Interview with Sonvi Khanna (Dasra)

The Social Compact, launched by Dasra and partner organizations, is a multi-stakeholder movement for greater equity and dignity for informal workers in India.

Sonvi Khanna of Dasra spoke with Lissa Harris on April 12, 2023. Click here to read the full conversation with insights highlighted.

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Lissa Harris: Could you introduce yourself and your organization and tell me a little bit about the problem that you work on?

Sonvi Khanna: My name is Sonvi Khanna. I work for the Social Compact at an organization called Dasra. Dasra has been working in India for the last 22 years with the private sector, largely advising them on philanthropy. But when the pandemic hit, many of those relations actually came to us and said, “We need some advice on industry practice. And this time with the insight of worker organizations rather than something that we would just make up ourselves.” And so, that’s how the Social Compact was born within Dasra, using our private sector inroads to help them reflect on the worker practices that they have within their own companies, their contractors, and their supply chains.

In India, there’s a very large percentage of the population, 200 million workers, who are informally engaged within the formal sector of industry, which basically means that they’re not covered by any kind of social security. So even though they seem to be in the formal sector, they’re as good as nobody’s problem. And we saw on the roads, 24 hours after India’s first lockdown, a very large percentage of them were these people who had something like ₹300, which is about less than £3 in their pocket. So after the lockdown they had to make hard choices, like eating or starting to walk back from the cities to their homes. That’s the context in which the Compact was born. It is designed as a multi-stakeholder platform, a collaborative between industry worker organizations and other industry influencers where industry and nonprofits are co-solutioning on the worker practices within these companies and their supply chain. We provide them with systemic recommendations after speaking to the workers.

Lissa Harris: Is it fair to say that you are facilitating relationships and cooperation between industry and worker groups and local nonprofits?

Sonvi Khanna: Yes. We are working with 60 principal and supply chain companies at the moment, over the last two years. That’s the size of the movement. We work with two core worker organizations and are expanding to a few more. The idea is that these worker organizations came together and brought together their decades of experience of working with these workers to say, put down a framework, a homegrown framework for India, to identify the vulnerability of this workforce. And it’s across industries. It’s focused on human vulnerability rather than industry-specific vulnerability. We have construction, manufacturing, automobiles, and fashion in these 60 companies and the framework has stood true in grounding all of them to say, “You need to look at your practices because it doesn’t matter what you’re doing at the meta level, people are living life on the edge, and especially those who are not on your books like your blue-collared workers — your janitors and your contracted workforce in your supply chain.

Lissa Harris: Can you talk about who is benefiting from your work among all of these actors and how specifically do they benefit from the work that you do?

Sonvi Khanna: The first benefit is to a system that is currently lacking bridges of dialogue. Industry and worker organizations were working on their own, and antagonistically. Both had their own policies on workers and neither was speaking to each other. That is a lose-lose situation. The Compact has created a win-win situation where the access of industry merges with the intelligence of the worker organizations to take a deep dive into what practices and systems look like. The grounding experience is banal. It’s not fancy. We are not broken at a fancy level, we’re broken at ground zero where you’re talking about no policies for overtime or no toilets for women, there not being a policy for it in the company. Something that covers not just your own workers, but something that covers all workers that are contributing to keeping the business alive.

Being specific, we are not at a point where we can say that the impact has already hit the worker, but I think the impact has started to correct the system. For instance, appointment letters for two contract workers from contractors were missing. Now we’ve been able to help principal companies, the top companies, understand that they have to make their contractors give [appointment letters] and they’re on it. The system is getting corrected even though we are years away from saying that everyone’s doing much better than they were.

Lissa Harris: How long do you think that timeline is between when this process starts and when the workers of a company that you’re working with are really going to see a tangible benefit from it?

Sonvi Khanna: It depends on the size of the company. For some of the SMEs, the small to midsize companies that we are working with, we’ve already started to see them get benefits. For example, medical insurance wasn’t there prior to the Social Compact intervention and now it’s there. In larger companies, where we are talking about several thousand workers spread across the expanse of a country as big as India, that’s where I would say it’s anything between five to six years that you would start to really see [an impact].

Lissa Harris: What makes your approach distinctive from other organizations that are broadly working in this space? What makes you different?

Sonvi Khanna: We actually entered this with no ideological commitment to anything. We were responding to something that we were watching happen and what we saw made us realize that there are good people, or people who are like-minded on both sides of the spectrum, industry and worker organizations. But either there’s fatigue or there’s a gap in the know-how or people have just become complacent to saying, “Everyone does it. I do it as well.” We had to adopt an enablement approach rather than an exposé approach or a guilt-driven approach.

