John Shegerian: Do you have a suggestion for a rockstar Impact Podcast guest? Go to impactpodcast.com and just click, Be a Guest, to recommend someone today. This edition of The Impact Podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet and your privacy, and is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider, and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit erdiriect.com. This episode of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by. Closed Loop Partners is a leading circular economy investor in the United States, with an extensive network of Fortune 500 corporate investors, family offices, institutional investors, industry experts and impact partners. Closed loops platform spans the arc of capital from venture capital to private equity, bridging gaps and fostering synergies to scale the circular economy. To find Closed Loop Partners, please go to www.closedlooppartners.com.

John: Welcome to another edition of The Impact Podcast. I’m John Shegarian, and I’m so excited and honored to have with us today, Maury Wolfe. She’s the Vice President of Corporate Responsibility and Social Impact at Cox Enterprises. Welcome to the show, Maury.

Maury Wolfe: Thank you, so excited to be here, John.

John: Maury, before we get going about all the important and impactful things you and your colleagues are doing at Cox Enterprises, can you first share a little bit about your background, where you grew up, how you got on this journey, who influenced you and things of that such?

Maury: Yeah, I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, so this is sort of full circle. Cox Enterprises is based on, I’m now back in my old neighborhood but what I didn’t have when I was sort of thinking about careers were jobs like these, they simply didn’t exist. The corporate sector was not focused on having career paths in purpose in social or environmental impact, and it was sort of by process of elimination as I think most do when they’re 18 through 20, and try to figure out what to do with their lives, but the thing I cared most about was the environment.

I had sort of a natural passion and calling for it and thought since it’s what interested me the most, that I wanted a career there, but the career paths were pretty limited. You either did environmental compliance, which didn’t sound all that exciting to me. I didn’t want to go to law school, so that limited some things, and so I really focused in on the nonprofit sector and thought that that’s where I would spend my career, and I always tell sort of people starting out in their careers what a great opportunity the nonprofit sector is because they’re so scrappy.

You get to have an opportunity to do all sorts of functions in the organization. You do things you probably aren’t particularly qualified for which was the case for me, but you really get a lot of opportunity to grow and sort of test yourself, and I landed at an organization called the US Green Building Council, which still exists. They do lead certification and I was working on the requirements for both the certification side, but really specialized in retail spaces, and was also working with them on how do you scale the program. How do you take this certification and help really bring it to like a chain restaurant, or to a retail space that is largely similar city by city, and so long story short, what it meant is that I was working with a lot of big brands, and the contacts I had at each of those they didn’t have the titles that we now have, but they were really the first movers in this space, so they realized that they could link a business need by having a return on investment, through energy or water or waste savings in a building with an environmental passion.

They were really driving the big brands of the world to think about how to build and design their physical spaces with lower impact on the environment, and they were selling it by having a business case, a return on investment, and so as we were working together, I got to sort of see some of the inside inner workings of these big companies, and I got really excited about it. I thought I might be able to have a bigger impact working from the inside out. Then always trying to knock down the door, so I quickly threw myself back into business school to sort of fill out some of the skillset that I thought I might need on the corporate side, and landed from there, and just sort of lots of good luck moments landed at Coke doing environmental work and then at IHG Intercontinental Hotel Group and now here, now here at Cox Enterprises.

John: First of all, 2 amazing brands you cut your teeth at. Let’s just say that Coca-Cola at Itercon, I’m huge fans of both. How many years ago did you join Cox?

Maury: Cox, coming on 6 years ago, I joined Cox and we always laugh because, because it’s such a good place to work, people never leave, so I think I’m still at like my guppy[?] stage of being at Cox now pushing 6 years.

John: Did prior to you coming in, did they already have a very, vibrant, corporate responsibility and social impact division? Or were you given a blank page and you had to start from scratch?

Maury: Yeah. What’s really interesting about Cox, so we are a private company. We’re a family owned business. Our fourth generation, now is now running the company, so Alex Taylor, our CEO is the fourth family member at the helm, and we’re about to celebrate our hundred and 25th year, so we have a really long history, and I smile when you hear so many companies talk about environmental sustainability, social responsibility, community impact being part of their DNA, because at a family company that really needs something very specific and very real for them. This really has been part of the ethos of this company from the very beginning. We talk about Governor Cox, who was our foundry.

