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The name of the company founded by a George Mason University master’s student is Etik, and it reflects not only what the firm does, but what the founder and his staff believe in.
“It’s Swedish for ‘ethics,’” says Joel Borgquist. “We never want to forget the base of what we do relates back to ethics, always. We want to see a more trustworthy, better world to live in.”
Joel Borgquist
Borgquist, a 2014 Conflict Resolution and Analysis graduate, is one semester into his postgraduate career at George Mason’s School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution. He and his co-workers, including his wife Krista and classmate Anthony Reo, are committed to making sure nonprofit and for-profit organizations are doing overseas what they say they are doing for their donors, consumers and clients.
Anthony Reo
“We work with organizations that have operations outside of the United States. We work with them on their ethics and how they conduct themselves outside of the U.S.,” he says. The company provides transparency reports and certification that their clients are acting ethically.
“It’s part enterprise and part peacebuilding endeavor,” says Reo, who is attending Mason’s conflict analysis and resolution school in Malta this year. “Etik’s services are designed for productive partnership and generative deterrence—what we have identified as missing in traditional compliance.”
For example, a U.S.-based homebuilder recently engaged Etik to evaluate and certify their “buy-one-build-one” promotion; for every home built domestically, the company promised to build one in a developing nation. Borgquist and Reo traveled to El Salvador and Guatemala to confirm the promise.
Anthony Reo interviews a family in El Salvador.
“We visited both nations, saw the homes were in fact there, got the financial reports and email communications between the builder and the four organizations that built the homes, and met the families living there and saw that everything was followed through,” says Borgquist, who is the founder of Mason’s undergraduate conflict studies organization Agora.
Everything checked out, but Etik found there was room for improvement. “Not problems per se, but we helped them fill gaps that had the potential for problems,” he says.
The firm is in its infancy, but Reo predicts that in 10 years, Etik will be a globally trusted name with hundreds of partners whose ethical practices will have been improved as a result of their work.
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