We were able to convert the intelligence of the organizations into a framework that has six outcomes, 35 words standards. We said, “Let’s see what you know about the worker practices along this framework for your contract workers and your supply chain workers. Let’s start from there.” That itself is an enabling exercise because you’re helping them see where the gaps are. Many of them find that very grounding because they realize they may not even have very specific basic information. It’s being taken for granted that that must be happening. The enablement approach is really the differentiator that we feel has taken us far. It didn’t stop at the tool or at talking to the workers and bringing back systemic recommendations. It goes on. When a company comes to us and says, “I see your point, but my workforce doesn’t know how to do it right and I don’t want to do it wrong,” we connect them to third-party providers who specialize in that solution.

We walk the journey with the companies to enable them to move from step A to step B. And in order to make it something scalable, we codify it. So if we crack it for one company, we codify it and then share it with everyone. We don’t have to solve every problem fresh but can offer models that companies can test, and if it doesn’t work they can come back to us and we’ll figure it out again.

Lissa Harris: Is there a tension there between companies not wanting to reveal too much information about their business practices to you wanting to replicate your successes?

Sonvi Khanna: If that is the case, they don’t usually say yes because the model is very clear, we have three steps. You’ve got to take the tool. We are going to speak to your workers, we are going to come back with systemic recommendations, and you must at least try to get into your supply chain. It’s very clear. Those who see that and feel, “No, I’m not going to tell you anything,” are not going to subscribe to this in the first place.

There is a growing ESG [Environmental, Social, and Governance] narrative and everyone knows that the S is the least spelled out for anyone. Even within that, in India, you largely compare it to the corporate social responsibility part of it, rather than really looking at how you, within your workforce, are trying to uphold the S of the ESG to create inclusive worker chains. The S is poorly spelled out globally. In India, we’ve created our own definition of it, which is equal to Corporate Social Responsibility, which companies do outside of their business using 2% of net profits. But that’s not what it should be. Before you go into communities and service them, let’s look at home.

The workers that we are trying to help, their lives are impacted by two systems: government and industry. We chose industry because you can break the problem into small chunks and just take charge of what you can, which is your worker chain that keeps your business afloat. You don’t have to solve the problem for everyone. You’re not the government. But can you take charge of a thousand companies in your supply chain and make sure that you have one aspiration towards worker wellbeing and practice? And you incentivize and live up to that. That’s why we started at the top because when we started in the middle with the smaller or mid-size companies, we realized it’s an unfair game. They’re pressed for margins. You’ve got to ask for better standards from the top. You’ve got to incentivize this change, and we’ve done that in the E. It’s time to replicate in the S and start from home.

Lissa Harris: Can you talk a little bit about what’s in it for the businesses at the very top of the supply chain that are able to have that power to move their suppliers in the right direction on this? What do they get out of engaging in a real way with this process?

Sonvi Khanna: So many of the top businesses already do global business, and labor practices in the supply chain are increasingly coming under the radar globally. You’ve perhaps heard of the German Supply Chain Act for global supply chains, which is mandating company chains that start from Germany to do due diligence on business and human rights. The EU is following next year. European companies have been asking for greater transparency on supply chain practices for workers for years now. So the global exposure and the desire to do global business, to be on the global market, is one thing and it’s going to become increasingly hard to do with poor supply chain practices, especially on labor wellbeing.

The second is, within India itself, the leading regulation body, SEBI, has now mandated all listed companies to start providing a public disclosure that includes a greater ask for transparency on worker-related practices, even those in your contracted and supply chain segments as well. The pressure is tightening from all spaces. Then there are investors who’ve started to ask for inclusion and how you are making that happen within your companies, whether it is CDPQ in Canada, whether it is Adinah Capital, which has just started in India.

I think the last one, which everybody knows but nobody cares about, is that a happier supply chain has less volatility and greater resilience. And we saw that during the pandemic. Those who were able to take care started off within a week of the lockdowns lifting, whereas those who couldn’t care less had to lose three months, a quarter, of business before they could start. Now those are extreme circumstances. You don’t expect it to repeat, but it is true that productivity and volatility have a relation to how you’re treated at the workplace.

Lissa Harris: You mentioned realizing as you were doing this work that you needed to go upstream into the larger companies and from the industry end rather than the government end. Is that something that is distinct about your approach?

