From Indian Villages To West Elm Shelves: Handmade Crafts Go High-End

This fall, Secretary of State John Kerry stood at a lectern with a speech and an apple. He wasn’t planning to snack, although the red, round fruit looked as he noted, “beautiful.” It was a souvenir from Kazakhstan, made from local wool by artisans in Almaty, and just the right prop to introduce the idea that the world is hungry for crafts.

Once limited to village markets or tourist shops, handmade goods can now be sold to anyone, anywhere, he noted. Promoting these purchases, Kerry added, has the potential to improve the lives of the individuals who make them.

“Consumers today care more and more about where something comes from, who produced it, under what conditions did they produce it,” he said.

That may help explain why an increasing number of stores have added artisan wares to their shelves and sites. That $2,300 rug with a faded floral pattern at West Elm? The $50 picture frame made of bone at Bloomingdale’s? Both handcrafted by artisans in India.

They are contemporary designs, styled for modern American home decor. Yet they are made using age-old techniques — ones that had been dying out, largely because in an era of mass production and low-as-you-can-go prices, these time and labor-intensive practices couldn’t compete.

The same qualities that once seemed to doom these goods are now making them more appealing to a new audience. A growing number of Americans, says Tori Mellott, senior editor at Traditional Home, are looking for something that’s got a human touch behind it: “We live in a world of plastic and screens. We want something personal.” And products that can both support craftspeople and be practical for the customer pack the ultimate “double punch.”

Photo Courtesy of Good Earth.

 

Read the full story at NPR.com.

How Do Children End Up as Child Soldiers?

Ishmael Baeh was 11 when his country, Sierra Leone, fell into a brutal civil war. At 12, he was separated from his family and abducted by a government militia that trained him to kill and kill often—in the most inhumane ways possible. In his memoir, A Long Way Home, Baeh wrote that killing became “as easy as drinking water.” The savagery continued till UNICEF intervened and took Baeh and other child soldiers away from their commander, offering rehabilitation and a life free from guns.

 

Some 300,000 children around the world have been swept up into a life of violence, according to UNICEF. They are used as instruments of war; boys are trained in combat, and young girls are forced into marriage or sexually exploited.

 

In 2002, 159 countries signed an international treaty, the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which prohibits the involvement of children under 18 in conflict. As a result, crimes pertaining to child soldiers can be tried in the International Criminal Court—as in the case of Dominic Ongwen, a commander of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, who was abducted at 10 by the LRA and forced to fight.

Read the full story at TakePart.com

How World Bicycle Relief Plans On Funding A Million Bicycles In Africa

In 1987, at 23, FK Day co-founded what would become one of the largest bicycle parts companies in the world, SRAM. Last year, they had over $500 million in revenue.

In 2005, he began building his next venture: a social enterprise that sells (and gives) bicycles to folks in Africa. In 5 years, he estimates, they could be looking at giving and selling, collectively, 1,000,000 bicycles on the continent.

FK Day (left) on a field visit.  Photo Courtesy of World Bicycle Relief.

Unlike other philanthropists, Day wants to make World Bicycle Relief, the non-profit, completely self- sustainable. What does that mean?

“There’s no reason we should have to be fundraising in the future,” he says in a phone interview from Chicago where SRAM is headquartered.  He wants the for-profit arm, or the the social enterprise, to finance World Bicycle Relief’s non-profit projects.

In the social sector, there has been an intense debate (and divide) between for-profit and nonprofit ventures.  The former come with revenue streams; the latter rely on fundraising.  Both parties are quite passionate about which one is the ‘right’ way to go.

World Bicycle Relief presents a hybrid approach– selling bicycles to co-ops and individuals, which can help the finance charitable programs for school kids and healthcare needs.

A farmer transport milk via bicycle — one of World Bicycle Relief’s programs to help dairy co-ops move more efficiently.  Photo Courtesy of World Bicycle Relief.

Currently, the organization is donating and selling about 300,000 bicycles, cumulatively.  But in five years, that could be closer to a million, Day says.

Read the full story at Forbes.com

When And How To Scale: DC Startup At Crossroads

A successful startup, TechChange is wrestling with the question of scale – be it in depth or breadth.  When should an enterprise scale and how?

TechChange is a DC-based for-profit online education company.  Think edtech for the development industry.  They train NGOs, the World Bank, and UN agencies on how to use technology for rural health care, delivering aid, mapping disasters, and dealing with humanitarian crisis. It’s part of an emerging industry termed “tech for good,” empowered by the expansive reach of cell phones in the developing world.

