Rainforest Alliance Inc.

“The Rainforest Alliance has an executive committee consisting of seven directors of the Board of Directors (the "Board"). Pursuant to the Bylaws, the Chair of the Board serves as the Chair of the executive committee. During the time between Board meetings, the executive committee can exercise all powers of the Board that may be delegated in connection with the management of the business affairs and property of Rainforest Alliance, except as restricted by law or the Certificate of Incorporation. The Executive Committee meets at the discretion of the Chair of the Board and reports all actions to the Board.”

“The cfo initially reviews the organization's draft form 990. The general counsel reviews the draft 990 with respect to any questions involving legal matters. The draft form 990 is distributed to each of the organization's officers and directors in advance of filing. Each officer and director is asked to review the draft form 990 and raise any questions or comments. The cfo oversees any revisions before the final form 990 is filed.”

“A copy of our conflict of interest policy, along with a conflict of interest disclosure statement, is furnished to each director, officer and staff member of the rainforest alliance upon undertaking the duties of such office, and annually thereafter for the term of such person's service to the organization. Any disclosures are reviewed by an internal committee made up of the president, cfo and the general counsel, and are reported on a quarterly basis to the audit and risk committee. The audit and risk committee has among its responsibilities the duty of reviewing and making determinations with respect to all transactions, agreements, or arrangements involving directors, officers, and key employees. In addition, a detailed form 990 disclosure statement is distributed annually to members of the committee that awards kleinhans fellowships and the rainforest alliance's directors, officers and key employees. It requests disclosures that are required to be reported on form 990 about any transactions between the organization and those who serve it in various volunteer and paid capacities, and about any transactions among those persons.”

“The organization has developed salary administration guidelines (the "guidelines") that apply in setting the compensation of all of its employees, including its president, officers, and key employees. Under the guidelines, the organization utilizes several salary surveys with similarly sized, international non-profit organizations to ensure that its salaries are within the range of those of comparable organizations. Generally, the midpoint of the organization's salary ranges falls within the salary range averages of comparable non-profit organizations. Performance reviews are then used to establish an individual employee's compensation within the range set by comparability data. The executive committee of the board of directors approves modification of compensation that extends to substantially all employees. The guidelines also require the executive committee to review and approve separately the compensation of the president and cfo, unless such individuals receive a modification of compensation that extends to substantially all employees. To ensure ra pay scales are consistent, fair and competitive, ra regularly engages the mercer group to conduct a global review of its domestic and international pay scales. The most recent review was completed in 2016, with the next review expected to occur in the next fiscal year.”

“The Organization's governing documents and financial statements are available to the public upon written request to management. In addition, the Organization's audited financial statements, 990s, conflict of interest and whistleblower policies, and summaries of all of its policies and procedures to ensure independence, are available on its Website.”

“Founded in 1987, the rainforest alliance's mission is to conserve biodiversity and ensure sustainable livelihoods by transforming land-use practices, business practices, and consumer behavior. We envision a world where people can thrive and prosper in harmony with the land. The core of our approach lies in leveraging market demand for sustainable products to conserve biodiversity and enhance local livelihoods. From large multinational corporations to small, community-based cooperatives, we involve producers, businesses and consumers all along the value chain in efforts to bring responsibly produced goods and services to a global marketplace in which the demand for sustainability is growing steadily. Since our first efforts in central america over 30 years ago, the rainforest alliance has grown into a global innovator of market-based solutions for conservation and economic development, and we are currently working in more than approximately 80 countries. The rainforest alliance is active in multiple sectors - including forestry, agriculture, tourism and carbon/climate - providing technical assistance and certification services to producers, while working with both local enterprises and domestic and international buyers to increase the competitiveness of sustainable business.”