Sonvi Khanna: I don’t think so. We didn’t make any ideology-driven choices. We started to work, and then we started to see what’s working and what’s not working. And then we said, “Okay, entering in the middle doesn’t work.” So then we said, “Let’s target the top hundred and get down from there. You won’t be able to change everybody, but let’s create a critical mass.” We were very heartened when Skoll actually came to support us for a four-year span to do exactly that.

I think it’s more the learning from proximity approach rather than leading with an ideology approach that is the distinction. As you speak to more people and as you forge more partnerships, there is always the push and pull of ideology. Being able to be open and respond to the situation, we’re seeing a good champion in industry, taking them on. If you’re seeing a good champion in NGOs, taking them on, seeing how they work best and moving and growing the movement is the approach we’ve taken. The other thing that we launched very early on is that it’s good to let go of control in a movement to let it grow. We were lucky that we put down a foundational framework that everybody resonated with. And after our model was clear, we said, “Okay, now do it the way it makes sense in your context.”

In addition to what I just said, which is the company part of it, we also run worker facilitation centers in industry hubs, which are meant to connect workers to government entitlements. Every center looks different because it’s run by a different partner, with a different industry partner. And that’s fine. As long as it comes out into something that we can together understand in a common data framework, it’s fine how it’s being run. It’s a lot of taking people along, adding more people to the mix, and still keeping it a bit coherent in the narrative and in the direction that we are going.

Lissa Harris: The way that that gets implemented on the ground is different depending on the local context and what’s working in a specific environment?

Sonvi Khanna: Yes, and the intelligence of the teams on the ground. If our worker facilitation center partners on the ground say, “What you’re saying is not going to happen, no WhatsApp groups won’t bring people back,” then I’m like, “Okay, I’ll stop saying that. I’m sitting here and telling you that as an idea, but if you feel that’s not worth it, then let’s not do it.”

Schemes are different in different states of the country. Some things are easier. Even national schemes play out differently in different political regimes in the federal system. The teams on the ground are the ones in the worker facilitation centers who are really connecting with the system and seeing how to work it for the greatest interest of the workforce.

Lissa Harris: Can you share a specific example, whether that’s a company or just some specific example that stands out to you, that illustrates the impact of the work that you’re doing?

Sonvi Khanna: Sure, I can give you two. I’m very hesitant to say impact because I think impact will be when they’re all happy. But I’d say progress.

I’ll give you one from a small company and one from a slightly large-ish one. From a small company, we were able to tell them that it’s interesting that you’re a fashion company but you have no women in the workforce. And that’s strange. It was also a woman leader and I think it stuck with her that that’s interesting. There was resistance initially, but they decided to go ahead with an all women’s unit to start with. After one month of resistance, the resistance subsided because productivity went up, wasted time and resources used went down. Everybody was happy. They’re just productive labor.

In a larger company, what keeps us going and what inspires us is at a much different level. It’s about saying that the very highest peak of the company has decided to invest in skilling for the contracted labor and making that something that they start to now report on in their sustainability reports. That’s a big win. It’ll take a while before the data starts to come in, before the machinery gets set in to make it happen, but it’s a big win. Then, having it translated into an action plan by the HR/IR heads of the company, shows it is going somewhere. But like I said, it’s miles before we sleep. There’s so much that can drop off, even though we recommend key achievement targets at different levels so that it doesn’t fall out from the system. That’s the challenge of a systemic correction. There’s so many slips between the cup and the lip. You’ve got to seal all of them. And we are trying to do that. The engagement, involvement and negotiation between levels within the company is what is the win at this stage. Seeing the top say to the bottom, “This is a penny-wise pound-foolish approach. This is not how the business is going to grow. There are other places where you should be cutting your margins, not on labor practices.” It makes you realize that there was no space for this conversation before this. It’s happening for the first time in front of our eyes.

Lissa Harris: You are watching a shift in corporate culture happening as a result of this.

Sonvi Khanna: Yes, new bridges of dialogue on new topics that have so far not entered the boardroom agenda are now beginning to get out of that middle layer and into the boardroom.

Lissa Harris: What insights or teachable lessons can be taken from your work that others can use? We’ve talked about some of this already, the starting at the top being important, but are there other lessons that other people in this space could learn from your work?

