In early 2026, Veerless’ headquarters city of Minneapolis lived through something most companies aren’t trained to navigate: sustained ICE enforcement activity that touched neighborhoods, families, and in many cases, our clients’ own employees. Leadership teams across the Twin Cities faced a version of the same question, over and over. Do we say something, or do we stay quiet and hope it passes?
We watched too many companies choose silence by default, not because leaders didn’t care, but because nobody had given them a framework for doing anything else.
Silence Is a Decision, Not an Absence of One
Neutrality feels safe. It rarely is. Employees, customers, and communities notice when a company avoids engagement during moments of visible harm, and that noticing carries a cost even when it isn’t immediate. Reputational cost. Cultural cost, when silence signals whose experience counts and whose doesn’t. Trust cost, especially for companies that have already made public commitments to their values. Strategic cost, as organizations that consistently lag behind social reality struggle to retain and recruit the people they need.
The most damaging organizational decisions are rarely the loud ones. They’re the quiet ones, made under moral pressure and justified as temporary or prudent. Silence is never free. The only real question is who bears its cost.
We didn’t want our clients guessing at how to navigate that question alone, so this winter we published two resources built specifically for this moment.
Resource One: A Guide for the Conversation Nobody Wants to Start
Our January edition of The Sheet, “Discussing the Price of Silence with Leadership Teams,” gives employees and managers language for raising these conversations with leadership, without demanding ideological uniformity or a reactive press release.
It reframes the most common leadership objection, “we don’t comment on political issues,” by asking a sharper question: who is being alienated by inaction? It gives managers without formal authority a real role to play, since cultural change rarely starts and ends at the executive level. And it offers leadership teams a way to weigh risk against responsibility that goes beyond avoiding backlash, toward thinking honestly about how a decision will be understood five years from now.
The guide isn’t a call for companies to take a side on every issue. It’s an invitation to stop pretending that silence is neutral, because it never has been.
Resource Two: A Policy Companies Can Actually Use
Conversations matter, but conversations without structure fade the moment the news cycle moves on. So alongside The Sheet, we published a downloadable draft policy on political activism, mutual aid, and civic engagement that companies can adapt for their own workplaces.
The draft policy covers the ground most companies haven’t thought through until they’re already in crisis: a non-retaliation guarantee for employees who engage in lawful political activity or raise concerns about client and project alignment, equal treatment of mutual aid alongside existing volunteer and matched-giving programs, paid time off for civic engagement without a disclosure requirement, and clear expectations for how managers should show up for their teams during periods of collective stress.
None of it requires a company to take a public political stance. What it requires is deciding, in advance and on the record, how the company will treat employees who choose to engage, rather than making that decision on the fly during the next crisis.
Business-Specific Activism Isn’t a Departure From the Work. It’s the Work.
Corporate responsibility has always meant more than emissions targets and supply chain audits. It means showing up for the people inside your company when the world outside gets harder to navigate. A company that has spent years building a values statement, a DEI program, or an ESG report, and then goes silent the moment those values get tested by something political, hasn’t actually built a values-driven company. It’s built a marketing position.
We don’t expect every company to take the same approach we did. Minneapolis is our home, and this crisis showed up on our doorstep in a way that made action feel unavoidable. But every company operates somewhere, and every company will eventually face its own version of this moment. The businesses that navigate it well are the ones that did the thinking before the crisis arrived, not during it.
Where to Go From Here
If you’re building or strengthening your own approach to corporate civic engagement, a few organizations outside of Veerless are doing important work in this space:
- PolicyLink conducts research and advocacy focused on racial and economic equity, with tools that help companies understand the policy landscape shaping the communities where they operate.
- Business Response to Authoritarian Threats (BRTAT) convenes business leaders across the political spectrum to talk honestly about the economic and reputational risks of democratic backsliding, framed around what’s good and bad for business, not partisanship.
- American Sustainable Business Network (ASBN) connects and mobilizes business leaders working toward a more just and sustainable economy, with policy resources for companies figuring out where they stand.
Download The Sheet. Download the draft policy. Adapt both for your own team. Silence has a price. So does the work of deciding, ahead of time, that you won’t pay it.