He was the governor of Ohio for a while, which is why we call him Governor Cox, and he actually in his will called out that he wanted to make sure that his family and the company took care of its people, and took care of its community, so this has been just an ongoing philosophy of how this business should run, straight from the family, so the language has changed. We didn’t call it CSR, the acronym soup that we now [inaudible] didn’t exist, but I think the principles of taking care of the community, taking care of your employees, taking care of the environment, we’re very central to how the family thought about how to manage their business, so in that sense, I really had the gift of coming into this very long legacy and very genuine history to build from. What I was asked to do was to pull out a blank sheet of paper though, and think about how do you take all those component parts that had been so strong and so critical to the value system and reimagine them in a way for the next [inaudible] years, but hopefully much longer, so that we continue to innovate that space in keeping with the market and in thinking about how to have even greater impact.

John: For our listeners and viewers who’ve just joined us, we’ve got Maury Wolfe with us today, she’s the Vice President of Corporate Responsibility and Social impact at Cox Enterprises. To find Maury and her colleagues on all the impactful and important work they’re doing, please go to www.coxenterprises.com. Maury, you just brought up the alphabet soup of sustainability, and since you are truly a sustainability clean tech OG, that has seen the evolution of this soup when I started the show, and when I started my recycling company there was no such thing as a chief sustainability officer.

The iPhone wasn’t even out yet. Inconvenient Truth wasn’t out yet, and now we’ve seen this fantastic with fits and starts though, like everything else that’s becomes really important in a culture and society. We’ve seen this rise of sustainability, which has now taken on this shift from the linear circular economy, the rise of ESG, the planet positive and all sorts of others, like you said CSR. With regards to Cox’s sustainability priorities, take from that alphabet soup and explain to our listeners and viewers please, how do you strata them? What are you truly focused on at Cox focused in terms of order of importance and things that you want to accomplish with your colleagues at Cox to make the biggest impact?

Maury: Yeah so at Cox, and I think this is true for a lot of companies that have been playing in this space for a long time, or for the newcomers who understand now that environmental and social impact provides a long-term business value. What I think is true for all of us in that world is that the language may change, the acronyms may have their heyday and change, but the core of the work will stay the same, because if you are a company who has learned and understood the value of this long-term strategic thinking, whether you’re thinking about it as business resiliency over the long-term.

Whether you’re thinking about it as building up strong communities for better customers. However, you’re framing that return on investment back to your business, I think the core projects and the core impact work will continue, and so that’s really core to Cox. We think long term because we’re a family company, we’re able to think very generationally. It’s a wonderful place to be for my line of work. We have a couple of core focus areas. One is on environmental sustainability, and actually in 2007 we launched what we call our Cox conserves goals, and those are environmental sustainability ambitions, and those are to be 0 waste by next year, so we’ve got a ticking clock to hit that target and to be carbon and water neutral by 2034, and so that’s really been driving a lot of our environmental moment.

What’s exciting for us in that space is while we keep our eye on the prize for those goals, what we learned is that we really believe the future of businesses also in clean tech. We have been making major investments in acquisitions of new companies that are also part of the clean technology space, so we’re taking what was a reduction in environmental impact, and a reduction of our own operations and laddering on top of that, an investment in new business. On the other side of the house the place where my team spends a majority of the time, we launched in 2020 a social impact goal, and as I said we have this long history of community impact of philanthropy, but we didn’t have a target or a measurement focus around how we wanted to think about that. After actually several years of work and alignment around the business, we landed on what we call our social impact goal, which is to empower thirty four million people to live more prosperous lives by 2034, so we’re pretty laser focused on how we focused work towards our moment and hitting that thirty four million target.

John: I want to unpack this for a second, so you bring up a good point about… first of all, let’s go back to private company versus public. I get to have all sorts of guests on who sit in your role or in that nexus of type of role that worked for publicly traded companies and some for private companies like yours, so it’s fascinating what you just said though. Private companies get to think long term, so you are not having to worry about quarterly earnings, quarterly reports and having to prove everything on such a short-term basis, when you are really thinking generationally in your decision making and your team’s decision making.

Maury: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. It is a tremendous gift because so much of this work, particularly in the social impact space takes a long runway. When you’re talking about change in communities, you’re also talking about change that impacts people, and while you may know you accomplished a good project overnight, you don’t see the measurable impact of that for some time, and so the gift of being at a private company is that you really can think about some really stretch long-term targets, and have the flexibility to go chase them.

John: When you talk about your sustainability priorities, so you talked about 0 waste. How hard is it to get to that to goal? I know you’re on a ticking timeline here, but from your perspective, was that low-hanging fruit or truly a pretty high hurdle that you’re close to getting at?