Sonvi Khanna: Yeah, I think I’ll recap some of the things I’ve already said. We always feel that what we have done for our country can be replicated in any other country that has a similar challenge – where industry and worker organizations are in very different frames and nothing yet has formally brought them into a core solutioning relationship. Essentially, that’s what we are creating. There are people that are champions within each system who have to be recognized and brought to the table. In countries where the population is the strength, how can you not invest in that asset? Why are you just seeing it as something that is replaceable and something that is diminishing? It’s really that synergy between the future of workers and the future of business that is untapped in developing countries right now. The gap between the productivity you see in developed nations is not just about machines, it’s also about who’s bringing their best self to work every day and why.

The whole model, starting with not advising industry in isolation, but through the intelligence of organizations that work with workers is critical. Creating a homegrown framework for your context is critical. Don’t be afraid of asking what impacts the human, don’t make it about industries. The people were on the road from all industries. What happened? What was that human vulnerability that we aren’t seeing? They are the working poor of the world, of your country. They work 12 hours but they don’t make ends meet. Who’s going to take care of that?

When you focus on the human being and where the human gets broken, these are the areas that you would start to invest in and the conversations you would start to seed. And the third thing, which I didn’t speak about much, is the community of practice. When we started to do this in year one, we realized we had to get them to talk to each other. If one company solves it, we always offer the next company that’s trying to solve that problem, to talk to them, find that bonding and that risk you’re taking together because it’ll help you take it without so much anxiety. Cross-pollination of ideas and solutions. A community of practice is critical as you are navigating new territories. It emboldens the entire flock.

Last but not least is the enablement approach. Let’s give up on cynicism. It has not taken us anywhere. If you have to solve the problem, you’ve got to face the problem, you’ve got to get your hands dirty. It’s messy, it’s time-consuming, it’s nuts and bolts. You need the inspiration of the poet and the hard work of the plumber to create it, right? And that’s where I think some of the organizations like ours, who own this space of upholding the platform, also become critical. Funders are starting to do this in other countries, finding the backbone organization that is ready to do this dirty work of filling in the gaps, getting the people together, creating the consensus building environment. The NGOs are the experts. You can never replicate that, but somebody’s got to galvanize the collaborative together and move it forward. I think those are some of the key replicable learnings for any other geography that wants to do this.

Lissa Harris: When you say organizations that are serving workers, what percentage of those, or how many of those are unions versus NGOs that are working in the community or what’s the breakdown there?

Sonvi Khanna: They are NGOs that also support unions. There are NGOs that do many things, they do research, policy advocacy, and also have unions and worker facilitation centers on the ground. They have been in the movement, in the thick of it doing everything. When you speak to some of our partners, they’ll always start by saying, “We have always done it from the antagonistic side.” That’s why we came in here. We realized that there was a space for a conversation which was not already pulled apart.

Lissa Harris: I was curious as to whether this plays out differently in workforces that are unionized versus ones that aren’t, or whether there is some tension to navigate between this dialogue or just how that impacts the work.

Sonvi Khanna: Yes. It’s definitely more challenging where it is unionized because our ability to give recommendations has to be very nuanced to the system since there’s already a fair bit of negotiation happening. Sometimes there are multiple unions, not one. There’s competition between the unions on whose workers gets the better deal. We continue because we realize that our kind of workers are nobody’s ward. They are in the background and are actually nobody’s problem. We go on with that, but it gets more complicated. I think you have to have far greater empathy with the company when there are multiple unions in the mix because you don’t know what the challenge is that they’re already navigating. It requires a lot more communication to understand what’s already happening, where are you getting your arm twisted, where should you be asking for greater flexibility and how do you ensure that everybody benefits and not just union A’s workers or union B’s workers. We are still early on the unionized worker’s journey and I hope to be able to share more in some time.

Lissa Harris: Can you talk about how you measure your success, how you track evidence toward progress?

Sonvi Khanna: Our key metric of progress is twofold. The number of companies that are on the Social Compact journey, which means they’ve started to take the tool, that’s when we start counting a company. They’re then at different stages on that journey of taking the tool to recommendations to integration. The second metric is the number of workers and the number of industries to whose workers we have given recommendations. We’ve currently given recommendations to industries that are engaging 300,000 workers. But that’s us having completed the loop. The number of workers for whose companies have already integrated, started to integrate some of the recommendations are 53,000. There’s a lag in us completing the loop and then companies beginning to take that into their system to correct the system. When even one systemic change starts to happen is when we shift the metric to impact triggered. Otherwise, it’s that we’ve completed our recommendations after the site visits and speaking to the workers. Those are the three metrics that we record.

Lissa Harris: Are there ways you track positive outcomes for the workers or for the companies? What kind of metrics do you use to track that?

