We are so pleased to announce that House of Hackney has officially appointed a new Director to represent both Nature and the Voice of Future Generations on their Board of Directors.
The luxury interiors, fashion and lifestyle brand made the announcement via this LinkedIn post and the move was featured in this Business Green article.
Brontie Ansell and Jessica Mond Wedd, from Lawyers For Nature, have been working with the brand for nine months to make significant constitutional changes to their corporate structure. Appointing a Nature Director means having someone whose sole role is to represent the natural world in Board discussions. We are particularly proud to have worked on this project because House of Hackney is the first company in the world to not only appoint Nature to its Board of Directors, but also the Voice of Future Generations, both human and more than human. To help ensure that the Nature Director can have meaningful impact, transparency and accountability procedures have been incorporated. House of Hackney’s change follows on from that of Faith In Nature, the first company to put Nature on the Board, who we advised and provided a Nature Director for. You can read more about that here.
These types of corporate governance interventions have a lot of flexibility. From an early stage of development, House of Hackney wanted to explore adding representation of the ‘Voice of Future Generations’ to the role. We expect to see a variety of iterations on this innovative approach in the future, across companies and the third sector.
Brontie Ansell, Co-Director of Lawyers For Nature, has been appointed as House of Hackney’s first ever Nature Director. She had this to say of the Nature on the Board movement:
“We are right at the start of this project, to ensure voices other than humans are represented in business decisions. We’re very excited to see where this journey will take us. We’re currently busy drafting tool kits and handbooks to enable companies and third sector organisations to make similar constitutional changes. We’d love to hear from you if you have ideas for how this should progress as a movement or if you would like to engage with having more than human representation in your decision making spaces.”
If you are interested in Nature on the Board or working with us to craft a similar intervention that works for your organisation, please reach out.
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The release of The Felling Film, which catalogues the years-long struggle by local activists in Sheffield to stop their street trees being destroyed by the local city council, is an excellent excuse to look back and take stock of that campaign and the many lessons it can teach UK nature protectors.
The Rights of Nature (RoN) movement in the UK has been newly revitalised over recent years. There was an early flurry of activity around 2005-2010, clustered around the UK Environmental Law Association (UKELA), which included some conferences, an excellent research report analysing the extent to which Wild Law already existed around the world, and annual Wild Law weekends (which continue!).