Maury: It was a really high hurdle. I’m really optimistic about where we will land next year hitting that [inaudible] target, but we have several different business lines, so we have newspapers, so we own the Atlanta Journal Constitution among others, so it provided that business model with paper, provided a great opportunity for recycling infrastructure, but also it’s a good, a consumer good that is going out into homes. We also have Cox Communications, which is our internet broadband division that has wire infrastructure that you’re putting out.

It has cable boxes going into people’s homes, so then you have an added element of how do you get material back from all these individual residential customers, and then you’ve got what was really interesting for us is within Cox Automotive, so we have an automotive division, which has Kelley Blue Book and Autotrader. It also has a number of businesses in the portfolio that are really business to business web, but the most challenging part was our Manheim auctions, so in the used car market most I think over 70% of the cars United States go through our Manheim auctions. Where they’re moved around the country, they’re bought and sold, they have to be cleaned up first, and so all those cars get cleaned up on our property. We end up with all of this waste, whether it’s old bumpers or old tires or a trunk full of who knows what, and so you really have a challenge in figuring out what to do with the end of life of all of these materials that are so different.

Unlike a newspaper plant where you have the same paper rolling through, the automotive division really proved challenging for us in thinking about how we have this really mixed waste challenge that we had to go out and tackle, so it’s been really several years and very frontline grassroots engagement to get our employees excited about being a part of this, and one of the great things that some of our colleagues leading waste have done is, they publish how each location is doing, and so they get ranked in sort of a silver, gold, platinum scale. They get to celebrate when they’re doing really well on their waste accomplishments, but it allows the frontline employees to be a part of feeling like they’re hitting a really big challenge.

John: Well, you bring up a great point, just like we had the rise years ago and the necessity for chief procurement officers, or director of procurements, do you now have a director of diversion who then manages all your locations and grades all them and keeps them sort of this inner circle tribe of competitors, that sort of in a friendly way compete against each other to trade best practices, but also get the diversion rates down to hopefully 0.

Maury: We absolutely do. It’s amazing. We now have a team of sort of waste professionals to help all of our different businesses understand how to tackle these issues, and to make sure that when we’re getting rid of the waste, we’re doing it in the most responsible way. It can really vary in municipality by municipality, and so we want to be able to make sure when we celebrate next year, that we also can do pass an audit, that we know what happened to the trash. We don’t end up in a state of accidental greenwashing.

John: When you talk about your carbon neutrality goals, by you said 2034. What’s that road look like and how, how difficult is that road. Is green energy one of the options, is carbon credits another option. Where are you focusing the evolution of your decarbonization goals?

Maury: Yeah so nothing is off the table.

John: That’s great.

Maury: We certainly are prioritizing really getting our own operational footprint in order first. Driving down as much carbon out of our processes, out of the 4 walls of any of our businesses as our top priority, then moving into some of the other spaces where we have invested in some virtual purchase power agreements. We’ve invested in sort of bulk solar farms where we have helped build them, really trying to make sure then that we focus on expanding the market to renewables, rather than just jumping towards buying recs. For us, the carbon credit and rec market is probably our last step. We’d really like to focus first on expansion of the renewable market first, and so we played had some pretty serious investments there.

I think one of the interesting things we still are challenged with, and we hope the market adjusts a bit in the future, is that as we invest in new clean tech businesses our footprint increases of course. We’re adding new businesses on, and so we take on the environmental impacts of that business, but the net result for the world around us is actually for the good, for an environmental benefit. Where we have not really seen the market shift is how do you calculate that piece of that, how do you look when you’re doing your carbon footprint, how do you think about the net benefit to society while you take on sort of the impact of an increased carbon footprint on your own balance sheets. It’s been an interesting place to play in.

John: Maury, I’m so glad you brought that up because literally I’m walking that highwire myself right now. We recycle at our company almost twenty million pounds of electronics every month. There’s a massive carbon offset that comes with that because it’s much more eco-friendly to recycle every type of metal, everything that comes out of electronics, it’s so much more eco-friendly to recycle them, to mine them from virgin ore, so in our mind, aren’t we supposed to earn credits for all those offsets we create?

