How to Support Conservation Efforts and Keep Your Feet Warm: Bartrams Socks Review

I smile when I see the United by Blue catalog in my mailbox because I know it will take me on an adventure. National Parks are frequently the backdrop for their clothing, accessories, and home and camping gear. For summer 2017, they photographed Ph.D. marine biologists with Bonefish & Tarpon Trust at a conservation fishing tournament who measured and tagged fish to investigate declining fish populations in Key West. They do so many good things as a company and when I went through their catalog, I couldn’t help but stop at the socks. Here is my full Bartram Socks review that you and the environment will love. 

Bartrams Socks by United by Blue Review: Catching Fish Shooting Clothes

In the fall, UBB followed volunteers for Conservation Northwest who documented the crossings of bears, wolverines, and other wildlife by placing cameras triggered by motion sensors near I-90 in Seattle. Their goal, to build a sustainable solution to help conservation efforts and a company that sells ethical clothing. One of their initiatives, Tracking Bears & Wolverines With Conservation Northwest, is to help create a more suitable habitat for all sorts of animals in the Northwest:

“What’s easy for us to move on is easy for animals to move on,” explains Chase Gunnell, Conservation Northwest’s Director of Communications, as he unpacks his supplies. Chase and three of his coworkers, Laurel Baum, Alaina Kowitz, and Jason McCue, have led us down a regrown stretch of road to unearth which animals have moved through the area, some only hours before we arrived.

As a B Corp, United by Blue (UBB) not only removes one pound of trash from waterways for every product sold: the company supports conservation by telling these stories, hosting clean-ups, and making goods from long-lasting and sustainable materials.

Related podcast: How Rachel Faller is Disrupting the Clothing Industry

I had admired the evergreen design and cross pattern in two styles of UBB’s Bartram’s socks online for several weeks before the fall catalog arrived. There, the array of sock colors was creatively featured.

(photo courtesy of UBB)

Reading the fine print excited me: 65% recycled cotton. The Fairtrade Foundation’s 2015 Cotton Commodity Briefing details the human, economic, and environmental challenges of cotton production.  With 2,720 liters of water per cotton t-shirt and 10,850 liters per pair of jeans, conventional cotton production can easily deplete and pollute local water sources. The briefing also cites the World Health Organization’s classification as hazardous $819 million of the $2 billion spent annually on chemical pesticides for cotton. Since its start in 2010, United by Blue has used organic cotton, which does not involve chemical fertilizers or pesticides. Recycling cotton prevents further waste and damage from cotton production.

Related article: The Top 7 Socially Aware Clothing Companies to Watch Out For

I hadn’t known how much UBB used recycled materials in their products, and I contacted them to find out more about Bartram’s socks. Here is my interview:

About Bartrams Socks

KJFG: Why are these socks named Bartrams?

UBB: Bartrams Garden is a beautiful botanic garden in our hometown of Philadelphia; it is also the site of our very first clean-up in 2010. It is still a spot that we visit often and have removed over 40K pounds of waste. The Bartram’s Sock Collection is a homage to one of our favorite places in Philly.

KJFG: Which came first: the design or the material?

UBB: Sustainability is at the core of our business so the material came first but the designs weren’t far behind.

KJFG: How is this cotton recycled? Where does it come from? What is the process for recycling it?

UBB: The yarn is sourced domestically from a company that uses a unique process of recycling textile waste. This company brings in cut scraps/textile waste from a variety of manufacturers, the material is then sorted by fiber content and color, and reclaimed into a fiber that can be spun with staple fibers to become yarn.

KJFG: What are the other materials in the socks?

UBB: The other materials are simply added for function or design aesthetics.

KJFG: Why did you choose the manufacturer in North Carolina?

UBB: When developing this collection, we had US manufacturing in mind and found a great partner in our manufacturer in NC.

Where You Can Find United by Blue Clothing for Yourself

Many of UBB’s other products feature responsible sourcing and North American production. In addition to the Bartrams socks, a beach blanket is made from recycled cotton. Recycled polyester pervades their products, being used in several styles of their beanies, jackets, bags, shirts, board shorts, and throw blankets.

Boots, tees, and fedoras are among many items made in the USA. UBB also recently shared the details of how they created an original supply chain for bison fiber, a by-product of the livestock industry that would otherwise be wasted. Journeying from Alberta and Ontario to Texas, the bison fiber is combined with recycled polyester and low-melt polyester to be used as insulation in outerwear.

Check out the Bison Sport Jacket, a beautiful and function piece.

The UBB headquarters and flagship store are in Philadelphia, 35 miles from where I live. I would buy from them if they were 3500 miles away because they built a conscious company and a community of consumer-volunteers to face the issue of water conservation.

Since 2010, they and more than 7500 volunteers have removed over 1 million pounds of garbage from waterways in 27 states. After Hurricane Sandy in 2012, they canvassed affected residents, distributed donations, and removed debris in Ocean City, NJ and Staten Island, NY.

In one of several collaborations with Subaru of America, Inc.—whose corporate offices and operations are nearby in New Jersey—they removed a sum of 37,000 pounds of trash from the Trinity River in Dallas, TX between 2013 and 2014. In 2017, UBB joined like-minded co-op REI for two road trips of cleanups: one on the West Coast in Southern California and one on the East Coast from Pennsylvania to Connecticut. They have also organized events in Canada and Taiwan.

See the next UBB water conservation project at their website

How to Get Your Impact Startup Off The Ground: Lessons From Combat Flip Flops

change creator combat flip flops

They faced the sharks on the famous show Shark Tank and demonstrated how they could change the world one pair of flip-flops at a time!

Change Creator’s interview with the two founders, Lee and Griff, revealed strategies and insights we can all learn from. Find the full interview is at the end of this article.

Donald Lee and Matthew Griff, founders of Combat Flip Flops, not only built a successful retail business but also help underserved communities all over the world by empowering them economically with employment opportunities.

As social entrepreneurs, Lee and Griff created a business model that drives “multiple bottom lines” – profits, social change, and sustainable economic growth.

How did the company come about, what unique challenges did they face, and what’s their secret to success?

The Multi-Million-Dollar Business Idea

Similar to many social enterprises that help communities in developing countries, the initial concept for Combat Flip Flops was born out of the founders’ personal experiences when they were living among the people they serve.

Lee and Griff were two Army Rangers stationed in Afghanistan where they experienced first-hand the people and culture of the war-torn country.

However, what they saw were not people waiting for a handout. Instead, they saw a community that embodied the virtues of persistence, creativity, and respect.

They saw hardworking people making combat boots and other army supplies to support their families and communities.

Then they realized that these workers would need a job after the war ends. They saw an opportunity to “manufacture peace through trade” and a business idea was born:

Combat Flip Flops would send veterans to countries affected by war, identify facilities that were established to manufacture tools for war and transform them to make commercial products that support peace.

They’d ship the products all over the world and create employment opportunities along the way.

Today, the company has factories in a few developing countries – creating employment opportunities and economic advancements in many underserved communities:

  • Their flip-flops are made in Columbia, where all the materials are sourced locally.
  • They use metal from landmines dropped in Laos during the Vietnam War to create jewelry. The revenue further funds landmine clearance to keep more people safe.
  • Their women-operated factories in Afghanistan make all the sarongs and scarfs sold on the website. Each piece puts an Afghan girl in school – an effort to battle the 15% illiterate rate among Afghan women.
  • They’re funding veteran missions overseas as well as clinical aid work – giving 2% of their bottom line to causes they support.

Unlike giving out aids and donations, Combat Flip Flops’ factories are creating long-term economic changes in the local communities. The business model gets to the root cause of poverty and creates a virtuous cycle of empowerment.

Related: How This Fashion Company Helps People Get Clean Water and Jobs

Learning Curve And Growing Pains

Taking an impact-driven startup off the ground is rarely a walk in the park. There are many moving parts and it can be quite challenging when all you have is a few thousand bucks and a simple website.

However, that didn’t hold Lee and Griff back.

Getting On the Radar With a Compelling Brand Story

Lee and Griff made their first sales at a trade show. They only had a night to prepare – barely enough time to get a website, a merchant account, and a bank account set up.

The event became the turning point for the company.

Making the most of what they’ve got, Lee and Griff attended the trade show and shared their compelling brand story with some bloggers who took photos of the products and posted them online.

They highlighted the story of how simply buying a pair of flip-flops can help people in underserved communities by creating jobs and putting them through school.

The business model was easy to explain and people’s immediate reaction was, “we wanna support that!”

From there, they sold thousands of pairs of flip-flops to consumers all over the world.

Make Products That Sell

As a for-profit social business, you need to generate a profit. Otherwise, you’ll be out of business before long and unable to make the social impact you set out to achieve.

That means you need to sell something that people want. Whether it’s a product or a service, you have to identify a market and create something your customers want to buy.

For Combat Flip Flops, their customers want high-quality and well-designed fashion items that also have a great story to tell. They want to feel good about their purchases by knowing that they’re helping communities in need.

Scaling the Company – the Power of Publicity and Team Work

A compelling brand story won’t generate sales if the world doesn’t know about it.

Lee and Griff designed a brand management campaign and had a clear target on which publications to pitch and how to direct their advertising budget.

They worked with a PR professional to help them promote their brand story and landed an interview with Gizmodo. The interview gave them the stage to share their story and a platform to introduce their products to the market.

A producer from Shark Tank saw the article and offered them a spot to pitch on the show.

The duo prepared well for the show and took that advantage to tell the company’s story.

They succeeded in building brand awareness and driving traffic to the website. However, they also learned the hard way that with a boost in publicity, they also had to make sure they have the infrastructure in place to support the increase in interest and the spike in traffic.

Nonetheless, the “Shark Tank effect” was real and they enjoyed a steady flow of traffic for months afterward.

In addition to the publicity, Combat Flip Flops grew from one distributor to a million-dollar company, thanks to its great team composed of dedicated individuals who know each member’s strengths.

Each member contributes his expertise to the company, such as networking, operations, business plan development, and design.

Lee and Griff roll up their sleeves and get into the trenches. All the partners are knee-deep in the business because everything is interconnected – from product design to logistics and marketing – one thing can affect many others and ultimately, sales.

Finding the Sweet Spot

As a startup, pricing your products and services can be quite a challenge – and Combat Flip Flops wasn’t spared such growing pain.

Having a social cause doesn’t make them immune to market forces. If anything, they need to be more diligent with their demand forecast because of the business’s mission to support the wide net of local communities.

Lee and Griff did the research, analyze market trends, and made adjustments based on their website metrics so everything fell in line with the industry standards.

The advantage of being a small company is their ability to pivot and turn on a dime to respond nimbly to the market.

They were able to optimize conversion rates, maximize revenues, and fine-tune ad spending to increase their ROI.

Combat Flip Flops experienced a 450% increase in their annual revenue recently. But they also invested substantially in inventory and infrastructure to get there so they just broke even.

To make the business profitable, Lee and Griff had to find out which products were making money using existing data and creating forecasts. They cut out products that were losing money and brought in more winners so they can come out ahead.

Now they can accurately forecast their demand and make sure their supply chain is set up to meet the needs of the market while supporting the communities involved in the manufacturing process.

Combat Flip Flops is a great example of how a social venture can generate a profit and deliver profound social impact at the same time.

It follows the “multiple bottom line” concept that works well for many social enterprises.

Lessons For Startup Change Creators On Creating Profit and Progress

Here are a few lessons you can glean from the company’s success and apply it to your own social business startup:

combat flip flips change creator

 

Travel to learn about the world and your market.

Traveling gives you the opportunity to learn about the world. You can get inspired by your travel experience and turn it into a business idea that can help a community.

Spend time in the communities you want to serve.

Spending time in the community you want to serve allows you to understand their culture, environment, resources, and economic reality – information that will help you structure a sustainable venture that benefits those who are most in need.

Share your mission with everyone.

Share your mission with the world. Tell a compelling brand story that takes your product beyond “commodity” and turns customers into evangelists to further your cause.

Don’t hold back until you are ‘ready’. Move forward now.

Take every opportunity you can and make the most out of it. Don’t hold yourself back just because you don’t have all the bells and whistles in place.

Generate the right kind of publicity for your products.

Generate the right kind of publicity for your products. Keep putting yourself out there and you never know who may see your article or interview!

Be prepared. When an opportunity comes, you’ll want to be ready!

Be prepared. When you come to the opportunity to promote your brand, make sure your infrastructure – such as website and shopping cart – are set up to handle the increased traffic.

Build a strong team.

Build a team of dedicated individuals who share your vision and understand each other’s strengths. If you are looking to fund your idea, investors will look at your team and ask: Can I see this team executing this vision? If not, what areas of your team do you need? Can you hire someone else? Get advisors?

Know the metrics that matter.

Analyze your website metrics to find the sweet spot in pricing, ad spend, and other marketing activities. Don’t waste time tracking metrics that do not matter to your brand, or company right now. Get to know how to read the reports, and how to make smart marketing choices.

Stay on top of market trends.

Stay on top of market trends and forecast demand so you can effectively manage your supply chain, sell products your customers want, and implement the right promotion strategies.

Get involved in the operations of the business so you know how your business works.

Get involved in the operations of the business and understand how all the moving parts affect each other and ultimately, sales. Keep an eye on the revenue as well as the profit – you’ll have to invest in inventory and infrastructure to grow but you also need to make sure they’re paying off.

What’s your million-dollar idea for an impact-driven business? How will you turn it into reality?

If you like this article you might want to check out our full interview with the Combat Flip Flops foundersListen to the Full Interview Here

What To Do With the Full Scale Collapse of Major Media

Speaking of the full-scale collapse of major media, we thought we’d share this article from our friends at www.activistpost.com which discusses this issue. Want to be more informed? Why are you reading the resources that are in your news feeds? Who is really paying for these conglomerates? Let’s investigate the full-scale collapse of major media and why you need to know about it.

As I indicated in a recent article, the B-team, or even the C-team, is now heading up the national evening news in America. These anchors’ faces and voices (Muir, Glor, and Holt) are not even faint reminders of the so-called Golden Age when father figures like Cronkite and Reasoner fed official truth into the brains of viewers. The new C-team is vague gloss from a paint job on a used car. This is an ominous sign for the news bosses in the upstairs suites. They can’t find adequate hypnotists anymore.

What happened to Major Media?

Many things—among them, the father figures left the fold. They decided to sell real estate or take corporate work in PR. They saw the handwriting on the wall: the networks were fostering a youth movement, seeking younger and prettier talent.

Why?

Because Madison Avenue was convinced the younger viewer demographic was the important one, in terms of consumer buying power. Therefore, on-air news faces had to be younger as well. This sounded right, but it overlooked one vital fact. The young news anchors couldn’t pull off the appropriate level of mind control. They were merely bland robots. Friendly, nice, literate to the point of being able to read copy. (Lester Holt at NBC is a bit older, but he comes across as a corpse someone dug up at a cemetery for a role in a Frankenstein remake.)

There is another gross miscalculation. The commercials, between news segments, are overwhelmingly pharmaceutical. Those drugs aren’t intended for the youth demographic. They’re for the middle-aged and the seniors, who want to toxify themselves for the rest of their lives.

So the commercials are playing to the older crowd, while the faces of the news are supposedly attracting younger viewers. It’s a mess. The news execs and programmers really have no idea what they’re doing.

They’re basically hoping their game somehow lasts until they can retire.

There’s more.

Terrified by “visionary” Ted Turner, who started CNN as a 24/7 cable news outlet in 1980, NBC decided they had to spin off their own cable news channel. This move, on its own, splintered the unitary hypnotic effect of having one anchor deliver one version of the news to one audience. Suddenly, there were several hypnotists on stage, all talking at once. It was a disaster in the making.

Then you had the various financial news channels, and FOX, and the sports channels, and the weather channel, and Bloomberg, and C-SPAN, etc. Plus all the local news outlets.

This fragmentation began to erode the programmed mind of the viewer. If, hoping to retreat to an earlier time, he sought out one face and one voice and one great father figure on ANY of these channels, he came up empty. The archetype was gone.

In a pinch, a viewer on the political right might opt for Bill O’Reilly, and a viewer on the Globalist left might choose Charlie Rose. But they’re both out of the picture now.

Enter, from stage left, the goo-goo behemoth, the CIA-connected Facebook, which, amidst building a tower of likes for infantile posts, is trying to convince its adherents that it IS the Internet and a source of tailored news that is sufficient unto the day. Unanchored news. No single voice or face.

Big media, no more.

Big media, in all its forms, has lost the mind control war.

It has lost it from inside itself.

Into the vacuum have swept the million of voices of independent media. I’ve written about that revolution at length, and won’t recap it here.

Consider the Youth Phenomenon

Instead, consider the Youth Phenomenon. You could peg it at the Beatles’ US invasion of 1964.

Why? Because that was the moment when children began to be entertained by other children. Seriously, deeply, religiously.

Add in the drugs, and other factors, and you had the groundswell of the 1960s.

Stay young forever. Never grow up. Adults are dull dolts.

These children eventually became parents, and their children became parents…and you have the whole generation-to-generation, societal, eternal-youth package. “I want to be young. I want to be happy forever.”

How do you sell these people the news?

You put a nice face on it.

And you lose the hypnosis.

You still have all the lies and cover-ups and diversions and omissions…but the trance element at the core grows weaker over time.

Like the snowfall from a great blizzard, the aftermath shows patches of snow disappearing, piece by piece.

This is happening, and the news titans can do nothing to stop it.

It’s a long-term trend, and it’s called good news.

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALEDEXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

Image credit: Banksy

Article author: Jon Rappoport

Used with permission from https://www.activistpost.com/

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6 Lessons Every Social Entrepreneur Can Learn From Living Goods Award Winning Success

chuck slaughter living goods skoll

Listen to our exclusive interview with Living Goods founder, Chuck Slaughter.

Subscribe to this show on  iTunes  |  Stitcher  |  Soundcloud

There’s often the impression that for-profit business models and positive social impact are at odds with each other.

Before you draw any conclusions, consider these results achieved by Living Goods, a Skoll Foundation Social Entrepreneur Award winning company:

  • Reduced under-five mortality rate by 25% for less than $2 per person per year
  • Reduced drug prices by 17% at clinics and drugstores in areas where it operates
  • Reduced the supply of fake drugs by 50%

Living Goods made all these powerful impacts and more by applying a for-profit business model to a non-profit organization.

Founder Chuck Slaughter brought together the best of private and public sectors and, in his own words, “used business tools to solve big hairy social problems.”

Before we dissect Chuck’s success secrets, let’s briefly look at what Living Goods does:

Living Goods operates in sub-Sahara Africa, supporting a network of community-based health entrepreneurs—women living in the community—to go door-to- door to teach families how to improve health.

These health entrepreneurs are equipped to make a living by selling low-cost, high-impact health products such as malaria and diarrhea treatments, healthy foods, and family planning products, so they can make a difference while making a living.

Living Goods even designed and developed its own line of products aimed to create substantial and long-term social changes.

For example, they offer a line of fortified food for toddlers six to 24 months of age because children in sub-
Saharan Africa often experience stunted growth that leads to a lifetime of underperformance in school and income
generation.

What makes Living Goods so successful?

What did Slaughter learn from his days in business school and as an entrepreneur that he applied to this non-profit organization?

Here are six lessons every social entrepreneur can learn from Living Goods:

1 – Apply Proven Business Concepts to Solve Inefficiencies

When Slaughter first got involved with an NGO in public health, he observed that owners of small drugstores and clinics were sitting around in their stores, waiting for customers to show up.

As a result, they were not as profitable as they should have been while people in the community were not getting the health care products they needed. There were a lot of inefficiencies in the system.

He devised a proactive solution to get those owners out of the store and into the community, providing the resources they needed to turn “sick care” into healthcare.

He then built on the success and leveraged the proven business model of person-to- person selling perfected by Avon, Amway, Tupperware, and the like to help rural women create a source of income while making essential health care products accessible to more people at a low cost.

According to Slaughter, Living Goods’ products are “cheaper than free” because of the efficiencies they create; instead of having to spend half a day and a few dollars to travel to a clinic for free medications, people can now get healthcare products delivered to their doors for just $0.50.

2 – Adopt a Cost-Efficient, Profit-Focused Model

Instead of blindly following a non-profit business model, Slaughter took the best of both public and private sectors to design his organization.

Even though Living Goods is registered as a non-profit, they adopted a for-profit business model for their operation.

Living Goods received funding from investors by showing a proof of concept and by leveraging Slaughter’s reputation in the private sector.

They use the same best practices, knowledge, and know-hows to run a non-profit organization as a for- profit business.

Instead of grants, they generate ongoing income from selling products to customers which proved to be more cost- effective than a public sector solution in which employees are salaried and services are free.

As a result, Living Goods is able to provide effective services at a fraction of the cost.

living goods

3 – Do Your Homework

Slaughter didn’t go into the market blind.

He did a lot of research on the potential market, the principle cost of mortality, the diseases to target, local conditions most conducive to his business model, population density, income and spending per capita, as well as political stability in order to identify the best market in which to start Living Goods.

He also noted that there’s a delicate balance between doing research and getting stuck in doing research.

Apple wouldn’t have invented the iPod if they simply did research and tried to come up with product ideas based on customer survey and market demands.

When you’re creating new solutions, you often can’t find the answer just by asking people. You can only find out if your idea works by offering a version of the product or service in the market to garner real feedback.

4 – Use the Lean Approach

Slaughter advises testing a business concept in the market by following the Lean Approach when developing a startup plan.

He tested the business model for Living Goods by scaling just large enough to test the market and getting reliable answers.

He was able to validate his concept quickly and cheaply; during the first 6 months, he only had one full-time employee while proving that the market was viable.

With this proof of concept—a hybrid model that covers 100% of the cost through the sales of products—he was able to get funding from investors to scale up.

Related: Everything you need to know about making good decisions

5 – Partner With Local NGOs

Living Goods partnered with local NGOs that already have an established footprint to test their business model. This approach greatly reduced the amount of time and money required to understand the market and fine-tune their approach.

From there, they were able to build their own network which, from day one, focused on monetization to speed up their growth and impact.

6 – Leverage Technology

Two years ago, Living Goods put an Android phone in the hands of every entrepreneur in its network. The phone comes with a custom Living Goods app which automates how the agents carry out their diagnosis, enables them to follow up with customers, and allows the organization to track the performance of every agent.

The use of mobile technology has tripled the speed Living Goods do performance management, and vastly improved the quality of the work on the ground.

Living Goods owes its success to Slaughter’s ability to quickly and cheaply test a business idea and adapt to the market using local resources and technology.

Slaughter’s focus on partnership, relationship, and collaboration also helped the company succeed at a rate that rivals the best startups in the world.

change creator chuck slaughter living goods

Chuck Slaughter and Living Goods were featured in issue 10 of Change Creator Magazine. Stop by iTunes or Google Play to get the app and read the rest of issue 10 for free!

Related: Everything you need to know about making good decisions

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How To Choose a Social Enterprise Idea That Will Fire Up Your Life

If starting a for-profit social venture seems quite daunting, you’re not alone. That’s why it is our mission to keep giving you inspiration. How to choose a social enterprise idea that will fire up your life? Read here to figure this out and get solving the world’s problems through business!

There are many aspects to consider. Not only your business idea needs to be commercially viable but it also has to deliver a meaningful social impact that’s sustainable.

Most successful social ventures are grounded in the founders’ visions, have a memorable brand story built on their missions, and are structured to deliver impactful social changes in the communities they serve.

Choose a Social Enterprise Idea that Works for You

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to what constitutes a “good” social enterprise idea. It all depends on you and those you want to serve.

Here are some criteria to help vet your ideas and find the winning formula:

Your Passion, Talents, Strengths, And Experiences

When you’re in the startup mode, you’d likely be rolling up your sleeves, putting in the hours, and wearing many hats.

If you’re not passionate about your mission and the community you serve, the business could easily turn into a grind and you’d no longer be motivated to stick with it.

When a business idea taps into your (and your team members’) talents, strengths and experiences, you’d have a better chance and an easier time to take it off the ground.

Consider your natural skills and abilities, as well as your formal training and education, to see how they fit into the big picture.

Your social enterprise business idea should be motivated by your vision and passion while being powered by your talents, strengths, and experiences.

Related: What Are The Unique Challenges of Starting a Social Enterprise?

Your Assets, Network, and Environment

It takes a lot to start a business and you should leverage as much help as you can get. What do you have at your disposal that can make things go smoother?

What resources do you have access to? Who do you know that can put you in touch with the right people?

These connections may not be immediately obvious so it pays to build relationships with a wide variety of people. Don’t be shy about sharing your vision!

In addition, your business idea should allow you to create a work environment that matches your personality type.

According to Holland’s Theory, you’ll have greater success and derive more satisfaction out of your career in a work environment that supports your personality type.

The Market

Unlike non-profit organizations, a for-profit social enterprise needs to generate revenue and make a profit to stay in business.

In short, you need to define who will be paying for your products or services and how to position your offering so it’s appealing to them.

Just like any marketing activity, you need to define the problem or challenge you’re solving and understand what’ll motivate your customers to purchase from you.

In addition, what distinguishes your product or service from others in the market and why would your customer want to buy from you?

Many social entrepreneurs incorporate the social impact of the businesses into their brand stories to set themselves apart while building brand loyalty.

Does your business idea tell an intriguing story that appeals to your ideal customers?

The Cause

Obviously, as a social entrepreneur, you have a cause you want to support.

If you’re starting out with a broad-stroke approach to a cause, you may need to refine it and give it a specific focus – e.g., by giving it a spin so it’s relevant to your market or tailoring it to the community you serve.

You should feel strongly about the cause behind your business. This personal drive will help you stay grounded when you’re pulled in a hundred different directions and keep motivated when things get tough.

Examine your business ideas and identify the one(s) that are most in alignment with your cause.

The Project’s Viability

Great ideas are just ideas until they’re put into action.

When you evaluate business ideas, consider the ease of implementation and the potential profit it can generate.

To build a sustainable for-profit social venture, it’s important to evaluate its potential to turn around a profit – not simply revenue.

What’s the cost of bringing the product to market (e.g., R&D, manufacturing, logistics)? How much do you need to invest in promoting the business? How long will it take for revenue to surpass these expenses – and do you have enough funding to reach that point?

How much is the initial investment and what are your options to secure the funding?

Shortlist a few business ideas and write up a business plan for each. The process will help you get a bird’s eye view of all aspects of the business, including competitive analysis, risk assessment, operations, and financials.

Sustainable Social Impact

Last, but definitely not least, your business idea needs to be relevant to the community you serve.

Successful social enterprises create sustainable impacts. They solve immediate problems for underserved communities while empowering them to thrive so they can become economically independent.

Unlike many non-profit or charitable organizations, which tend to focus on aids and donations, for-profit social ventures emphasize on generating economic activities that not only provide employment but also allow revenues to be reinvested into the local communities and create a virtuous cycle.

Does your business idea solve a pressing problem faced by the community you want to serve? Does it encourage employment and skill training at the local level? Does your business model allow for revenue to be reinvested into the local economy?

Finding the Sweet Spot For Your Impact-Driven Business

Your social business represents a convergence of your values, beliefs, convictions, talents, skills, experiences, your market, and the community you want to serve.

The sweet spot for your social enterprise is where all these factors overlap.

Nailing the winning business idea may take some time and effort but it’ll be worth it when you find the sweet spot that allows you to create a profitable and impactful social venture.

What business ideas get you excited?

To learn more about starting a social business we recommend you check out – The Beginners Guide to Starting a Social Business.

What Makes a Great Entrepreneur (One Powerful Expert Tip)?

change creator entrepreneur

What does it take to be a great entrepreneur?

Isn’t that a burning question we all have?

Ask several different people and you might get a lot of variation in the answers.

Maybe the better question is: What kind of entrepreneur do you want to become?

Every time I interview someone I have the honor of learning from them just as you would any mentor. The more I talk to a wide range of amazing people the more I find a common and consistent message.

Great entrepreneurs are on a mission and they play for something bigger than themselves. 

The motivation they have is not spawned by the idea of money. No, it’s from something bigger, a cause or a mission in their life that they become obsessed with. Money is only the means to pursuing the mission.

Nothing or nobody can derail them from pursuing it. Their vision is clear and desire strong.

Passion is an important part of the equation but to succeed in scaling an idea and creating a good lifestyle you also must know your competency and market.

