We’re happy to share that Create Academy is officially a Certified B Corp™. This isn’t just a certification to us. It’s a promise to keep doing what we set out to do in the first place: create something beautiful for the world and the people in it.
What does being a Certified B Corporation™ actually mean?
Certified B Corporations™ get independently assessed by B Lab™, a nonprofit that spends its time checking whether a business actually treats people well, not just whether it says it does. They look at governance, workers, community, environment and customers, and give you a score.
We’re scored 95.2. The median for ordinary businesses that take the assessment is 50.9. We're not sharing that to boast so much as to say that this wasn't a box-ticking exercise. Their independent assessors took a proper look at how we run things, from how we pay people and how we treat instructors to how we think about our impact on the community.
As part of the certification process, we also signed and committed to B Lab's Declaration of Interdependence, which is a nice way of saying we've agreed, alongside a lot of other B Corps™ around the world, that people and place matter as much as profit does, and that we're responsible for each other.
Why we wanted this
Create Academy was born out of a passion for making beautiful films and a desire to share the inside knowledge from creators at the top of their field with people around the world.
Over the years, our members have written in to share that they not only enjoyed our courses but that picking up a course got them through a hard patch. That an hour spent painting, gardening, or baking was the first thing that felt theirs properly in ages. That their half hour with Rita Konig or the Bannermans was becoming an essential moment of calm in their week.
We've had subscribers tell us, in their own words, that our courses helped their mental health. That's not a small thing to hear, and it's shaped how we think about what we're actually making. Not just beautiful content. Content that helps people live a bit more beautifully, and feel a bit more themselves.
We realised that our initial vision, to create courses that are good for the person learning, good for the person teaching, and good for the people and places behind every video, was something we never wanted to lose sight of. Getting certified is our way of holding ourselves to that commitment.
It starts at home
You can't ask a team to make something joyful if the place they work in isn't. So a good chunk of what got assessed was about us internally too: how we look after our own people, how career development works here, how satisfied our team actually is day to day. We've always tried to keep our workplace as creative and as considered as the content we put out, and it was important to us that this certification looked at that just as closely as it looked at our subscribers and instructors.
What actually changes
Honestly, not too much. We'll keep making the same courses with the instructors we admire.
What changes is that we're now formally on the hook for our commitment. B Corps recertify every three years, and the standards keep getting higher. This isn't a plaque on the wall; it's a standard we've agreed to keep meeting and improving on.
Thank you
To everyone who's told us how a course helped them, thank you for trusting us. To the instructors who bring their craft to every lesson, thank you for building this with us. And to our team, who make Create Academy a good place to come to work, this one's yours too.
We're proud to be part of a community of businesses trying to prove you can run things properly and still make something beautiful. This is the start of that for us, and we'll keep sharing how it goes.
You can see our full B Corp™ score and profile on the B Corp Directory.