Meanwhile, the bigger we get more locations and more volume, more man hours and labor hours, etcetera, etcetera, and more operational hours creates a bigger carbon footprint for ourself, so I don’t think the marketplace has figured out yet how to reconcile those competing, but complimentary factors as well yet, but I think that days to come but it’s a fascinating point. Let’s go back to your point about innovation and investing. How do you and your team, do you have a whole capital markets team underneath you and underneath other executives that are hunting, or searching or receiving incoming inquiries about your investments in the clean tech space? How do you strata those opportunities and innovations, and decide which ones are the right ones for you to be investing in?

Maury: We are a business that really grows by acquisition. We have a long history in that space, and so there is actually a separate team that looks at all of our M&A strategy and investment opportunities, many of which are in clean tech, some fall in other market and thesis areas but there is actually a clean tech division that sits within Cox Enterprises to look at various different opportunities.

One that we’ve made a lot of investment in is controlled environmental agriculture so we’ve invested in a couple of companies there. Bright Farms and Moochie are our 2 biggest plays, where we really can see some great environmental benefit by these controlled environmental buildings allow us to grow healthy leafy greens with no pesticides, with reduced transportation a across the country, you’re able to put them much closer to urban centers, so there’s a lot of environmental benefit, health benefit from the reduction of pesticides, and so we really see that as one of the sort of marquee places that we’re going to invest clean tech, but it’s new for us to be now in farming is a new space for the company, so it’s great there’s a dedicated team really running that shop.

John: I had no idea that you were in the automobile industry till you brought up that whole issue, so I think of Cox and I think of cables, and I think of all the IT and everything that you do and all the infrastructure work, but I don’t think of all the unbelievable ancillary businesses that your company hasn’t gotten themselves involved with, it’s fascinating. Talk a little bit about your Cox Conserves program. I know that’s very important and impactful, and I’d love you to share what Cox conserves does and what the mission is.

Maury: Yeah so this was really back in 2007, I can brag on them because I wasn’t here, so it wasn’t my work. Our chairman at the time Jim Kennedy really pushed the company to think about what does good environmental stewardship look like, and environmental goals were pretty rare at the time. At the company at the corporate sector and so he just really pushed the team at that time to think about where should we be going from an environmental conservation. It was a passion point for him he just really believed in taking care of the environment that, as does our current chairman and Alex Taylor, that this is one of the, societal imperatives of our time and the folks who were here, the engineers who were in enroll at that time said they did as all good engineers would a number of calculations, tracking how they thought the company would grow and what that would mean for reduction, and what good might look like in absence of any of the frameworks that now exists today.

The family lore is that they kept giving these proposals and just kind of getting the head shake know that it didn’t quite feel right, until they finally just said, how about we get to 0? How about the impact is 0 and legend has it that was the answer, and so long before there were these definitions around the goal, we established that as sort of the hallmark, that we would try to have 0 impact on the environment, and so now that the market is shifting and there’s definitions and science-based target initiative and so many other things. We have to continue to keep our eye on that and make sure that we’re keeping up with any new ideas, innovating our own goals with the times, but the ethos really will continue to stay the same, that the idea is to take our fair share out of the market.

John: Understood. How much has been invested in Cox Conserves, and how does that look on a annual basis?

Maury: Yeah it’ll fluctuate annually, but we’ve invested over a hundred and forty million in sustainability and conservation project, so we feel like we’re on track to meet these really aggressive targets and if I can shift a little bit, I think that really great moment allowed us some of the room to set this social impact goal, and so to have now this sort of sister goal around empowering thirty four million people to live more prosperous lives by 2034, we now have parallel paths around 2 of our major principles and our purpose values coming to fruition all in 2034, and that sounds like a random number.

I know for anybody who doesn’t work here, but 2034 is actually our growth target year, so we have business growth objectives understood to hit in 2034, so it was actually very intentional to then marry our environmental and social target, so that as our business grows, we do not lose sight of the kind of steward we want to be in the community and environmental space.

John: If you’ve just joined us, we’ve got Maury Wolfe with us today, the Vice President of Corporate Responsibility and Social Impact at Cox Enterprises. To find Maury and her colleagues and all the impactful work they’re doing at Cox Enterprises please go to www.coxenterprises.com. You talk about the social impact goal of thirty-four million people improving them, helping them improve their lives by 2034. Explain the algorithm and metrics around what you believe is a successful program by the time we get to 2034, of what improving their lives really means. I’m fascinated to understand from you and your team’s perspective, what does that really mean in terms of improvement?