In our interview with Tony Robbins, he said that:

“aside from your love, your labor is the most sacred give you can give, so find something that you’re here to play for that’s bigger than yourself”

People like Sasha Fisher, who was featured in issue #11 of Change Creator Magazine, will leave you in awe with her story of great leadership at Spark Microgrants.

Sasha Fisher moved to East Africa in July 2010 to develop the Spark MicroGrants model. Her previous experiences in South Sudan, South Africa, India, and Uganda have led to her passion for community-led development.  Spark has designed a novel approach for launching communities facing poverty into action and has partnered with 150 villages across Rwanda, Uganda, Ghana, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Spark strengthens the fundamental vitals each village needs to succeed, building the base infrastructure for families to discuss, deliberate and make local progress. Spark takes each village through a six-month facilitation process where families set village goals, brainstorm projects to reach one goal and plan a project. Each village opens a community bank account and receives an $8,000 seed grant to launch their project into reality. The six-month process is outlined below.

Now, as you might already know, marketing expert, author, and brand ambassador, Guy Kawasaki is no stranger to the startup world.

We had the honor to talk with him on a range of topics and what we got in return was an overflowing amount of priceless strategies that will help any entrepreneur step up their game.

One of my favorite quotes from Guy is:

“Great companies start because the founders want to change the world… not make a fast buck. Call me a romantic, but I think entrepreneurs should try to change the world.”

Are you ready to become a great entrepreneur?

Everything You Need to Know About Making Good Decisions

change creator amani institute decision making

What decisions are you making? How do you know you are making good decisions?

Understanding why you want to make a difference and the internal and external options you have right now to make it happen can show you what you can do today to get on the path to bringing your vision to life or narrowing down what it is exactly.

However, it’s one thing to say I want to change my life—or the world—and another to follow through with it. Life happens no matter what we do. And if we don’t bring consciousness to our decision making, we will forever live based on external stimuli and internal patterns we don’t recognize as they are playing out in our daily lives.

Daniel Kahneman, arguably one of the most important contemporary psychologists, demonstrates clearly how we like to think of ourselves as rational in our decision making while the truth is that we are subject to many biases in his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow”.

As Change Creators, we can’t afford to ignore the intricacies of our decision making.

The Twin Sister of Decision

When Ilaina Rabbat and Roshan Paul decided to build Amani Institute, they were both working at Ashoka. They used their vacation time to do initial sensing, spent nights working on the concept, connections and strategies, hosted meet-ups to come up with a name and logo and finally moved to Nairobi, Kenya to start building the Institute on the ground.

In the process, they had to make a million different decisions. Literally.

The most important one, however, was to commit to making it happen.

Commitment is the twin sister of decision.

Your fears, internal and external options, your strengths and interests, and real or perceived opportunity costs all color the decisions you are making. What makes them count, however, is your commitment.

The Visible and Invisible Leap of Faith

Decisions don’t have to be literal leaps of faith.

Roshan and Ilaina didn’t immediately quit their jobs to start their social enterprise; they took time to prepare the ground. The visible leap of faith—relocating, starting the program, and such—was preceded by an invisible one that was the commitment to creating an answer to a problem they perceived: the lack of the equivalent to a medical training school for people who want to build careers of meaning and impact.

For some people, it helps to publicly say they want to run a marathon to actually follow through with it.

But others experience a sudden lack of energy after sharing with someone that they want to write a book, for example, or want to tackle a difficult problem in the world.

Sometimes, sharing your invisible leap of faith too early and with too many people can also take energy out of it as you get confronted with everyone’s opinions about your decision.

Ground yourself before you make it public.

A compass for decisions:

1. The Cause

When I asked Tosh Juma, who is launching Nairobi Design Institute, an Impact Design Academy in Kenya, what he thinks when he hears “decision making,” his answer was fast as lightning: “The cause.”

If you are aligned with something that is bigger than you, your fears, and your shortcomings, you will figure things out.

Sometimes, that means continuing with your job and moonlighting your idea.

Sometimes the “cause” is not a specific social change topic but just the commitment to doing work that is impactful.

Or it means figuring out that you actually are not a social entrepreneur but rather an intrapreneur, and there is nothing wrong with that if it still furthers the cause you are committed to.

2. Fears, Values, and Happiness

Double-check your story to see if your decision is disguising a fear that you can actually face.

In my last column, we spoke about a fear practice you could develop to make sure you are familiar with your fears and build courage to face them.

For example, one of our alumni decided to build a career working in the nonprofit sector but realized that she would really have more impact in her previous company that wanted her back.

She faced her fears of falling into old patterns and negotiated a new role that allows her to innovate from within and create cultural impact through a very large media company in Europe.

Her decisions pivoted as she worked through her fears, but the commitment to the cause (creating positive social impact through her work) didn’t change.

What is crucial when we talk about fears and commitment is Peter Senge’s distinction between creative and emotional tension. Your fears can create an emotional tension causing you to lower your vision or giving up altogether in the worst case.

Focusing on your commitment, accepting reality, and remaining open to different ways to making your vision come alive will help you build the ability to remain in creative tension that inspires finding better solutions to achieving your goals.

Sometimes, we think we don’t do something because of a lack of courage.

An interesting reframe of such a situation happened when I ran into an alumnus who remained in his family business instead of starting his own social enterprise as he initially envisioned.

He shared with me that he realized it wasn’t really a lack of courage but a very strong value around family that kept him there. A clash of values doesn’t have to create “either-or” situations for you.

In my last column, I shared the “Third Horizon” framework that can help in such a situation: You can build towards a more significant shift of your work in the future by including small things in your daily or weekly routine that help you build expertise and experience.

Read here for more about how values affect your decisions.

Harvard Psychologist Dan Gilbert presents some very interesting research on how our beliefs about what makes us happy are often wrong and how that translates into bad decisions.

Watch his TED talk – Why We Make Bad Decisions

Decision-making tools are only as good as you know yourself

There are many tools that can help you with the actual decision making, ranging from flipping a coin to elaborate frameworks that can help you weigh your options. I particularly like these 52 skills on mindtools.com or this great “Beginner’s Guide to Better Decision Making” by James Clear.

Oftentimes, you won’t know all the answers and have to follow your gut instinct, or you are someone who always does that but needs to start being more analytical in how you are making decisions.

In the context of the Inner Journey, this type of self-reflection is crucial to understanding where your strengths and weaknesses lie. And in the context of social change work, this sometimes translates into a matter of life and death of people you are working with, or puts you in an ethical dilemma that you can’t resolve but still have to act on.

Decision fatigue is a reality and can be a serious problem. Taking a hard look at all the decisions you make on a daily basis and seeing which ones you can eliminate can be very helpful. Remember: Habits replace willpower and making decisions requires a lot of willpower!

Community of Practice

Last but not least, a community of practice and support is incredibly important when you are making important decisions.

Join a group of likeminded people such as the Change Creator Facebook Group – I Am A Change Creator, a Fellowship, or make a point of getting your friends together to support you when you are taking the leap.The ones that will pick you up when you get knocked down and encourage you to try again.

As Brene Brown puts it in her talk “Why It Isn’t Your Critics Who Count”:

“yes, it was as terrible as you thought it was, but you were brave, and now let’s go try it again.”

Don’t let noise distract you.

Know who the people are who are also in the arena and keep on building a better world!

Ready?

Asking for feedback from experienced professionals and friends, finding your blind spots, and checking your assumptions have to become habits if you want to improve your decision making.

You can google decision-making tools, but they are only as good as your ability to self-reflect and your commitment to making change happen.

Understanding why you want to create change and exploring both your internal and external options to making it happen can help you understand what decision you need to make next as a Changemaker.

Expanding your ability to be increative tension instead of letting emotional tension snap you back is crucial to honoring your commitments.

Stop Struggling to Find Your Social Business Idea and Read This!

change creator social business ideas

In a previous article I went over ways for aspiring entrepreneurs to come up with social business ideas. Find your social business idea here!

That article focused on ideation, or creating new ideas from scratch, or else finding opportunity to reapply and reinvent old ideas. If you haven’t read that article, I encourage you to do so, as this one is a sort of continuation.

Social Entrepreneurship Ideas

I’m going to jump into more specific examples of where and how you can come up with social business ideas.

Don’t feel bound to this list! If you find your interests, passions, and ideas drifting in different directions, you owe it to yourself to explore your own ambitions. Many times the path to a great idea is winding and indirect.

Sometimes, you’ll have to “strike gold” to find a good idea. A bit of random luck can go a long way but won’t happen if you’re not at least looking.

That being said, there are steps you can take, including ideation, to increase your chances of success. I don’t want to spend too much time rehashing ideation for social business. However, there is one point that every social entrepreneur should uphold: know and respect the communities you are working in and the causes you are working on.

Where do social business ideas come from?

To be blunt, there are a lot of would-be Change Creators and do-gooders out there who have their heart in the right place but don’t understand their community and causes. As a result, resources are squandered and sometimes communities are harmed. As they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Another factor to consider is yourself.

What are your passions? Where do your talents lie? Can you align your talents and passions to improve a community or further a cause?

Is there an opportunity to bring market forces into play to support your efforts? If so, you may have a great social entrepreneurship opportunity at hand.

Look For Cross-Compensation Opportunities

With Cross-Compensation initiatives one group pays for a product or service. The profits of these products or services are then directed back to an underserved community. This way, those who can afford to pay end up paying. Meanwhile, resources are directed back to an underserved community.

Inequality has increased dramatically over the same several years. As Bill Kramer notes in his Change Creator article “The Regenerative Economy”, eight men now hold as much wealth as the world’s bottom 50 percent, and the top one percent own more than everyone else.

Fighting income inequality is a fantastic cause, and cross-compensation be an excellent tool because those who can afford to pay, will pay. Those who can’t can still get access to resources.

Often, those who pay won’t view the reallocation of their spending as a detriment. Just the opposite, they could be spurred to make a purchase precisely because they know their hard-earned money will be put to good use. As such, cross-compensation can become a part of your marketing and brand.

What does a cross-compensation social enterprise look like?

What would a cross-compensation social entrepreneurship business look like? Consider a restaurant. You start a restaurant and then donate 15% of your revenues to support soup kitchens and food banks. Customers who can afford to pay are treated to a great meal. Meanwhile, struggling families and individuals will enjoy greater access to resources.

Or perhaps you can build an educational app. Customers in Europe and the United States can pay for the app. Instead of pocketing the profits, however, you can fund technology and education projects in developing countries. There are many possibilities. As your business takes root, you can use your donations as a way to distinguish yourself in often crowded markets.

Find Ways to Connect Markets

If you’ve had the opportunity to travel to exotic and far-flung regions of the world, you may have come across some truly amazing local products, services, and other things. Is there a way to connect those resources with other markets? For example, let’s assume that a country is building up its eco-tourism market. You stayed at some truly awesome eco-lodges, participated in awesome local community-building projects, and various other activities.

Is there an opportunity for you to connect markets? Even simply spreading awareness of the eco-tourism opportunities you enjoyed could be making a difference. Even a simple post on social media would help.

Never underestimate the impact of social media.

Never underestimate the impact of social media. Michael Berean explores social media’s impact, from real-time emergency response to digitizing donations, his article “The Power of Social Media Tech During Times of Need”. You can read about it in the Change Creator Magazine, issue #12

Have Some Business Acumen Behind You

How about building an actual business?

Can you create an app that helps backpackers and other travelers find great ecologically friendly places to stay? By doing so, you may be able to greatly help the local community or organizations, generating revenue growth and perhaps kickstarting the local eco-economy.

Of course, connecting markets can mean a lot of different things. Perhaps while hiking through central America you stumble across an amazing coffee farming co-op. Can you plug that co-op in with bean roasters back home?

Speaking of apps, how about Atlas, they developed a running app that supports important causes and were able to raise funding for their program. You can read about them in issue #11 of Change Creator Magazine.

Turn Existing Businesses Into Social Enterprises

Starting a social enterprise doesn’t necessarily mean reinventing the wheel. Of course, if you do find an opportunity to do something all-new and never done before, go ahead and pursue it. However, another route is to look at already established business models to see if there is a way to establish a social enterprise based on the same (or similar) models.

Consider grocery stores. They have been around for years and years. In the United States alone there are roughly 40,000 grocery stores. How about building a sustainable grocery store that sells all-natural foods, is powered by solar panels, and focuses on selling local produce and other goods? There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking about this concept, but the sum impact could be substantial.

The same is true with many different business models. Perhaps you’re a business skill coach, helping everyone from junior employees to CEOs with a variety of personal and leadership skills. Fantastic. Now how about setting up workshops for disadvantaged communities, such as refugees, to teach them basic business skills? Better yet, maybe you can find corporate sponsors. Perhaps a department store chain will help pay for the events, and in exchange, you could refer potential employees?

There are so many ways to turn existing businesses into social enterprises that this list could go on near infinitely. Think about your own consumer habits. What do you like to do? What do you like to buy? Now, can you add social aspects in unique ways to create value for communities and causes?

Another option is to get existing, non-social enterprises to donate goods and services. Many companies would be willing to donate resources, such as software and computers, but they need a social entrepreneur to help out. Consider “TechSoup”, which works with software companies to donate software and hardware to nonprofits and other organizations. TechSoup also provides other forms of technical assistance, such as training. You can learn more about TechSoup in “Powering Up Social Impact” in issue 7 of Change Creator Magazine.

Don’t Forget Digital Opportunities

A lot of social entrepreneurs love getting their hands dirty. Get out in the community, live there, get to know the challenges first hand. This is fantastic, and to the greatest extent possible, social entrepreneurs should get hands-on experience. However, this “on-the-ground” approach often results in a perhaps too intensive approach to creating physical products and solutions.

The Internet, smartphones, and other tech devices have emerged as very powerful tools in recent years. Just ten years ago, if you needed a ride somewhere and didn’t own a car, you’d have to hail a taxi. Now, you can dial up Lyft or another rideshare right on your phone and get a relatively cheap ride.

A lot of people looking to help a community will focus on physical solutions. Let’s say you want to provide employment skills to a disadvantaged community, such as single mothers. Holding classes at the local neighborhood center is great, but what if mom can’t come because of her work and family schedule? For single moms, time is often in short supply. How about developing some Youtube videos that mom can watch on her phone or computer? Even if she has to go to the library to access a computer, she will have more flexibility than if you just held physical classes.

This is a really simple idea and one that you can implement even if you’re not all that technologically savvy. If you happen to have more well-developed tech skills, you should consider developing an app. What about creating a carpooling rideshare program where people can provide free rides to disadvantaged people on their way to work?

So you want to change the world? Congrats on your ambitions. Market-driven social enterprises are proving to be a powerful force for change. Each and every day, social entrepreneurs are working to make the world a better place. With the right idea and a healthy dose of commitment, you can join their ranks. But first, you need to come up with that “right” idea. So, here we go Here is how to find ideas for your social enterprise that you’ll want to pursue!

Discovering Your Passion is Not Enough

Passion and a desire to help is great. However, by itself, these factors are not enough. If your social enterprise is going to succeed, it has to be grounded in the real world, and specifically the markets and local communities you want to work with.

Passion is an important part of the equation but to succeed in scaling an idea and creating a good lifestyle, you also have to know your competency and market.

There’s no sure-fire process to generate a great idea. However, there are some steps you can take to make your brainstorming sessions more productive. There are also some tried and true methods you can use to test your idea to see if they are viable. Before we get into that, let’s talk about how to approach an idea in the first place.

My approach with this article: Develop the methods to create new ideas first!

I’m going to approach this article from an “ideation” standpoint. In other words, I’m going to help you try to develop methods to create new ideas and solutions. However, this glances over another way to find ideas: borrowing. You should never steal someone’s intellectual property, but you can take tried-and-true methods and products and then apply them in a new community or in a new way.

How about setting up a local farmer’s market? Or a zero or low-waste grocery store or restaurant? Maybe your restaurant could donate some or all of its profits and unused food to soup kitchens? These ideas aren’t 100% new, but they could make a big impact in a community.

Related: The Beginner’s Guide to Starting a Social Business

Start By Considering The Community

So how should you start with coming up with an idea? First, don’t start with your own wants or needs. Sure, you can and will have your own areas of expertise and interest. Yes, you should leverage these assets. However, if you want to help a community, that community has to take precedence. How can you use your skills to help the community?

The best social entrepreneurs know the communities they are trying to help. If your social enterprise is people focused, meaning you want to directly help people, it’s important to understand the local community. Many charitable efforts, international development projects, and social enterprises have failed, or worse, cause harm, because the people in charge didn’t understand the community.

On the flip side, those leaders who understood the community they were working with have been able to maximize the impact. They understood the community, its needs, its wants, and local conditions. By understanding these factors, social entrepreneurs can craft solutions that will both address local needs and will be adopted by the local community.

Related: Uncovering 5 Marketing Lessons from Lucky Iron Fish

If You Don’t Know Your Community You’ll Struggle to Create Change

One of the Change Creators featured in our magazine, Makana Eyre, was working on a project in Cairo. The idea was promising: through Ashoka: Innovators for the Public his team would provide local women with entrepreneurship skills training. As the old saying goes: Give a woman a fish, and you feed her for a day. Teach a woman to fish, and you feed her for a lifetime.

So they set up an entrepreneurship training class, reached out to the community, and invited participants to come to a scheduled training class. No one showed up. Why? Turns out that her team never bothered to ask the local women what times would work best for them. The time they had picked for the training session conflicted with bus schedules, local norms, and other factors.

Fortunately, the solution for this problem was pretty straightforward: communicate with the community and find out what times work best. Gather a bit of data, then act on it. However, keep in mind that the consequences can be direr than simply rescheduling a training workshop. Organizations that don’t understand the local community and conditions can waste vast amounts of resources.

Consider the 2004 Asian tsunami, which claimed a quarter million lives and destroyed ocean-side communities across South East Asia and Africa. The devastation sparked one of the largest humanitarian relief efforts in history. Unfortunately, much of the money, resources, and effort was wasted.

For example, companies and organizations sent countless boats to Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere, intended to replace destroyed fishing fleets. Many of the boats simply rotted away on beaches because they were not fit for the South Indian Ocean and other Asian waters. They were too small for fishing and for the local water conditions.

The list of other failures is too long to recount, but the primary source of failure isn’t hard to pick out: many of the organizations trying to help did not understand the local conditions.

Related: 5 Things That Will Kill Your Social Enterprise Startup

Travel to That Community and Submerse Yourself to Get Ideas

So how can you actually get to know a community? Or don’t know which community you want to help? Consider traveling to one. Of course, not everyone has the money or ability to simply pick up and move to a foreign locale. However, communities don’t have to be far away and exotic. There are almost certainly nearby communities that need your help.

Are their local refugee communities? How about soup kitchens, or homeless shelters? The world is full of need. You can find a community to help right in your backyard. Often, it will be a bit easier for you to help these communities because on some level you’re likely familiar with them.

Even if you don’t have an idea right now, as you get to know your community the gears will start turning. You may stumble across ideas on your own, or you might find an organization to team up with. Often, members of the community can share their needs, and even offer solutions to fix them. They might lack resources and skills, but perhaps you can help them find the needed inputs.

Identify Needs and Potential Solutions

By now, you know that the community is important. Consider different communities. Often, it’s best to start with communities that you already know very well. If you’re based in New York City, perhaps it’s best to first focus on the local community rather than a far-flung one that you don’t know or understand.

When it comes to selling in markets, your good or service will need to solve a need or address a want. Many social entrepreneurs focus on “needs” rather than wants. Usually, needs are simply more pressing than wants.

A need can be thought of as a challenge or problem that must be addressed. If left unaddressed, conditions will worsen. So consider the problem you want to address. You can start at the highest level. For example, “I want to help poor communities in New York City.” The challenge is poverty.

Now, ask yourself why? Why are people poor? Why is that a problem? Generally, people are poor because they lack access to a good income.

Maybe they lack the education needed to secure a high-paying job. Maybe they are elderly or handicapped and cannot work? On and on the list goes. How can you address such problems? Community training programs? Educational apps? Assistance for those in need? Where can you get that assistance? Perhaps by taking food that’d be thrown away and delivering it to the doors of the elderly?

After you understand a community, you can identify needs, and then you can come up with solutions. Make sure you talk with community members. They might know of solutions. And they might know of challenges that you haven’t seen yet.

Keep The Market In Mind

The market has proven to be one of the most powerful forces for good in history. Simple economics dictates that good ideas will succeed and bad ideas will fail. Charities sometimes run into trouble because they do not necessarily respond to market forces. Donors can and will fund bad ideas.

Social entrepreneurs, however, can and must embrace the market. If your goods or services are failing to drum up interest, you need to revisit them and make sure they are addressing the local community. Something isn’t working. It might be that your marketing campaign simply isn’t effective. Why? Are you misunderstanding the community? For example, you might be trying to reach out to a Latino community, but your adverts are in English.

On the other hand, the product or service you are selling might simply not be addressing the pains and meeting the wants and needs of the local community. You’ll be able to know by measuring market adoption rates. Are people buying your product or service?

Related: The Most Sacred Gift You Can Give According to Tony Robbins

Look At Existing Products and Identify Social Aspects

The modern market economy has generated a tremendous amount of technologies and solutions. Most of these were driven by a pursuit of profit. As a result, many technologies and solutions lack a true social aspect. Can you take an existing business solution and add a social element? If so, you may be able to launch a social enterprise without needing to reinvent any wheels, and without having to open up new markets.

Further, you might even be able to find businesses will to invest in your social endeavors. Not only that, but you may even be able to draw in some talented private market talent that can provide a lot of skills. Consider microlending programs, including those run by the Grameen Foundation, that provide cash-poor people with access to funds. These funds can help them break the cycle of poverty by allowing them to invest.

The people who started these funds, such as Grameen founder Muhammad Yunus, didn’t do anything overly revolutionary. The idea of lending to people has been around since the earliest days of money, and even before. Yet Yunus and others realized that cash-poor people often lack access to traditional lending institutions.

By offering a new model they were able to extend lending to these communities. In turn, this allowed the communities targeted to invest in and uplift themselves.

Another great example is Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia. Chouinard realized that his steel pitons were damaging rock-climbing surfaces. So Chouinard decided to create sustainable climbing gear, and thus Patagonia was born. You can learn more about Chouinard on the Patagonia website.

Addressing “Small” Problems Can Make a Big Difference

The challenges you take on don’t have to be grand. Environmentally friendly climbing gear is the type of idea you’re likely only to discover if you’re part of the mountain climbing community. The average person might not even be aware of the challenges posed by gear that isn’t environmentally friendly.

Just the same, you might find solutions to seemingly small or niche problems. That’s a fantastic place to start. By taking on smaller problems, you might tackle issues that people aren’t even aware of, or don’t think is worth their time to address. However, if you’re solving a challenge and making the world a better place, it’s worth the effort.

Next Steps: Getting Your Ideas Off The Ground

Rather than concluding with the usual summary, let’s consider how you can bring your ideas to life. Makana Eyre outlined “Five Things That Could Kill Your Startup Social Enterprise”. Along the way, he also outlined some great tips for getting your social enterprise rolling.

First, get your idea down on paper.

If you followed the above steps, you have hopefully identified needs and potential solutions. Now it’s time to start refining your ideas, considering concrete solutions, challenges, and other factors.

Next, start building a team.

As Makana notes, it needs to be balanced. You need both visionaries and business experts and people with technical skills. From there, you have to check your assumptions. I can’t do Makana’s work justice in a few sentences, so make sure you check out his article. Point is, coming up with an idea is great, but once you have an idea you have to get it rolling, or it’ll just waste away.

Listen to examples of others you can learn from.

There’s nothing quite like the learning that comes from others who are on the ground, doing what you want to do. If you are just starting your journey, you need to learn all that you can from others who have been there, done that. That’s why we created the Change Creator Podcast series. Adam Force goes deep into how these amazing Change Creators started their companies, where they discovered their ideas and many, many lessons on how they grew their companies as well. I strongly encourage you to get listening! Podcasts are great on long drives, or Sunday afternoons, just fyi!

Read more in-depth examples of social impact leaders in Change Creator Magazine!

Conclusion: So Many Ideas and So Many Places and Ways to Find Them

This list is far from exhaustive. Wherever markets are at play, there is likely a social business or angle opportunity. Rather than worrying about specific ideas, take some time to step back and look at both yourself and the market. Figure out where your passions lie. Figure out what your skills truly are. Then, examine the market for opportunities to use those skills and passions to create change and to produce profits.

Remember, the market is the social entrepreneur’s friend. Markets determine which ideas and opportunities are viable and profitable.

Profits, meanwhile, can be used to generate positive change.

However, make sure you don’t sell out your causes and communities in the name of profits.

Your causes and communities should always take precedent.

Our list of social business ideas to further inspire you! Let the ideas flow!

Meet Aloha for People: Fashion. Clean Water. Better Jobs.

change creator

This article was originally posted by Grant Trahant on Caustartist

Meet Aloha for People. The mission of the brand is to provide clean water and jobs to people in need around the world and in the brands home state of California. With every product sold, Aloha for People provides a person in need with access to clean water for 2 years minimum.

Aloha for People was founded during the summer of 2016 when the company founders, Brian and Emily, were inspired after learning about the lack of clean water and jobs available in Guatemala. The brand prides itself on creating jobs in both Guatemala, Nepal, and in the United States. All of the shirts are made in Los Angeles, California.

Brian and Emily have partnered with the organizations Ecofiltro and Wine To Water to help people in Guatemala and Nepal receive clean water. Ecofiltro makes water filtration systems that are used to provide water to children in schools as well as educate the children and their families on the importance of clean water. Every Aloha for People shirt that is purchased provides a child access to these water filtration systems for 2 years. Wine To Water focuses primarily on permanent water solutions and infrastructure in rural villages of Nepal.

Below is an interview with Brian Poage, co-founder of Aloha for People.

change creator

What inspired the idea of Aloha for People? Tell us your social entrepreneurial story!

During the spring of 2016 Emily and I were searching for deeper meaning in our careers. She was working in the apparel industry and I was working in construction management. Both of us felt unfulfilled and wanted to have a more positive impact on both the environment and for people who were in need. We were inspired after reading Blake Mycoskie’s book Start Something that Matters and began to seriously brainstorm how we could create a company that we would love and that could help improve the world around us. I have always loved aloha shirts. Their ability to tell stories, be conversation pieces, and represent a culture of people has always fascinated and inspired me and I have a closet full of aloha shirts with vibrant colors and unique images.

Emily and I thought that we could create a similar type of shirt that represented the culture of a group of people who could also use our help. We both had some friends from Guatemala and knew they are famous for having vibrant and unique textiles. After also learned that they had a terrible water crisis, we discovered our business model. Aloha for People was born to create new ways to provide clean water and jobs to people in need by making aloha shirts in downtown Los Angeles from fabric hand-woven in Guatemala. By using fabric from Guatemala we provide employment for sewers and textile workers in the country.

Related: What are the unique challenges of starting a social enterprise

We make all of our shirts in downtown Los Angeles which provides jobs here in the United States.

One of our main focuses was to help bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States and specifically California. We are proud that all of our products are made here in our home state and that all of our manufacturing partners are paid fair wages.

How did you get in contact with your current textile suppliers?

The amount of technology we have today is absolutely incredible. We can communicate with people all over the world without leaving our homes and that is exactly how we were able to create our network of suppliers and manufacturers for Aloha for People. Emily and I began our search on Google trying to find reliable fabric suppliers from Guatemala at a competitive price. We reached out to probably a dozen wholesale suppliers to discuss pricing, availability of patterns, quality of fabric, and to understand their business model and standards for their workers. We finally found an incredible supplier out of Florida through David Green. He has been an invaluable partner and has continued to provide us quality Guatemalan fabric at competitive prices. The textiles are incredibly well-made and he has a fantastic relationship with the sewers in Guatemala.

Tell us a little about the water issues people in Guatemala are facing.

Guatemala is truly facing a water crisis. Currently, 95% of the water sources in the country are unsuitable for human consumption and their leading cause of death for children is water borne illnesses.

In their cities, water infrastructure is far inferior compared to our systems in the United States and there is a high water tax for anyone who wants fresh water. This means that only wealthier families are able to have continuous access to clean water while most families cannot afford it.

