Is it possible to turn a profit without being greedy? Is it possible to serve your customers without pandering to their basest desires? Are business leaders who embezzle and financially ruin companies and employees inevitable?

"The conventional model has been that the real purpose of business is to maximize the return on shareholder investment," says Jeff Van Duzer, dean of Seattle Pacific University's School of Business and Economics. If you happen to also do some good, and it's good for the bottom line, then so much the better, he says. Van Duzer says SPU's five-year-old Center for Business Integrity can turn that model "upside down" and show that businesses can make money by making their central purpose to serve the community by providing the goods and services it needs and by "providing opportunities for people to have meaningful employment."

Van Duzer will speak at a fundraiser for the Center for Business Integrity at the Steelhead Diner. The idea behind the center was to "drill down on this concept to both develop it more fully in an academic setting, but also promote it to the broader community," Van Duzer says. Steelhead Diner co-owner Terresa Davis, an SPU business school graduate, will host the event.