Nick Martin, a former web developer, is the founder of TechChange.  With friends Will Chester and Chris Neu, who quickly turned into colleagues as CTO and COO, respectively, Martin bootstrapped TechChange in 2010 with $150,000.  In 2013, they had a gross revenue of just under $500,000.  This year, Martin wants to double that, striking near the $1 million mark.  With nine full-time staff and about a dozen contractors, TechChange would be classified as a small business.

Read the full story at Forbes.com.

Paul Polak Shares Tips For Finding ‘The Business Solution To Poverty’

Paul Polak was a social entrepreneur before it became sexy to be one. Polak first joined the global community of “do-gooders” in 1981 as founder of iDE, a social enterprise that pioneered foot-powered pumps for poor farmers in Southeast Asia. The rudimentary irrigation technology has reportedly reached 19 million farmers in the world, thanks to iDE’s efforts. Polak went on to create D-Rev, the Bay Area-based design company that concocts new designs (on a budget) for the “other” 90%, he says.

Polak is 79 years old but still zipping the globe to deliver electricity, water, and other basic needs to the world so-called “bottom billion.” His latest book, The Business Solution to Poverty, co-authored with non-profit guru Mal Warwick, looks at the nitty gritty of the social innovation space.

Polak spoke with Esha Chhabra at his Denver residence about the new book, the need to scale, and the imperative changes needed in the sector to get real results.

What do you hope to achieve with this second book, The Business Solution to Poverty?

I want to create a global movement to end poverty for 2.7 billion two-dollar-a-day people. It takes off where the first book, Out of Poverty, left off. It addresses the problem of how to reach scale by creating a new breed of frontier multinational. In the book I describe every practical step required to create a new big business that has three goals: to transform the livelihoods of at least 100 million two-dollar-a-day customers, to generate annual revenues of at least $10 billion, and to earn attractive enough profits to bring in commercial global investors.

What is your advice to people before they launch a business?

Over 25 years in starting and running iDE, I learned that the first step is to talk to people as customers rather than recipients of charity, and to find out what their needs, preferences, and aspirations for the future are. Then you build the technology and the business strategy around what you learn. The process of learning shapes what you do in designing the technology and operating the company.

At what point should a company scale?

At the point at which you have the first idea to do something. You don’t scale anything by creating a project and then tacking scale on the end of it. You accomplish scale by keeping scale in mind from the beginning. I won’t touch anything unless it has the potential—if successful—to reach 100 million two-dollar-a-day customers. That means that you have to do the winnowing process at the very beginning.

To reach 100 million customers, you really need a problem that affects a billion potential customers, because a realistic target is to reach 10 percent of the market. So you start thinking—and it really is a question of thinking differently—what are the problems that have a billion potential customers? Well, there are a lot of them: there are a billion people who don’t have access to safe drinking water, electricity, affordable nutritious foods, education. There are just under a billion people who need eye glasses but don’t have them. There are probably a billion people who need crop insurance—it can be as specific as that. And the list goes on and on.

When you pick a problem, you plan from the beginning to ultimately reach a scale of 100 million. In my case, I see that happening over a 10-year process.

Do you collaborate with non-profit organizations?

The central operating style is to run everything as a for-profit business, but we will work with other organizations.

For example, in the drinking water business, part of the issue is public education: people in the village have to be brought up to speed on the relationship between drinking bad water and illness. For now, we’re trying to cover that deficit through for-profit, blitz marketing approaches. But in the future, if there are customers we can’t reach by the commercial method, we might work with granted non-profits who help with public education—we’re not against bringing in organizations that can help reach that market.

The question is: what kind of market penetration do you want to reach? We’re shooting for 50 percent; we’re able to reach 30 percent now. Maybe to reach the last 20 percent we’ll need some collaboration with non-profits.

What changes do you want to see as social enterprise evolves?

There are a lot of problems with social enterprise. It’s sort of like saying ‘sustainability’ and ‘green’—it becomes popular and loses all meaning.

One of the biggest problems is that there is a huge tendency for young people to be attracted to self-congratulatory conferences and incubation processes that help them make elevator pitches, write business plans, and market what they’re doing. But unfortunately, it often takes them away from doing the grunt work that’s needed to start a business on the ground.

I think it’s backward. Unfortunately, the charity model is based on having good marketing to raise money to support the charity, and that often puts the cart before the horse. The non-profit development organizations that are successful know how to market, but they often are weak in making it actually work in the field.