Outside the cities, there is very little infrastructure and almost zero access to clean water. Many of the villages and communities use the same water sources for drinking, cleaning, and as bathrooms. This water is then filled with bacteria and the majority of people are not educated on the importance of clean water and hygiene. This is one of the reasons we are so proud to partner with Ecofiltro. The company was founded by Philip Wilson and focuses on providing water filtration systems in schools and homes in mostly rural areas of the country.

They make all of their filters in Guatemala out of materials native to Guatemala and they focus on not only providing clean water, but on educating the children and their families on the importance of clean water and hygiene to stay healthy. To date, Ecofiltro has provided over 400,000 children in Guatemala with clean water and their goal is to reach 1,000,000 by 2020. Aloha for People is here to help Ecofiltro reach this incredible goal.

Why do you think it’s important to provide clean water specifically to children?

Children are the future of any civilization or community. One of our most important duties in life is to educate children and prepare them to live a fulfilling and productive life. By providing children clean water, it keeps them healthy and allows them to attend school and have a chance to improve their lives. In countries like Guatemala, children are the key to pulling communities out of poverty and improving the overall conditions of the country. Clean water is necessary for life and Aloha for People’s mission is to help ensure that all children are able to have clean water access so they have the chance to grow up and improve the world around them.

Tell us about your team in Los Angeles assembling your Aloha for People shirts.

We are a tight-knit team here at Aloha for People. After founding the company in 2016, Emily and I brought on our friend and roommate Jeff Michaels. We each have our own roles and play off each other’s strengths and weaknesses to help build the brand. Jeff is our Chief Branding Officer. He created our logo, leads all design efforts, and helps guide the overall feel and direction of the brand.

Emily Sansom is the Chief Design Officer. She leads the design and fit of our products and has leveraged her relationships within the apparel community to help Aloha for People get into retail stores and build a reputation among the other brands here in the Los Angeles area. Brian Poage is the Chief Aloha Officer. He helps to establish our sourcing channels, manufacturing partnerships, and seeks out water partners while also focusing on the future goals of Aloha for People.

Beyond the three employees, we have developed an incredible group of Aloha Ambassadors. These individuals truly embody the Aloha for People mission and represent the brand in a radical way. They help to promote the brand and spread the aloha everywhere they go. We would not be where we are today without their incredible support!

You might also like to read 8 Famous Social Entrepreneurs Doing Good and Making Money

Are Tech Startups Peaking while Social Good is Rising?

change creator tech startups and social good

For the first twenty years of my career I was a techie.  And it was an amazing two decades to be in tech, spanning the dot com bubble, the ubiquity of the personal computer, the Web, a mobile phone in every pocket, smartphones, tablets, social media, and the cloud.

Six years outside of tech, it is interesting to watch how that market seems to be reaching a zenith.  My computer is almost six years old, and doing just fine.  There is nothing an iPhoneX does that my iPhone6 doesn’t already do.  I use the same apps on my 6 as I did on my 4.  For that matter I use the same apps on my notebook as I did back in 2010.

And it’s not just me, a recent TechCrunch article was lamenting “After the end of the startup era” and a recent Guardian article as asking “As tech companies get richer, is it ‘game over’ for startups?

Of course, that is conflating all startups with tech, which is the type of hubris that gets former techies in trouble when they venture out into other industries.

Related: Social Enterprise vs Non-Profit – Dispelling the Myths that Still Exist

One such industry is the world of social good, a.k.a. impact, a.k.a. social enterprise, a.k.a. regenerative capitalism, a.k.a. conscious companies.  This is the industry where I now work.  I do that not only because it is inspiring and because it needs to be done, but also because it feels like an industry that has decades of growth ahead of it.

Looking around the industry and there is growing excitement everywhere.  More entrepreneurs than 750 inculators can help.  So many new funds forming that the industry needs an accelerator for fund managers.  New national and global events each year, all while SOCAP grows its attendees more than 25% year after year.

It could simply be that we have 1-3 billion people left to pull out of poverty (depending on your poverty line), 10 billion people to feed in the next decade or two, 95% of electricity production to replace with renewables, dozens of diseases to eradicate, fisheries and forests to save, and a whole planet to cool back down.

Or it could simply be that tech focused on the low hanging fruit for the last four decades, overlooking the other 99.6% of opportunities.  See Ross Baird’s The Innovation Blindspot for that thesis.

11 Impact Business Models New Entrepreneurs Need to Know About!

change creator social enterprise

If you have a desire to work with underserved communities and promote sustainability along the way, starting a social business will give you the opportunity to get involved with the people you want to serve at a grassroots level.

What are the unique challenges of starting a social enterprise? That’s a good question. Is it like other kinds of businesses? Or more like a non-profit? What makes starting a social good business that much more difficult than a typical for-profit business model?

That’s what we are examining today.

Can you make a living and change the world?

It’s becoming easier to help more people, change the world, and make a living at the same time through social businesses, which are set up such that communities can get the help and resources they need, in a way that works for the local culture and environment.

The business models of many social enterprises ensure that profits are reinvested back into the communities and funding is directed to those who need it most.

However, it takes more than a product or a business model to start a social venture.

At the root of any successful social business is the founder’s vision and desire to serve a community that he/she cares about.

The Unique Challenges of Starting a Social Enterprise

One of the unique challenges many social entrepreneurs face is coming up with a business idea that’s exciting for them, speaks to their passions, and is profitable in the long run.

Meeting these challenges also led to many innovative ideas for social enterprises that are inspiring and game-changing.

For most social entrepreneurs, the birth of a business often comes about as a result of living among the people their businesses aim to serve and allowing their passion to take shape organically.

For example, Maggie Doyne was working with Nepalese refugees in Northeast India when she discovered her passion for working with children, which later evolved into her foundation, BlinkNow.

But she didn’t go from having an idea to creating a foundation overnight. She took baby steps – specific actions that were focused and not overly complicated – and allowed her idea to take shape so she could recruit partners and realize her vision.

Another unique challenges of starting a social enterprise is coming up with a business model that’s sustainable and profitable without compromising their vision.

The key is to combine your passion with sound business concepts. Get inspiration from other social enterprises, see what works, and apply the ideas to your venture. Remember, it’s all about solving a social problem first, the business plan, the growth, everything entrepreneurial will come second.

Related: Download Change Creator Magazine to get in depth strategies and insights from some of the best impact entrepreneurs on the planet 

Social Enterprise Business Model Ideas

Each social enterprise has its unique vision and audience. We’ve grouped these business ideas into larger themes to help you focus on their commonalities and underlying principles rather than the specifics of the individual ventures. Many of them can start off as a small business, then expand as the market demands, so if you’re just starting out, you will still want to think about the type of social enterprise you want to have moving forward.

1. Products With “Dual-Markets”

If you have a product that can solve a problem for people in both developed and developing countries, you can leverage the commercial component of selling the item in the developed world and subsidize the initiatives in the developing countries.

For example, Gavin Armstrong’s Lucky Iron Fish is designed as a convenient and cost-effective way to solve health issues caused by iron-deficiency, which is common in both developed and developing countries.

The website has an eCommerce store that sells its products to consumers in the US, UK, Canada, Europe, and Australia. With the profits from the store, Lucky Iron Fish can continue to work with local partners in developing countries and make sure the product reaches those in need.

The company also has a prominent “Give Lucky Iron Fish” section on the website where customers can donate the iron fish to families in need.

2. Buy One, Give One

The beauty of this model lies in its simplicity. Whenever a consumer purchases a product, a similar item will be given to someone in need.

The model can be easily explained to customers and it can be applied to a wide range of products – from TOMS (shoes) to Warby Parker (glasses), Lucky Iron Fish, and Mealshare (food).

This model, however, isn’t without its critics as it often fails to address the root cause of poverty or undermines local producers.

As a response, social enterprises are “souping up” their BOGO initiatives to deliver a more profound local impact:

  • Source the “give one” items locally to support communities in need by creating employment opportunities.
  • Charge a small fee for the “give one” item, empowering beneficiaries by changing them from a dependent to a responsible consumer.
  • Use the proceeds of the “give one” item to fund local initiatives that alleviate poverty.
  • Partner with local businesses or organizations to deliver the “give one” items.

What kind of sustainable development goal is your impact business trying to solve? Thinking about the big reason WHY you are doing this business in the first place can help you decide on your model? If your business model doesn’t help the local community you are trying to help, and the sustainable development goal, perhaps it is time to rethink your model from the beginning.

3. Marketplace To Facilitate Commerce

You don’t have to produce a product to become a social entrepreneur.

You can create a marketplace to connect consumers with items produced by artisans in communities you want to help.

This model gives access to consumers to ethically produced goods that are unique and of high quality, while allowing craftsman to get a fair reward for their work and educating the public about the culture in other parts of the world.

In addition, you can donate the proceeds from the sales to charities in need. For example, Society B gives to Action Against Hunger and Kids In Need Foundation.

Such marketplace model can also be used to support local producers such as independent farmers who are often at a disadvantage since they don’t have the bargaining power of Big Foods.

FoodConnect in Australia connects consumers with seasonal and ecological produce and food items from local farmers.

Today’s technology allows for easy coordination of logistics and deliveries, making it feasible for fresh local produce to reach more people at a reasonable cost.

4. Fair Trade Products

Consumers are becoming more conscious about the origins of the items they purchase and many are looking for fair-trade, responsibly sourced products made from conflict-free materials.

These socially conscious items are produced in a better working environment than their counterparts (e.g., with increased wages and better safety) while being sold at a reasonable price.

These social businesses are often based in the communities where the craftsman, artisans, or farmers live to make sure most of the proceeds from the sales are reinvested into the local community.

For example, Rachel Faller’s zero-waste fashion line tonlé brings together craftsmanship and the latest in fashion. Its products are reasonably priced and appeal to a global clientele.

5. Access To Natural Resources And Other Basic Needs

Today’s technology makes it very affordable to deliver natural resources such as clean water and solar power to communities in developing countries at low cost.

If you have a knack for tinkering and inventing, you can find opportunities everywhere!

There are many social enterprises hard at work in making sure those in need have access to these resources:

  • org brings safe water and sanitation to communities through access to small, affordable loans. When people have access to safe water, they have time to go to school, earn an income, and take care of their families.
  • Soma sells beautifully designed water filter. For every water filter sold, they donate to charity: water projects.
  • Husk Power is a rural empowerment project that creates a self-sustaining ecosystem in the villages it serves, enabling economic development along with environmental protection, physical wellbeing, and strengthening of the rural communities.
  • Smart Solar Box is a program that teaches users how to build a power-producing device at home for less than $200.
  • Environfit, founded by Ron Bills, offers a global product line of clean cooking technologies that cook faster while reducing fuel use, smoke, and toxic emissions.

6. Sustainability-Focused Products Or Services

Besides economic advancement for underserved communities, sustainability is another important component of social entrepreneurship.

There are many ways to promote an environmental cause through social businesses and here are some examples:

  • Help people in your community recondition batteries to reduce toxic wastes and save money.
  • Start a business constructing affordable homes with shipping containers either at home or abroad. These houses can provide shelter to the homeless, people affected by natural disasters, or battered women in need of temporary residence.
  • Become a community event planner to connect local businesses or a digital event planner to work with social businesses all over the world. You can specialize in events that support the causes you’re passionate about, generate revenue with sponsorship, and use the proceeds to help charitable organizations of your choice.
  • Start a sustainable, ethical online clothing company that reduces waste!

7. Microlending

Microlending, made possible by the widespread use of the Internet, has become a popular social enterprise business model.

It allows entrepreneurs in the developing world access to loans they’d otherwise be unable to obtain so they can start a small business and sustain themselves.

Microlending institutions help administer such lending for humanitarian purposes and ensure that the money is being put to good use.

These organizations, such as Kiva, allow lenders to choose categories or borrowers they want to support. Lenders will get updates on their loans and later see the amount, plus interest repaid to their accounts.

The use of data allows microlending organizations to select borrowers with a high likelihood of repaying the loans. In fact, Kiva boasts a 97% loan repayment rate.

Lenders often get a return that’s higher than putting money in a traditional savings or CD account. They can fund a portfolio of many dozens of microloans to help disperse the risk.

8. Social Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding has become a popular way for many social enterprises to get seed money without having to go through the lengthy process of obtaining VC funding or loan application.

If you’re passionate about helping other social entrepreneurs realize their dreams, you can start a crowdfunding platform dedicated to helping social businesses, such as Alex Budak’s Start Some Good.

Besides access to supporters, social crowdfunding platforms can assist social enterprises by offering resources and access to additional funding opportunities.

9. Sourcing And Skill Training

You don’t have to be inventing social good products to make an impact.

In fact, many of these products already exist, yet they don’t get to the intended communities due to the lack of distribution systems and proper training.

If you have a talent in organizing logistics and training workforce, you can make a big impact by sourcing several social good products (e.g., clean cookstoves, affordable power solutions) and provide training to underemployed groups in a community to sell the products on a commission basis.

Livelyhoods uses a hub-and-spoke distribution model, with branches in slum communities that serve as training centers and inventory stock points.

In addition, it uses a micro-consignment and door-to-door distribution model to provide women and young people with a low-risk way to earn an income while making social good products available to the community.

10. Educational Travel

If you love to connect with different local communities and share your passion for traveling, consider starting a travel company that focuses on providing an intercultural learning experience and a positive social impact on the local communities.

For example, Evoluzion Travel partners with local communities to ensure that tourism revenue goes directly to guides and local entrepreneurs. They also work with grassroots organizations in the destinations to support community development projects.

They support the local economy by using local transportation, staying at local hotels, buying crafts and products from local artisans, and designing authentic travel experiences that promote cultural exchange.

11. Virtual “Assembly Line”

Outsourcing is everywhere in our society, but what if you can facilitate outsourcing while having a social impact?

That’s what Cloud Factory does. The company provides skill training to underserved populations in specific programming tasks and then create an “assembly line” that can put together a product or project, e.g., a website, in a way that’s faster, cheaper, and with a higher quality standard than conventional outsourcing.

Local workers not only receive job training but also have access to employment with higher wages than they would normally receive doing menial work.

Conclusion

As you can see, a social enterprise can take on many shapes and forms – it’s only limited by your passion and imagination!

There’s a world of possibilities when you connect the global society with local communities.

The success recipe for many of these ventures is sensitivity to the environment and culture of the local community. We can no longer just take what we think is “right” in the Western culture and impose it on other communities.

It’s important to do your homework and understand how a specific product or service can fit into the context to deliver the desired outcomes, as well as how it contributes to the continued growth of the community by investing resources into solving the root cause of the challenges.

It all starts with solving a social problem. What problem are you going to solve through business? What’s your big idea?

Now that you know the challenges, you might want to learn how to start a social business. We recommend you check out, The Beginner’s Guide to Starting a Social Business.

Social Enterprise vs Non-Profit – Dispelling the Myths that Still Exist

change creator non profit

Many of us still think that social enterprise is synonymous with nonprofit, but that simply isn’t the case. There are many key differences between the two, and several myths still exist about the comparison between both. We asked one of the country’s leading experts on social enterprise, Luni Libes to share his thoughts on these myths. I know you’ll find this discussion compelling and informative. Social enterprise vs non-profit — let’s examine the myths that still exist.

Introduction by Amy Aitman, Change Creator Director of Content

1. The myth that social good is nonprofit social work.

Jump back 50 years, to the 1960’s before the Summer of Love, to a booming America, a western world emerging from the destruction of the first half of the 20th Century. A world with commonplace automobiles and air travel, where electricity water and phones were in most American homes, but where people’s grandparents could still tell stories of when those modern conveniences arrived.

This was the age of The Jetsons, when we were first promised flying cars, 4-hour work days, and push-button lives.

The Seattle World’s Fair of 1962 and New York World’s Fair of 1968 showcased this future.

Those fairs were specifically looking 50 years into the future. To the amazing future of the 2010’s. A time when all the world’s problems would be solved, and solved through advanced technologies.

Here we are in that future, and not all is well.

Half the world lives on less than $5 per day, and half of them at less than $2 per day.

A billion of those people don’t have enough food.

They are still dying from curable diseases.

They don’t have potable water, or running water for that matter.

They nearly all have phones, but no electricity to charge them, nor electricity to light their homes at night or to access the push-button lifestyle envisioned at those World Fairs.

Two things happened to get us here.

First, the population of the world doubled. There were just 3.2 billion people living on Earth in 1962, and 7.5 billion here in 2017. We did manage to go from 80% poverty to 50% poverty, but percentages don’t explain that we went from 2 billion poor to 3.5 billion poor.

Second and just as importantly, for the past fifty years we left it up to governments and nonprofits to solve the world’s problems. Neither of those sectors was given enough resources to succeed, and upon any success, neither have a model that scales to serve billions of people.

What we forgot over the last fifty years is that it wasn’t government or nonprofits that brought the first billion people out of poverty. It was business. Profit-seeking, for-profit, capitalism.

It was the Ford Motor Company and General Electric and U.S. Steel, along with a hundred other giant corporations and hundreds of thousands much smaller companies. It was the general store, issuing credit to the local townspeople. The garage inventor, making and selling a better plow or sewing machine or typewriter.

The For-Profit Cycle Creates a Middle Class

The for-profit cycle creates a middle class. A middle class then demands schools for their children. Roads. Police. Courts. Etc. And that middle class pays for that service themselves through taxes.

After 100 years, this cycle lets a company like Coca-Cola sell its sugar water in just about every village on the planet. But remember, it took 100 years for Coca-Cola to scale to that size. Coca-Cola was once a tiny startup with a single founder, serving one drink at a time in one shop in Atlanta, Georgia. And while that particular product may only bring smiles rather than good health, the same model of selling a product for a profit and using the profits to expand works for replacing three stone fires with efficient cookstoves, replacing kerosene lamps with solar power, for mechanizing farms, expanding distribution networks, and everything else needed to pull the last billions out of poverty.

This is the vision for the next fifty years. Mission-driven for-profits tackling poverty, hunger, and the other 15 UN Sustainable Development Goals. Companies that do good through business. Some which will scale up to the size of Coca-Cola, and millions more that are like that old general store, working solely in their local communities.

This is what social enterprise can and should be.

Related: How to Find Ideas for Your Social Enterprise That You’ll Want to Pursue

2. Examples of mission-driven for-profits

Mission-driven for-profit companies span every imaginable sector and geography. They range from breakthrough innovations, like recycling all cotton clothing, to providing basic necessities, like clean, flushable toilets in the slums of Kampala, Uganda.

What they all have in common is that they aim to make the world a truly better place, serving some social and/or environmental purpose, with that purpose embedded within their product or service. Or in other words, they are a business that does good in the course of doing its business.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with 82 such companies over the past six years. Let me tell you about just a few:

Evrnu: Technology that Recycles Cotton

The most impactful company I’ve seen so far is Evrnu. They invented a chemical technology that recycles cotton. Take old, used, worn-out cotton clothing, bedding, or towels, toss it in a vat, add Evrnu’s magic formula, and everything dissolves into a thick soup of fibers. Shoot the goo through a spinneret, and you have a fiber that is as good as the best cotton of the world. A fiber that can be spun into yarn, woven or knit into fabric, cut, sewn, and turned back into clothing, bedding, or towels. In other words, recycled. We expect this of paper, metals, and some plastics.

Now, for the first time in human history, we can do the same with clothing.

JOELEX: Making an Impact in Uganda

The company with the most obvious need is JOELEX, which builds and operates toilets in Kampala, Uganda.

There are three million people living in Kampala, two million in slums, in homes with no running water. Those two million people have access to just 1,000 flushable toilets. 1 toilet per 2,000 people. Or in reality just no toilets for most of the women and children, who spend most of their days in the slums.

Their solution is called open defecation. You’d recognize it as the same method Americans use with their dogs. Go on the edge of the path and put the poo into a plastic bag.

But unlike American dog walkers, there are no trash cans in Kampala and thus the bags are just tossed onto a far-away roof or behind the neighbor’s house. The obvious solution is toilets. JOELEX is doing just that.

Pay-per-use toilets, following in the footsteps of the public toilets which appeared in 1800’s London, when that city had millions of people, no toilets, and no sewers.

Arqlite: Tackling Plastic Waste

In between breakthrough and obvious ideas is Arqlite, which takes any and all plastic wastes and turns it into artificial rocks for use in and under concrete. There are 300 million tons of plastic waste generated each year, and just a small single digit percentage is recycled. A lot is collected for recycling, but the reality is that most ends up in landfills, incinerators, or the oceans.

Arqlite instead wants the 90%+ of unrecyclable waste turned into something of value, a product that replacing the quarry stone mined from the Earth and ground into the ubiquitous stone we see in concrete. Plus it turns out plastic makes for great concrete, lighter in weight and thus in need of less concrete in total, with better acoustic properties and better at holding in heat. A win-win for the environment.

How Africans Can Grow Chickens

Back to the developing world, in 2016 Bill Gates said that if he were poor, he’d grow chickens. African chicken had already thought that idea back in 2015, and started working with 64 women to grow chickens for them.

Turns out the two hurdles for poor people growing chickens is the cost of feeding the chickens for months before they are ready for market, then access to a big market to grow the chickens. The feeding and care is easy. African Chicken does the hard part for these women, providing baby chicks, feed, vaccines, and veterinarian care. All for free.

They then buy 90% of the chickens three months later, leaving 10% for the women to feed their family, plus $1 per chicken for the women for their labor. African Chicken processes the chickens, ships and sells the chickens in Dar es Salaam, the biggest city in the country, to hotels, restaurants and supermarkets who would never buy small quantities directly from the rural poor. After all the expenses, the company and the women each earn $1, and the city goers get a steady supply of high-quality chicken.

Coffee Can Lead to Change Too

Down in Nicaragua, the cash crop if coffee, not chickens. Trouble is twofold. One, coffee prices are highly volatile, and the small producers have to sell at the market price. Two, every few years some disease comes along, and the small producers can’t afford the fungicides and other treatments. Enter Jicote, which teaches those farmers how to keep bees, and which aggregates and exports the honey from those bees.

Honey is an another international commodity product, but one with a far steadier price than coffee. Plus bee keeping increases the yield of coffee plants, boosting that income stream too. Like chickens, the hurdles for small growers is access to markets, and Jicote plugs these farmers into a market they otherwise couldn’t reach themselves.

There are dozens more companies I could talk about, and you can watch each of them tell their stories in their own words at fledglings.fledge.co. For now I’ll leave you with one more.

Shift Labs: Social Good Health Solutions

Shift Labs makes a simple medical device that clips on to an IV bag. It’s an electronic device that counts the drips, telling the nurse how quickly the medicine from that bag is entering the patient. Anyone not trained as a doctor or nurse would expect such a device had been around as long as IV bags. You’d be wrong. The normal way this is measured is by looking at the drips, counting them by eye and estimating. Sometimes checking for a specific time against a watch. In a lot of countries checking against a certain number of pulses in the nurse’s pulse. Often just guessing.

For less than $100, Shift Labs’s Drip Assist gets ride of the inaccuracies and the guessing. The nurse can set audible alarms if the rate slows down or speed up too much (which is does when the patient moves her arm). This is a battery-operated device tried and tested in India, Kenya, and Nigeria, as well as deployed in emergency rooms and hospitals in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. It’s simple. It improves health. And while Shift Labs seems like a tiny version of Philips, it is a social enterprise, with a mission of improving lives of everyone on the planet, with by designing and selling devices affordable by clinics everywhere.

Related: How to Find Ideas for Your Social Enterprise That You’ll Want to Pursue

3. There simply isn’t enough money for nonprofits to scale.

In the modern world, we look to the nonprofit sector to solve the problems of poverty, hunger, education, etc. This is starting to change, with projects like the UN Sustainable Development Goals inviting businesses and “the private sector” to join in, but when most people look at those goals, they see a list of topics for the NGOs and governments to tackle.

We’ve left those topics up to government and nonprofits to solve for the last fifty years, and they’ve not done enough. More people are poor now than were living on the planet fifty years ago.

The reason why is rather simple. There isn’t enough money for governments and nonprofits to provide solutions. A bit of analysis can clearly show this truth.

Let’s start with two companies, both based in Seattle, both founded by college dropouts.

One not too long ago was the largest for-profit company in the world (now even larger in value but ranked third).

The other is the world’s largest nonprofit.

change createor luni libes

An Examination of Two Companies: Social Enterprise vs Non-Profit

Turns out they have the same founder, Bill Gates, Jr. The for-profit is Microsoft, and that fortune is the basis for the nonprofit, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

What makes the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation the largest nonprofit is $40 billion in assets. It’s endowment.

change creator

That is a huge sum of money, larger in size to most of the GDPs of most countries in the world. That is $40 billion, billion with a “b”. But it’s not as big as Microsoft’s revenues. In 2016 Microsoft sold $93 billion worth of products to its customers.

change creator

That, however, is comparing apples with orangutans, as the $40 billion is all the money the foundation has versus the new cash that came to Microsoft in just one year. An apples to pears comparison would be the foundation endowment versus the market capitalization of Microsoft, i.e. the value of all of Microsoft’s shares. That was $460 billion back in 2016 (now over $600 billion at the end of 2017).

change creator

But wait, the foundation has only $40 billion. They don’t give all of that away each year. If they did that, they’d be out of the charity business next year. Instead, they give away just 5%. Or more specifically, they give about $2 billion from their endowment, plus another $2 billion that is gifted to them by Warren Buffet, founder of Berkshire Hathaway and good friend of Bill Gates.

$4 billion is again a lot of money. That is still billion with a “b”. But rather than plot out what would be a barely visible sliver of a bar, instead go back and look at the difference in scale between one entrepreneur’s nonprofit and for-profit efforts. $40 billion on the left and $460 billion on the right. A ratio of more than 10:1.

Is that a meaningful number? Is there 1/10th the capital in the nonprofit world vs. the for-profit world? No, not even close. To see the a more accurate ratio, let’s compare the top 100 charities with the top 100 public companies.

change creator top 100

A Further Look at the Numbers

There are far more than 100 charities and far more than 100 public companies, but for both sectors the size of the entities drops off quickly, and in both cases it is easier to get data on the biggest entities. What we find is striking. The sum total of the assets (a.k.a. endowments) of the top 100 public charities is $300 billion.

change creator

$300 billion is a huge sum of money, but note that it is not even equal to one public company, Microsoft. Add up the value of the other 99 biggest public companies and the result is mind boggling. $15 trillion. That is trillion with a “t”, a.k.a. 1,000 billion or 1 million million.

change creator

For this comparison, the ratio of assets in the nonprofit sector to for-profit sector is 1:500. For every $1,000 of value in a for-profit, there is only $2 in a nonprofit. $100,000 of investment in a for-profit, $200 donation to a nonprofit.

But this too is misleading, as the 101st largest nonprofit has a value less than 1/500th the 101st largest for-profit. There are over 3,000 public companies in the U.S., most of which with a value larger than the 100th largest public charity.

It gets worse, remember how the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation only gives away $4 billion per year. That is 1/5th of all the giving of the top 100 foundations. In 2016 the sum total of giving was just $20 billion.

change creator

If 100% of that $20 billion were spent on the 3.5 billion people who live on less than $5 per day (and it’s not), that would be just $5.70 per person per year.

$5.70 doesn’t put a child through school for a year. It doesn’t replace the three stone fire with an efficient cookstove. It could buy a few chickens and some feed, but wouldn’t be enough to deliver those chickens out to the billion households who would use them. It simply isn’t enough to make a dent in global poverty, world hunger, etc.

This is why nonprofits fail to solve these problems. They simply don’t have the money.

But what about governments?

They have trillions of dollars. Yes, they do, but they don’t spend it on these solutions. In the U.S., the total budget for non-military foreign aid in 2016 (before the Trump administration’s budget cuts) was $24 billion.

That more than doubles the charitable giving, but doesn’t increase it by a factor of 5 or 10 or 500. It changes the total potential per person from $5.70 to $12.57. Still not enough money to even reach all 3.5 billion people in need, let alone bring them anything that could help.

Which is fine, as the giving model doesn’t work. Giving fish doesn’t teach people to fish. It leaves them and their children depending on charity.

For comparison, let’s look at the 100 largest American advertisers. These are all for-profit companies. Tide, Clorox, Dove soap, Budweiser, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Disney, Comcast, Visa, etc. They spent $110 billion in 2016 wooing the 310 million Americans. Spending that money because it led to more than $110 billion in profits.

This number sinks in better when viewed side by side with the $44 billion from USAID and the charities. This $110 billion was just spent in the U.S., on television, web, radio, and print advertising. Selling products we already buy.

