Blog Entries
Thoughts on the 2009 SERI Summit
This is a blog post written by Vanessa Danziger, a student at Brown University
First, I was thrilled to attend the SERI summit. It was an inspiration simply to be in a room with so many like-minded, forward-thinking people. I was surprised by the size of the conference and the quality of the speakers. As someone who is excited about social improvement and working for the betterment of people, it is easy to feel anxious that you are fighting a daunting battle with a two-sizes-too-small army. However, events like this remind me that I am not alone in the pursuit of a better life for the global community.
As for specific speakers or projects that I found particularly inspirational, I would say the speaker from Ashoka and the speaker from the Hippo Water Roller stuck out as two of the most striking. Throughout the day, I discussed the Hippo Water Roller with almost everyone I spoke to. I was struck by how simple the idea was and how significant of an impact something so simple could have. It was simultaneously inspirational and depressing to realize how much of an improvement such an simple idea can make but had taken so long for the discovery to be made and the change implemented. As for Ashoka, it was nice to finally put a face and personality to the organization. I have long been interested in Ashoka, but to hear someone speak in person about the organization made the work tangible and highlighted the human aspect. The effect was so strong in fact that later that afternoon I sent an email to Ashoka inquiring about potential internship opportunities after I graduate. In an ideal world, I could be a member of the team on the ground in a third world country searching for the social entrepreneurs who are making social change happen in their communities.
If I left with one idea, it was a lesson one of the speakers left us with: the guide to a fulfilling life is to learn, earn and return. I'm working on learning right now, we'll see if I can earn, but I will no doubt return anything and everything I have.
The 2nd Roundtable A: Using the Social Enterprise Network and Resources to Advance Your Goals
This roundtable filled up rather quickly, with some attendees standing in the back for the duration of the session. Andy Cutler from Cutler & Co. moderated the panel and made sure that introductions were kept short and that we got to the roundtable portion with plenty of time to have attendees ask questions.
SERI's 1st Roundtable B
The first of the two roundtables I attended was called “Using Social Ventures for Skills Training & Job Creation”. While this could be seen as a very relevant and poignant topic, the floor was opened to the rest of the room early on in the session to ask questions, which I always find to be way more valuable of an experience for attendees. The panel for this roundtable had a nice range of non-profit leaders in
SERI's Plenary Session
If you’re reading this blog then you most likely already know what social entrepreneurship is but in case you don’t know or are looking for a succinct way to explain it to others, I find that the definition “business for the greater good” is both concise and accurate.
social Purpose Businesses -- Session 2 - Part 2
(Note: -- indicates participant, all panelist comments noted by initials. See part 1 to learn who's who.)
RL: Two interesting network emerging. BALLE - the Business Alliance for Living Local Economies - that Doug helped found - and NESEA-RI, the Rhode Island chapter of the North East Sustainable Energy Association, that meets once a month at the Everyman Bistro.
What are some must-read or key websites for you?
JA: I read Kunstler years ago, but I started to get sick of the doom and gloom. So I got away from those kind of books, but David Orr's Down to the Wire got me back to it.
Orr thinks that climate change is all about politics. He's very hard on optimists like me. So after that reading I needed something positive. So I went back to Stuart Brand Whole Earth Discipline.
Whole Earth Catalog, there's a now famous sentence: We are as gods. We might as well good at it. This new book says We HAVE to get good at it.
Brand says politics is not enough. There are 4 things we need to do to reach the future.
- Greening of the cities - by 2050 that's where 80% of the population will live
- Nuclear power - a new generation of nuclear power has to be part of the mix (no idea if I agree)
- Biotechnology to feed the world
- Geotechnology to reverse climate change
This is anathema to most environmentalist.
Chris Martenson's Crash Course
1491 by Charles Mann - a look at the America's just before Columbus
DH: Age of the Unthinkable by Joshua Cooper Ramo
Also, Biomimicry - Janine Benyus - looks at the way nature provides products and services. We can find models for our economy by looking at the way that nature provides those same services or products.
Daniel Goldman - The Age of Ecological Intelligence - more problems than solutions, but a good read.