I would like to see social entrepreneurs start by going to where the action is, talking to the people who have the problem, listening to what they have to say, and doing the grunt work in the field. And then coming back and improving their skills at elevator pitches.

 

This story is written by Esha Chhabra and Ben Thurman, brought to you in partnership with Dowser.org, a media organization that reports on social innovation, focusing on the question: Who is solving what and how?  This was originally posted on Forbes.com.

Chocolate from the Congo: A Sweet Business Model

This originally appeared in the BBC.

Most couples who get divorced want to get as far away from each other as quickly as possible. Joe Whinney and his ex-wife Debra Music decided to take a different path – they went into business together.

Mr Whinney, 46, and Ms Music, 51, run Theo Chocolate. Based in Seattle, they make award-winning, organic, Fair Trade chocolate bars.

Mr Whinney founded the company in 2006, and had no hesitation in bringing in his former spouse to look after sales and marketing.

At that time they had been divorced for seven years following a five-year marriage.

Mr Whinney, chief executive, says: “I asked Debra to help out part-time with sales while we were starting up the factory, because I knew that she wouldn’t let anything fall through the cracks. I trust Debra completely, and as the company grew so did her responsibilities.”

He adds that while they still occasionally row, it has a positive outcome.

“In so many ways we are totally different people. The tension created often leads to successful, passionate, and functional business practices.

“During our most heated conflicts we both know that we are safe and that the outcome will work.”

Ms Music agrees, describing their working relationship as both “challenging and rewarding”.

“There can be friction between us, [but] at this point in the life of the company, and after much trial and error, we have learned how to ensure that friction generates creativity, innovation, and constructive dialogue,” she says.

Mr Whinney first became interested in high-quality chocolate when, as a young man in the late 1980s, he and a friend sailed from the US to Honduras and Belize in Central America.

 

He agreed to volunteer for a small conservation foundation in the region, helping to harvest cocoa pods.

“They handed me a shotgun and rice sacks,” recalls Mr Whinney about his first day on the job. “I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with either.”

However, he soon learned how to do the work, and also seeing first-hand how the business and social impact side of the chocolate industry were intertwined.

Fast forward a few years, and now back in the US, Mr Whinney decided to become a cocoa broker, hoping to import high-quality cocoa at a fair price.

So he wrote letters to 12 of the biggest US companies procuring cocoa beans at the time.

One of the companies, Brooklyn-based CocoaLine, replied, and in 1993 Mr Whinney brought the first shipment of certified organic cocoa to the US.

But he says he was still frustrated. He wanted to create his own chocolate company, one that went from “farm to bar”, ensuring full transparency and fair wages for the farmers. And so the idea for Theo Chocolate was born.

Today the company employs 95 people, and its chocolate bars and other products – which are all made at its base in Seattle – continue to grow in popularity across the US.

For the rest of the rest, please go to BBC Business.

Group Lets Indian Professionals Pitch In

Udaybhai Jadva (left) and ICA ambassador Rajan Saxena visit with Priyanka, part of a group of children from the slums of India who had the opportunity to perform on tour in the United States this year through the Ekatva project. Photo: Unmesh Sheth, Courtesy Unmesh Sheth/ICA

 

It’s a professional organization that’s been in existence for 43 years and has made $5 million in charitable grants, but ICA – Indians for Collective Action – is still pretty much an unknown in the Bay Area, its former president says.

But that may be changing as more young professionals decide to get involved.

“Nowadays you see so many young people who want to make an impact, who want to reconnect with their South Asian roots after being brought up in the Bay Area,” says Bhupen Mehta. “But changing the mind-set of older people, people in my age group, to give back has been much harder.”

That concept of service is at the core of ICA – an association of Bay Area professionals who have established careers in technology and business but want to make a social impact, too.

So they gather monthly to assess social projects, primarily in India, in need of funding and support. Among the projects the group has helped support are women’s empowerment communities, low-cost prosthetics units, annual health camps and care for senior citizens.

Making a difference

ICA is, in many ways, a sort of LinkedIn for social impact in the Bay Area, says current President Unmesh Sheth. It’s not merely the funds that they dole out, but also the massive network that they’ve built over the past four decades that creates an impact.

For Sheth, ICA is not only about supporting grassroots organizations back in India but also about capturing the talent in Silicon Valley and applying it to new challenges.

“For several years, I was pondering over the wisdom, value and practical impact of my own involvement in technology and management to society, just to come up empty,” says Sheth. Now, as leader of ICA, he is asking a different question: “Can we use (our) skills to empower the economics of global poverty?”