The conclusion when you look at these number is clear. The money and power is in the hands of the for-profits. Their efforts dwarf the foreign aid and charities.

If the UN Sustainable Development Goals are going to be reached, the only path to do that is through for-profit capitalism.

The Good News! There is Social Enterprise

The good news is that a new wave of companies is doing just that. It will take them decades until they are big, public, and global, but this seed change is happening. The pioneers of social enterprise, Ben & Jerry’s, Stonyfield Farms, Whole Foods made it big, got bought by multinational companies and their ideas are infecting their new owners. Plus thousands of other mission-driven for-profits are following that path, doing good in the world through business, scaling up to reach the last few billion who will rise out of poverty and join the middle class in the next few decades.

It’s not a matter of if, just when. It’s inevitable.

4. Social Entrepreneurship vs. The Myth of Tech

Another myth circulating around the world is that all startups are tech startups. When you talk to the people organizing entrepreneurship ecosystems around the world (and I’ve met dozens of these people as they visit Seattle seeking to replicate the success of my home city), first and foremost they all want to bring tech to their cities.

The reality is that only a tiny sliver of startups are the high-growth, disruptive tech startups that get so much press. All of venture capital in the United States funds less than half of one percent of the companies started each year in this country.

The other 99% of startups get less than 1% of the attention of the press and of investors, and yet it is those 99% of new companies that employs so much of Americans. I’d tell you how many of those are mission-driven companies, but I can’t, as no one is measuring that and thus no one knows.

In any case, given the focus on tech it is not surprising that the plethora of incubators and accelerators and business plan competitions and Angel groups and other entrepreneurship programming is primarily seeking the next Facebook, the next Google, and the next Amazon. If you are a social entrepreneur, it can be difficult to find any help using Google, Facebook or Amazon.

It is there, it’s just hard to find.

Find a Good Accelerator Program

One place to start is the brand new Accelerator Selection Tool, created by Conveners.org through their Accelerating the Accelerator program. The goal of that tool is to allow social entrepreneurs to find a list of training programs that fit their geography, sector, stage, and more. Almost 1,500 program are known by that tool today.

These programs range from nonprofit focused on a single sector (e.g. agriculture) in a specific region of a specific country (e.g. northern Uganda) to global for-profit accelerators like mine (Fledge), which works with companies from all sorts of sectors based in any country of the world. The programs vary from 1 day to 1 year in length. Some fly you to gather with others in some city of the world. Others come to you over the internet.

Other places for finding like-minded entrepreneurs and investors are the big events like SOCAP, the world’s largest social capital conference, held annually in San Francisco. The SANKALP Forum, with annual gatherings in Mumbai, Nairobi, Jakarta, and the Hague. Foro Latinoamericano de Inversión de Impacto (FLII), annually in Merida, Mexico, and the largest of these events in Latin America.

Websites like ImpactSpace have listings of social enterprises and impact investors. Impact Base has listings of impact funds.
Organizations like the Global Impact Investors Network (GIIN) and B Lab create and publish systems for measuring impact in an organization.

Then when it comes time for funding, groups like Investors’ Circle, Toniic, and investorflow.org share investment opportunities with their investor-only members.

And when all of those sources tell you are just too early, there is free entrepreneurship education and advice on my website, lunarmobiscuit.com.

It turns out that there is a lot of help for social entrepreneurs, it’s just not easy to find, hiding amongst the noise of the tech-focused startup landscape.

You might also be interested in ready the article entitled, The Role of Empathy in Social Enterprise.

A Look At Social Business Models and NGOs

change creator social business

The social business is not new. It has existed for decades in different forms with many definitions, some having been more effective than others. It has long been seen as an alternative to the NGO, a model that streamlines impact and eliminates bureaucracy. And yes, from many perspectives, social business is a model for the future. It allows quick growth and broader impact than the traditional NGO.

With a social business model, staffers do not have to fundraise, engage donors or work with government. They can focus on work without the burden of grant writing or taking donors on site tours. But with this trend, many important organizations that enable and support social change have stopped supporting non-business model organizations entirely.

The social business model is similar but also diverging from traditional business because of its mission. Unlike a traditional business, the mission and goal of a social business is to address a social or environmental problem. This is typically done through a market-based approach that uses the sale of products to generate income.

For a social business, profit is a means to achieving a mission not an overall goal.

It is also different than corporate social responsibility and business charity because all activities of the social business address the problem not simply one department of a company. There is one major requirement for a social business: a market. Without a market, a business cannot function—if a product cannot be sold or purchased, no revenue is generated.

Related: Why Social Enterprise Matters: An Examination Into the Role of Social Enterprise to Solve Social Problems

That brings the question: can we monetize all of the problems that we face? Many leaders in social innovation think so.

The rhetoric and policy changes among thought leaders and support organizations are starting to reject any social venture that is not sustainable.

Approaches like impact investment (formally recognized by J.P Morgan Chase) are overtaking organizations that work with problems that are harder to monetize. Business for a social purpose is good. Growth is quick, startup costs are often low and efficiency is high. But the trend of only supporting social businesses will damage important work that is being done to address the issues that we cannot monetize—the issues that we cannot create markets for.

The population of children living in the street across the developing world is a good example. How do we monetize them? How do we create a financially sustainable system in which these children can access education, healthcare, and food?

Some problems are difficult to create markets for and this is where we need traditional NGOs. Yes, they rely on unsustainable and inconsistent funding but they fill an important gap that social business misses.

These organizations need support, they need the funding and backing of foundations and governments. And just as trends go, as big support organizations change their requirements for eligibility, the smaller ones will follow and important work could stop.

What You Need To Know About Creating New Habits

Want to start a new exercise habit?

Maybe meditating?

Daily journaling?

Whatever it might be, we have deep rooted patterns in our lives and creating new habits take hard work.

The steps themselves might be deceptively simple: pick one habit, keep it small to start with, and remember to do it every day.

But it’s not always so easy — there are a number of forces that can stand in the way:

  • People in our lives create resistance to the habit.
  • Our environment itself creates resistance (i.e. Internet distractions get in the way of writing).
  • We forget.
  • A crisis or other disruption comes into our life unexpectedly.

All of that is difficult … but there’s one obstacle that gets in the way more than any other.

Our biggest obstacle is ourselves.

I’m guessing you’re not so surprised by this. We have seen ourselves give up on habits many times, because:

  • We are busy.
  • We procrastinate because we’re tired or just don’t feel like it.
  • We get distracted by our addictions.
  • We are afraid of failure.
  • We don’t like the discomfort of the task.

We are our own biggest obstacle to the new habits we want to create in our lives.

The biggest reason is because we come up with all kinds of objections.

And then we listen to those objections.

We object to waking up early to write, because we’re tired. Tiredness is a big objection of ours.

We object to doing yoga or exercising, because it’s hard and we don’t feel like it right now. We’d rather check our phones. Procrastination because distraction is easier than discomfort is another major way we deal with our objections.

We object to the difficult studying, because it makes us feel like losers to not know what we’re doing. This feeling of uncertainty is another huge objection.

We object to the daily practice, because it feels restricting. It feels useless somehow, to practice but not get anywhere. It’s not working.

We object to discomfort, uncertainty, being overwhelmed, having to do something regularly, not being able to comfort and reward ourselves whenever we want.

How do we overcome these objections? How do we overcome the obstacles of ourselves? Let’s investigate a few ideas.

Overcoming Our Own Objections

There might not be just one answer to this obstacle. People respond differently depending on how they respond to expectations — their own expectations, and other people’s.

So the right answer for me might not be the right answer for you.

Let’s look at a few different approaches.

Have Answers to the Objections

If we have a set of common objections to sticking to something, then we can pre-plan our answers instead of blindly believing the rationale we usually use.

Here are some common objections, with examples of how you might plan to answer them:

  • I’m tired (or don’t feel like it). Answer: Just do a little bit of it. You don’t have to do it for very long … if you can do one minute (or write one paragraph), you can call that a win for today.
  • Why should I put myself through this. Answer: This is a gift to yourself. Doing this habit is a loving way to make your life better, and always putting it off is a harmful habit. See the deliciousness in this experience!
  • You deserve a break/treat. Answer: Take a break right after you do it for a minute. Or … let this be your treat!
  • I’ll do it in a minute (or “One won’t hurt). Answer: You know that rationale is a lie. Don’t listen to the lies you tell yourself when you’re tired or afraid. Instead, tell yourself that doing the habit for one minute won’t hurt. Or putting off doing something you’re trying to quit (cigarettes, for example) won’t hurt.
  • This is scary/sucks because I don’t know what I’m doing. Answer: Yep, the uncertainty is scary! And yet, everything good in your life has come because you pushed into uncertainty. So see it as something to savor, this uncertainty, because it is the ground where you learn, grow, and get better. Learn to relish in it.
  • This is hard, I’ll do it later. Answer: Do a small dose of the hard stuff now, then go to your favorite distraction after. Switch up the order and things get a lot better in your life.

Of course, the answers above won’t necessarily be the best ones for you … so figure out what answers work for you.

Set Up Your Environment

If having answers to your objections doesn’t work, you might set up your environment to be more conducive to habit success, when you’re feeling good and optimistic.

Some ideas:

  • Clear away distractions. Make it hard to get to them.
  • Make your best option the most convenient option. Put out the healthy snacks where you can see them, and make yourself have to drive to the store to get the unhealthy stuff.
  • Tell others in your house/office that you’re not going to do something (not go on Facebook, not eat candy) … and if they catch you doing it, you owe them $50.
  • Get others to join you in a challenge.
  • Put reminders or inspiration everywhere.
  • Make your Instagram or Twitter feed only filled with inspiration, not distractions.
  • Ask others to encourage you on your goal every time they see you.
  • Set up your yoga mat, meditation cushion, writing space, or sewing area so that it’s easy to dive into your new habit.

Again, what works for one person won’t work for others, so experiment!

Find the Freedom

Some people really don’t work well with restrictions or being told they have to do something over and over. If that’s you, then find the freedom in the activity.

Why eat broccoli and kale? If you make it something your mom is telling you to do, you might hate it. But if you find the deliciousness in fresh, healthy, whole food, maybe it can seem like a wonderful choice. If you think about the freedom it gives you to be healthy, strong, fit and able to do all kinds of outdoor activities, then kale becomes a beautiful empowering leaf.

Why give up cigarettes? Instead of thinking of this as a restrictive thing, think of it as freedom from the burden of having to buy cigarettes, financial freedom, freedom from being tied to a burdensome habit for the rest of your life, freedom from getting super sick from smoking (which will absolutely suck for you and your loved ones).

Why sit down every day to write your book? Think of it as freedom from procrastination and distraction, freedom to express yourself, freedom to finally create when you’ve been running from it for so long.

Find the deliciousness, the treat, the freedom, the fun. And soon you’ll be not your own biggest obstacle, but your own biggest supporter.

Related: 

If you’re a busy person then this one skill will change your life

change creator tired

“Sure, I’d love to help.”

“Yes, let’s setup some time.”

No matter how busy I would get, I had a very tough time saying no to people.

Little did I know, that mastering that one skill would change my life. Seems trivial right? It’s a huge factor as you’ll see when I break it down in this article.

Pursuing work as an entrepreneur can be even more tricky after being in the traditional 9am-5pm role because you need to make your own schedule. There are so many choices to make on how to spend your time to be most effective.

If you’re the kind of person who has an activist-spirit or is already pursuing social business than you probably have a high level of empathy. Something that is very powerful in business actually because it’s so important to understand things from the someone else’s perspective. However, while being a very good thing, it can also be a bit of a curse that you need to be very aware of because you always want to help others.

I noticed this the most during my entrepreneur years the most. I would always be networking and meeting new people. As that happened opportunities would come up to work with them.

At the early phase of a business you likely don’t have a ton of cash flow.

You bootstrap and do everything yourself which means you don’t have an assistant.

You’re just a person following their passion and trying to figure things out.

The one thing you can trade since you don’t have a lot of money is your time. Write an article for someone, build their website, make a video…etc. Whatever skill you might have that can help them out.

But the habit of saying yes to everything has huge downsides that I outline below.

But first, why do we say yes?

Why am I a “yes” addict?

As technology continues to boom and connect us in every way possible we lead high paced stressful lives with infinite choices.

We are taught to help others, be kind, bring value to their lives. This is what gets you a return in life.

You don’t want to let someone down or destroy an important relationship.

You want to be helpful and positive. No, is seen as unhelpful and negative, right?

It the book, The Power of a Positive No, William Ury states:

“Saying no has always been important, but perhaps never as essential a skill as it is today.”

Ury even says that “whether and how we say No determines the very quality of our lives.”

His whole thing is about learning to say No in a positive way that still gets the yes.

Mahatma Gandhi once said:

“A “no” uttered from deepest conviction is better and greater than a `Yes’ merely uttered to please or what is worse, to avoid trouble.”

Related: Find out what it takes to get paid to change the world with Change Creator Magazine

Delayed Personal Progress

It’s exciting to connect with people who show interest in what you’re doing. Maybe you can help each other out? Out of excitement we might rush into decisions, giving into negative emotions such as fear and guilt.

I was always open to a mutually beneficial partnership because it meant progress to me. But, that usually meant carving out some of my limited time to make it happen.

When you do this a few times, you suddenly realize you’re over committed and basically delaying your progress more than anything because you’re spending less and less time on the things that truly matter to your personal goals.

Eroding Relationships

When you become spread too thin and overcommitted, you start having shallow relationships.

You tap into that limited time inventory and start paying less attention to the most important people in your life, business or personal.

Maybe the work you promised someone in your professional life is being delayed. Maybe your quality is suffering because you’re scrambling to get things done based on a super busy schedule. Now, that relationship starts to erode because they are unhappy with your work and attention to them.

I have built so many connections as I interview tons of social entrepreneurs and connect with people in the industry. It’s very hard to keep up with everyone and most times you cannot. I wish it wasn’t the case but you have to keep your attention focused. People don’t want your half baked attention. They want to feel like you give a shit. They want you to listen and provide your undivided attention to them.

Focus is an art itself. Learning how to keep your attention narrow and avoid constant distraction is important. Practices like meditation help this a lot. It has for me.

Related: 5 best tips for increasing your productivity that you need to know now

Saying No Leaves Room For a Better Yes

As you have read so far, there are very good reasons for learning how to empower your life by saying no.

Your time is limited and you can’t buy more of it, so it’s value is very high. You must use it wisely.

When you’re focused and you know what your priorities are you can intelligently determine when to say yes or no.

When you say no you leave room for a better yes.

You say yes to giving your goals precedence.

You say yes to quality time with family and friends.

You say yes to take care of your health – mental and physical.

You say yes to very important opportunities that surface. Things that are important to you.

Final Words

Success in life requires key pillars – health, wealth and strong relationships. Not just one of the three. I have interviewed people such as Tony Robbins and Arianna Huffington who will tell you this very thing.

I can appreciate the macho hype about living the “grind” to be a successful entrepreneur. You have to put in your time to do great work but how you allocate that time is very important.

All work does not lead to success. You need your personal health and strong relationship – friends and family. This is holistic and keeps you in a good state of mind for better work success.

If you want to learn more about how to say no and still get a yes, then definitely check out the book, The Power of a Positive No, by William Ury. I think you’ll enjoy it.

Related: How to fully commit to your idea

How to Find Ideas for Your Social Enterprise That You’ll Want to Pursue

So you want to change the world? Congrats on your ambitions. Market-driven social enterprises are proving to be a powerful force for change. Each and every day, social entrepreneurs are working to make the world a better place. With the right idea and a healthy dose of commitment, you can join their ranks. But first, you need to come up with that “right” idea. So, here we go Here is how to find ideas for your social enterprise that you’ll want to pursue!

First  Things First, Discovering Your Passion is Not Enough

Passion and a desire to help is great. However, by itself, these factors are not enough. If your social enterprise is going to succeed, it has to be grounded in the real world, and specifically the markets and local communities you want to work with.

As Change Creator founder Adam Force puts it:

Passion is an important part of the equation but to succeed in scaling an idea and creating a good lifestyle, you also have to know your competency and market.

There’s no sure-fire process to generate a great idea. However, there are some steps you can take to make your brainstorming sessions more productive. There are also some tried and true methods you can use to test your idea to see if they are viable. Before we get into that, let’s talk about how to approach an idea in the first place.

My approach with this article: Develop the methods to create new ideas first!

I’m going to approach this article from an “ideation” standpoint. In other words, I’m going to help you try to develop methods to create new ideas and solutions. However, this glances over another way to find ideas: borrowing. You should never steal someone’s intellectual property, but you can take tried-and-true methods and products and then apply them in a new community or in a new way.

How about setting up a local farmer’s market? Or a zero or low-waste grocery store or restaurant? Maybe your restaurant could donate some or all of its profits and unused food to soup kitchens? These ideas aren’t 100% new, but they could make a big impact in a community.

Related: The Beginner’s Guide to Starting a Social Business

Start By Considering The Community

So how should you start with coming up with an idea? First, don’t start with your own wants or needs. Sure, you can and will have your own areas of expertise and interest. Yes, you should leverage these assets. However, if you want to help a community, that community has to take precedence. How can you use your skills to help the community?

The best social entrepreneurs know the communities they are trying to help. If your social enterprise is people focused, meaning you want to directly help people, it’s important to understand the local community. Many charitable efforts, international development projects, and social enterprises have failed, or worse, cause harm, because the people in charge didn’t understand the community.

On the flip side, those leaders who understood the community they were working with have been able to maximize the impact. They understood the community, its needs, its wants, and local conditions. By understanding these factors, social entrepreneurs can craft solutions that will both address local needs and will be adopted by the local community.

Related: Uncovering 5 Marketing Lessons from Lucky Iron Fish

If You Don’t Know Your Community You’ll Struggle to Create Change

One of the Change Creators featured in our magazine, Makana Eyre, was working on a project in Cairo. The idea was promising: through Ashoka: Innovators for the Public his team would provide local women with entrepreneurship skills training. As the old saying goes: Give a woman a fish, and you feed her for a day. Teach a woman to fish, and you feed her for a lifetime.

So they set up an entrepreneurship training class, reached out to the community, and invited participants to come to a scheduled training class. No one showed up. Why? Turns out that her team never bothered to ask the local women what times would work best for them. The time they had picked for the training session conflicted with bus schedules, local norms, and other factors.

Fortunately, the solution for this problem was pretty straightforward: communicate with the community and find out what times work best. Gather a bit of data, then act on it. However, keep in mind that the consequences can be direr than simply rescheduling a training workshop. Organizations that don’t understand the local community and conditions can waste vast amounts of resources.

Consider the 2004 Asian tsunami, which claimed a quarter million lives and destroyed ocean-side communities across South East Asia and Africa. The devastation sparked one of the largest humanitarian relief efforts in history. Unfortunately, much of the money, resources, and effort was wasted.

For example, companies and organizations sent countless boats to Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere, intended to replace destroyed fishing fleets. Many of the boats simply rotted away on beaches because they were not fit for the South Indian Ocean and other Asian waters. They were too small for fishing and for the local water conditions.

The list of other failures is too long to recount, but the primary source of failure isn’t hard to pick out: many of the organizations trying to help did not understand the local conditions.

Related: 5 Things That Will Kill Your Social Enterprise Startup

Travel to That Community and Submerse Yourself to Get Ideas

So how can you actually get to know a community? Or don’t know which community you want to help? Consider traveling to one. Of course, not everyone has the money or ability to simply pick up and move to a foreign locale. However, communities don’t have to be far away and exotic. There are almost certainly nearby communities that need your help.

Are their local refugee communities? How about soup kitchens, or homeless shelters? The world is full of need. You can find a community to help right in your backyard. Often, it will be a bit easier for you to help these communities because on some level you’re likely familiar with them.

Even if you don’t have an idea right now, as you get to know your community the gears will start turning. You may stumble across ideas on your own, or you might find an organization to team up with. Often, members of the community can share their needs, and even offer solutions to fix them. They might lack resources and skills, but perhaps you can help them find the needed inputs.

Identify Needs and Potential Solutions

By now, you know that the community is important. Consider different communities. Often, it’s best to start with communities that you already know very well. If you’re based in New York City, perhaps it’s best to first focus on the local community rather than a far-flung one that you don’t know or understand.

When it comes to selling in markets, your good or service will need to solve a need or address a want. Many social entrepreneurs focus on “needs” rather than wants. Usually, needs are simply more pressing than wants.

A need can be thought of as a challenge or problem that must be addressed. If left unaddressed, conditions will worsen. So consider the problem you want to address. You can start at the highest level. For example, “I want to help poor communities in New York City.” The challenge is poverty.

Now, ask yourself why? Why are people poor? Why is that a problem? Generally, people are poor because they lack access to a good income.

Maybe they lack the education needed to secure a high-paying job. Maybe they are elderly or handicapped and cannot work? On and on the list goes. How can you address such problems? Community training programs? Educational apps? Assistance for those in need? Where can you get that assistance? Perhaps by taking food that’d be thrown away and delivering it to the doors of the elderly?

After you understand a community, you can identify needs, and then you can come up with solutions. Make sure you talk with community members. They might know of solutions. And they might know of challenges that you haven’t seen yet.

Keep The Market In Mind

The market has proven to be one of the most powerful forces for good in history. Simple economics dictates that good ideas will succeed and bad ideas will fail. Charities sometimes run into trouble because they do not necessarily respond to market forces. Donors can and will fund bad ideas.

Social entrepreneurs, however, can and must embrace the market. If your goods or services are failing to drum up interest, you need to revisit them and make sure they are addressing the local community. Something isn’t working. It might be that your marketing campaign simply isn’t effective. Why? Are you misunderstanding the community? For example, you might be trying to reach out to a Latino community, but your adverts are in English.

On the other hand, the product or service you are selling might simply not be addressing the pains and meeting the wants and needs of the local community. You’ll be able to know by measuring market adoption rates. Are people buying your product or service?

Related: The Most Sacred Gift You Can Give According to Tony Robbins

Look At Existing Products and Identify Social Aspects

The modern market economy has generated a tremendous amount of technologies and solutions. Most of these were driven by a pursuit of profit. As a result, many technologies and solutions lack a true social aspect. Can you take an existing business solution and add a social element? If so, you may be able to launch a social enterprise without needing to reinvent any wheels, and without having to open up new markets.

Further, you might even be able to find businesses will to invest in your social endeavors. Not only that, but you may even be able to draw in some talented private market talent that can provide a lot of skills. Consider microlending programs, including those run by the Grameen Foundation, that provide cash-poor people with access to funds. These funds can help them break the cycle of poverty by allowing them to invest.

The people who started these funds, such as Grameen founder Muhammad Yunus, didn’t do anything overly revolutionary. The idea of lending to people has been around since the earliest days of money, and even before. Yet Yunus and others realized that cash-poor people often lack access to traditional lending institutions.

By offering a new model they were able to extend lending to these communities. In turn, this allowed the communities targeted to invest in and uplift themselves.

Another great example is Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia. Chouinard realized that his steel pitons were damaging rock-climbing surfaces. So Chouinard decided to create sustainable climbing gear, and thus Patagonia was born. You can learn more about Chouinard on the Patagonia website.

Addressing “Small” Problems Can Make a Big Difference

The challenges you take on don’t have to be grand. Environmentally friendly climbing gear is the type of idea you’re likely only to discover if you’re part of the mountain climbing community. The average person might not even be aware of the challenges posed by gear that isn’t environmentally friendly.

Just the same, you might find solutions to seemingly small or niche problems. That’s a fantastic place to start. By taking on smaller problems, you might tackle issues that people aren’t even aware of, or don’t think is worth their time to address. However, if you’re solving a challenge and making the world a better place, it’s worth the effort.

Next Steps: Getting Your Ideas Off The Ground

Rather than concluding with the usual summary, let’s consider how you can bring your ideas to life. Makana Eyre outlined “Five Things That Could Kill Your Startup Social Enterprise”. Along the way, he also outlined some great tips for getting your social enterprise rolling.

First, get your idea down on paper.

If you followed the above steps, you have hopefully identified needs and potential solutions. Now it’s time to start refining your ideas, considering concrete solutions, challenges, and other factors.

Next, start building a team.

As Makana notes, it needs to be balanced. You need both visionaries and business experts and people with technical skills. From there, you have to check your assumptions. I can’t do Makana’s work justice in a few sentences, so make sure you check out his article. Point is, coming up with an idea is great, but once you have an idea you have to get it rolling, or it’ll just waste away.

Listen to examples of others you can learn from.

There’s nothing quite like the learning that comes from others who are on the ground, doing what you want to do. If you are just starting your journey, you need to learn all that you can from others who have been there, done that. That’s why we created the Change Creator Podcast series. Adam Force goes deep into how these amazing Change Creators started their companies, where they discovered their ideas and many, many lessons on how they grew their companies as well. I strongly encourage you to get listening! Podcasts are great on long drives, or Sunday afternoons, just fyi!

Read more in-depth examples of social impact leaders in Change Creator Magazine!

5 Things That Will Kill Your Social Enterprise Startup

There are endless articles listing 5 or 10 or 20 things that will kill a startup. But what about those of you who are launching a social enterprise? What’s out there for you? That’s why I want to discuss the things that will kill your social enterprise startup. You are doing important work. Don’t let some of these things sabotage your success!

Some might argue that the early stages of business and social startups are essentially the same – that you need a strong vision, a product or service, a market, passion, creativity, and so on.

But there are certain things that you, specifically as a social entrepreneur, will face that can make or break the success of your venture.

So, what are the five things that could kill your startup social enterprise?

1. Not planning.

Don’t panic – we’re not talking about a 50-page business plan with detailed financial forecasts, human resource plans, or expense policies. We’re talking about planning out the basic elements of your venture. Without basic planning, your venture will lack focus, likely not achieve the change you seek, and potentially fall apart. So what should you do?

Here are a few ideas:

  • Get your idea on paper. Write it out, type it, draw it – get it in physical form so you can see it in front of you.
  • Consider the business model you will use. Then consider the model you will use to make the change you’d like to see. How will you do it? Who will help you? What do you need?
  • Think about your challenges. Once you’ve got that down, consider some of the challenges you might face and how you’ll mitigate them.
  • Consider your basic finances. How will you make money? Will you have a social enterprise with a product, will you apply for grants, will you use some sort of hybrid model?

These are the important questions you have to ask yourself. For more information about social enterprise planning, see an article we just ran on the topic.

2. Waiting too long to launch your service or product.

This is a pitfall that plagues both social and business entrepreneurs because your product or service is your baby; it’s something you’ve put your blood, sweat, and tears into and you will feel that the last thing you want is to release it before it’s ready.

We’re familiar with the sentiment. It’s easy to feel this way. But it’s important to be honest with yourself and accept that the chances that your product or service is perfect from the onset are quite low.

What’s more, what often happens is people spend lots of time and money on a product or service and then once they think it’s perfect, launch it to a market that doesn’t need it, like it, or use it.

That’s why it’s important to launch pilots, test your assumptions and get out there generally with what you plan to do. Don’t worry, it won’t ruin your project or your reputation. Your market won’t turn against you or disappear. In fact, it’s almost always the opposite. Your target group gives you feedback, helps you improve your service, and allows you to test the assumptions you’ve made. So don’t keep your creation hidden in a basement. Get out there, test what you’ve come up with, talk to people and get feedback.

3. Having an unbalanced team when it comes to expertise.

The social enterprise startup is unique because it requires both social development and business acumen to be successful. In my experience, very few people are experts at both. Some are development visionaries – they can see what needs changing and which ideas would help. Others are business gurus who can find the perfect price point, financial model, and business development strategy.

You need both. There’s no way around it.

So what do you do?

Make sure your team, volunteers, interns, advisory board and so on are diverse in terms of experience and background. Ensure that you have a mix of people around you and on your team who you can defer to for specialized expertise. Avoid at all costs a team of purely business people or purely development experts. Having an overabundance of one can kill your social enterprise startup and hey, isn’t it more interesting to have a diverse team anyway?

4. Not checking your assumptions

This goes for everything. Validating your assumptions is a common business practice, but it’s even more vital when it comes to your social enterprise startup. Before you launch your startup and during its early and mid stages, you need to make a list of all the assumptions you made and go out and test them.