“RA-Cert includes certification, verification and validation activities in the areas of forestry, agriculture and carbon/climate. These services are focused on conserving biodiversity and ensuring sustainable livelihoods. Here are highlights: We launched our Forest Products Legality Verification (FLV) service, which helps companies meet timber regulations for the import and trade of forest products, thereby satisfying market demand for legal products. FLV, which applies to any level of the supply chain and follows a risk-based approach, supplements our Verification of Legal Compliance (VLC) services, which only apply to forestry and timber-harvesting processes. Global land area under sustainable or responsible management was 46 million hectares. In the agriculture sector, the land area of sustainable or responsibly managed palm oil plantations more than doubled, from 58,000 hectares to 119,000 hectares, and the banana sector also grew dramatically, from 119,000 hectares to 207,000 hectares. RA-Cert collaborated with FSC, NEPCon, ANSAB, and other organizations in Nepal to pilot FSC Ecosystem Services evaluations, which are a pioneering step toward expanding our impacts at the landscape level. These evaluations examined soil, water, biodiversity, NTFPs, and carbon values in the mountain ecosystems in Gaurishankar and Charnawati. The Ecosystems Services program is designed to bring economic value to communities for the responsible management of all resources within their forested landscapes. Elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific region, our team completed an FSC forest management assessment for a large forest management enterprise in Papua, Indonesia, covering 139,470 hectares of natural forests. We have made important progress in China, where RA-Cert was recently approved to continue our SAN and FSC certification auditing work, and where the RA Certified seal has been approved for use on RA Certified products that have been grown, produced, and sold in China an application that had not been previously allowed. Currently, nearly 200 agricultural products bearing the frog seal are being distributed, and 22 of these are sold exclusively in China. We won a competitive bid for an international multi-site FSC CoC certificate for Lenzig Corporation, which is headquartered in Austria and has seven mills around the world. The company specializes in textiles and nonwoven fabrics made from cellulose fibers. We saw strong growth in indigenous/first nations community certificates. In the US, the Coquille tribe in Oregon added a new FSC certificate covering nearly 3,500 hectares of forestland, and in Canada, the size of the FSC certificate issued to Nawiinginokiim in northern Ontario was nearly doubled, covering a management area that includes the communities of seven First Nations tribes. Also in Canada, forest-products company Groupe Crte nearly doubled their certificate area (from 409,780 hectares to 711,990 hectares), thanks to a new not-for-profit group certificate holder composed of nine members, including Groupe Crtes Riopel division, Domtar, and two public forest tracts north of Montreal. Chiles Compania Agrcola y Forestal El Alamo, our oldest FSC client in South America, engaged us to certify their agricultural operations, making them our first South American client to hold both FSC and SAN certificates. A few more firsts We began offering UEBT Ethical Biotrade certification, and our first combined SAN-UEBT audit took place in Africa, with the certification of a vanilla producer in Madagascar. We have issued our first SAN certificate for rubber in Africa to HEVECAM in Cameroon. And in Argentina, we completed the first SAN farm audit for lemons.”