Also, we're reading a lot of children's stories, not for grandkids, but because someone in the house is getting a Master's Degree in Linguistics.
Now Robert's pitching Providence & Beyond featuring Doug Hammond next week at the New Commons studio. You could check it out, I guess.
Open Discussion
-- What are the mechanics of an employee-run company. We want to move to an ESOP model. We can easily make decisions with 5 people, but...
JA: (Tosses his book, The Companies We Keep, to the participant.)
-- I'm 39. I've lived in RI my whole life and worked in juvenile corrections for 17 years. What is stopping RI from thinking beyond its borders? If I said "social enterprise" to my colleagues, they'd walk away.
RL: There's an energy in Providence that's animated by people who CHOOSE to move here. People who have "shopped for cities" are choosing Providence.
JA: As I travel, wherever I go, people say the same thing? RI is not that special. I live in a place with 6 tiny towns on a tiny island, and we have the same issues. In places that have vitality or are becoming vital, there is greater passion from the newcomers than the 'locals'.
Redundancy is wasteful, but there's an even greater fear of a place losing its character.
Social Purpose Businesses -- Session 2 - Part 1
The Social Purpose Business roundtable doesn't have a table. And it's not particularly round, more oblong or even amorphous. Be that as it may...
Robert Leaver of New Commons is moderating a discussion with John Abrams of South Mountain Company (SoMoCo) and Doug Hammond of Alive Communities.
Question: From your experience, what business building tools and practices are effective, e.g., the worker owned business coop of South Mountain?
JA: When we made SoMoCo a cooperative, we've always been a very collegial group, but this year has been a great challenge. I started to wonder what kind of dynamic would emerge, but it was not a problem. We found out we're a pretty hearty, dependable group.
There are about 8 or 9 million people working in employee-owned companies, but many of them are not particularly democratic, especially ESOPs
Mondragon and the steel workers are cooperating to create a new kind of employee owned manufacturing business. This could have a huge impact.
RL: Could you describe the decision making situation.
JA: We have a scale of pay based on seniority and skill, but the range is much smaller than most companies. Corporate average is about 400-to-1, ours is about 5-to-1.
All the strategic decisions are made by all owner consensus. If we can't find consensus, we have a super-majority voting structure as a backup. We've had 3 votes in 22 years. In each case, the opposition was very small, so it was almost a consensus.
Consensus ensures that issues get vetted and it prevents the situation where 49% of the people are dissatisfied.
DH: There's a new collaborative operational model that's not the same as a cooperative model. I've met a lot of social entrepreneurs that are currently untethered from their projects - they're running on their own - and they want to work, but they don't want to be tethered to an organization. It's not a B Corp, we don't know what it is. We're on the verge of trying to understand what we're doing. Artists do this all the time, but not business people. We need enough freedom to create change, but enough support to get the job done.
JA: There's an area in Italy where hundreds of cooperatives are joining to compete with multinational corporations. The local governments are strong, left wing, business oriented. Those words don't go together very often.
RL: What are B Corps?
DH: Its a kind of corporation that reaches certain targets in certain aspects of their business. The government will recognize the social and environmental value of the corporation. It's not a legal entity yet, it's a concept and an emerging set of practices. Basically, it says that financial performance is not the only bottom line.
Go to the B Corp website and you can do a self-assessment. http://www.bcorporation.net
RL: LC3 or L3C it's a state recognize low-profit LLC that generate a consciously slow and modest profit. Only a few states have this, notably Vermont. Because you're not maximizing profits, you're not maximizing tax revenues, so states are wary.
DH: As businesses moved along the improvement of practice and process, they surpasses the non-profit world. The non-profits are lagging. Right now, it's really important for non-profits to find these B Corp standards and implement them.
Participant: It sounds like what 6 Sigma did in manufacturing.
DH: Very much.
RL: Any other revolutionary business practices at SoMoCo?
JA: Not really revolutionary, but there's a structure for what we do with profits. 15% is donated, mostly locally. 35% is split between all the owners. The other half is equity that is backed up by and investment corporation. We're committed to maintain 50% owners equity as cash. It's fundamental that people KNOW their retirement money is there.