For example, a venture I was working within Cairo came up with a wonderful program for giving women entrepreneurial skills. However, after setting up training and mentorship sessions at various times throughout the day, which we thought would match an Egyptian woman’s schedule, we realized that no one could come. The reason? There were many – from cultural norms to bus schedules to the distance of our office to many suburbs. The result was that our first training session was a complete disaster, and it was because we didn’t ask these women what time worked best for them.

Related: The Role of Empathy in Social Enterprise

When you’re launching your social enterprise startup, you need to talk with your beneficiaries: ask them questions, get the details of their lives, ask them whether your assumptions are true, gather data, send out surveys – do whatever it takes to understand what the reality on the ground is.

5. Venturing out alone.

This may sound like simple advice but you’d be surprised at how many social entrepreneurs don’t take advantage of the people and networks around them. The advice of people who have previously launched a social enterprise can be life-saving to your venture. It can help you avoid common mistakes and expected pitfalls, and can give you the courage to continue when you’re struggling.

I don’t mean to burst your bubble but you can’t do this on your own.

No successful ventures, business or social, have been built with the hands of just one person.

It simply doesn’t work like that. So reach out to people, ask for advice, make calls, make friends, talk to people, ask questions. The most important take away is that people want to help you; you just need to ask.

What Early Phase Entrepreneurs Need to Know About Conferences

change creator new business growth

Excitement. Stress. Wins. Losses.

It’s all part of the entrepreneurial journey.

Maybe you’re waking up early and working on your social business before your day job starts.

Maybe, you’re staying up late working on your social business after your day job ends.

Maybe your social business is your primary work focus already.

The two biggest challenges we hear from most of the entrepreneurs Change Creator talks with include:

  • They can’t get the traction they need to reach the next level
  • They can’t get funding they need to scale up

All entrepreneurs face those challenges but only some overcome them.

I usually reply by asking what steps they have taken to try to get traction. The typical answers include marketing strategies such as video, social media, groups and SEO…etc.

But that’s only half the battle.

You also have to build your network, brand equity and authority if you want to break through saturation and gain momentum. Easier said than done, right?

This is why a conference like SOCAP is so powerful for anyone in the social business space. It’s an opportunity to build incredible partnerships, brand equity and authority.

Here’s what you need to know as an early phase broke entrepreneur struggling for more traction and funding.

Related: The Beginner’s Guide to Starting a Social Business

Investing in Opportunity

Let’s be blunt. At some point, you have to put money into the machine and see what comes out.

You can’t expect to have a successful social business that drives big impact if you’re not willing to invest in yourself or the business beyond a $20 Facebook boost.

I interviewed the founder of Bustle for Change Creator Magazine and in 2016 they earned $30 million in revenue but they also spent $30 million. Crazy right? They will be profitable in 2017. They play very big and believe in their strategy!

Big event’s like SOCAP offer a big return but you have to be willing to invest in attending.

I used to look at conference ticket fees and say, “but I need that money for marketing and operations.”

Here’s the thing, that ticket for the conference is an investment in marketing and operations. A very powerful and most times better investment at the early phase.

Why? Because one of the most powerful tools we have found for growth is building a great network.

You can hide behind your computer and fire off some emails or Linkedin messages but there is no substitute for meeting people in person to build a solid relationship. Remember, you’re interviewing people just as much as they interview you.

In 2017 SOCAP was saturated with over 3,000 of the most amazing like-minded people in the world tackling our most pressing problems. Everywhere our team turned we learned something new and connected with someone relevant to our business. Some were investors, some were in media, some were incredible social entrepreneurs. You can barely keep up with it. Good thing three people from our team attended!

You have to get out there and show up. When you do, opportunities you never would have expected tend to pop up.

For example, this was our team’s first year at SOCAP. Once we got into town we realized that Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Muhammad Yunus was speaking at the Commonwealth Club. So, we decided to go check it out. Long story short, we spoke to his publicist and ended up interviewing him for the January 2018 Change Creator Magazine cover story! That never would have happened if we didn’t invest in our trip to San Francisco for SOCAP.

Remember, your network is your networth. You have to invest in your future.

Related: What early stage investors really look for in a social enterprise startup

Dust Off Your Dating Game

If you’ve ever been on a date that went well, then you’re ahead of the game and will do just fine at a conference like SOCAP.

change creator new business growth

Actually our team was blown away by the relevancy the dating analogy has to the experience. We would meet people and say, “do you think they liked us, will they call?” Or, “should we reach out now or wait a few days?” We had a good laugh about it.

What are you looking for in a partner?

Funding, content share, maybe a technology partnership, speaking opportunity, or advisory?

Let’s pretend you’re on a first date with someone you’re interested in.

For starters, we all get into character. When you go on a date you get into character to attract the other person. You don’t just wear your sweatpants and burp after each course. You’re polite, respectful and dress the part. This may go without saying but you’d be surprised! So, be yourself but play the part. No matter how you feel about it you’re playing a sales role.

How would your date feel if you dominated the conversation all night talking about how awesome you are? I can answer that. They would hate it and feel like it was an awful experience. If you haven’t read the classic book by Dale Carnegie that talks about winning friends than you should.

You have to listen to people and let them ask questions about your business. Their story is essential to understand so you can see where you might fit in and if there are partnership opportunities.

Now, let’s say you’re the type that ultimately wants to get married and have kids. Would you ask them to marry you that night? Of course not, you wouldn’t even bring it up.

You’d seem crazy right? So, don’t ask for funding on the first date either.

After listening to them, if you get a good vibe on a human level and see a good fit to work together, the best thing you can do and let them know that and plan a second discussion to explore ideas. Look them up on Linkedin on the spot to connect and pass that old school business card over for good measure.

Once that fire gets warm you want to keep it warm, so don’t let weeks go by after the conference before you lock in the next steps.

Stacking Success

Once you decide to get out there and show up you need to get a plan in place.

I’m the kind of person that loves strategy. It can be a flaw sometimes because I overthink things. But most times it’s a big benefit.

When is the right time to get to a conference like SOCAP? What do you want to get out of it? Who do you want to connect with?

I like to stack success. What this means is that I determine a big desired outcome and define the intermediate steps required to get there. It’s like a prerequisite for a class.

For example, we did not reach out to get Tony Robbins for the front cover of Change Creator Magazine until we had Neil Patel and Arianna Huffington. We also waited until his latest book was being released. Those were the prerequisites for connecting with his team as we felt it would improve our chances. And it worked!

Planning your experience at SOCAP is not much different. Based on where you are in your journey, you should clarify your desired outcome and plan accordingly.

If you want mentors and investors that can help you grow your business, what do you need to prepare to attract them?

A few thoughts:

  • If you want to increase your chances for success, than you probably want more than an idea to share with people.
  • Maybe something in beta form
  • A well designed website
  • Potentially some early adopter beta test feedback
  • Maybe you already have some partnerships in place or a solid team of co-founders?
  • It could be very good to have a small leave behind that’s visually appealing to share with people that amplifies your value. For example, we would show award winning social entrepreneurs we have featured on our magazine.
  • Is your social business complicated? Can you explain it simply?

Those are some factors that can help attract people to work with you and take you seriously.

SOCAP and other conferences will also usually offer an app or forum to connect with other speakers and attendees in advance before the conference starts.

Make a list of key people you’d love to connect with and let them know you’ll be there, you’d love to introduce yourself and then share a little something to grab their attention.

Many conferences have a lot of people in one place which can get chaotic. Taking steps to connect before hand could be the difference in meeting specific people or not.

Lastly, don’t avoid talking to people because they don’t fit your perfect partnership profile. You never know who they know and what kind of incredible story they have.

Final Thoughts

The fasted way to build your network with wonderful people is to get out there and meet them. This is an exercise in building your brand, being on the inside track in the industry, and opening the door to new opportunities.

I cannot express enough, how much you can expedite your process by investing in networking. We have met people that we never would have met or gotten attention from if we just emailed.

Being in-person allows you to cut through the clutter and jump the line for attention. After you meet and make a good impression, they will reply to your email first.

Why Great Businesses Start with Niche Market Ideas

change creator niche market

I love an inspiring grand vision.

As the applications roll in for Fledge (accelerator), quite a few are big, audacious, grand plans.

The problem is that startups don’t have the resources to make those visions a reality, at least not within a year or two or three.

The bigger problem is that most first-time entrepreneurs don’t know this. They are too often deluded, thinking that everyone on earth will see their grand vision as they do and jump aboard as a customer, vendor, employee, etc. to make it happen.

Meanwhile, the seasoned investors know the truth.

Investors expect the entrepreneurs to have a roadmap that realizes the vision in year-by-year steps.

The trick to that, which trips up most grand visions, is the first step. This is the “minimum viable product” of the Lean Startup philosophy.

An initial product that has enough value to customers that they’ll pay something for it, and at the same time, a product that after many more iterations implements the grand vision.

Dropping out of the hypothetical, let’s look at one common plan I’ve been pitched a dozen times: a website where entrepreneurs post their ideas, where the community joins in to provide feedback, where teams are formed, where customers find new products, filled with reviews, recommendations, and so on. Or in short form: “Amazon for startup ideas”.

Related: How to know which type of investment to seek

Imagine that website with 10,000 ideas and 10 million daily visitors, and it sounds great. Imagine it with three ideas and one daily visitor and it’s pretty much useless. I’ve seen sites like this with a dozen ideas and that’s not enough. Nor a hundred. Sites like this need a “critical mass” of ideas and visitors, and few find a viable path to get to that scale.

One strategy for getting there is to beachhead niche. That is, to focus the initial set of customers to a small niche where the features of your service are highly valued, yet a big enough niche that there is enough money to be made to prove the usefulness of the service. Focus on grabbing a big percentage of that marketplace, then repeat with another niche. Keep repeating until you’ve reached critical mass.

This is how Facebook got so big. They started with Harvard and Yale, then the other Ivy League universities, then all universities, then finally everyone.

This is also how Google Maps came to be. Google was far from a startup at the time, but the same principal works for grand intrapreneurship ideas. The product was originally Google Local, a replacement for Yellow Pages with the results drawn on a map. Then it added directions. Then satellite view. Then traffic. Now it’s an indispensible tool for getting from here to there.

Big audacious ideas are great. We need more of them. But we need big ideas that succeed, and for that we need more entrepreneurs to understand how to get from idea to success. Hopefully this tidbit of advice can help.

The Environment: Innovative Solutions to Our Biggest Challenges

change creator climate change

The Earth is beginning to heave under the strain of overpopulation, war and famine. According to The United Nations, the ever growing global human population is expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100. This will not only put increasing pressure on natural resources such as food and water that are essential to life, but will also increase demand for everyday necessities such as energy, housing and jobs, to name a few. As the world’s population — and the cities that support and accomodate this populace — continue to expand, the natural world is coming under increased strain. Added to this is the pressure of climate change impacts, which are becoming glaringly apparent everywhere we look.

The Nature Conservancy recently released a report, The Biggest Environmental Challenges of 2017, which shares perspectives from global leaders on the most pressing issues facing people and the planet.

Some of the key challenges identified in the report include:

Climate Change — this needs to be addressed before it’s too late.

Sustainable Food Production — how do we feed a growing population without clearing natural areas to expand existing agriculture or expand already overfished fisheries?

Sustainable Cities — we need to create sustainable cities that are self-sufficient, which do not overburden surrounding land and water ecosystems that serve as vital life support systems for both wildlife and human life.

While this may seem like a doom and gloom scenario, Mark Tercek, President and CEO of The Nature Conservancy, is optimistic that these challenges can be overcome with creative, nature-based solutions.

“At The Nature Conservancy, we believe nature-based solutions can play an important role in addressing these big challenges. The road ahead won’t be easy,” cautions Tercek, “but by investing in nature, we think we can find common-ground solutions that are good for biodiversity, good for the economy and good for people.”

Population growth will certainly exacerbate these problems, yet it can be argued that our planet has sufficient resources for everyone, but these resources are poorly managed, and in many cases squandered, with little regard for the needs of others or the future. This is largely the result of a money-based rather than resource-based economy, where saving costs and making profits is the key driver behind unsustainable practices. But some enterprises are moving away from the traditional bottom line approach that focuses exclusively on financial performance, opting for the triple bottom line approach, which measures their social, environmental (or ecological) and financial performance instead, in an effort to improve their sustainability performance.

For social entrepreneurs, these challenges present fantastic opportunities to come up with creative solutions to address these problems for the benefit of humanity, while at the same time generating profits. Below are some of the measures the report proposes we take to address these challenges, as well as some examples of innovative solutions that social entrepreneurs have come up with to tackle the environmental and social issues associated with some of these challenges.

Related: Sustainability as a Model for Environmental and Social Entrepreneurship

Opt for Clean Energy

It is imperative that we tackle climate change head-on by committing to a low-carbon future and transition away from fossil fuels to clean, renewable sources of energy.

Tesla, a technology and design company with a focus on energy innovation, is on a mission to do just that. From state of the art electronic cars that do not compromise looks, power or quality for carbon-free motoring, to solar roof tiles and power banks that supply a home with energy from the sun, Tesla offers clean energy solutions for motoring and electricity supply that will save motorists and homeowners thousands of dollars in fuel and/or energy costs after the initial purchase.

Ned Tozun, together with his partner Sam Goldman, of d.light solar is another example of a social entrepreneur in the energy space who is on a mission to change lives by bringing safe, affordable lighting and clean solar power to communities that do not currently have access to energy. Look out for our podcast interview with Ned in May.

Acknowledge Nature’s Role in Addressing Climate Change

The report also suggests that we maximize the use of nature for addressing climate change and for mitigating the impacts of climate change. For example, reforestation projects can play an important role in absorbing carbon emissions that contribute to climate change, while restoring natural buffer zones such as wetlands and coastal zones can protect ecosystems and people from the impacts of climate change, such as sea level rise and storm surges.

When it comes to reforestation, we can all do our bit by planting trees in our own backyard, school or community. Felix Finkbeiner is a social entrepreneur who not only did just that at the tender age of nine, but in the ten years since planting his first tree, also founded the environmental group Plant-for-the-Planet, which in partnership with the United Nation’s Billion Tree campaign has planted more than 14 billion trees across 130 nations. The group has since upped the stakes, setting a new tree planting goal of one trillion trees.

Improve Global Fisheries Management

Our oceans are over-exploited, and as a result fish stocks have drastically declined. Yet for many people around the world, seafood is a staple diet and often the only source of protein. With fish stocks declining, the livelihoods and staple food source of people who depend on it is in jeopardy. It is therefore essential that we manage fisheries appropriately to ensure these stocks remain viable and this vital source of food remains sustainable.

Dr Alasdair Harris of Blue Ventures, who we interviewed in the 6th edition of Change Creator Magazine, recently won a social entrepreneur award for his conservation work with coastal communities, aimed at restoring marine biodiversity and fisheries in overfished coastal waters. Blue Ventures uses a tempory closure model that allows stocks to recover, which ultimately benefits conservation and the communities that depend on fisheries for their livelihoods and food.

Urchinomics has a truly innovative solution that addresses both issues above, as well as other environmental and social issues. The company plans to harvest invader sea urchins, feed them up so they meet the high standards demanded by this luxury seafood market, then sell them to high-end restaurants. By doing so, they hope to eradicate invasive urchins that are decimating kelp beds worldwide so that affected kelp beds can recover.

As these kelp forests provide essential ecosystem services, including absorbing carbon dioxide, protecting coastal communities from storm surges, and providing habitat for commercial fish and other marine species, removing the urchins will not only provide a sustainable source of seafood, but will also allow biodiversity to return so that the kelp beds can continue to offer these services. Furthermore, the project will offer exciting business opportunities and employment to rural coastal communities where fisheries have been devastated by urchins or environmental disasters, such as the tsunami that ravaged a fishing community in Japan.

Expand Sustainable Agricultural Practices

With population growth and climate change impacts such as drought and floods, together with war and famine being on the increase, food security is one of the greatest challenges humankind is faced with. How do we balance the need for increased food production while preventing deforestation, maintaining healthy ecosystems and limiting contamination of freshwater bodies and our oceans at the same time? Some obvious solutions include moving away from monoculture and pesticide use and opting for more organic forms of agriculture. It also requires some thinking outside the box, moving towards innovative, unconventional approaches to food production that are healthier and greener, and that simply make ecological sense.

Aquaponics is one ecologically sound solution that offers opportunities for individuals, communities and commercial farming ventures to produce healthy organic food (fruit and vegetables as well as protein in the form of fish) by following basic ecological principals. It also offers opportunities for social entrepreneurs. For example, some have developed innovative aquaponics kits to enable households to grow their own food right in their kitchen, while in South Africa, a 13-year old girl has launched a successful aquaponics business that grows food commercially while she attends school!

YouTube video of 13-year old’s successful aquaponics business

Urban rooftop farms and vertical gardens are other creative ways of maximizing space for food production without clearing more natural land for agriculture. For the latter, hydroponics is both a space and water saving method of growing organic vegetables in an indoor urban environment and lends itself to vertical farming. Listen to our interview with social entrepreneur, Tinia Pina, Founder and CEO of Re-Nuble, a socially minded organics-to-energy enterprise that converts food waste into an organic fertilizer as a byproduct of energy produced during the biodigestion process.

YouTube video on Rooftop Farm in New York

YouTube video on Vertical Farming

Create Sustainable Cities

Currently 54% of the world’s population live in urban areas, and according to The United Nations, this figure is expected to rise to 66% by 2050. To accommodate the needs of this growing urban population, cities need to be developed with sustainability in mind. ReGen Villages has taken up the challenge. The company recently launched a pioneer development project that will feature integrated and resilient residential areas that are self-sufficient, providing the energy and food needs for the communities that live there. The first ReGen Village pilot community will be built in Almere, Netherlands, and thereafter the company plans to expand the project across Northern Europe.

YouTube video of ReGen Village concept

When Life Gives you Lemons, Make Lemonade

Yes, the world is facing some mammoth challenges right now, but as we can see, necessity is the mother of invention. These challenges present wonderful business opportunities for social entrepreneurs with passion and drive to literally take up the challenge for the greater good of the planet.

Related: Sustainability as a Model for Environmental and Social Entrepreneurship

Goodio Organic Chocolate: Good For Munchies and The World

goodio founding team

This article was originally posted by Grant Trahant on Caustartist

Meet The Organic Chocolate Company Built On Beautiful Design, Transparency, & Sustainability

Meet Goodio, the pioneering organic chocolate company founded on transparency and sustainability. Goodio’s roots lay in innovation provided by founder of Jukka Peltola, a former game developer at Rovio, the company responsible for Angry Birds.

Meet Goodio, the pioneering organic chocolate company founded on transparency and sustainability. Goodio’s roots lay in innovation provided by founder of Jukka Peltola, a former game developer at Rovio, the company responsible for Angry Birds. After a creative career in technology and entertainment, Jukka came to food through a personal journey for better health.

Jukka found his passion in blending natural ingredients and fusing them with unique flavors, such as wild blueberry and sea buckthorn to give you a delicious one-of-a-kind treat. All Goodio bars are made with raw cacao, which is high in antioxidants and classified as a superfood.

Looking for alternatives to heavy sugar and salt-ridden snacks, Jukka did extensive research and found cacao — a superfood that’s often only associated with unhealthy chocolate bars you see in grocery stores and gas stations. By adding raw cacao to his diet and dropping traditional dairy products, Jukka changed his thought process and adopted a new diet and lifestyle.

After changing his diet and lifestyle he began to see amazing results, feeling more energetic, lighter, and rejuvenated, Jukka then set out to share this knowledge with his colleagues, friends, and family. While raw cacao and healthful treats were the focus, the team also wanted to build a company that stood for more than profit.

“There has to be greater transparency in where our food comes from, how it’s sourced, and how it’s treated,” Jukka says.

Below is a quick Q&A with the founder of Goodio, Jukka Peltola

Why chocolate?

It was 2010 when I started optimizing my wellbeing with nutrition. In a very short time period I got tremendous results which lead to totally a new relationship with food and nature. I was passioned and started experimenting and studying nutrition and found out about amazing nutritional properties of raw cacao, which is one of nature’s most nutritious foods, due to it’s wide array of unique properties.

Cacao is a main ingredient in a chocolate, but I couldn’t find chocolate that was produced in a way I wanted so I started doing my own chocolate at home. It was stunning to realize that you can actually do a favor for yourself by eating chocolate, if it’s just done with right ingredients, way and intention.

I felt so excited about chocolate and was really grateful for finding out what proper nutrition can do for wellbeing so I started thinking why are we suffering so much, why are there so many additives, fillers and other things in our food. I felt disappointed on big corporates’ contribution and also really small, because of the scale of this issue. I remember thinking that somebody should do something about it. Then I thought that self pity doesn’t help and I’m gonna do it for the greater good, no matter what. It still feels kind of crazy, but actually it makes so much sense, it’s just the right thing to do.

That’s how the idea of Goodio was born, not only to make the best possible chocolates but to accelerate the positive change in the world. Later on I found about the dark side of chocolate industry and decided that it’s not only nutrition that needs to be fixed, it’s the way the whole business has developed in the past decade.

Here is a little bitter sweet fact box of chocolate:

The global chocolate market is worth over 100 billion in 2017 and is estimated to grow at a compound annual growth rate of almost 5% by 2020.

Around 70% of world’s cacao comes from West African countries where there’s estimated to be 2.1 million child laborers. Two biggest cacao growers are Ghana and Ivory coast. In Ghana the average income of a farmer is 0.84 $ a day and Ivory coast just merely 0.50 $ a day. Affordable chocolate has it’s price that has just been hidden from us.

goodio chocolate

Tell us about your cacao beans and the process of making Goodio chocolate bars.

We use cacao beans from DR Congo, Ecuador and Peru. Our Maranon Canyon beans from Peru are considered to be the rarest cacao beans in the world. Our Congo Mountains of the Moon beans, that come from Rwenzori mountain range, are certified organic and Fair for Life. Currently we have fine flavor cacao beans from 40-50 different farms in test. The beans are all wild, certified organic or organically cultivated.

We have our own factory in Helsinki where we make our bean-to-bar chocolates. We don’t roast our cacao beans and we stone ground all the ingredients around 72 hours in low temperature to sustain the good nutrients in ingredients.

Our approach to making chocolate is holistic and we are always willing to learn and make our products better. This doesn’t mean that we are changing our recipes all the time. It means we are constantly thinking how to have even bigger positive impact, whether it means biodegradable packaging, supporting small family farms or choosing healthier ingredients.

Related: How the Kind Foundation is Connecting Youth, Spreading Kindness and Creating Future Social Entrepreneurs

Why do you personally think the Nordic countries are such leaders in sustainability and innovation?

I think there are a multitude of things that have made this possible. Here is my personal reasoning in three points:

Engineer mindset and education system – Our ancestors have lived in harsh environment and just to survive you had to be very practical, especially before electricity and technology. Nowadays we Finns are world famous of our free and high standard education system. There are no tuition fees at any level of education and in higher education you can even get financial aid from the government. Because of this we are generally very well educated.

Our rough past and excellent education have made us logical, good adaptors and problem solvers. We Finns are not known about our small talk or marketing skills but for making great products that only a few know about, not to mention well-known brands like Nokia and Angry Birds.

Nature – Even though we are very tech savvy people we haven’t wandered too far away from our roots, nature. We are 5.6 million people, 71% of the country is forest and we have over 180.000 lakes, 500.000 summer cottages and 3 million saunas. In Finland we have the freedom to roam and foraging is very popular. Especially wild blueberries, lingonberries and many mushrooms are common bounty.

Wellbeing – We are very fortunate to have a high standard of living because of our free education, health care and extensive social security system. These privileges give us the freedom to think. When you don’t have to struggle so much and you have all your basic needs satisfied, you feel that you want to give back. We have ability to do things for greater good and that’s amazing.

What does transparency within an organization mean to you?

I’m fascinated to question general operating models that are just learned without deeper understanding or first principles thinking. Are these models still valid and working for our best? Therefore I like to ask ”stupid” questions. Questions like what if we make all our recipes public or what if we publish our whole business strategy.

Currently our priority is to make Goodio a fully transparent company. Everyone in our company is fully committed and excited about the direction we are going. It’s not only the right thing to do, but actually really inspiring and fun too. I believe that many other companies will follow us in the coming years and in the future it will become a new norm of doing things and it’s all good.

Get your own pack of Goodio chocolates on Amazon now — Click here for the latest deals!

The Role of Empathy in Social Enterprise: Why it’s Vital to Your Success!

Empathy is a powerful emotion, allowing us to understand other people, their position, and their needs. For anyone looking to start a social enterprise, empathy will be vital. If you want to make a difference, you need to understand the communities you will be working in and how your efforts will impact them. What is the role of empathy in social enterprise? What about other kinds of business models? Let’s examine this!

What is empathy? Why is it so important in social enterprise?

In the past, charity and international development agencies had a habit of blindly (and sometimes condescendingly) charging into communities and launching projects will little to no feedback from the local community. Funded by donors, many of these projects continued even as local communities rejected them. These efforts lacked empathy. The result -unsurprisingly- was a lot of waste and projects that ultimately failed.

Now, many social enterprises are forging their own unique path. They are beholden to the market.  If they fail to listen to and incorporate local communities, their risk of failure is higher as money will dry up. The market is a powerful force for choosing winners and losers, and in the case of social enterprises, it helps keep them on task.

However, markets will not always ensure that a social enterprise remains true to its social aims. Markets ensure profit, not the well-being of people, communities, and the environment. That’s where empathy comes in. By embracing empathy, social enterprises can ensure that they stay true to their community and causes.

Related: How the Kind Foundation is Connecting Youth, Spreading Kindness and Creating Future Social Entrepreneurs

Putting Employees First Makes Business Sense

Of course, some might wonder why they should bother to pursue empathy or social entrepreneurship at all? Ultimately, most social entrepreneurs don’t have to grapple with that question, they already know the answer and it’s personal. However, companies that ignore communities and higher causes put themselves at risk. As Imran Anwar put it in his article “Why Putting People Before Profit Is Good Business:

“Companies that put profit before people can face the wrath of dissatisfied customers on social media. People may ditch a profit-centered brand the moment they find a better alternative.”

Beyond bad publicity on social media, Anwar also outlines how companies like Costco make money by playing their employees more. Why? Higher retention rates. Meanwhile, low wage companies, like Sam’s Club, struggle with low productivity and constant turnover.

Personally, I don’t need any incentives to want to build good companies or to put profits before people. However, for those businesses that do go with profits first, it’s important to ask if the short-term drive to produce profits is resulting in lost opportunities and higher long-term costs.  Perhaps empathy offers a path towards a profitable and sustainable future.

What is the role of empathy in social enterprise?

Interestingly enough, empathy is a relatively modern concept. Philosophers and psychologists only started grappling with empathy directly in the 19th century.  Of course, humans have almost certainly possessed empathy for thousands of years. Now, social entrepreneurs are using empathy to build enterprises that both produce a profit and address important social issues.

Empathy also plays an important role in “prosocial” behaviors. A prosocial behavior refers to putting someone else interests before your own. In the world of social enterprises, this can be expressed as putting people before profits. These prosocial tendencies are ultimately what distinguishes a social enterprise from a normal enterprise.

Related: The Beginner’s Guide to Starting a Social Business

Empathy Has Greek Roots But is a Modern Concept

The word “empathy” is relatively modern, especially by philosophical standards. Ethics, politics, and other concepts have been debated and examined for thousands of years. Often, these intellectual debates can be drawn directly from ancient Greece and other philosophically-inclined ancient civilizations right up until modern times. However, the Greek root of empathy, “empatheia”, actually meant “physical affection or passion”.

Only later on would empathy evolve into understanding how other people feel. As a word, empathy entered the English language in 1909 when German philosopher Edward Titchener adapted “empathy” from the German word “Einfühlung”, which means “feeling into.” Yet even the Germans had only begun grappling with “Einfühlung” in the second half of the 18th century.

While empathy is a relatively new topic of study, the emotion has undoubtedly played an important and long-standing role in the evolution of human society. However, our understanding of empathy remains relatively weak compared to other human emotions and concepts.

The Pros of Empathy in Social Enterprise

These days, empathy is important for social enterprises, which themselves are a relatively new concept. A social enterprise puts people, communities, and the environment before producing profits. Empathy is vital because it helps the social entrepreneur understand these communities, people, and causes. Without empathy, even the best of intentions can fail to produce any real results.