Abhay Bhushan, another former president of ICA, aimed to do just that. A longtime employee of Xerox, he had a desire to blend social impact with his everyday working career after a stint in 1978 when he took a “social service leave” from the company to learn about rural development in his native India.

He returned to work with an outlook of “creative simplicity” – the genesis of many rural innovations. For Bhushan, the focus became making an environmental impact – personally and professionally.

He made small modifications in his own life; riding a bicycle instead of using a car and generally becoming more environmentally aware. He also got Xerox to start thinking more about environmental impacts, helping lead the company to decrease energy usage, recycle more and consider the materials it used, all long before it became hip to be eco-friendly.

Other notables involved in ICA include Paul Polak, who was instrumental in building San Francisco’s D-Rev (Design Revolution), whose mission is to improve the lives of people living on less than $4 per day. Polak has spent considerable time in the farming villages of Southeast Asia, devising tools such as water pumps for farmers that are low-cost and effective.

‘Connecting the dots’

In 2001, ICA spawned the better-known America India Foundation (AIF), a Bay Area-based network that also works on development projects in India, funded by the South Asian community in the United States.

Over the past decade, AIF has garnered much media attention and connected with high-profile individuals such as former President Bill Clinton through the Clinton Fellowship for Service. ICA, meanwhile, has remained relatively low-key, “connecting the dots and keeping no overhead,” says Mehta.

Still, ICA has worked with massive grassroots organizations and social entrepreneurs such as Jaipur Foot, which makes low-cost prosthetics for the disabled and the injured, and SEWA, the Self-Employed Women’s Association, which has more than 12 million members spanning nine states of India.

Working with some of these grassroots organizations has led Sheth to make one conclusion: Giving out more money doesn’t mean more impact.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Group-lets-Indian-professionals-pitch-in-4013370.php#ixzz2V5jyWagg

Weekly Roundup: Busan, Durban, LA OWS, and Forbes

December 2nd, 2011 12:14 PM

By Esha Chhabra

This originally appeared in Dowser

More big meetings, more empty promises?

Photo Courtesy of Guardian:  Jeon Heon-Kyun/EPA

• Busan: The Fourth High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness.

The aim: a partnership for global development and aid effectiveness that has big players like China and India on board. The hope: that the forum could establish a set of unifying principles for aid based on effectiveness, transparency and accountability. Early on the UK tried to pull the  Chinese into the agreement, given their economic interests and activity in Africa.  But, China refused. At the last minute the delegates came to an agreement – but on very wishy-washy terms that don’t hold the Chinese and Indians to the same terms as other countries.  As the  Guardian  reported, the document read: “The principles, commitments and actions agreed in the outcome document in Busan shall be the reference for south-south partnerships on a voluntary basis…”

One of the other big problems the forum wanted to address is the fragmentation of aid that has made delivering and using aid effectively a big challenge.  Rwanda, for example, called for an end to tied aid, aid that must be spent in the donor country. They’d rather have full ownership of the funds to be disbursed as efficiently as possible.  Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.

Villagers shelter as floodwaters submerge houses and fields in Assam, where nearly a million people were displaced by extraordinary floods in 2010. Photograph: Str/EPA

• Durban: The UN Convention on Climate Change

As Durban, the next climate change negotiation conference, gets going, frustration  is already building with a group of developed nations, including the US, Canada, and Japan, who are not interested in new legal negotiations before 2015 when the current round of negotiations will expire.  The US, and now Canada, are staying away from the Kyoto Protocol, which sets binding targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And new players like China and India are only adding to the headache by delaying hopes of a global consensus. At the Guardian Amy Goodman writes passionately about why Durban may be the last chance for Kyoto and why change must start happening now.

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Photo Courtesy of LA Times: (Al Seib, Los Angeles Times / November 30, 2011

Occupy Wall Street Loses Ground in LA

The LAPD wiped out remaining protesters in one quick sweep in the middle of the night.  The LATimes  reports that with an “overwhelming use of force” the protesters stationed outside LA City Hall for the last two months were circled and pressured into fleeing, a move that had been in the works for several weeks now.  The breaking up LA’s OWS base happened the same night as a similar scenario played out in Philadelphia.  But does the shut down of these physical camps mean dwindling support for OWS?  The LATimes explores, signaling that yes, numbers may have decreased somewhat.

Charlie Rose analyzed the movement, asking two New York journalists if OWS still has steam, if they can fight the naysayers who called them a leaderless, mission-less group, and how technology has fueled this movement.  Watch the interview here.