The other big thing we do is our commitment to maintain a predefined level of profitability. There's a real sense that our first responsibility is full-time, better than living wage jobs for everybody at SoMoCo. Our second responsibility is to our community.
DH: I think we're at an inflection point. My oldest daughter was graduating from a fairly conservative college. She handed me a statement on her graduation day. It was a corporate responsibility pledge the student put together - that all the places they would work in their lives would meet these responsibilities. Those who took the pledge would wear green tassels. 87% of the students had green tassels.
There's now an expectation and a mandate for corporate responsibility.
Social Purpose Businesses
My most sincere apologies to the entire SERI Summit community. I have utterly failed in my blogging responsibilities. And not for lack of trying. Really, it was a lack of taking my own advice.
They always teach you with these computer boxes that you should save your work, early and often. Well, I didn't. And more's the pity. A solid 2,000 words gone with an accidental click of the mouse.
In my inimitable style, I waited until the session was almost over to obliterate my work.
So, one more time, so sorry. Session 2 is starting.
And I promise to save. Early and often.
Social Enterprise: Leveraging Your Giving
Good morning,
Allow me to introduce myself, my name is Christopher Brida and I am a sophomore at Bryant University, the home of this year's Social Enterprise Rhode Island Summit. After a very informative and inspiring morning, we're slowing down a little bit and so I'm currently seated at a roundtable titled: Social Enterprise: Leveraging Your Giving.
Riverzedge Arts Project
Bekah Greenwald, director, Riverzedge Arts Project
Riverzedge provides Woonsocket youth paid opportunities in the arts and a voice in their community. They are looking for mentors and board members to get involved.
Jennifer Jackson, student, Woonsocket High School
Jennifer's family of engineers and nurses urged her not to study art, but she followed her passion nonetheless. In addition to learning art and video at Riverzedge, she also learned how to do business. Jennifer was involved with the installation of a fish ladder project in RI and has connected with a supportive network of friends in the arts.
Steve, mentor at Riverzedge
Steve was involved in making a clean clothes workshop, in which all clothes are produced with environmentally friendly fabrics and inks.
Social Enterprise Business Models
Jody - The MET school
The MET school engages students in an innovative entrepreneurial curriculum including a business plan competition, student-owned businesses, extended day after school classes, and an e-ventures class.
Rebecca Onie, Project Health
Rebecca did early work in housing law and found that health was always an underlying issue when dealing with housing. When dealing with health with families that have been foreclosed upon, for example their health issues really stem from the fact that the family has been living in a car.
Cynthia Koenig, Hippo Water International
In Africa, water sources are often scarce or contaminated, and getting water is a huge challenge. In the U.S. we use 200-400 gallons of water a day. Most people in Africa use less than a gallon. One gallon of water weighs about 44 pounds. Wells are part of the solution, but they break down, and people are often not trained to fix them. The problem then, is transportation. The Hippo Roller is a simple rolling device that can carry five gallons of water and facilitate easy transportation. The organization has no full-time staff. Engineers Without Borders did a pro-bono redesign for them and brought the cost down from $100 to $30 per roller.
Rajiv Kumar, founding partner, Shape Up Rhode Island and Shape Up the Nation
"Harnessing the power of social networks to promote healthy behavior change"
Many of the diseases in the U.S. are easily preventable with behvior change.
Rajiv is a former medical student from Brown University. He found that people who succeeded in changing their behaviors toward a healthier lifestyle did it with the support of people in their networks. People who were more private about their efforts were less likely to succeed. Shape Up RI started with 2,000 people. The initial group reduced their body mass index by an average of 1 point, which amounts to about 8 pounds. The effects of this change are a 57% reduction in people's chance of contracting type-2 diabetes and an average of a $202 reduction in health care costs per year. The next phase for Shape Up RI was to partner with employers who have a stake in their employees' wellness. In expanding to a national program, they have raised $1 million from angel investors. 100,000 people in 26 countries have gone through their program.