That doesn’t mean that social enterprises don’t pursue profits. They do. In fact, one of the key distinguishing features of a social enterprise is that pursue profits and operate in markets. However, profits aren’t enough for the social entrepreneur. Instead, they’re driven by something “higher”.

As Change Creator Founder Adam Force puts it:

“The motivation they have is not spawned by the idea of money. No, it’s from something bigger: A cause — it’s a mission in their life that they become obsessed with. Nothing can derail them from pursuing it. Their vision is clear.”

What is this Higher Purpose and What Does Empathy Have to Do With It?

There is no one universal “higher purpose” that will drive every social entrepreneur. If we were going to take a stab at defining such a universal it’d probably be something like “making the world a better place.”

Let’s be honest, that sounds nice but it doesn’t say much. What does it mean to make the world a better place? Less pollution? No more cruelty towards animals? The end of warfare? Global access to adequate health care? There’s no single answer.

Interestingly, those philosophers who first started grappling with empathy were faced with a similar challenge. They wanted to know what was going on in other people’s heads. What makes people tick? Why do we care about one another?

Just as there is no one answer for a “higher purpose”, there is no one definition of what empathy is. However, the Cambridge Dictionary defines it as “the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation.”

We can think of it in layman terms as putting ourselves in another’s shoes. What is another person experiencing? What challenges might they face? Once one understands these questions the social entrepreneur can start to ponder “how can I make a difference in this community? How can I be a positive force for change?”

Related: Social Entrepreneurship: A Higher Calling With Ilaina Rabbat

Without empathy, a social entrepreneur is blind.

Profits on their own can drive business success. For the social entrepreneur, however, profits are not enough. Making a difference is what gets most social entrepreneurs out of bed in the morning. Profits keep the business sustainable and allow it to grow. Profits are necessary but not sufficient conditions for success.

High-minded causes need to be grounded, however. In general, you can approach social entrepreneurship as either community-grounded, meaning people, animals, etc. Or you can approach it as cause-grounded, i.e. reducing carbon emissions. The distinction is itself arbitrary. If you reduce carbon emissions you are going to impact communities. If you help a community become more sustainable, likewise you will be impacting a cause.

Empathy, or understanding these communities and causes and why your own efforts will be important, is a great start. However, you need to ground your empathy in more concrete measurements. Key performance indicators and other metrics are vital for tracking your progress and shortcomings.

A Case Study: Setbacks Happen but Empathy Can Right the Ship

We can learn as much from our failures as we can from our successes, if not more. Consider Mailafiya, an eHealth service program in Nigeria. The program was started due to a severe lack of access to health care facilities in rural areas. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) tools were a major component of Mailafiya’s efforts.

Mailafiya launched an aggressive effort to send 24 field teams into rural areas to collect data and provide services. The initial roll-out saw a 270% increase in patients seen and a 900% increase in diseases reported. Then, the program failed. A lack of access to the Internet, a lack of basic computer literacy among local health care workers, weak governance, and a poor local ICT infrastructure led to its collapse.

Mailafiya had plenty of passion, but not enough empathy. They didn’t understand the local conditions well enough to ensure success. The program didn’t fail, however. Instead, the program’s leaders doubled down on efforts to understand the local community and build empathy.

Putting Communities Before Causes Can Produce Results

Let’s wrap this discussion by discussing how putting people and causes before profits can be beneficial. Many social entrepreneurs find their empathy challenged when they are faced with business challenges and when profits are so tantalizing close. Meanwhile, many entrepreneurs who lack empathy never give anything besides the pursuit of profits a second thought.

This is a mistake. As Anwar Amran puts it:

“Putting people before everything else, including people, can make you lose focus on the things you do best. It diverts resources from your core business to what seems profitable in the short term.”

The Case of Southwest Airlines

Consider the fate of Pacific Southwest Airlines. Once one of the most successful airliners, the company tried to expand into car rentals and hotel business. These sectors offered enticing profit potential at the time but were outside of the company’s expertise. You’ve likely never heard of Pacific Southwest. That’s because the company went bankrupt. However, you’ve probably heard of the airliner that emerged from this bankruptcy: Southwest Airlines.

There are countless other examples of profits over all else failing. More recently, General Motors went through a bankruptcy after the company focused on building large (and very profitable) gas guzzlers, including SUVs and pickup trucks. When oil prices spiked from 2004 to 2008, people slowed their purchases of big trucks. When the economy crashed in 2007, even more, people stopped buying.GM had produced fantastic profits through the 90’s. By 2009, General Motors was bankrupt.

The company would emerge from the ashes, this time with a newfound understanding that short-term profits aren’t everything. While GM still sells trucks and SUV’s they’ve diversified. Now, GM offers a variety of higher-quality small cars and crossovers. Not only that, but GM offers the all-electric Chevrolet Volt, and plugin Hybrid the Chevrolet Volt.

GM, among other automakers, recently announced that they’d go all-electric. GM has also become a leader in climate change action. Frequently, when GM’s leaders speak to the public, you can hear their empathy. They have a newfound concern for producing environmentally-friendly technologies. GM’s also been doing much better as a company over the past decade. Coincidence? I think not.

Over the long run, is empathy in business better?

This adds an interesting foil to the debate around empathy and profits before people. Could the short-term drive to produce profits at the expense of people, communities, and causes hurt companies in the long run? Meanwhile, could empathy and embracing “higher” motives generate long-term results? Perhaps being sustainable can produce companies that are actually sustainable? And perhaps empathy will result in companies that perform better over the long run.

Related:

 

Get Funding! What Early Stage Investors Really Look For in a Social Enterprise Startup

So you’re looking for investors for your social enterprise? Fantastic! Here’s what early stage investors really look for in a social enterprise or startup idea.

Do you have what it takes to get funding? Keep reading!

Many investors are now considering the social and environmental benefits (or drawbacks) of potential investment opportunities.

Some funds and investors have even been set up specifically to fund social entrepreneurs, such as the TOMS Social Entrepreneurship Fund.

Other organizations, such as Investor’s Circle, will support any entrepreneur but will give socially and environmentally business special consideration.

It can be difficult for startups to get started without some initial capital. Sometimes, social entrepreneurs can fund their own efforts. Other times, they may have friends and family who are interested in investing. However, it’s often necessary to reach outside of personal networks to find funding. Good news is: angel investors, seed funds, and accelerators are willing to invest in startups and ideas.

Related: The Beginner’s Guide to Starting a Social Business

Consider the Investor’s Point of View

Every time you want to work with or pitch anyone about anything, consider the audience and their point of view.

What is an investor looking for?

The primary concern for most investors is producing a profit. They invest and assume risk in anticipation of making money. Some investments will go sour, that’s a fact of life. Other investments will go on to make money. Early round investors will “take gambles” and assume high amounts of risk.

However, no investor wants to lose money. Early round investors accept that they are investing in high-risk ventures. They will accept that risk if the long-term pay off looks big. Many young companies fail, but those that succeed and eventually reach either an IPO or a buyout can produce massive profits.

Data suggests that angel investors average returns of 2.5X their initial investments. However, while some savvy angel investors manage to turn a large profit, many fail to make much if any. In fact, angel investors are actually more likely to lose money than making money on a deal. When they do make money, they tend to make a lot.

Of course, investors who invest in social enterprises are looking for more than profits. Just like social entrepreneurs themselves, social enterprise investors looking to make a positive impact. Some investors will favor certain types of change. Bill Gates, for example, just announced a $2 billion investment in sustainable energy.

Related: How to know which type of investment to seek

What Early Stage Investors Look For In Social Enterprises?

Early stage investors in the social entrepreneurship space will look at the same things as other investors.

  • How does the team look?
  • How about the chosen leader or leaders?
  • What is their vision?
  • Any financial plans, projections, revenues, or other numbers?

However, for investors looking to invest in social enterprises, these numbers won’t be enough. And sometimes, they might overlook gaps in the business plan, product, or team if they believe in the potential to make a positive impact.

The most committed social enterprise funders will go even further and prioritize social and environmental benefits. These funders are more concerned with making a positive impact rather than producing profits. If the enterprise produces small profits but generates a lot of change, that’s not only acceptable but great.

Many social enterprise investors are looking for a mix of making an impact and producing a profit. Profits are important for two reasons. First, yes most investors are looking to generate a return.

Secondly, profits will help the business sustain itself and expand. Self-sustainability is one of the key differences between a social enterprise and a charity. Charities rely on donors. They have to run donation drives, find big money donors, or convince corporations to give them funding. A social enterprise can rely on funds revenues generated by selling products and services.

Understanding What “Early Stage” Investment Means

Investors look at different factors at different stages.

The earliest round of funding is usually called either “seed” or “angel” funding. Angel investors may not expect to see revenues and sales. In some cases, early-stage seed funders will even provide funding when the product itself hasn’t been clearly defined.

One accelerator, Startup Bootcamp, “simply” wants you to have identified your market and the “why” behind what you’re trying to create.

Of course, having sales or at least a defined product certainly helps. Yet early stage investors will invest in entrepreneurs and teams that they believe have potential. The more proof that your product or service will be a smash success, the better. Often, it makes sense to “bootstrap” and produce some results before you even look for funding. A pilot test or soft launch can go a long way towards providing that your business will be a success.

Let’s look at a case study.

Pilot Projects Are Fantastic For Proving Viability

Talk is great. Business plans are fantastic. A strong team and a great vision can go a long way. But do you know what gets investors really excited? Results. Of course, it can be hard to produce results without funding. However, you may be able to set up a pilot project, even a small-scale one on a tight budget or just plain old sweat. If so, you should get that rolling before you even approach investors.

Take Blue Ventures, for example. The company rebuilds tropical fisheries in coastal communities. Many fisheries have been overexploited, and either has collapsed or are at risk of collapsing. The environment itself is damaged and communities that rely on those fisheries have been adversely affected.

Blue Ventures started in one small village in Madagascar. The company ran an experiment, closing off a small section of an octopus fishery to see if it would rejuvenate. It was a small test project, the type of thing angel investors might fund even if the risks are high.

Related: Funding your social enterprise: first stop – grants

The experiment worked. The local fishery became far more productive. As news spread among other villages, Blue Vision found itself in hot demand. The market already proved that their idea would work. These early results helped Blue Ventures expand its efforts locally. It also attracted funding and resources. Blue Ventures went on to win the Tusk Conservation Award, a Skoll award, and other accolades.

Now, the Blue Venture’s impact has reached a viral phase.

Investors Invest in People (But That Probably Means Something Different Than What You Think)

There’s a common saying among venture capital firms: they invest in people, not ideas or even businesses.

This saying is very nuanced, and quite frankly, many aspiring tech geniuses and would-be social entrepreneurs misinterpret it. Venture capital firms don’t invest simply in “people”, nor do they invest in savvy salesmen who make great pitches. Venture Capital firms invest in people who they believe can get sh** done. Potential investors will spend a considerable amount of time evaluating management teams.

A savvy investor isn’t going to be convinced by a great smile or wowed by the most intricate investment proposal. Sure, these factors can make a great first impression; however, the world is full of savvy people and fantastic ideas. In the long run what separates titans of industry from intellectual tinkerers is the ability to execute.

Investors also prefer to invest in established and skilled teams. A lone entrepreneur can’t build a company on his or her own. Sometimes, seed funders will provide resources to a lone founder. However, it is important to build a team.

This team needs to be balanced. Let’s look at a quick excerpt from our magazine:

“The social enterprise startup is unique because it requires both social development and business acumen to be successful. In my experience very few people are experts at both. Some are development visionaries- they can see what needs changing and which ideas would help. Others are business gurus who can find the perfect price point, financial model, and business development strategy.”

In addition to having a social development expert and a business whiz, it also helps to have the technical/skilled staff on the team already. If you’re looking to launch an app, it’ll help if you have the app developer already on board.

Great Ideas Are Great But Not Enough

Here’s a fact: the word is full of great ideas. If you head to a conference, incubator, hackathon, or other event packed with bright, ambitious minds, and you get everyone to open up, you’ll hear tons of great ideas. I’ve been to quite a few of these events, and without exception, I’ve come across a ton of great ideas.

So what will make your social enterprise startup idea attract the big fish in silicon valley? You will need more than just a great idea if want to attract what early-stage investors really look for — a great idea and a great investment.

Here’s another fact: accurate, reliable futurologists are hard to come by. The brightest analysts at the best Venture Capitalist firms, the biggest banks, and the most elite consulting firms don’t know what the future holds. Sure, they might publish confident reports predicting future “certainties”. However, if you go and dig up past reports, you’ll find that the experts themselves are often wrong.

The inherent uncertainty of the future is one of the several reasons that early stage investors will invest in people rather than businesses or even ideas. The future might change, markets may not react the way that you think. However,  great business leaders will adjust. They will anticipate markets, look for opportunities, and when necessary, abandon or change ideas up.

No one can predict the future. Further, an idea that seems like a sure-fire could flop once it hits the market. And that’s assuming that the product ever reaches the market. Fact is, many startup ideas remain ideas and never become actual products.

As Lowercase Capital puts it “ideas are cheap and execution is the cat’s pajamas.”  A great team will bring great ideas to life. A proactive team will adjust when products are failing. The wrong team, however, will simply waste money.

Scaling Up: Every Early Stage Investor Wants to Go Big

Early stage investors know they are taking on risks. However, they also want to go big. Scalability is very important for every investor. They don’t just want to hear buzzwords about how you’re going to change the world or save the fish in the sea. They want to see an actual plan with steps and considerations.

Your plan to achieve scale doesn’t have to be micro-detailed. You don’t have to know every person or organization you will reach out to, or the exact structure of projects you haven’t even started working on. However, you do have to prove that you’re serious and that you’re thinking ahead.

You need to have a clear vision for how you plan to scale, and you need to have a general idea of who you’re going to contact and who can help you achieve your plans. For social enterprises, that often means the local community. Take Blue Ventures, for an example. The company rebuilds aquatic habitats, working with local fishers to make local fisheries sustainable.

A Quick Case Study: Using Profits to Drive Change

A social enterprise can rely on the products and services it sells to fund its operations. Often, simply the act of selling a good is creating impact. Consider Patagonia, a company that sells active lifestyle gear, including rock climbing equipment. When founder Yvon Chouinard founded the company he wanted to do more than just produce profits. In fact, he was already producing profits but realized that the steel pitons he was manufacturing were permanently damaging rock faces. So he started producing climbing equipment that wouldn’t hurt the environment.

Patagonia grew, and every time the company sold a product, that meant that customers were choosing a sustainable product that wouldn’t damage the environment. At the same time, the company was producing profits, which it could then reinvest in new product lines. Now Patagonia produces over a half billion dollars a year in revenues. Patagonia now produces a lot more than climbing gear. It is a full lifestyle company that produces a range of products. However, it has never lost sight of its social ambitions.

Patagonia was a stunning success, but it started small. The company reached its tremendous heights by utilizing the market and turning profits into sustainable change.

So Where Can I Actually Find Resources?

Enough talk. It’s time for action.

There are many opportunities for finding resources.

Consider your own social and family network. Do you have a “rich uncle” who might be willing to provide some funding? Do you have friends who could contribute some free sweat labor?

Explore these opportunities first, because if you can get the ball rolling now, it’ll help you when you apply for external funding.

If your company is very young, then you should consider accelerator programs. Resource and funding packages vary from accelerator to accelerator, however, most will offer somewhere around $120,000 dollars in exchange for 6% of your company. Most will also offer office space, mentorship, and business advice. They may also be able to link you up with venture capital firms.

Many angel investors are also very active. In 2011 angel investors seeded some 65,000 different startups with roughly $22 billion dollars. Finding angel investors can be tricky. Often, it takes a personal connection. By attending trade shows, conferences, and hackathons you might rub shoulders with potential angel investors.

Crowdfunding is also growing in popularity. However, securing funding is a bit of a crapshoot. Some projects stick and go viral, many simply fade away. If you go for crowdfunding on Kickstarter or another platform, make sure you explain the value of your project, why it’s different, and why people should care.

Final Words

No matter who you approach for funding, remember to consider their perspective.

What are their motives? Profits, sure. But what else? How can your business generate both profit and good for the world?

Put your presentation in terms that your audience will understand and relate to. There’s no way to guarantee that you will secure an investment, but aiming your pitch at your audience will help.

Social Responsibility Advice For A Good Life: An Open Letter

In this open letter to small & mid-sized companies, Fatima Homor, MBA, shares advice about social responsibility in all areas of life include business. Let her words inspire you to action and keep smiling!

For existing businesses:

Dear Social Entrepreneur,

Let me start at the end: I wish you profitable growth and also thank you for being a socially conscious businessperson.

Is it easy? Is it hard? Are you profitable?

Being a social enterprise from one perspective is easier, from the other is harder than it is for a rather unconscious business (UB).

Why?

First. A UB does not take a lot of crucial details into consideration, from paying the colleagues correctly and legally, to investing in renewable energy or sustainable NGO support.

Second. The UB focus is first and second on growing margin, it is a rather ego based attitude. Meaning, it won’t lead so easily to the give-up stage.

People committing to be social entrepreneurs chose a lifestyle, are more emotionally committed and therefore might feel overwhelmed more often.

Both the success and the failure of a social entrepreneur lies on their long-term belief they will be successful!

3 Reminders:

  1. Do not quit
  2. Talk about it to everyone
  3. Constantly read, research, and educate yourself

Related: 13 Traits That All Effective Social Entrepreneurs (And Conscious People) Share

I have some good advice and practices to share with you in order to offer you some support..

Need funding?

Start finding locally available Angel Investors.

Many of them told me in 2017: I am tired of the same pitches all the time, start-ups willing to earn money by creating an App etc. I want to invest into value-creation, where the entrepreneurs are 101% committed, and they also possess great knowledge in their topic of sustainability!

You have to commit to sustainability at all levels. CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) implemented into the core of the business starts with you personally.

Related: The Beginner’s Guide to Starting a Social Business

For example, do you smoke? Do you drink too much alcohol? Do you use makeup products tested on animals? Do you take plastic bags from the supermarkets? Do you overuse electricity? Do you eat too much meat? (One of the biggest contributors to global warming…) Do you have 10 minutes long showers? Do you pay for processed food? Don’t you recycle your own trash? Do you drink your coffee or water from a plastic bottle?

Don’t you talk to your friends…?

Why the heck have I raised the last question?

Because the philanthropic way of living is the first and foremost aspect of real and successful CSR operations. You need to be consistent on that in all areas of your life.

Related: The Most Sacred Gift You Can Give According to Tony Robbins

How does it apply to you?

There are similarities and differences when we take into consideration the actual to do’s, but being human at all times is a key perspective. To learn about this more, hire and get into contact with smiley people, women, and youth.

As an important practice, you must internalize your external costs. E.g. if your business acknowledges the facts of its food-waste cost impact and internalize these expenses, you will see how much more both you and your evaluators will reflect on your real sustainability goals. The Business Commission on Sustainability has measured the impact of this practice: 99%.

Another impactful task is to raise the wages of your employees and yourself from the minimum wage to the living wage level.

If you are unable to do so due to funding constraints, build these aspects into your business plan and offer it with an explanation to the Angel Investors.

Further, a key perspective is the education of yourself, your colleagues and partners. According to recent measures connected to the SDGs (United Nations 2030 Sustainability Development Goals), one dollar invested into education brings back 10 dollars at least.

How can you educate yourself?

There are tons of articles, books, Online-studying opportunities, where you can further and further educate yourself on your subject. You need to be an expert in your topic and turn your expertise into convincing sales.

Here comes a challenging question: do you have to be a good salesperson? Yes, you do. Should you be willing to earn a lot of money? Yes, you should.

One of the largest stop signs of social entrepreneurs is that they are afraid of talking about money, asking for payment of their goods, services. Social enterprises are NOT non-profits. And they shouldn’t be. Money in good hands is the best tool ever!

Do not get confused with being social and earning good money! These shall be on the same page. Have you read the Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki? Or the quote from Sharon Lechter:

“Your money. Your business. Your life.”

Social enterprises should earn more money so they are able to invest back more into themselves and their socially committed businesses.

Yes, we must support each other. Yes, we, socially committed business owners and CEOs should leave our doors open and provide real value when we open our hands. Though our businesses will thrive only when we become conscious about our real value creation.

What about existing businesses?

You shall use CSR as the main basis for your incomparable advantage to gain your loyal customers and coworkers on the long run. You should lead by example as a business owner both in your business and in your private life, and communicate it at every event, forum, and conference. Share the word of the doing good while doing well phenomenon is happening. Be proud of it! It is really chic!

change creator socially responsible team

50 years ago or so it was a chic to be the godfather-type-of businessman. Today we open our mouth and many of us say, our religion is: we believe in doing good. This brings us inclusion.

The SDGs aim to affect all aspects of our life. We are the doers! The more we are committed, the more success we earn. The more success we earn, the happier we are as we feel our life is meaningful.

I am Fatima Homor, MBA researcher at the University of Liverpool, owner of the Angeling Profit, CSR Kickstarter Online social enterprise. Thank you for your care and listening.

Greetings from Hungary now!
Fatima

Ps.: A smile is not unprofessional, a smile is self-confidence.

Related: 13 Traits That All Effective Social Entrepreneurs (And Conscious People) Share

How the KIND Foundation is Connecting Youth, Spreading Kindness and Creating Future Social Entrepreneurs

Today the KIND Foundation announces its biggest bet yet — a $20MM multi-year commitment to connect one million students through an initiative called Empatico! The name, which connotes empathy, underscores the importance of the so-called “soft skills,” which are increasingly critical to success in a divided country and interconnected world.

We are so proud of the work the KIND Foundation is doing to create the next generation of social entrepreneurs, we had to talk to the director of the KIND Foundation, Dana Rosenberg. Learn more from our interview here:

Listen to our interview with KIND Foundation Director, Dana Rosenberg

 

In 2016, The KIND Foundation was formed in order to help KIND Snacks further their efforts to make the world a kinder place. Through the foundation, they have been able to fund projects that implement systems of kindness in schools, recognize and support those who have performed extraordinary acts of kindness, and award grants to organizations who are attempting to make a difference in their community.

We were lucky enough to be able to interview the director of the KIND Foundation, Dana Rosenberg, in our Change Creator Podcast where we discussed the origins of the KIND Foundation, their current initiatives, and what they’ve done to help the social entrepreneur community.

What is the KIND Foundation?

“The KIND Foundation was established by KIND Healthy Snacks in the beginning of 2016. Through our foundation, our mission has always been to foster kinder and more empathetic communities,” Dana tells us. “You might be familiar with KIND Snacks as the meter of healthy, nutritious snack options but what you might not know is that we were also founded with the mission to inspire and spread kindness. Furthering that value of being kind has been part of our efforts since day one.”

Related: This 9 Year Old Wrote a Letter To KIND CEO, Here’s What Happened

 What is the KIND Schools Challenge and how did it form?

Dana knew that once the foundation was established, they needed to find ways in which they could engage with their community and help them further the belief that it was necessary to foster kindness and connect with each other.

“We were introduced to Rick Weissbourd who is the head of Making Caring Common, a program of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, and were really blown away by the work that they were doing there. As we got to know them, we established the first KIND Schools Challenge.”

The first KIND Schools Challenge was launched in Making Caring Common schools last year with the intent to help schools and students create change within their own community. It was extremely successful and financial support was given to a school in Jacksonville, where three students created a program that helped other students realize that they were more connected than they initially believed.

“Based on that experience, we teamed up with Harvard once again and we are so thrilled. Applications are now open for this year’s KIND Schools Challenge,” she announced. “The big difference this year is that we are no longer limiting it to the Making Caring Common network. We are opening this up nationally. Any middle school and high school in America can take part. All they need to do is form a team of 3 to 5 students, find a teacher adviser, and address a challenge that they are facing.”

Those who win the KIND Schools Challenge this year will be receiving a small stipend to launch the program and expert advice from a team at Harvard so that they can better shape their community into a kinder place.

What are you trying to achieve through your projects?

“For us, I think this is really making kindness more top of mind and reinforcing it as a value that we should all continue to prioritize and think about as we go on with our daily lives. For us, kindness calls on us to treat each other with respect, compassion, and empathy. It means taking that effort to listen and get to know people that you might not otherwise get to know. It goes well beyond this program. We hope that it is a mindset that people continue to prioritize and celebrate in their own lives.”

Kindness Gives Students a New Kind of Platform!

Teaming up with leading technologists (including the former CTO of Kickstarter) and global education experts to incubate the online learning tool, KIND Foundation has created a whole new way to connect students. Through seamless video conferencing technology and standards-based activities, an 8-year-old in India can now explore what life is like for an 8-year-old in Arkansas. Perhaps more important given the state of affairs in our country, that same kid in Arkansas can meaningfully interact with his or her Brooklyn peers.

Daniel, the Founder & CEO of KIND snacks conceived this idea more than a decade ago (they have the 4 am emails to prove it!) after doing work in the Middle East and realizing the importance of giving people a platform to share their stories.

Will you be expanding your efforts at the university level to help address the importance of social entrepreneurship?

“Right now, we’re evaluating all different points of a young person’s journey until they enter the workforce. For us, our next step is going to be that third and fourth grade age range. We think it’s a really interesting opportunity in terms of the development of a child and their ability to accept and understand different viewpoints. However, we’re also exploring those older age groups as well.”

Related: How 3 Students Stepped Up to Win a National Kindness Award

She goes on to discuss the free social entrepreneurship summit that the KIND Foundation hosted last year where interested entrepreneurs could learn about how to make money while building their own business that was socially conscious. All of the KIND staff took the day off to help entrepreneurs with different areas of business and they were able to speak with successful members of the entrepreneur community such as Arianna Huffington and CEO of KIND, Daniel Lewbetzky.

“It was really an incredible day and an opportunity to give back to our own history. KIND is really proud to be a business with a social purpose and a chance to really encourage that next generation of social entrepreneurs. We need more people who are thinking about, how do I create a great business but also have an impact at the same time?”

She also tells us that working on social entrepreneurship is not an area that they are currently focusing on but that it will be in the future.

What should people be doing to support the mission of spreading kindness?

“Submission for projects to be a part of the (KIND Schools) challenge closes on October 25th. I just encourage as many people across the country to get involved, to think of an idea, and to submit it and to really make an effort to make their schools kinder and more caring. The other thing is, in terms of your social entrepreneurs, I encourage them to look at the KIND Schools Challenge toolkit that came out of last year. These tips and tricks that we’re giving to middle school and high schoolers can be applied to social entrepreneurs to make this a part of your daily life.”

How to Spread Kindness in Your Communities – Key Takeaways:

  • Make a real effort to learn from others. Many of the people in your community have gone through situations that you have gone through as well. Make an effort to learn about the lives of others and you will be better suited to empathize, connect, and show them kindness.
  • Incorporate kindness into your daily life. Find ways that you express kindness to people daily and turn kindness into a habit.
  • Get involved. Look for programs and organizations in your community who are trying to make a difference and get involved. Major changes begin with individuals like you!
  • Kindness needs a bigger platform in this world! How will you spread kindness and empathy today?
  • Think about opportunities to create a great business with impact!

You can find out more about the KIND Foundation and their initiatives through the links below:

KIND Schools Challenge

KIND Schools Challenge Toolkit

Kind Entrepreneurship Summit

Of course, you can always support brands like Kind buy purchasing their product. Check out the latest prices of Kind bars right now!

Why Social Enterprise Matters: An Examination Into the Role of Social Enterprise to Solve Social Problems

Unlike solely for-profit businesses, social enterprises are in the unique position to solve real social problems in this world and make money doing it. Unlike charities that have to continue to raise funds to give back, social business can create lasting and sustainable solutions for social and societal change. In today’s changing landscape, we examine why social enterprise matters — why do we need it? What can we do to support it?

The rise of entrepreneurship has had its fair share of benefits. However, businesses have also brought about some difficult challenges that are affecting us now and can get even worse in future if not controlled.

Due to this, some people started thinking about more than just profits. To them, there’s no need for people to try providing solutions with their businesses, only to end up creating other problems elsewhere. There were just too many social, cultural and environmental issues that needed to be sorted out.

Think about it. Have you heard about factories that mistreat their workers? Don’t you just cringe at the thought of blood diamonds? Or at the fact that some companies have been constantly messing up the environment? You’re not alone, many have been asking themselves the above questions and more.

So, what’s the solution to all this?

Simple. Social entrepreneurship.