“Landscapes and Livelihoods includes certification programs that encourage farmers to grow crops and manage ranchlands sustainably, including environmental protection, social equity and economic viability, to support long term success. The program also works to help small and medium enterprises to harvest and manufacture forest products in a sustainable way and to market these goods to responsible businesses and consumers around the world. Here are highlights: The community forest enterprises with which we collaborate steadily increased their revenue from $117 million in the last quarter of FY16 to $139 million in the third quarter of FY17. We launched the Accountability Framework, a collaborative effort between 10 NGOs, to help companies eliminate deforestation and human exploitation from their supply chains. This initiative has gained great traction and is increasingly recognized as the go-to approach for serious companies. We successfully rolled out training in the 2017 Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN) Standard across 19 areas of origin, and launched a farmer training app to improve producers understanding of compliance and certification. UNESCO and Pearson are using the app as a case study in Initiative for Literacy: Improved Livelihoods in a Digital World, and the Rainforest Alliance RA will be part of project presentations at various international conferences and inform the future work of UNESCO. To scale up our already impactful community forestry efforts, we launched the new Community Forestry Frontiers Initiative, which has garnered the endorsement of and partnerships with leading indigenous groups from Mexico, Central America, South America, the Congo Basin, and Southeast Asia. This new platform will offer a pathway for us to replicate our forestry successes in new frontier areas. In Guatemala, we have successfully evolved our market-based approach to conservation to incorporate landscape-scale sustainability issues, climate resilience, and the strengthening of government agencies. With funding from USAID, we have brought over 1.2 million hectares of forests under sustainable management and reduced more than 1.5 million metrics tons of greenhouse gas emissions. Our support for sustainable natural-resource businesses has generated more than 11,000 jobs and resulted in the sale of over $97 million in responsible products. To further grow this work, we supported the signing of a landmark agreement whereby the World Bank will purchase carbon credits from the Guatemalan government a move that will help to create new markets for ecosystem services. In Mexico, we successfully completed M-REDD+, a flagship initiative to reduce climate change. Through this multi-year project, we improved the capacity of thousands of land managers and government officials to implement climate-smart land management; supported the design of two state REDD+ strategies; ensured robust public participation in the design of climate policies; and created a suite of training and guidance tools for producers, communities, and governments. With the launch of our community forestry activities in Southeast Asia, we are supporting Indonesias rollout of community forestry initiatives at the national level. We also led the development of the Sustainable Districts Platform, which creates pathways to sustainability for smallholder palm producers, and we continued to innovate new climate-smart agriculture approaches in the cocoa sector, in partnership with OLAM and MCAI. In Ghana, we completed a major research project that included an assessment of possible financing mechanisms to channel public and private sector investment into the adoption of climate-smart agricultural practices, and renovation and rehabilitation (R&R) activities on cocoa farms.”

“Markets Transformation helps organizations across the forestry, agriculture and tourism value chains to successfully integrate sustainability into their business practices from sustainable production to sustainable consumption. Here are highlights: Companies like Tesco, Morrisons, Kroger, Aldi, Lidl, Ahold, Whole Foods, and Amazon have all expanded their portfolio of RA Certified products. We successfully launched the new mass balance program for cocoa, which was met by renewed market growth in the sector. McDonalds and Dunkin Donuts have expanded their certified offerings, with Dunkin converting all of its espresso to RA Certified product in 2017. Beyond these companies and other long-term partners (such as Caribou Coffee and Costa), we have forged new relationships with chains like 7-11, Wawa, and even numerous gas-station chain stores, all Joe Coffee, a chain with 14 stores in New York City, launched two RA Certified blends. By narrowing our focus on several key sectors that drive deforestation forest products, palm oil, and rubber we have been able to increase interest in our work and connect with companies that have not yet established their sustainability policies and practices. These efforts have attracted clients like Patagonia, as well as companies that are entering the sustainability field, such as Johnson & Johnson. We conducted training sessions for Tiffanys, which plans to implement our guidance on sustainable sourcing. In early 2017, we launched a new traceability system for the banana sector, which allows us to adequately address several high-risk areas within the banana industry.”

