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Over the last three decades Jeff Mendelsohn has been a social entrepreneur, advisor, and investor in social enterprises, playing a leadership role in impactful movements to align business with positive social and environmental outcomes.
Mendelsohn is founder of LocalCode, a national non profit helping low income communities build wealth and wellbeing through local ownership of real estate. The organization’s flagship affiliate, LocalCode Kansas City, is majority owned by Co-founder Ajia Morris, who lives on KC’s Eastside. Its first two projects comprise 3.5 city blocks and represent a $177 million investment in the community, with long term local ownership built into the business model. Previously, Mendelsohn co-founded Green Valley Farm + Mill, a land stewardship project with an innovative ownership model, enabling farming families with limited assets to be equal partners and own their homes.
In 1998, Mendelsohn founded New Leaf Paper, and spent the next fifteen years leading the shift toward sustainability in the paper industry. His presentation, “Pulp Non-Fiction: Vision for a Sustainable Paper Industry,” was heard across North America, on main stages, in activists headquarters, and in board rooms. With the New Leaf Eco Audit, he pioneered the calculation and communication of environmental and social benefits of purchasing choices. His transparent and collaborative approach to business broke the resistance to change that characterized the highly commodified paper industry. New Leaf Paper proceeded to launch the first 100% recycled paper products for everything from marketing materials to book publishing, culminating with the Canadian Harry Potter books, which catalyzed a global shift in publishing.
Along with 15 other social enterprise leaders, Mendelsohn spent three days in the Anza Borrego desert with the B Corporation founders prior to its launch, helping bring B Corporation into being. Mendelsohn signed the B Corporation Declaration of Interdependence and New Leaf Paper became a Founding B Corporation in 2007. In 2011, New Leaf joined Method and Plum as one of the first Delaware Public Benefit Corporations. Jeff is Henry Crown Fellow of The Aspen Institute.
Personal mission: Design, advise, and co-create businesses and social institutions that bring out the best in human nature. Align human behavior with a sustainable, abundant, just, and beautiful world.
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