This is where for profit social enterprise companies create solutions to the above issues. They mix up profitable and non-profit ventures to ensure they generate a positive return to the society, especially where social, cultural and environmental issues are concerned. Their focus is more on the social impact than their financial gains.

Why exactly does social entrepreneurship matter?

It’s a smart way to solve social problems. It is the only way to solve sustainable, long-lasting social problems.

Let’s face it. The society faces so many problems.

In an interview with Change Creator, Sasha Fisher, the co-founder and executive director of Spark MicroGrants, stated that she grew up wondering why the world she lived in was unequal. There are people and societies that have way more than enough to survive. On the other hand, some local communities can barely afford a decent meal.

Social enterprises smartly solve social problems. Let’s look at Spark MicroGrants, for example.

Smart example #1: Spark MicroGrants

Spark does not focus on giving aid to communities or lording over them with what they’re supposed to do. They actually give communities control over their future.

When Sasha went to Rwanda, she was keen on ensuring that whatever happens was owned by the local communities. They used this as a way to create long-term change. Spark works in conjunction with the Rwandan government to strengthen leadership in the village.

Their business model is simple: The community selects their own projects that have an income component. Spark then focuses on bringing those projects to life. Through this collaboration, they have been able to help communities build businesses where they mill cereals for other villagers and also sell surplus crops from farming.

The village is now more hopeful. They have better family lives. They are not only able to earn an income from this, but they also have immense control of their future.

If you’re thinking of starting an impactful social enterprise like Spark, here are some key things you can learn from Spark MicroGrants:

  • Empower communities to have control over their own future
  • Work on positive and sustainable change, where a community doesn’t depend on you but are able to depend on them
  • Focus on social impact than financial impact – such communities usually need more than just finances
  • Help people improve their conflict-resolution mechanisms

Spark has done a tremendous job and changed so many lives. It’s now offering solutions to 5 countries – Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, DRC, and Ghana.

Another group of people that need more help across the board is persons with disabilities. And that’s where Accessibility Partners comes in.

Smart example #2: Accessibility Partners

This is a socially aware business that helps in accessibility issues – testing and reviewing products to make sure IT (information technology) is accessible to persons with a number of disabilities.

What makes the Accessibility Partners team unique is that more than 70 percent of its employees are actually individuals with disabilities. This ends up being a smart way to empower this specific important group of individuals – using a team that faces similar challenges. It’s a powerful business model aimed to help those inside and outside of the company.

Founded in 2003, it has now become a strong force to reckon with. It works with private and public information technology companies, organizations of different sizes and federal agencies. This socially aware organization comprises of technologists, subject matter experts, and senior consultants.

Some of the key takeaways that can be derived from this social enterprise business model include:

  • Social entrepreneurship is also excelling in the tech industry
  • Persons who are considered disadvantaged can actually become extremely productive when given a chance.
  • Success kills stigma

When a stigmatized group of people is successful, the world gets to see that they don’t need to stigmatize them. That they’re also human beings who have immense strengths that are useful and important for the society.

The above organizations show us clearly that socially aware businesses smartly solve social issues. Some of these issues are usually left in the hands of governments and non-profits. However, this is all changing because such companies are making the implementation of such projects quicker.

Social entrepreneurship hastens implementation of key projects.

Governments are responsible for taking care of their citizens – at least that’s what people have been thinking for ages.

However, governments can sometimes be spread too thin. They run too many projects at the same time. This means that they prioritize certain projects over others, thus some important projects may take too long to be enacted.

In comes social entrepreneurs. These are keen to meet their set agendas without relying on government processes. The community, therefore, reaps the benefits faster without having to wait for the government to prioritize their issues.

Additionally, and sadly, the governments of some growing countries have not yet gotten to the point where they put the ordinary person first. Others are still oppressive to their citizens. It takes independent social initiatives to bring positive change to the society in these countries that are fast losing hope.

Related: Want to Change The World? You Need To Read This First

Social aware businesses don’t just hasten projects that would have been done by government. They also do the same for non-profits.

Housing is one of the areas that many people need help on. There are so many homeless people in the world. The numbers are appalling.

When a global survey was done on the homeless back in 2005 by the United Nations, it was found that there were 100 million homeless people. Worse yet, 1.6 billion did not have adequate housing. Lots of people are dying out there due to poorly built houses. Natural disasters like earthquakes even multiply such fatalities to unimaginable levels.

Dr. Elizabeth Hausler, featured on the cover of issue 10 of Change Creator Magazine, is working hard to change this. She actually won the prestigious 2017 Skoll Award. She’s changing lives, one brick at a time.

Here’s how:

How Build Change is literally building change.

Dr. Elizabeth Hausler is the founder the award-winning organization called Build Change.

“It’s not the earthquake that kills people; it’s the collapse of a poorly built building.” – Hausler

According to her, safe housing is a basic human right.

So, what’s Build Change all about?

It’s a social enterprise that saves lives through working with communities in emerging countries to build houses and schools. They do this in a way that these structures don’t collapse when there are occurrences of earthquakes and typhoons.

Their mission is to reduce injuries, deaths and economic losses brought about by these natural disasters.

They first work with governments to develop building standards. This fills a gap in these countries, where the government does not have the capacity, personnel, resources, vehicles, inspection capabilities or even budget required to enforce effective building codes.

Build Change streamlines all this, making it simpler and even using latest information technology tools and apps to make sure things work smoothly. It also provides access to financing; knowing very well that businessmen will need a grant or a loan to build back their businesses after a disaster.

Through such initiatives, Build Change has enhanced the safety of the structures of 230,000 people. It has won numerous awards for its excellent work.

This all started when Hausler decided to leave her comfort zone and fly to India after the 2001 earthquake that killed between 13,000 and 20,000 people. She couldn’t just keep quiet and keep seeing disasters like the one on the figure above. Not if she could do something about it. And now 230,000 people are living in safer conditions.

Some of the key takeaways from this include:

  • To make a change, many times you need to leave your comfort zone and go help people in another state, country or region
  • Use technology to streamline your processes
  • Governments and NGOs do not always have the capacity to solve some problems. Help them when you can.

Social aware enterprises solve business problems, but here’s more.

They offer solutions that cater for people in both social and economic networks. They matter because go above just business. They take it up a notch by making sure that whatever solutions they give do not end up messing up social, cultural and environmental ecosystems – they make it their mission to safeguard these important sectors.

Their functions are nourished by the emotional and informational support. Here entrepreneurs holistically take care of those in need.

As an agent of change that contributes significantly to the global economy, it brings change in ways that governments, businesses, and non-profits don’t. They offer alternative solutions when the administration is not effectively working on the needs of the day.

If you’re such an entrepreneur, you get joys and satisfaction that are way beyond money. Most businesses are out for a profit. But your social enterprises will balance economic and social issues. This is a higher calling which brings lasting change, making the world a better place for now and the future.

The Gallup study, How Millenials Want to Work and Live brought out very important findings. These include:

  • Millennials don’t just want to focus on a paycheck, they want to serve a purpose
  • They’re shifting focus from their satisfaction to their development
  • Instead of working for bosses, millennials are looking for coaches
  • Their lives are not about annual reviews, but rather ongoing conversations
  • They don’t focus only on their weaknesses, they put emphasis on their strengths
  • To millennials, it’s not just a job – it’s their lives

This study shows that millennials don’t just want to do business, they want to leave a social impact. This clearly shows that social entrepreneurship now matters more than ever.

According to Nielsen, global consumers are more willing to reward companies that give back to communities. The giving aspect makes them want to pay more for the products.

For social purpose businesses, this is a huge plus. It will not only increase their bottom line but also give them more resources that they can use to make an even bigger impact on the society.

Let’s look at one entrepreneur who took business as more than just an avenue to make money.

The Dr. Alasdair Harris (Al) example.

Dr. Harris is referred to as simply “Al” in his site, Blue Ventures.

Al founded Blue Ventures, an award-winning social enterprise, in 2003. This was to show that proper marine conservation requires entrepreneurial, pragmatic and locally-led approaches.

Al’s organization has made a huge difference in marine ecosystems and also created a stream of revenues for locals in emerging countries. One of its biggest achievements is that it created the biggest marine-protected, locally-managed areas in the Indian Ocean They also established sustainable ecotourism businesses and aquaculture.

This solves both a business and a social problem.

Successful social entrepreneurs set an example.

Above we talked about Sasha Fisher’s worry when she was growing up. She simply struggled with the fact that there is so much inequality in the world, and that led to her founding Spark MicroGrants a while later.

Sadly, there are many live lives oblivious of the challenges that other people are facing in the world. In their minds, they say, “Those are other people’s problems. Let their governments and non-profits fix them.”

When people actually go out of their way and start changing people’s lives, the whole story changes.

As a social entrepreneur, you inspire others to work on social businesses. You set an example to those who once looked at social, cultural and environmental challenges as “other people’s problems”. Through your initiative, they start believing that they, too, can make a difference.

Since this is a sector that brings in a lot of positive change, the world needs lots of inspirational stories, just like yours. It’s inspiring to see someone considered privileged and comfortable going out of their way to create solutions for those who really need a helping hand.

The world matters and social entrepreneurs bring global solutions to business.

There are so many things happening all over the world. Lots of global changes that need our attention.

Social aware businesses bring in an angle that solves pertinent issues such as health, education, and employment among others. They strengthen economies and deliver efficient public services.

Many social entrepreneurs think globally. Think about the following before starting your social enterprise.

  • Is your business solving humanity problems?
  • Are you infringing on any fundamental human rights?
  • Are the items you use for your business products of factories that mistreat and underpay their workers?
  • Are you solving any cultural, environmental or social issues?

Nielsen’s sustainability imperative came up with some interesting findings in 2015. These included the following:

  • Sales of consumer goods from brands that demonstrate a commitment to sustainability grew by over 4% in 2015. Those without grew by less than 1%.
  • 60% of consumers were willing to pay more money for sustainable brands in 2015. This was a remarkable improvement from the previous years – 50% in 2013 and 55% in 2014.

(Source: Nielsen)


This shows that it’s not only brands that are becoming socially aware, consumers are, too. As much as social entrepreneurs focus on social impact, the above study proves that increase in social awareness is also changing how global business is done.

Key takeaways here include:

  • Your business should not only fix local solutions. Think globally.
  • Customers are happy if your products are socially aware. There’s a whole market out there for such initiatives.
  • Focus on social impact, no matter how small it is. When more people implement such projects, the effect will be noticed globally.

They fix problems brought about by business.

Business is not wrong in totality. They need to make a profit, and we need to buy their goods and services. We need their products to solve some of our basic and luxurious needs. Some businesses, even without precisely being social enterprises, still make the world a better place.

However, there are a number of businesses that have brought about some of our biggest global challenges. Social enterprise changes this by marrying for profit and non-profit aspects. This takes care of some of the global challenges that we’re currently facing.

The shocking Rana Plaza tragedy — how tragedy can create change.

The Rana Plaza tragedy made people change their thoughts on who exactly makes their clothes.

This single tragedy led to the deaths of more than 1,100 people and is the worst industrial accident in the world. What now remains is the debris of what was once a factory that made cheap clothing for the west.

On the 23rd April 2013, a television feature showed cracks in the Rana Plaza building. However, Sohel Rana stated in the media that it was safe for workers to return to the building. He reported that it was still safe.

However, on 24th April, at around 8:57 am, the building collapsed with over 3,122 workers still inside. 1100 did not make it out alive.

Sohel was simply trying to make as much profit as possible from his business. However, he didn’t consider the safety and livelihood of his workers, leading to this astronomical tragedy that could have been avoided.

This led to a rise in socially aware businesses that actually make sure that all their processes are done in a way that does not endanger human beings or the environment. Therefore, they’re fixing a huge problem that other businesses have been creating for ages.

Scarcity has brought about marvelous innovations, but false scarcity creates problems.

There are definitely more problems than people who can solve them. Thus social entrepreneurs have used this scarcity of resources to come up with some of the biggest innovations of our times. These are huge innovations since they solve issues such as poverty, poor quality of life and environmental issues among others.

This mixes up a mission and cutting-edge technology.

Solutions brought about by social entrepreneurship.

There are many awesome companies that have been started by social entrepreneurs. Here are a few:

  1. Kiva: Provides loans that change lives
  2. Grameen Bank: Gives banking solutions to the poor in Bangladesh
  3. Teach for America: Learning solutions for Americans
  4. Accessibility Partners: Makes it easy for persons with disabilities to access information technology
  5. Everlane: A socially aware clothing company

Cost-effectiveness in social entrepreneurship.

Social entrepreneurs think about the long-term impact of their initiatives. In their eyes, there’s no need for creating a huge business today that will bring end up causing a disaster in future.

Think about some of these workplaces that give their workers poor working and living conditions, exposing them to numerous expensive health challenges, such as the Rana Plaza tragedy mentioned above.

Social aware entrepreneurs think differently. Their goal is to heighten innovation and impact, not income.

Here profits are not as valuable as social results. No matter how much income is made, a social awareness project fails if it does not have a meaningful social impact. In fact, any social entrepreneur who generates colossal profits and does not convert that into a cost-effective, meaningful social impact has wasted useful resources.

Some of the social impacts they can push for include:

  • A cleaner environment
  • Easier access to health care
  • Improved education
  • Housing for the homeless
  • Reduced poverty
  • Protection of abused children
  • Improved working conditions

These are done in a cost-effective way. They end up bettering the lives of the disadvantaged. In the long-term, they’re good for the well-being of other human beings and eventually the overall worldwide economy.

Here, cost-effectiveness will not only affect the core services being offered by a company, it also applies in their employee uptake.

The 2016 Cone Communications Employee Engagement Study came up with interesting findings to back up this claim. Their studies showed that:

  • More than 75% of millennials would accept a pay cut if hired in a responsible company
  • 88% find jobs more fulfilling when provided with opportunities to make a positive impact on environmental and social issues (US average is 74%)
  • When deciding where to work, 76% consider the social and environmental commitments of a company
  • 64% would decline job offers from companies without strong CSR practices

The key takeaway here is the fact that social entrepreneurs find it easier to hire millennials, thus reducing the costs and time taken to hire experts.

Millenials will soon form more than 50% of the workforce, therefore having practices that appeal to them will greatly increase their chances to work for you. A brilliant, socially conscious, young workforce will be able to help greatly push the agenda of a business, while still ensuring there’s reasonable social impact.

So, does social entrepreneurship matter?

Yes it does.

It solves social problems, hastens implementation of key projects, solves business problems, fixes issues brought about by businesses and is cost-effective in the long run. It changes lives. It makes the world a better place. More people need to follow this model and start creating lasting, effective, sustainable social impact. The world needs it!

Want To Change the World? You Need to Read This First!

A lot of people want to change the world and make a difference. Perhaps you’re a recently graduated college student. You’ve had the opportunity to learn about many of the world’s problems and you want to do something about them. Problem is, you’ve got student loans payments, bills, and all the rest.

Or maybe you’re in the middle of your career, and you’ve been doing some volunteer work on the side. You love the causes you’re working on as a volunteer and to do it full-time, but you need to cash some checks as well.

Dreaming about a better future is easier than actually making it happen. So how can you become a social entrepreneur or a self-sustaining change creator? People who change the world don’t get up one morning and suddenly become a social enterprise leader. It takes step by step choices every day, a lot of heart, and tenacity to change the world and that starts with you!

What are some things you can do to make yourself a more effective change creator and increase the likelihood of success? Or maybe you’re already changing the world for the better. How can you maximize impact?

We field these questions and topics all the time. Often, the answers can be found in our magazine.

Today, we’re going to grab the bull by the horn and jump right in. Let’s talk about why creating change is important. And let’s talk about how you can get the ball rolling and start pursuing your social entrepreneurial ambitions. We’ll also share some tips and insights on how you can constantly improve your ambitions and business.

Along the way, we’re going to go over some high-minded concepts, and also examine some real-world examples. A lot of people have already changed the world for better, but just as a business can constantly improve, so too can the world. And you can be a part of the movement to build a better world and more sustainable future.

Why Should You Bother Creating Change At All?

What’s the meaning of life? Philosophers have been asking that question for millennia, and we’re not going to be able to answer it here. Perhaps there is no one answer. Or maybe the answer is different for each of us. But we can still ponder. From a biological point of view, the meaning of life is to reproduce and pass on your genetics.

A lot of us tend to embrace higher meanings, and that’s great. But when it comes to giving a sh**, basic biology remains relevant. That’s true even if basic biology doesn’t yield all the answers. What we do today will echo throughout our lifetimes and beyond. Those of us living in the present are custodians of the future.

Change Your Mind. Change the Future. How to Approach our Resources.

When we consume non-renewable resources in the present, we deprive those resources of future generations. Forget about oil, gasoline, and the other non-renewable resources that often come to mind. Think about the many reefs around the world that are dying and can never be replaced. Think about our forests or parks. Or think about it in human terms. Every child who dies from a preventable disease is a squandered resource. That child might have gone on to do extraordinary things. Become a doctor,  a fantastic parent, or a life-changing teacher. Or anyone else who could have contributed to society. People like you are tired of the status quo and are ready to do something about it!

Related: Why Social Entrepreneurship is Picking Up Steam

Dream of a Better Future, Then Make It Happen

People love to dream about the future, spending as much as one hour of every eight thinking about it. Many of the dreamers that fill the pages of Change Creator have spent even more time pondering what could be. Many other social entrepreneurs also like to spend time with their head “in the clouds.” The future makes for a potent driving force. That’s true for both for our personal ambitions, and the potential to make an impact on the world.

There are countless different ways you can make a difference, and put giving a sh** into action. You could change your personal habits, consuming less, recycling more, and embracing a sustainable lifestyle. You could donate to charities and volunteer in your free time. Or you could become a social entrepreneur, putting the market to work. You can produce a profit for yourself and your company while also building a better future. That might mean developing sustainable technologies and alternatives. Or using technology to provide education to those who otherwise lack access.  There are many ways to pursue positive change.

Business Can Be a Force For Building a Better Future

Change Creator is a business, we don’t deny it. We care about business measurables, including advertising revenues, readership, subscriptions, and all the rest.  We must care about those things so that we can make a difference. Without money and readership, the lights go out and the mission dies.

The mission to make an impact by inspiring more social entrepreneurs to shape a better future is what drives us day-to-day. If we cared only about revenues and all that, we would have chosen a more profitable topic. But there are already tons of “money first” publications out there. Of course, money can and must be made in the social entrepreneur space.

Many of the entrepreneurs we’ve interviewed have built successful, even thriving companies. Still, if you want to be a true “Change Creator“, you have to think beyond dollars and cents. You need a driving motivation to make the world a better place and to preserve what we have for the future.

We are all driven by different things. Our Founder, Adam Force, is passionate about finding solutions to the world’s most pressing problems. He’s also passionate about empowering others so that they can find solutions. If Change Creator can inspire even one person to go out and make a big difference, it’ll all be worth it. But we’re aiming much bigger and our vision is to inspire one million Change Creators.

Millennials Find Their Passion First. Then Make Money and a Difference.

Or how about Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia. We’ll dive into his story later, but early on he was faced with a choice. Short-term profits, or sustainability. Chouinard is passionate about outdoor activities. He also has a deep respect for nature and sustainability. When founding Patagonia 1973, Chouinard focused on producing gear that was environmentally friendly. Now, Chouinard is a billionaire, and his company is one of the most respected and sustainable businesses around. It also generates hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues each year. Chouinard himself is also one of the most respected and lauded people on Earth.

Now, Chouinard is a billionaire, and his company is one of the most respected and sustainable businesses around. It also generates hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues each year. Chouinard himself is also one of the most respected and lauded people on Earth.

Titans of industry come and go, yet their names are often forgotten in the annals of history. Do you remember who was the shipping giant in 15th century Venice? We don’t. Wealth and power are fleeting, but striving to make the world a better place? That’s something that history remembers. We remember the Mart Luther Kings, Gandhis, Benjamin Franklins, and all the rest. Even yesteryear’s titans of industries, such as Carnegie Mellon, are now remembered more for their philanthropy than their businesses.

Change Creator is Serious About Creating Change to the Status Quo

We’re not talkers. We’re doers. Our magazine is very much about making a difference.

Contributing to the world is something that Change Creator takes seriously. Words can inspire action and impact.

The printing press ushered in the age of enlightenment, allowing for the diffusion of ideas and spurring intellectual debate. More recently, the Internet has given birth to the modern “Knowledge Economy”, shrinking the world. Now, researchers and thinkers from around the world can share their ideas and insights instantaneously.

For Change Creator, we want to support social entrepreneurs, do-gooders, and thought leaders who give a sh**. We want to inspire people to become social entrepreneurs as well. That can mean a lot of different things. Readers will see that in the diversity of our stories and the accomplishment of various social entrepreneurs.

When it comes to making a difference, there’s no one-size fits all approach. You have to figure out what’s most important for you, and what you can do to make a difference. What motivates to you as well. Just remember, we’ve only got one world so we’d better take care of it. We have to think not only of ourselves but those who have yet to come. We can’t offer you a simple blueprint to follow for creating change. However, we can share some lessons that we’ve learned along the way.

Related: 5 Ways to Stay Highly Productive and On Top Of Your Game

Get Sh** Done: Putting Talk Into Action

Talk is great, but without action, you won’t be making much of a difference. It’s the same with writing. At Change Creator, we don’t want to ink the prettiest words, we want to craft content that drives people to action. We want to inspire people, quite simply, to get sh** done.

Dreams and ambitions are beautiful, but without action they are meaningless. At some point, you have to stop dreaming and starting doing.

How you should get started depends on what you want to achieve. You need to educate yourself in the industry, community, and area you want to work. Education means more than reading (though reading is great!). Gain experience.

If you want to sell more sustainable fruits and vegetables, start a garden or go work on a farm. Work at grocery stories as well, and study how companies sell food. You can’t gain experience in every area, but the more experience and education you have, the better. Pursue your ideas. You might not have the funds to start up a grocery store right away or to establish a big farm. However, you may be able to grow vegetables on the land you have. You can sell your products at the nearby farmer’s markets, or by setting up a stand. Many great entrepreneurs come from humble beginnings.

You (Probably) Can’t Go It Alone

Share your ideas, try to find people who can help you in your efforts. Lone individuals often don’t accomplish very much. Humans are social creatures. It’s through organizations, society, and combined effort that most great things are accomplished. Steve Jobs had Joanna Hoffman, Steve Wozniak, and others.

These days, Bill Gates is known for his philanthropy. Can you name the wealth manager who helped Gates become one of the richest people in the world?  His name is Michael Larson, and he’s regarded by many as being one of the best investors on the planet. Point is, both business and creating change are team efforts more often than not. As you strive to establish your business and make an impact in the community, you need to identify and reach out to potential team members.

Persist and then Persist Again

Creating change, building a business or movement, and establishing yourself as a leader won’t be easy. And chances are, you’re not going to be an immediate, smashing success. Quite likely, you’ll suffer some setbacks and failures along the way. Those failures might be personal. You might lose track of friends and family, or come to blows with business partners. Your failures might be abject.

Your first social enterprise could fall flat because you didn’t understand the market, the community, or another factor. Doesn’t matter. Persist and then persist again. People like to dream, and along the way, many people come to believe that their business will be a smashing success the day they launch it. You have a great idea, right? The world’s going to see that immediately, right?

As Dale Partridge, founder of StartUpCamp and millennial superhero says when entrepreneurs first start their company:

“People think it’s the Super Bowl. It’s really the first game of the season.”

You might have a smashing idea, but it’s not likely to be a smashing success, at least not right away. Persistence may be the biggest difference between would-be change creators who fizzle out, and those who go on to change the world. Try and try again. Failures don’t have to be losses. They can be learning experiences that inform your future efforts and ambitions.

If you’re serious about accomplishing anything, consistency is likely going to be the key. That’s why it’s important to find something you’re passionate about.

Whatever you’re trying to accomplish, you’re going to have to do it again, and again, and again. If you want to build a sustainable mountain climbing gear company or a thoughtful publication, you’re going to have to wake up day after day, making gear, writing and editing articles, whatever.

 The Social Entrepreneur’s “Secret” Weapon: The Market

In the past, “do-gooders” and business-minded folks often lived in two different worlds. The business-minded folks would build a company, produce a lot of money, and then become rich. Along the way, some of them would give their money to charities and other do-gooders. Or some business folks would go ahead and start their own charity. Still, their business efforts and charitable endeavors were often distinct and separate.

Bill Gates is a great example of this. First, he built his company, Microsoft. Over time, he acquired billions of dollars. Then started his own charity, the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation. Gates isn’t overly active in the business world these days. He was relinquished many of his duties at Microsoft. Meanwhile, his wealth is managed by professional investors.

However, Gates is actively pursuing various charitable endeavors, including global public health and education reform. Mr. Gates should be applauded and lauded for his efforts. However, “social entrepreneurs” are pursuing ambitions and changes that could produce even bigger changes in the long run. Social entrepreneurs seek to combine market forces with the “kind heart” of do-gooders.

It’s Good to Produce Profit and Change — At the Same Time.

A social entrepreneur wants to change the world and produce a profit at the same time. The secret to a social entrepreneur isn’t the profits themselves.  Instead, it’s the power of markets and their ability to allocate resources. The market has proven to be the most efficient resource allocation system known to man. Perhaps a bit ironically, the power of the market is derived as much from its failures as its successes. Markets allow bad businesses and ideas to fail. Markets also allow great ideas to succeed and reward such ideas with more money and resources.

There are many great, efficient charities that allocate resources effectively and efficiently. These charities operate in a quasi-market where donors will often choose the most effective and efficient charities to donate to. However, this market isn’t as efficient and effective as the private sector where the ability to make profits determines whether a company will sink or swim. Social entrepreneurs compete in the private market. Either their ideas will succeed and they will produce profits, or they will go out of business. This means that effective, efficient, and well-managed companies with good ideas will succeed. Inefficient companies will go the way of the dinosaur and go out of business.

Staying True to Your Community

One of the challenges many social entrepreneurs face is creating positive change. The market is great for allocating resources to successful, profitable business ideas. However, the market can’t necessarily ensure that ideas and businesses do good. That’s up to you as a social entrepreneur. Are you willing to set aside short-term profits for the sake of grander, more holistic goals?

Remember Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia? Before founding his company, Chouinard was faced with a difficult choice: he could have pursued short-term profits, continuing to manufacture high-quality steel pitons, but doing so was going to damage the environment. After more than a decade of success, Chouinard came to find that the steel pitons that provided the bulk of his income were also damaging Yosemite’s rock faces. It turned out that the steel pitons he was making, were damaging the natural wonders in Yosemite and elsewhere.

Chouinard could have just kept his head low, continuing to sell his pitons. He would have made money, he would have paid his bills and supported his lifestyle, even if it damaged the environment. But Chouinard decided to stay true to his community. The environment is a precious resource, and the old way of doing business would have destroyed rock faces, ruining them for future generations. He chose instead to embrace “clean climbing” and sustainability, seeing it not as a hindrance, but a way to distinguish his company in the marketplace and to offer competitive advantages. Patagonia was born, and his new company wasn’t going to simply sell climbing equipment and outdoor gear.

Chouinard incorporated sustainability into his business model, making it a part of his company’s DNA. Producing profits wasn’t enough. Patagonia would produce profits while also acting as a custodian for the environment. His company grew, and now produces hundreds of millions of dollars per year in revenues.

Measure. Learn. Adjust. Repeat.

When it comes to being a social entrepreneur, it’s not just about profits. You already know that, and that’s why you’re reading this article. High-minded goals like saving the world and ending the poverty are great. Embrace them. Let them drive you. But you need smaller, more measurable goals as well.

Consider Change Creator. We worry about advertising and subscription like any other publication. Publications also worry about readership. How much time are people spending on an article, website or app? Are they reading the entire article? Are they acting on what they are reading by signing up for a newsletter, paying for a subscription, or sharing on social media? We obsess over these statistics because it helps us measure how many people we are reaching.

For Change Creator, we want our audience to be as large as possible, and it’s not just about the bottom line, it’s about expanding our reach and inspiring as many people as possible.

How can you measure your impact? How can you track how many lives you’re impacting?

Data is important because it informs you and allows you to measure your success. Intricate data, such as how long a person spends reading an article, provide a lot more insight than a simple bottom-line analysis. Even if your company is profitable, are you really maximizing success? Your data can help you find out. You can discover what’s working and what’s under-performing.