“4D line 4 -Evaluation & Research includes evaluating and communicating program impacts and developing and implementing effective, scientifically-based strategies, programs and projects through monitoring, evaluation, and results-based management that follows industry best practice. Here are highlights: We completed a 2017 cocoa impacts report, entitled Toward a Sustainable Cocoa Sector: Effects of SAN/RA Certification on Farmer Livelihoods and the Environment, which analyzed the performance of 186 certified cocoa certificates, representing more than 170,000 individual farms in Cte dIvoire, Ecuador, Ghana, Indonesia, and Peru. With support from ISEAL, we made progress on the creation of Supporting Evidence Frameworks for both the SAN/RA and FSC systems, to improve our ability to monitor and demonstrate the field level impacts of certification. These initiatives aim to identify ways for auditors to collect better quality and more systematic data on farm and forest level performance. We designed and conducted monitoring and evaluation training workshops for Nescafs Asia, Africa, and Latin America Farmer Connect markets and Nespressos Latin America AAA Markets. The workshops set the tone for long-term partnerships to monitor, evaluate, and report on sustainability risks and performance in these coffee supply chains. We also completed 2017 sustainability performance reports for three Nescaf origins and five Nespresso origins, which helped to illuminate on-the-ground sustainability performance, and facilitated more data-driven management and decision-making in these markets. In partnership with our Sri Lanka- and India-based partners (the Alliance for Sustainable Land Management and Tea Technologies Outsourcing, respectively), we conducted landscape-planning workshops to support the RAs GEF UNEP project Mainstreaming Sustainable Management of Tea Production Landscapes. The workshops convened key government, NGO, and tea-industry stakeholders from across priority tea production landscapes to create a landscape level vision and goals for overcoming the sectors most pressing environmental and social threats. In FY 17, we launched a four-year program to develop a Global Impacts Platform with ISEAL and WWF for certification and certification-like mechanisms that aim to halt deforestation and achieve other sustainability outcomes related to agriculture and forestry supply We developed and shared technical guidelines for farm managers and group administrators to collect and submit certificate location data through the audit application process. This will vastly improve the ability of accredited certification bodies and auditors to assess compliance with certain certification criteria, including 2.1 (no destruction of High Conservation Value areas), 2.2 (no current or recent destruction of natural ecosystems), and 2.3 (no degradation of protected areas). Furthermore, improved location and boundary information will also help farmers better manage their farms and enable group administrators to be more effective in supporting their members.”

“4D Line 5 - Communications is responsible for outreach and education of the public on certification standards, sustainable practices and RAs work around the world and producing and publishing studies focused on forestry, agriculture and certification. Here are highlights: We worked with companies, representing a variety of industries, to support their sustainability-themed marketing outreach. We executed two national cause-related campaigns in the US. We expanded the reach and engagement of all of our communications vehicles, developing our first regional newsletter for donors and achieving continued robust growth in our social-media channels and select regional and/or business blogs. This years annual Follow the Frog global marketing campaign centered on our 30th anniversary. With the involvement of 75 companies in 9 countries, we engaged consumers, employees, and distributors around the world, and launched our 30-Day Sustainability Challenge for the general public our most successful membership email campaign to date. To harness the incredible power of video as a tool for raising awareness about sustainability, we created an internal video production unit and completed our first international shoot on the subject of banana production in Costa Rica. We also produced videos on our forestry work in Appalachia, honey production, our community forestry work in Guatemala, our REDD+ initiative in Mexico, and dozens of micro-videos about our impacts in our many areas of work.”

“The organization had signature authority over bank accounts in the following countries:bolivia, canada, cameroon, costa rica, ecuador, ghana, guatemala, indonesia, kenya, mexico, nicaragua, peru, united kingdom.”

“FUNCTIONAL EXPENSES - OTHER EMPLOYEE BENEFITS - There are certain countries in which Rainforest Alliance operates that mandate employer contributions for pension benefits and for the cost of the health care for employees that are citizens of that country. These are paid as part of the employer taxes and contributions. GIVEN THAT THE AMOUNTS ARE PAID AS PART OF PAYROLL TAXES, BUT REPRESENTS BENEFITS TO THE EMPLOYEES, RA HAS INCLUDED THESE AS EXPENSES AS OTHER EMPLOYEE BENEFITS IN THE STATEMENT OF FUNCTIONAL EXPENSES.”

“OTHER CHANGES IN NET ASSETS - The Organization operates in several countries and incurs foreign translation gains/losses. Included in line 9 is $70,916 of foreign transaction losses.”

“FOREIGN DISREGARDED ENTITIES - The Organization filed a form 8832 for disregarded entity status with respect to all its foreign subsidiaries. The Internal Revenue Service has approved the election for treatment of disregarded entity status on the following entities: Rainforest Alliance LTD (UK) - EIN # 98-1051166 Rainforest Alliance Trading LTD (UK) - EIN # 98-1069583 Rainforest Alliance (Ghana) - EIN # - 98-1051463 Foundation. The Organization has not received a determination with respect to the remaining foreign subsidiaries. The Organization will continue to treat them as foreign disregarded entities within form 990, including the filing of form 8858 for each one.”

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