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FORBES ranks Social Innovation

Known for its lists on millionaires, FORBES created its first Top 30 Social Entrepreneurs List  with a special feature on the new trend of investing in social ventures.  Does the list do justice to the field? Check it out and let us know in the comments.

Photo Courtesy of Forbes

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More Interesting Reads

• Time’s Martha White writes about the weakening of the American Dream – can it make a comeback in a more modest form?
• And Inc. asks why many young entrepreneurs are going elsewhere, especially back home with their ideas.  Is this the beginning of a brain drain for the US?
• FT’s Sarah Murray looks at social enterprise in Latin America, a part of the world that’s finally getting more resources, attention, and the expertise it needs to deliver on more “good” projects.
• Duke University is richer this week.  The Gates Foundation granted the University $37 million for its projects on HIV/AIDS.
• Guardian’s Sarah Boseley writes on World AIDS Day about the implications of the collapse of the Global Fund.
• The Telegraph writes about converting non-givers to givers in the UK.  Read how the richest of the UK are learning about the new ways of giving; this isn’t your grandpa’s philanthropy.

Testing a Start-up 8,000 Miles From Silicon Valley

 

After being founded at UC-Berkeley, NextDrop is pioneering a

text-message water-alert system in Hubli, India.

By Esha Chhabra |  @esh2440   | Dec 2, 2011

This originally appeared in Inc.

In India, water brings uncertainty: when it will arrive, how it may arrive, whether it will arrive.

Anu Sridharan, a young entrepreneur from California, tells the story of a woman in India who would have had to miss a wedding to wait at home to collect water, if it hadn’t been for the service provided by Sridharan’s new company, NextDrop.

“She could send her brother home to collect water, because she got our text message telling her that the valve had been opened,” Sridharan says.

Sridharan’s company, NextDrop, is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, but is being tested halfway around the world, in the “small” town of Hubli, India, population: one million.

Going instantly global is a tall order for a little company with a big mission. NextDrop was born in the classroom two years ago when a public policy student and a civil engineer collaborated in a class on mobile-based solutions. The idea was refreshing; the need was sincere. Finding a partner on the ground was a logical first step.

NextDrop found Hubli, which has a cutting-edge city government with a utility board that could not afford the hefty sum of $40 million to provide 24/7 water (something, in fact, no city in India provides). Despite that, Hubli wanted to introduce some transparency and efficiency to its limited water-delivery system.

NextDrop’s solution was to “use humans as sensors,” Sridharan explains. “This could be bigger than water. We’re not limiting ourselves.” The idea starts with water but it could be applied to electricity, other utilities, and even pensions, she says with enthusiasm.

Turns out, water makes an appearance only once a week or even just once in two weeks in Hubli. “Here people don’t have large storage devices so they can’t hold water for much longer. So when it comes, it’s important that they’re at home to collect the week’s supply,” Sridharan clarifies.

That’s where NextDrop comes in. The utility board sends out a text notifying residents that the water was being turned on. A live dashboard keeps track of the water flow (with a little help from Google). And individuals send a message back or call to confirm that indeed the water is trickling in. That feedback helps identify any leaky pipes and breakages along the way. In tech terms, that’s referred to as crowdsourcing to collect data.

“Hubli is one of the most innovative local governments in India,” Sridharan says. “They’re even looking at introducing e-billing to their customers. So, we can learn from them as they can learn from us. It’s a two-way street to share information. And at the end of the day, I think they want the same thing as well: to just provide a really good service.”

In order to text the service, a small enterprising team of students at UC-Berkeley traveled to the region. The pilot only worked with about 60 families, but 82 percent said they liked the service and would be willing to pay a nominal fee of five rupees a month for it.

In recent months, the service has expanded to more than 1,000 registered customers, 60 of whom are paying for the service. Sridharan has stationing herself in Hubli for the next few years to see if NextDrop can take that idea and turn into a full-fledged operation by 2013, servicing all of Hubli’s residents—only a million, remember.

NextDrop is funded by a $375,000 grant from the Knight Foundation as well as support from Vodafone Foundation and exposure at Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s prized enterprise incubator. Last month, it was selected as one of the finalists for Intel’s Global Challenge at the University of California-Berkeley.

The market will tell them if it’s a worthwhile service. And that’s what has drawn Sridharan to building a for-profit social enterprise. Behavior change, she says, is the toughest part of building this enterprise.

“When you’re working with technology, you’ve got to get people to think about using that technology in a different way.”