Maury: Yep, so we spend a lot of time thinking about this, because we also don’t want to define what good looks like for somebody else. That’s going to look different between you and me and what our personal aspirations are, so the way we think about it is about removing barriers and removing obstacles that are holding somebody back, so we actually often talk to our colleagues that we see our role here or our goal is that no barrier shall hold anyone back from greatness, and that if we can help remove some of the obstacles, we cannot allow people the freedom to go pursue their version of prosperity.

Now that can also mean where we play in that space, could mean a lot of different things, and one of the things that we have learned and and I believe is that each company can be most successful in the social and environmental space, if they really play to their strengths. If they leverage the skillset that the company has to really focus on programs where they can have an outsized impact, either because they have either from like a risk aversion or because they have the skills and they know how to really impact a lot of change. We spend a lot of time thinking about where our business has those strengths, so that we could focus our efforts in key areas of impact, and so we actually have 6 of them. We have focus on technology access, lifelong education, employment skills, social equity, environmental sustainability of course, because we talked about our investment there and good health, and so when we think about barrier removal, we really focus in those 6 pathways.

We call them our pathways to thirty four and that’s allowed also our teams to think about where to innovate. How to leverage the tools and resources that each of our colleagues has in their individual role to really make a difference in the community, and that’s allowed us to have a greater impact. You asked about methodology, and that’s been an interesting space because unlike carbon accounting, how you measure social impact does not have science. There’s no gap accounting principles for us to lean on so we also have spent a lot of time with a couple of groups, some advisors from EY and some other consultancies as well as a group. An outfit that we partnered with called True Impact that really has helped us both set up the framework for how we would quantify our impact, as well as measuring all of the work that we do with community partners, so true Impact is really interesting. They take all of our in-kind donations to a community partner.

They take the board work, the volunteerism, the cash donations, and they track them all the way through that partner to the outcomes for the nonprofits constituents, so that we’re able to know how our program raised the scores in math and science for girls at Girls Inc. How many kids at our at Boys and Girls Club had access to innovation centers that we provided for them, so we’re really able to start measuring the impact of our programs which has allowed us to track our progress to 34 by 34.

John: That’s wonderful when you think about impact and you think about sustainability, is there an annual report that Cox puts out every year, wrapping it all up into 1 report that then is published and your constituents clients and others out there can see all the important and great work that you and your colleagues are focused on on a daily and yearly basis?

Maury: Yeah, we put out an impact, we call our impact report, which tells all of our great stories in these spaces, but it also covers comprehensively our inclusion, diversity and equity programs. It covers our employment practices so it tells the story of environmental social impact as well as our clearing house for all ESG reporting. What’s interesting is that because we’re private we don’t have a 10K, so this is really voluntary for us, but we feel like it helps provide the authenticity to the market that we’re going to report in line with public companies, so that we can be compared apples to apples and hopefully shine some light on what we think is a leadership.

John: Maury, we talked earlier about private versus public companies. You worked for public companies before in this. Explain your own experience of long-term planning, versus the pressure of analysts and Wall Street and investors and institutional investors and things of that such. Is it more fun where you’re working now, even though you worked for tremendous and great brands before, so none of that has nothing to do with this part of the discussion. It just from a day-to-day and quarter to quarter and year to year work basis. Is this where the fund’s at, at a privately held company compared to a publicly traded company?

Maury: Well, the answer is of course yes, but I do think there is a real distinction and it’s just a different challenge. One really isn’t better or worse, but at public you really have to find the magic around what projects can you get done that meet that quarterly shareholder requirements, so in some ways it will allow a faster return because you’ll get an answer and you can move on, but it does limit the opportunity.

Unless you have a very special leader it limits the opportunity for that long-term thinking, and in this line of work as we talked about earlier, and it’s certainly true for the environmental side, and even more so I think on the social impact side, it is a long-term plan. Being at a private company allows you to take some really big betts about who we want to be, what kind of company we want to be a decade from now, and of course you got to deliver some ongoing successes along the way, but you may not know that you’re going to get all the way there for quite some time, so it’s nice. I’ll just say personally, it’s nice to be able to stretch a different part of my brain and thinking about what kind of projects we want to go chase.

John: I didn’t want to leave out the fact that we were just talking about your social impact report, the annual social impact report. I assume those live on your website, so people can find them, read them and enjoy them. You had the foresight prescient, whatever we want to call it, to choose a career path that had a huge future and upside, besides a huge impactful importance to the world around us. There’s a new generation that now you were I believe much rarer than you were the anomaly back then.

Maury: Oh, they all thought I was crazy.