Dan MacCombie, Runa
Runa produces an energy drink, which is derived from the guayusa plant harvested in Equador, and uses the revenues to preserve Ecuadorian communities and ecosystems and build jobs. Runa is certified Fair Trade, and also goes beyond Fair Trade. They create sustainable sources and build. All of their employees are working in Ecuador. There are 600 farmers working in 800 communities. In Equador, the people are very suspicious of companies exploiting their efforts. Runa pays their workers what they call a "fixed market price" and pledge not to lower it. Also, their employees own a significant portion of the company.
Debra Schimberg, V.P. and co-founder, Glee Gum
Debra was involved in starting the Southside Community Land Trust as well as a charter school in Providence.
In Belize farmers tap trees with machetes, enough to extract chicle but not enough to harm the trees. Currently, most sources of gum are derived from petroleum. These days, nobody in the gum business uses chicle anymore, except for Glee Gum. Their motto is "Don't be glum. Chew Glee Gum."
Fueling Social Enterprise Locally and Globally
John Abrams - president, South Mountain Company
John moved to Martha's Vineyard with his wife and found it to be a place that was too precious to really live in. He started South Mountain Company, an integrated development, architecture, building, energy services, and consulting company as a way to enrich their community. They restructured to worker-owned cooperative, so their employees have a stake in success. The company regularly makes contributions to affordable housing and climate initiatives. Had a talk about how to restructure with the collapse of the economy. Layoffs of newcomers and underperformers never came up. They created a worst-case scenario plan involving rolling furloughs if their finances required it. Then they put their minds to make sure that the worst-case scenario never came to pass. It was about ownership. "In the history of mankind, nobody has ever washed a rented car". Another piece of advice: "When you're fishing, always use a big hook - it's better to catch something smaller than you intended than to not catch anything at all."
Providence Mayor, David Cicilline
The mayor spoke on the city's initiatives toward improving schools, transportation systems, cultural activities in order to attract and retain entrepreneurs.The city acts as a convener, promoting Providence and RI as a place for social entrepreneurship. The partnership with the universities and students is key. Cicilline highlighted Southside Community Land Trust as an example of an organization creating the character of a city that people want to live in. The Better World by Design conference, Jennifer Rose Packing (cotton grown paper for packaging supplies), and the Providence Economic Development Partnershp were other initiatives the mayor highlighted.
Susan Wolf Ditkoff- Bridgespan Group
The Bridgespan Group is a consultancy helps organizations improve their strategies for impact.
Susan focused on how you define success. It's not about charity - it's about improving capacity. We must hold ourselves to a higher standard as philanthropists. The need is usually greater than the resources. The Bridgespan Group has a symbiotic relationship with several constituents in order to increase resources.
Susan told a story about a non-profit that set out to radically improve education in low-performing public schools. They had evidence that students learned better with the a new educational program that they created. 20% of their target schools were implementing the program and had radically improved results. The other 80% of the schools made only incremental changes. In analyzing their results, the organization had to make a choice. They either had to accept that they were only 20% successful, or they had to change their mission to be creating incremental changes. They did what very few organizations would: they refused to change their mission and instead focused on targeting the rest of the schools that they hadn't fully reached yet. Favorite aphorism: "It is not incumbent on you to complete the task, but neither are you free to set it aside."
Mary Gentile - Director, Giving Voice to Values / Babson College
Mary stated that the old model for philanthropy is Sequential (Learn - Earn - Serve). In this model, you are always limited to what you can accomplish. The new model is Simultaneous: social, environmental, and economic value working in tandem. She also highlighted that students are incredibly valuable - they can take risks, they want to work in a sustainable way, and they have the passion to make things happen. Faculty and staff's job is to provide tools to students without squelching their passion.
Diana Wells, president of Ashoka
Ashoka, for those who don't know, coined the phrase "social entrepreneur". There are three Ashoka fellows in attendance at the summit today. Ashoka focuses on system changes (not building a school, but modeling a new way children can learn. Not building a hospital, but modeling how healthcare can be structured more effectively). After 5 years, 94% of Ashoka fellows are still working on the objective that they started with. Diana brought up that the world is no longer led by elites. People have a voice in what the want to see. One of Ashoka's sayings is that "everyone's a changemaker".