Field States is committed to respecting the human rights of everyone affected by our business — our workers, our clients and their communities, our suppliers and partners, and the residents of the places our work touches. We treat all people with dignity and respect, and we seek to identify, prevent, and address adverse human-rights impacts connected to our operations and value chain. This commitment is grounded in the standards of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the International Bill of Human Rights, and applied at a scale appropriate to our size and risk profile.
Field States is a small, Portland-based urban strategy practice with a short value chain that includes professional labor, software and digital services, a leased office, and occasional travel. We do not operate in, or source materially from, high-risk sectors or geographies. Our most salient human-rights responsibilities concern the people closest to us: our own workers, the subcontractors and partners we engage, and the communities affected by the projects we advise.
We take those responsibilities seriously because our work shapes places where people live and work. Adaptive Urbanism is, at its core, a practice concerned with community context – and the majority of our work is explicitly oriented toward just outcomes for affected residents.
In our workplace. Our Employee Handbook establishes binding protections that operationalize this commitment: equal employment opportunity; prohibitions on discrimination and harassment across all protected classes; reasonable accommodation for disability, religion, pregnancy, and survivors of domestic violence; an equitable-pay policy under the Oregon Equal Pay Law; and full compliance with Oregon and federal labor, leave, and safety law. All workers are paid well above a living wage, within a 1.25:1 pay ratio.
Freedom to raise concerns. We maintain a formal complaint and grievance procedure (consistent with the Oregon Workplace Fairness Act) that allows any worker to report concerns – including about the Founder directly – without observing a chain of command. We strictly prohibit retaliation against anyone who raises a good-faith concern or participates in an investigation, and we do not use agreements that would prevent a worker from discussing discrimination, harassment, or assault.
In our value chain. We engage subcontractors and partners who share our commitment to lawful, fair, and respectful treatment of people, and we expect them to uphold equivalent standards. Where we identify a risk or concern, we address it directly with the partner involved.
In our client work. We bring a stakeholder lens to the projects we advise, accounting for community context and the interests of affected residents alongside commercial and regulatory considerations.
Accountability for this commitment rests with the Founder, with oversight from the Advisory Group. We review this commitment annually alongside our Oregon benefit report, and we will deepen our due diligence if our size, sector exposure, or value chain changes materially.
Questions or concerns regarding this commitment may be raised with Field States leadership through the grievance procedure described in the Employee Handbook.