How to find and work on your Foundation Requirements

Foundation Requirements contain the fundamental eligibility requirements for B Corp certification. In this section of B Impact, you will assess your eligibility, evidence meeting the B Corp Legal Requirement, and complete a Risk profile. While Eligibility and Risk must be completed before Submission, the Legal Requirement section should be completed as early as possible to avoid potential delays.

It is critical to make sure all the Foundation Requirements are addressed to ensure that B Lab has all the information regarding your eligibility in order to start the self assessment. 

The Foundation Requirements can be found by navigating to the Home page and selecting Assessment from the left sided menu and the drop down option Foundation Requirements. This will show Eligibility: Ineligible Industries and Practices, Legal Requirements and if applicable, the Risk Profile. 

Once you have submitted your setup experience and a Scope section is generated, you will see the Foundation Requirements on your home page. Select "Get started" on the Foundation Requirements card. 

Like other parts of the setup experience, you can complete it over time, rather than in one moment. Track your progress on the right side of the page.

Eligibility: Controversial Industries and Practices:
This section will have questions that relate to all entities in scope of the Assessment. You can learn more information about controversial industries and practices in the guide How to meet FR1.2. On the right side of the page you can track your progress.
 

When question responses are saved, it will indicate a check mark on each set of questions and that the progress of the questions is addressed on the right status card.


Legal Requirements section
All companies can see what entities are in scope of their certification, and which entities have to meet the legal requirement under the Setup: Scope section. The list of entities that have to complete the legal requirement will also appear on this page under the Foundation Requirements.
 

The Legal Requirements section will indicate what actions a company has to take to meet the legal requirement, and if a legal pathway is available for the specified entity, you are required to provide evidence for review.

Before evidence can be provided, select the entity type for each listed company to see its legal requirement. Until this information is inputted, you will not be able to upload  the required evidence.

Once this information is provided, the evidence upload card will be ‘unlocked’ and updated to “Action required” allowing you to add a document that indicates the legal requirement for your entity type is complete. Please note, companies can only upload one document per Entity required. If you uploaded the incorrect file, you may delete it and upload a new document.

Once evidence is uploaded, the status will be set as “Pending Review” until a verifier reviews the document. 

You have completed this section when the status indicates either No immediate Action or Validated, enabling you to proceed in the certification process.

If applicable, complete the Risk profile

The Risk profile is a tool that assesses the business across four key aspects related to business risk: employees, productions, operations and reputation.The Risk profile is only available for companies with company sizes higher than Micro. Learn more about the Risk profile and why it is important for certification and how to manage negative impact through the foundation requirements

Once all questions are completed, the status card on the right will track the team member and date completed. 

A status card will indicate any updates to the assessment made for your company, based on the risk assessment. If there were no changes made, this card will not show up on the page.

There will be up to two cards:
The top card will be the list of identified risk flags.
The following card will be a list of identified safe zones.

You are able to edit your responses in the Risk Profile easily at any time before assurance begins. If you have submitted your setup application, any changes to the responses can result in changes to the applicable sub-requirements, but please update them if the responses to the Risk Profile have changed.