Sonvi Khanna: We are beginning to create our monitoring, learning and evaluation framework right now. For the first two or three years it was okay to be able to say, this is happening. It’s not like we should shut shop. Now it’s about saying what is the impact on the worker? What is the impact on the company, which would be indicators like attrition, volatility reduction, productivity increase, et cetera? Impact on the workers would be, if you’re providing medical insurance, how much is health expenditure from the pocket reduced? That requires a very longitudinal kind of study. The third is on the ecosystem, which also we are recording today. So what is the level of mainstreaming that we are able to do? What is the amplification level?

It is important to understand how many industry influences have started to integrate Social Compact in one way or the other. We often tell investors and other industry influencers, just take our tool and make it part of your evaluation frameworks for companies before you give them money. Adinah Capital, which I just told you about, is a new fund in India that has agreed to adopt the Social Compact standards as part of its pre-investment metrics. That is the exit plan for us. If that starts to happen, those who are wielding the stick start to ask for labor standards and with a little bit of sensitivity to the approach, don’t go by publicly available documents. That’s not enough. You’ve got to have an approach that speaks to the workers and corroborates what you see in the publicly available documents, then make your rating along these standards. I think then we’ll exit. Our work will be done.

Lissa Harris: You’re already looking forward to a time when your work is not so desperately needed?

Sonvi Khanna: Yes. 10 years. We need to be able to record some stuff on impact, the kind of worker impact we may be looking at might take about four or five years because some of it depends on adversity. So you need to have a sample size. You need health insurance. Some adversity happens or there is a death, then you need accident coverage. So some of it is adversity linked, but we are hoping we’ll also be able to record some of the more proactive indicators of improved wellbeing, improved loyalty, less fear or anxiety. We are in the midst of looking for a third party that can help us go a little deeper because I think we are very close to it, to be the people designing this alone.

Lissa Harris: Sometimes in tackling social problems, you learn as much from things that don’t work as things that do. Can you talk about something that you tried that didn’t work that maybe you learned something from that other people could learn from as well?

Sonvi Khanna: We haven’t cracked action in the supply chain. We’ve tried three strategies so far. The principal companies are easier to change, even for their contract workers, because they have direct influence. In the supply chain, the influence is less. For example, you’re a company, you’ve given me work for 20 people, but my company is 2000 people. Now you’re asking for the sky and the stars for my worker practices where you’re actually only responsible for the bills of 20 workers, why will I change my system for you? We’ve tried a couple of strategies. It’s all in the testing phase, and I feel like that’s where we are failing the most and we are learning the most. I don’t think it’s there yet. Some of them try a training approach where they have taken on this journey and they want to now extend it to their supply chain partners. I think we are seeing a little more traction in that approach than in the complete aspiration sharing approach. And even the stick bearing approach.

The learning is dialogue. You need to start the dialogue. We tell all our companies, “Please start by issuing the Supplier Code of Conduct that Social Compact has created to all your suppliers. Please make sure it’s read to them, so they know what they’re buying into before they sign it because otherwise they won’t even read it. And please get a sense of the discomfort that they’re feeling and start a conversation. Everything is a discomfort, right? Cost is a discomfort, timelines are a discomfort. This will also be another discomfort. Just start a dialogue around this and you’ll get somewhere.” I think that bridge of dialogue is something we still believe will be a success, but how? We are still failing and recreating every day.

Lissa Harris: My next question was getting into challenges that you are currently facing that you haven’t yet been able to overcome or to solve. And this issue of extending those approaches down into the supply chain seems like a big one. Are there other large challenges in terms of scalability or reception to your ideas or accessibility or those sorts of challenges that you haven’t yet been able to crack?

Sonvi Khanna: I think we need more funders to lead with trust in these very sticky problem areas. There’s no other experience that you can get. You can only immerse and see it through emotion and then feel what you feel from it. Do you feel disappointed? Good. Do you feel happy? Good.

But how many funders are ready to go through that discomfort or be open to that experience? We lead in with targets, we lead in with agendas. I think we need more funders like the Skoll Foundation and some of the other individual philanthropists who’ve been supporting our work to say the only way for systems change work is that all parties be immersed. In whatever capacity you are in, be part of the journey because that’s the only way of feeling confident, asking the right questions and getting the transparent answers. If you’re 50,000 feet outside and you ask very intelligent questions, you’re very likely to get a very intelligent answer that doesn’t satisfy anyone. So emotion is the answer and we need more funders who are ready to immerse themselves.

Lissa Harris: Can you talk more about how you’re working to advance systems level change, specifically with what mechanisms are you working towards system level change?

