Our Social Responsibility
At Ikaria Design Company, we are in the alignment business. We create solutions that help our customers live free from chronic pain, and we apply that same principle to our corporate impact by taking a preventive, upstream approach to social and environmental change.
We want to break down the physical, mental, and societal barriers that keep us in conventional sitting positions and make the spaces where we work and live more active and healthy.
The ultimate goal of each Ikaria Design Co product is to create living and working spaces that encourage more movement throughout the day. We aim to challenge the outdated assumptions about what ergonomic furniture needs to look like with unique designs. Products that don’t interfere with workflow, but improve it, and go hand-in-hand with active and healthy lifestyles by promoting frequent movement, more natural sitting and sleeping positions, and better posture.
Our purpose is to advance systemic wellbeing by committing 10% of our annual net profits to targeted initiatives in Climate Action, Education, and Social Justice. Just as we align spines, we actively build and fund strategic partnerships that create long-term, measurable health and environmental resilience for the communities we serve.
Climate Change
From fires in the US and Australia, drought and famine, to species loss globally, the effects of climate change are devastating economies, communities, and the ecosystems we share with our fellow creatures. Though developed nations are the biggest contributors to global warming, the steepest price is being paid by people in developing nations. The path forward for modern humans to live equitably with our kin has been known now for decades. We have the technology to do it. Resolve among those who can change policy is sorely lacking. Ikaria Design Company supports organizations working towards a carbon negative future, climate justice, reversing deforestation, and economic equality. Through our product offerings and lifestyle education, we are encouraging folks to live and work with less furniture, lengthening the years that we can stay mobile and inspired, in better shape to care for the natural environment in our midst.
Education
Just as our journey through the education system sets us up for sedentary lives, our schooling systems are mirrors of inequality in our society. We support initiatives aimed at eliminating opportunity gaps hindering students of color, girls in STEM, and increasing movement and activity in the classroom. An example of a project in this area is the ButtOn Chair initiative. We help produce and distribute an open-source chair designed by Dr. Osler, an academic trauma surgeon and research epidemiologist, that helps keep students active in the classroom.
Social Justice
Economic inequality is a global disease held in place and spread through the social viruses of white supremacy, human caste systems, and binary notions of gender and misogyny. As an organization, we understand that the very culture through which we operate our business can perpetuate this if left unchallenged. We welcome feedback about our blindspots. We also welcome learning about vendors, suppliers, and networks with whom we can partner to be more effective in bringing about positive change for LGBTQIA+ communities around the world, for the Black Lives Matter movement, and for addressing economic and environmental racism. We give direct support to unionizing efforts, and to organizations such as Southern Poverty Law and the Movement for Black Lives. We are proud of the role one of our local upholsterers had in setting up our county's bail bond fund, offering relief to neighbors being victimized by our criminal justice system.