SHI is. The desert and the plants growing there asked us to listen.
What the Land Said
Ben Levine said he was struck by how the land moved through us. We can talk about place and plants all day long, he said. But speaking from a place or letting the plant speak through us is where things get really interesting.
Angella Willard mentioned that one of the questions she is bringing home is how do we continue forward with influence while preserving the sacredness that is within the ethos of SHI? “How to preserve what is sacred in a world (and an industry) that is built around bigger and bigger without any stop,” she asked. She wants to help preserve the essence, for SHI to be a full circle, that nourishes itself so that no matter the size, what it is emanating is within the natural laws of life.
Feeding the Soil
Andy talked about the tension of how to create validity in a world that demands outputs. SHI doesn’t rush to claim ownership of outputs because it recognizes the value is in the soil that creates these outputs. There is then an opportunity for SHI members to share where they have created some of those points of value out of what they’ve gained from being part of SHI, even if not an SHI thing because that is a way of demonstrating the value of this work.
“If we believe in an emergent process and that it is important,” Andy said. “We have a responsibility as a collective to feed that back into the soil so that it can grow, that soil.”
Ben added that SHI is a fractal of the industry. The questions we wrestle with in SHI — how to grow while staying true to our values, how to measure the impact of relationship-based work in a world that demands quantifiable metrics — reflect what every company faces. And so, when we are working on SHI challenges, we are also learning about and working on challenges and tensions that every company is working on.
Questions I’m Carrying
At the beginning of our time in the desert, we gathered to each set our intentions for our time together. I shared some of the questions and tensions I am holding as the founder of SHI:
- We have built a solid network of SHI members. How do we better tell the story of what we are doing?
- Who do we need to reach that we aren’t?
- How to get financial stability without compromising our strengths.
One of the most powerful things I took from our experience is the process of walking to the plants, inviting them for guidance, and listening to what was offered. That process, more than any specific steps to take, is the guidance that is staying with me as I explore these questions.