John: There you go. Until they think you’re a genius, and now so many people, so many of our young listeners around the world watch these shows and email us and want to be the next Maury Wolfe, so if you could talk to your 18 year old self and 22 year old self, and where inflection points happen in in life. What advice would you give this next generation that now understands and knows the importance that yeah, we all got to make a living to pay the bills, keep the lights on, buy the groceries, etcetera, but they actually also now want to make a living, but also make the world a better place and make a difference. How do you counsel the next generation behind you to be ready for these kind of roles, and important roles that you have?

Maury: Yeah, first, I’m just so glad that they are there. We are not going to get this done in our generation of work, so I’m so glad that there’s somebody who’s going to take the reins and do a better job, and have sort of more foresight and wherewithal about it, so I’m grateful that there’s someone sort of pushing us to not get complacent along the way. What I would say is I’m typically like typically everybody’s HR worst nightmare because I think what you’re supposed to say is be a generalist and take the opportunities as they present themselves to you, and that was just not my path.

I was a bit stubborn about really wanting to have a career path that squarely fit in my values and what drove my purpose, and I think that for me in the long run that has worked out, but what that means for me is that every day I wake up and I am really comfortable and excited about the work, even on the hard days, because there’s a north star for me about it that gets you through the downs that anybody has in any career, so my advice would be to stick with that. You’re right, we all have to sort of pay the bills, but to really know what values you want to help drive in the world will help you find a company with similar values, and then you can have flexibility about what the job is, because I think just as these careers didn’t exist when I was starting to think about the job market, there are careers that I think probably don’t exist right now.

This space will continue to evolve and grow. You and I have both just talked about examples of for-profit companies that are value additive from an environmental perspective. There will be people running those and changing those, and so there will be all types of careers, so I would really focus on finding the place that aligns with your purpose.

John: You talked about the hard days and getting out of bed. What gets you the most excited and jazzed? You’re 6 years into it, but as you said you still feel as one of the rookies on the team or guppies on the team where what excites you every day now about the great and important work that you’re doing.

Maury: Yeah there’s 2 things, so while I won’t geek out about how we calculate 34 by 34 anymore, those numbers are representative of people, and actually we just did our update and since 2020, we have empowered 6 million people to live more prosperous lives through our business and our program, and what we do spend a good deal of time on is capturing each of those stories, because we don’t want to lose sight in the data that those are humans and people, and there’s many who touch it.

There’s employees who are driving programs of change and investment opportunities, and then there are recipients in our community who are having a different trajectory, and so that every day reminds me how exciting this space is and how meaningful it can be. The other piece of that I love is that we do not know how we are going to get there. We did not build the goal to empower thirty four million people based on a business as usual path. We looked at all of the barriers that are holding back people in the United States, and then we looked at our 6 pathways and we found that it was about thirty to forty million people facing those particular barriers, and so thirty four million was our best guess at how many people needed the change.

Needed to have some barrier or obstacle removed, and we might not get there but we wanted our goal to be about solving the problem, and not just solving a piece of it, and so we will have to innovate. We will have to find new solutions, and that idea of that constant innovation is just incredibly exciting. Actually it sparked for us a program we have in Atlanta called Techstars for Social Impact, where we actually take a cohort of ten startup companies through every year who are solving social or environmental challenges. These are tech companies, they’re for-profit and we take them through this accelerator program and we get to learn and grow with them about all the new ideas, and innovations that are going to disrupt the business, but solve social and environmental problems. It’s things like that where we get to wake up and think about how do we do this better or differently or grow or scale, that I think is pretty exciting.

John: Well, it’s pretty exciting to have people like you on our show Maury. Thank you for joining us today. You’re always welcome back on The Impact Podcast. For our listeners and viewers to find Maury and our colleagues and all the important and impactful work they’re doing in CSR sustainability, social impact at Cox Enterprises, please go to www.coxenterprises.com. Maury, thank you for the work that you do. Thank you for sharing it with our listeners and viewers today, and thank you for making the world a better place.

Maury: Thank you. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

John: This edition of The Impact Podcast is brought to you by Engage. Engage is a digital booking platform revolutionizing the talent booking industry. With thousands of athletes, celebrities, entrepreneurs, and business leaders Engage is the go-to spot for booking talent, for speeches, custom experiences, Live Streams, and much more. For more information on Engage or to book talent today, visit letsengage.com. This edition of the Impact podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet and your privacy, and is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity focused hardware destruction company in the United States and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com.