Sonvi Khanna: We embraced the system of industry as the one that we will plug the gaps in. And there are three levels that we are working at. One is the level of the company itself where we say you’ve got to, with the advice of the worker organizations and the so-called framework, bridge this gap in your own worker practices, in your contractors’ worker practices. The second layer is the supply chain, which is about eight to 10 times of the company’s own size. We are saying how can the principal company take charge, like the government would take charge of a state? For your own chain, what is it that you can do? On every other front, you don’t let cost go, you don’t let quality go, so why do you let worker practices go? How do you manage that in a scattered supply chain? Figure this out too. That’s the second part. The third part is the community of practice within industry to say the wrongdoers connect the dots and start partying together to flout the law, to create ways of evading what’s right to do. The ones who do the right things actually don’t speak about it. From day one we said you’ve got to be vocal about your baby steps and your small victories. It’s really critical because the devil lies in the nuts and bolts of making it happen, not in the fancy policy document. The community of practice is the other addition to the system, which is really critical.

Last but not the least, is working with the industry associations at the national and regional level. Social Compact is working with CII, with FICCI Gujarat and with the Federation of Gujarat Industries. These are the Chambers of Commerce equivalence of India and they made Social Compact a part of their mandate. We have a committee in two of these organizations. We sit in one of the committees elsewhere to say, “How can you ensure this message and this aspiration starts to get mainstream with your networks of businesses, so that the ones who’ve started the journey don’t feel like they’re continuing alone in this journey?” There should be larger communities that have already bought into the idea, or are at least familiar with the idea, that the mind has been disrupted. Now it’s about making it happen. Those are the four levels that we are working with.

The fifth level, which has not come in yet but it’s coming with one company, is how do you get the worker to provide a loop to the principal company on the go? We are ready to hear from our white-collared workers every now and then. But we’re not ready to hear from our blue-collared workers except our unions. Why? They don’t understand themselves. What’s the deal? How do you create that feedback loop from the blue-collared worker of all categories, contract, supply, everything to the principal company which holds the reputation risk, which has the exposure, which wants to be that kind of company that is globally accepted? How do you bridge that gap? That’s our gold standard and we’ll get there.

Lissa Harris: We’ve touched on this quite a lot already, but is there more that you want to say about what’s needed from other actors in this space? What do other entities need to do in order to realize this vision?

Sonvi Khanna: See a problem and solve it, whatever it takes. I think that’s what the bottom line is. Ideology sometimes creates boundaries which come in the way of problem solving. If we are committed and we put our heads together, I think we can [solve problems]. That’s what we realized. We saw this happen in the last two years. It was really quite unreal what we saw happen. If you leave your baggage behind, it’s actually quite doable and requires very small steps. I think convergence is the future. People who are solutions-minded are the future. They are in all sectors and walks of life, so find them and work with them and forget the baggage that our brands and logos bring to us because it’s a lose-lose situation if we start to give more importance to the brands than to the problem solving capability of the human being involved.

Lissa Harris: How do you see your work evolving over the next five years?

Sonvi Khanna: We are going to involve 150 companies and reach 1 million workers by 2025 or 2026. We are already in year three of our journey. We had planned our results framework for five years and, in addition to replicating what we’ve done with 60 companies and the workers with this target group, we also want to be able to create some evidence of depth, both by tracking or showing some models of success in how you change practices related to labor in the supply chain, but also what is the impact of doing this for workers, companies in the ecosystem.

I think the ecosystem will provide the launchpad for what we do in the next five years. We’ve already created a space where you’re in it because you’re in it. It’s a great space to be. What comes out of this in the next phase will be interesting. I think the one stakeholder group that we want to bring more center stage is not just worker organizations, but the workers themselves. How we make them part of this journey will be a very big focus of our next few years and the phase after that. That will define what happens to some extent.

Lissa Harris: Wonderful. We’ve covered so much ground here, but is there anything else that we didn’t get to that you thought was really important to include?

Sonvi Khanna: No, I think this is great. When you are transcribing this, if you feel there are any questions, I’d love to stay in touch. It was really nice talking to you, Lissa. Thank you for patiently listening.

Lissa Harris: Thank you so much. 

Click here to read the full conversation with insights highlighted.

Lissa Harris is a freelance reporter and science writer (MIT ’08) based in the Catskills of upstate New York. She currently writes about climate, energy, and environment issues from a local perspective for the Albany Times Union, her own Substack newsletter, and various other digital and print publications.

* This interview has been edited and condensed.

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