For example, we can crunch data to find out what articles people are reading and what topics are performing well. We can also see what topics aren’t gaining traction. Then we can adjust our publishing calendar to key in on the topics that are performing well. This should yield even more success.

What data you collect is going to depend on your business and your goals. When it comes to social entrepreneurship it’s important to remember your community and your altruistic aims. Many companies lose sight of their “do-good” ambitions by failing to keep track of their in-community impact. Don’t lose track, and don’t let profits become your sole focus. Always remember that you have higher ambitions. Make sure that those ambitions are coded into your company’s DNA. Blast them on your “About Us” page, codify them into your official company values, and track them with data, constantly and incessantly.

It’s Time To Get To Work

You know what? Enough talk. We could go on about this forever. It’s our passion. But the first step to creating positive change is to put ideas, dreams, and ambitions into action. So get to work. Pursue your dreams. Make the world a better place. We’re going to be right there with you trying to create a better present, and building towards a better future. We hope you’ll join us on our wild ride.

13 Traits That All Effective Social Entrepreneurs (And Conscious People) Share

What exactly is a social entrepreneur?

According to Investopedia, a social entrepreneur is “a person who pursues an innovative idea with the potential to solve a community problem.”

Take, for example, Muhammad Yunus. Yunus founded his own bank in Bangladesh that allowed those living in poverty to borrow money without having to pay collateral. His ultimate goal in creating this bank was to reduce poverty levels in the area and it was and continues to be quite successful.

To this date, the Grameen Bank has had an extraordinary impact on poverty throughout Bangladesh by doing something as simple as providing banking services to those who would normally be turned away.

Now that we know exactly what a social entrepreneur is and what they set out to do, the next question we need to ask is, what makes a social entrepreneur effective enough to make a large impact? What made Yunus so successful?

If you are struggling with your own business, what differentiates you from some of the successful social entrepreneurs of today?

It all comes down to a handful of powerful personality traits.

If you want to join the ranks of the effective social entrepreneurs, study and incorporate these 13 traits into your personality:

  1. Effective Social Entrepreneurs Are… Authentic

Social entrepreneurs are dedicated to their cause and wholly believe that it is their responsibility to do what they can to alleviate social issues such as poverty and the lack of access to education in certain countries. Those who are not invested in a cause and are only interested in making a profit are destined for failure. Effective social entrepreneurs are authentic and seek change, not a paycheck.

How can you avoid becoming a social entrepreneur that is only in the business of change for profit? Make sure that you are truly invested in your cause. Imagine that you have traveled five years in the future and are currently working to support your cause. Have you grown bored with your work? Are you excited about the type of money that you are making? Do you measure your success in checks rather than changes? If you’ve answered yes to any of the above, chances are that you not dedicated to your cause and will not be effective in your efforts.

  1. Effective Social Entrepreneurs Are… Prepared

Social entrepreneurs, although goal oriented, know what it takes to run a successful business. Before they launch their business, they’ve constructed an ironclad plan that will ensure the longevity and impact of their business. They’ve done their homework and they are prepared for any obstacles that may come their way while they are running their business. The most successful of social entrepreneurs are prepared for the business side of their goals.

You may or may not have heard of Blake Mycoskie but you have most certainly heard of his company TOMS. TOMS is a company that produces shoes, clothing, and accessories for men and women. For every shoe or product bought, the company gives away water, shoes, and other types of materials and services to those who are in need. TOMS was and continues to be very successful in its efforts.

This success can mostly be attributed to Mycoskie’s entrepreneurial background. Prior to founding TOMS, Mycoskie successfully founded and ran five different businesses. His experience goes as far back as 1996 when he founded a laundry service for Southern Methodist University called EZ Laundry. Until the creation of TOMS, he also founded a billboard company, a cable network, an online driver’s education service, and a marketing firm.

Without this essential business experience, who knows where Blake Mycoskie’s company TOMS would be today.

  1. Effective Social Entrepreneurs Are… Collaborative

No business functions well if a single person is attempting to control it or do all the work necessary to keep it running. Social entrepreneurs are well aware of this truth and have a large team by their side to help them achieve their goals and fight for their cause. They allow people to help them out and welcome ideas presented by others who share similar philosophies and values. An effective social entrepreneur knows to collaborate with others rather than trying to take on the world by themselves.

Need some networking tips that will help you become more collaborative? Take a look at some of the ideas below.

  • Reach out to people who have a large audience and who are dedicated to your cause.
  • Seek out family, friends, and acquaintances. These people will be your greatest assets during your entrepreneurial journey and may just have the skill sets that you require to steer your organization in the right direction.
  • Judge someone by their talent, not their status. While someone may have had 10 years of experience at a tech company and founded their own organization, it does not mean that they will always be the right fit for your cause. You may end up with someone who is uneducated but who has the skills you need to be successful.
  • Be kind and generous. Networking will not work for you if you are someone who consistently takes in relationships or who never reaches out for the sake of it.
  • Go to places where you might expect to meet someone who will be interested in your cause.

  1. Effective Social Entrepreneurs Are… Flexible

Like Jimmy Dean once said, “I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.” Things around us are constantly changing and social entrepreneurs understand that they need to change their ideas and their businesses to better equip themselves to deal with the problems they are targeting. Effective social entrepreneurs are flexible, adaptable, and know that they must change things constantly to be successful.

Flexibility is exactly how Lucky Iron Fish, a social enterprise dedicated to eliminating iron deficiency, managed to prevent their business from failing despite facing overwhelming odds.

Lucky Iron Fish appeared to have everything they needed to be successful. They had developed a product that was efficient and aesthetically pleasing, they had more than enough funding to launch the product, and they had created a sales team that would go door-to-door throughout Cambodia to sell their product.

The results, however, were anything but promising. The organization had failed to gain the trust and the interest of the community and they overlooked the fact that the Cambodian government had already been giving out free iron supplements. Instead of continuing to sell the product according to their original plan or giving up entirely, Lucky Iron Fish changed their course and began working with other organizations who were already operating throughout Cambodia in order to become trustworthy to the people and make their product more appealing.

Related: How to find ideas for your social enterprise that you’ll want to pursue

Now, Lucky Iron Fish has been recognized by individuals such as Oprah and is selling around the world. What can we learn from this? Well, as the CEO of Lucky Iron Fish once said,

“We failed a lot and had to quickly adapt.”

  1. Effective Social Entrepreneurs Are… Daring

Social issues are generally brought about because society has been traveling in one course that has resulted in the issue itself. Because of this, a social entrepreneur has to be willing to go against the grain of society in order to solve the problem that is plaguing society. Social entrepreneurs that are truly dedicated to their cause understand that it takes a revolution and a little bit of rebellion to solve a problem that has been deeply ingrained into our beliefs and behavior.

Don’t be afraid to cross a few lines or do something new to achieve your goals. This does not mean that you need to break several laws or do something unethical in order to make a difference in the world but it does mean that you have to have the courage needed to challenge the status quo and push a few buttons in the process.

  1. Effective Social Entrepreneurs Are… Creative

Although this may seem like an obvious personality trait, social entrepreneurs are creative in more ways than one. They are constantly providing unique solutions to some of society’s biggest issues, changing the way that businesses are run, and coming up with additional ways to impact the world around them. Using creativity to achieve these types of goals is what makes a social entrepreneur effective.

One company that comes to mind when I think about the word creative is soleRebels. soleRebels is a company in Ethiopia that handcrafts sustainable footwear using materials such as organic cotton and recycled tires. The way that the company produces their shoes also helps to reduce carbon emissions.

Along with their mission to recycle and reduce our carbon footprint, the company also provides jobs locally to improve the economy and to help those who aren’t able to support themselves otherwise. soleRebels solves not one, not two, but three different problems that are currently plaguing our society. This creativity is what sets them apart from other social entrepreneurs and makes them extremely effective at what they are trying to accomplish.

  1. Effective Social Entrepreneurs Are… Passionate

A social entrepreneur usually chooses to become a social entrepreneur because they themselves or someone that they know has been a victim as a result of a social issue. Whether they have previously led a life of extreme poverty or have experienced violence within their culture, they are passionate about their cause and are dedicated to making a change in regards to their cause.

One such notable social entrepreneur who experienced a social issue firsthand and was passionate enough to make a difference is Shiza Shahid. Shahid is the driving force behind the Malala Fund, which is an organization dedicated to providing education to women in countries where it has been outlawed or isn’t provided.

Shahid was raised in the capital city of Pakistan, Islamabad, and was devoting her time to help others from a young age. She was lucky enough to receive a scholarship to Stanford University and was able to receive a quality education. She noticed, however, that other women and girls in her country were not as lucky.

That was when Malala Yousafzai started receiving recognition for her effort to draw attention towards the lack of education in her country. Shahid, inspired, reached out to Malala and organized a camp that would give her the inspiration needed to become an activist and entrepreneur. A couple of years after Shahid organized the camp, Malala was shot by the Taliban.

Shahid once again rushed to her aid and because of the event and Malala’s recovery, Malala’s family and Shahid were inspired to create an organization that would address the lack of education for women. Malala decided that Shahid was the person for the project and Shahid took the helm, despite not initially believing in herself.

This type of passion is what made Shahid an effective social entrepreneur. She experienced an injustice that caused her to take action, persevered through the challenges of running an organization so that she could make a difference, and came out successful.

  1. Effective Social Entrepreneurs Are… Charismatic

Social Entrepreneurs have a magnetic personality and a way with words that could convince you to join almost any cause that they had. This works in their favor because they are able to create of network of people united towards a common goal that will inevitably carry them to victory. A good social entrepreneur is charismatic and knows how to network with individuals that will prove to be valuable resources down the road.

Being charismatic isn’t as complicated as the masses make it seem. All that is required to be charismatic is passion and conviction. BELIEVE in what you are trying to achieve. KNOW that what you believe is an absolute truth. CONVINCE others that what you are trying to accomplish is possible and that you need their help in order to achieve it.

Believe in yourself and in your cause and your charisma will shine through.

  1. Effective Social Entrepreneurs Are… Persistent

A non-negotiable goal and an iron will are necessary if you ever plan on being a social entrepreneur. If you have any doubt in your goal or if you give up easily in the face of conflict, you will never be able to create the change that you are seeking. You must be ready and willing to do anything necessary in order to achieve your goal. Persistence is one of the key traits that all effective social entrepreneurs share.

Many of the world’s most famous social entrepreneurs have faced failure and came out on top, including Arianna Huffington. In fact, according to her,

“I failed, many times in my life. One failure that I always remember was when my second book was rejected by 36 publishers… But my mother used to tell me, ‘failure is not the opposite of success, it’s a stepping stone to success.’ So at some point, I learned not to dread failure.”

Arianna went on to create Huffington Post, become one of Time Magazine’s Top 100 most influential women, and recently launched a new company known as Thrive Global. Without this kind of persistence, Arianna wouldn’t have become the effective Social Entrepreneur that she is today.

  1. Effective Social Entrepreneurs Are… Energetic

Social issues do not have days off. Poverty or starvation does not disappear or momentarily cease simply because it does not feel like functioning one day and neither do social entrepreneurs. Social entrepreneurs are highly energetic and can always be found working, generating new ideas and solutions, and motivating and inspiring others to work towards their cause. Laziness or temporary lapses in motivation have no room in a social entrepreneur’s schedule.

  1. Effective Social Entrepreneurs Are… Intelligent

Individuals who are determined to create change are highly intelligent. They are knowledgeable about their cause, they are well-versed in business, and they are clever enough to generate the funds and gather the following needed to keep their business running smoothly. They are constantly seeking new knowledge and embrace learning. Intelligence is necessary if you are striving to be an effective social entrepreneur.

Some great places to begin learning about business and socal enterprise include:

Begin to invest your time in learning these subjects and you will have a much easier time setting up and launching a successful social enterprise. Turn away knowledge and you may end up with a failing social enterprise instead.

  1. Effective Social Entrepreneurs Are… Humble

Social entrepreneurship has no room for the ego. The business of making a change in society has nothing to do with the person who is running the business. A social entrepreneur doesn’t make an effort to bring attention to them or make themselves seem important. They focus on the problem their business was designed to remedy and they do it to the best of ability, with or without recognition.

A great example of a humble social entrepreneur is the founder of Citizen Effect, Dan Morrison. Citizen Effect is a non-profit organization that was created to help fund small-scale philanthropic projects that provided people and places with things such as clean energy, food donations, and clean water.

The organization received $300,000 in funding in 2009, which Morrison planned to use to advance the company and receive even more funding. However, this never happened. Morrison, rather than acknowledging his talents and picking a role in the organization that was suitable for him, he decided that he was the CEO of the Citizen Effect.

Because of his ego, the organization did not grow and the funding that they received was wasted. On an article in The Guardian, this is what Morrison had to say about the situation:

“What should have happened? My funders and board should have sat me down, muzzled my ego and said: “Dan, you are going to be the founder and chief innovation officer and report to the new CEO we are now conducting a search to find… At the end of the day, it is not my board’s fault but mine for not being honest with myself. If I had been, there’s a high probability that a real CEO would have paused tech development, taken the data from our pilot along with the credibility that TomorrowVentures’ investment gave us, and hit the road to raise the capital we needed to assemble a powerhouse team and build a human and technology platform that would have changed the lives of millions for the better.”

He goes on to wrap up the article with a powerful statement that you will hopefully never have to utter to yourself:

 “Lesson learned.”

  1. Effective Social Entrepreneurs Are… Confident

Confidence is key in business. If you are not loud, proud, and absolutely sure of your business, you are not likely to attract the attention or the funding that you will need to support your cause. An effective social entrepreneur is sure of both their ability to make a difference in the world and their ability to create a business that will provide the solutions to make that difference.

You can start becoming more confident in how you conduct business with others by doing things such as dressing for success, replacing negative self-talk with positive thoughts, reminding yourself of your accomplishments insofar, knowing what you want and going after it, and eliminating self-doubt. Once you’ve proven to yourself that you can conduct business effectively and confidently, it will be easier for you in the future.

Social entrepreneurship is about heart, dedication, and passion but also about trying to make money. To become someone who makes a difference, all you have to do is care enough to take action. Once you’ve found that desire, everything else will fall into place.

Related:

PROTRASH’S Winning Strategy to Clean Up Poverty and Waste!

The world needs social entrepreneurs and it is our mission to help create 1 million Change Creators in the next 10 years. That’s why we want to celebrate those social enterprises that are on the ground changing the world and making money while doing it. Every week, I choose an amazing team, individual, or social enterprise out there changing the world. Let’s get started!

Company

PROTRASH

 Team Members

  • Andrea García López
  • Valeria Sanchez Navarro
  • Yuvia Lopez
  • Monica Lopez Vargas

They are a team of four Mexican women, Andrea, Valeria, Yuvia, Monica, eager to create more economic opportunities for our country. They have grown up seeing wealth polarization, poverty, and waste accumulation all their lives and they decided to take action in order to change this reality.

How long have you been running this business?

2 years

What is PROTRASH?

PROTRASH is a social enterprise that empowers women in low-income communities, by exchanging their recyclable waste for money in an expense card.

What are the big problems that PROTRASH is solving?

  • Poverty
  • Waste accumulation
  • Wealth polarization

How is PROTRASH solving the problems?

They generate a sustainable culture in low-income communities, collecting the recyclable materials in order to generate an extra income, that we pay with a card in order to create a financial inclusion.

What is PROTRASH business model? How does PROTRASH make money?

They collect the trash in the communities and sell it to recycling industries. From every Kilo they sell 60% goes to the community, and 40% goes to PROTRASH as gross margin.

What has been the biggest challenge and how did PROTRASH overcome it?

The process of getting the government permits was a huge challenge — they couldn’t operate without them. They created a model that circumvented that process so they could continue forward.

What has PROTRASH accomplished?

  • They currently have 89 active users and operate in 4 communities in Mexico
  • 4300 kg of recyclable waste has been collected
  • Selected as one of Top 5 finalists at Hult Prize for 2016
Team Pro Trash presents during the Hult Prize Finals and Awards Dinner 2016 at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting on Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2016, in New York. (Mark Von Holden/AP Images for Hult Prize Foundation)

Related: 5 Women Social Entrepreneurs Reinventing the World (Get Inspired)

What impact has PROTRASH had?

They are changing the way people collect and repurpose their trash, creating income for families. This creates a new system of economic opportunity for communities while improving the environment on a real grassroots level.

PROTRASH pays people in low-income communities with an expense card which can cover their basic necessities.

What’s next for PROTRASH?

  • Expanding PROTRASH Machine —  a more compact machine that can be placed anywhere in the city, an original model of exchanging waste for incentives.
  • Creating PROTRASH Card —  which gives people more access to their points for goods, or allows them to give them back to reinvest in expanding their impact. The machine can be adapted to any place where there is electricity and where the points accumulated in the PROTRASH card by the person inserting the recyclable materials can be exchanged.

  • Developing PROTRASH App for smartphones that registers every transaction of recycling waste that is made in the center. The mobile device is connected to the scale with Bluetooth and transfers a number of points for every transaction automatically to the PROTRASH card.

Why should we pay attention to PROTRASH?

Because they are a company that is focusing on revitalizing low-income communities by implementing a sustainable culture, so they can lift their economy by themselves. We’ll be on the lookout for what these women can do! 

Lessons For Wealth That Stand The Test of Time

change creator wealth

I have now spoken to a lot of different entrepreneurs and been around the block in the business world for almost two decades. We are all eager to figure out the magic formula for success or the next great tactic to win. While tactics regularly change, there are deep rooted lessons and shared messages among experts, around success and wealth, that stand the test of time. 

Continue reading

How Fitppl’s Social Mission is Helping Busy People Stay Fit

This article was originally posted by Grant Trahant on Caustartist

“…there needs to be something to help busy people stay fit people.”

Fitppl is a BCorp certified collective of individuals who are producing forward thinking products, such as plant— based protein powders and ethical apparel.

The founder of fitppl, Patrick Schecht, strives to reduce plastic pollution by using kraft paper pouches and wooden scoops for their protein powders.

Fitppl takes their entrepreneurship a step further and provides funding for Active Cleanups, which are fitppl hosted events where the fitppl community cleans up heavily littered areas.

change creator fittppl

Check Out My Q&A with fitppl founder, Patrick Schecht.

What’s the story behind fitppl and its community!

Fitppl started from an idea back in 2012, while standing in the company kitchen of a startup that I was working at. The options provided were mostly unhealthy, and was I feeling the effects of consuming them daily. This was right after returning from living in Costa Rica, where I was eating clean local foods and smoothies.

I asked the office manager to bring in a protein powder to offer smoothies as a healthier option. She ordered a generic dairy based protein with flashy graphics and a laundry list of ingredients I didn’t understand.

Other employees wanted to make healthy choices too, but I noticed they needed simplicity to balance out the busy workday. I remember standing in the kitchen thinking, “there needs to be something to help busy people stay fit people.” This was during the explosion of social media and smartphones, common words were usually abbreviated on these platforms.

So I abbreviated people and came up with fitppl. I loved the simplicity and uniqueness of the name. Now I had a name and an idea.

I eventually quit that job in March of 2013 and pursued freelance film, a skill I’d taught myself from personal interest. This schedule allowed me to spend time traveling and put more focus towards fitppl, which was still just an idea at this point.

The purpose piece came to me while traveling through Thailand in the Fall of 2013. Swimming near Koh Hong Island, I noticed a lot of plastic floating around the otherwise clean and crystalline ocean, this sparked my concern. I started doing research while in Thailand, and the more research I did about plastic pollution, the more dire the situation became.

The catastrophic plastic waste in the oceans is one of the biggest problems facing our species and countless others.

The origins of the Ditch The Plastic initiative was born from the experience, which was the catalyst that took fitppl from an idea to conception.

I spent 2 years developing everything and then launched in late 2015. Our community has been flat out awesome since the launch. They are incredibly passionate and an integral part to spreading our mission.

What types of plant-based proteins can be found in your protein and superfood blends?

We started with two products, our plant proteins and our 2-in1 superfood. Starting a company that was so purpose driven towards the environment, I couldn’t use whey due to the environmental toll that dairy farming is causing, not to mention the nasty hormones and steroids in dairy. I also could never stomach whey protein with just water. I wanted something I could mix with water, but still versatile enough that people could make recipes.

For the plant proteins, we use an organic rice, pea, and hemp blend and instead of flavoring it with artificial ingredients commonly found in protein powders, we use fruits like acai, goji, pomegranate, and blueberries. Then, we created two flavor variations, Vanilla & Goji and Cocoa & Blueberry. Both are really smooth and delicious with just water, and can be added to smoothies or whatever you can think of!

Our 2-in1 superfood is a blend of alkalizing cereal grasses and algae which make up the greens, and a diverse array of fruits which make up the reds. Hints the name, Green & Red superfood. This blend delivers a combination of chlorophyll & antioxidants to increase energy, promote detoxification, battle cell damaging free radicals, boost your immune system, and other benefits. It’s our most versatile as far as recipes.

We even had one person submit their superfood avocado dip. It can be mixed with just water also, it’s tangy and delicious!

For those not in the fitness world, what makes your protein different from what most of us see on the shelves in stores.

It’s what sources of protein we use, and what we left out. If you look at our ingredients, you don’t have to google anything. No xanthan gum, emulsifiers, or artificial ingredients. We also left out the stevia. It’s usually highly processed in powder form, turning it from a green leaf to a white powder.

We’re 100% plant-based, which is better for people and better for the planet. Our diets have an immense effect on the environment, mainly due to meat and dairy production. Cows require a lot of water, energy, and transportation. They also release a good amount methane gas through belching and farting. This is without even touching on the animal cruelty aspect.

Do some research on humans consuming cows milk and there are some alarming facts. Plus, milk gets denatured due to Pasteurization, the process of heating milk to high temperatures, which destroys vital vitamins, minerals, good bacteria and enzymes. Additionally, most commercial whey protein powders are highly processed at high temperatures leaving a highly denatured and damaged protein.

Our plant proteins do not go through this high temperature processing, while still achieving a complete amino acid profile. You can also find plants and nuts that have more calcium than milk.

So, if you can replace meat or dairy with plants, it’s a win-win, for you, the environment, and animals.

[Related] If you’re liking this than you’ll probably love “Spotlight: On The Ground Floor With Yarden Garden

 

change creator

Tell us about the Ditch The Plastic Initiative and what it means to you.

“A lot of people don’t realize that 80% of plastic pollution enters the ocean from land.”

Our Ditch The Plastic initiative is an integral part of the of why fitppl was created, it’s all about action and awareness. There are too many people littering and not enough picking up, we want to shift this trend and influence individuals to make an impact in their everyday lives. If you see plastic or trash litter, pick it up and dispose of it properly.

This is really what put the idea into overdrive. I didn’t come from a background in any kind of environmental studies or influence. I just saw the plastic pollution issue first hand in Thailand back in 2013 and literally thought to myself, “This is f*cked up and I have to do something about it.” The challenge was how to get people behind a daunting issue, the facts are real and can be discouraging.

There’s an estimated 46,000 pieces of plastic per square mile in our oceans, and by 2050 we’re estimated to have more plastic than fish in our oceans. Plastic production is set to double in the next 20 years and we’re dumping a garbage truck worth of plastic in our oceans every 60 seconds.

This is where the problem lies, when plastic makes its way to our oceans, it causes havoc for sea-life, and eventually human health. This plastic doesn’t magically go away, it can take up to an estimated 1000 years to decompose.

So the initiative is about action and awareness. I wanted to weave the initiative into the brand in a way that empowered people to support our purpose. Consumers have immense power with their spending. Where you spend and invest your money is a powerful way of voting each day to support a healthy you, and planet. So each purchase supports our mission to reduce plastic pollution through our Active Cleanups and forward-thinking products.

Our Active Cleanups combine the active lifestyle of fitppl and our company mission, by hosting free community workouts with an organized plastic cleanup afterwards. These are free for anyone to join and as the company grows, so do the cleanups, our goal is to host all over the U.S. and eventually the world. We also drastically reduce plastic packaging and eliminate plastic scoops. We did this by using kraft paper stand-up pouches and reusable wooden scoops included inside. All future products will honor this initiative. Our Ditch The Plastic initiative is an integral part of the of why fitppl was created. Our branding, messaging, products, and cleanups all tie together to allow customers to get involved in numerous ways.

We’re loving the organic clothing. What ethical fabrics are you using in crafting your fitppl tops?

We use organic cotton and recycled plastic bottles. They’re also made in California using low-impact dyes, and water-based screen printing. A lot of people are unaware that the fashion industry is the second biggest polluter of freshwater resources on the planet, behind the oil industry. A quarter of the chemicals produced in the world are used in textiles. People wanted apparel, but we couldn’t promote this mission, then cut corners when making products outside of our core focus.

What’s the fitppl collective about and how does someone become a member?

Most brands in the supplement space have ambassadors, which is commonly a person, celebrity, or athlete with a large social following selling their products for an incentive. What we’re doing with the collective is featuring people who are creating real change in their communities towards our mission. Activist, environmentalist, and community leaders actually doing positive things and making a real impact. We don’t care about followers or likes, we care about impact. We recently launched this and are looking for people to feature, you can go to fitppl.com/collective/ to apply.

If their were a few tips you could give to someone who wants to create a more healthier lifestyle for themselves, how would you tell them to start what are the most important first steps to take.

There is a lot of information, diets, and fads floating around. Simplicity is the best way to start. A good starting point is to eat 5 times a day. Eat mostly plants. An ideal day of eating should include breakfast, a mid-morning snack, lunch, mid-afternoon snack and dinner. This will help keep your metabolism in check and curb over eating. There are calculations you can use with your weight and height for target calories.

When you buy food products, the less ingredients, the better. You should be able to count them on your hands. If you have to pull out your phone to google ingredients, you may want to pass.

[Related] If you’re liking this than you’ll probably love “Spotlight: On The Ground Floor With Yarden Garden

Yarden Garden: Starting a Social Enterprise Spotlight

Social entrepreneurship is the new sexy. Not only that, we and the world need social entrepreneurs. We love when people are out there making the world a better place. Let’s give some love to the social entrepreneurs and social enterprises out there that are making a difference but might not be getting all the PR and media that they deserve.

Here’s where we change that. In this feature showcase,  I choose one social entrepreneur per week and introduce them to you. So, let’s get started!

Name: Jason Coleman
Company Name: Yarden

How long in business:

10 months (less than 1 year)

What big problems are they solving?

1.Lack of health literacy and food literacy

Today, people don’t have local access to gardens or food literacy. According to Jason’s experience of losing 165 lbs by eating healthy, such as fresh vegetables that his family grew, and of seeing his nephews eat the same exact food as he was, health literacy is about the same as his was growing up and schools, all they are teaching about eating healthy much are the same diet was being fed to them.

2. Commodity Crop Farming (Food waste, water waste, massive unhealthy and unnecessary food)

65% of all home in America had a garden during World War 2 and it turned to commodity crop farming now for the purposes of turning into processing foods, which is completely unhealthy and unnecessary, and unfresh. Much of our crop fresh produce is more than 90 days old, which brings us to gases and GMOs to help all the produce, grow bigger, last longer and sustain the wear and tear distribution travel chain.

Commodity crop farming leads mono crop culturing with high usage of pesticide and the distribution for those crops requires millions of gallons of fuel per year to burn lean to go to the atmosphere. All these problems that we have, climate change, water waste and food waste, human health awareness, need to be addressed in an impressive but practical way.

How are they solving these problems?

Yarden is a home gardening platform for people who want edible gardens. Yarden maintains gardens that their customers own, harvests their produce, and set it at the door steps ready to eat. The “Yardeners” handle that distribution and are out maintaining the gardens weekly, and they also harvest and pack produce.

The reality is that people grow vegetables in their gardens without proper knowledge so it ends up ruining the vegetables and wasting water. On the contrary, “Yardners” are professional. They know how to grow vegetables and herbs, so to the customers, the gardening gets done without too much effort. All they need to do is just to decide what to do with the produce, which is trade and eat it, sell it to the restraints, or give it away to the charity to the local food bank.

Yarden decreases food waste, water usage, pesticide usage, the greenhouse gases due to food distribution, and increases health and human wellness, food circulating in the community, and job creation.

Yarden’s customers have the option of getting a Mediterranean, East Indian & Asian, or an American Liberty garden with all the corresponding vegetables and herbs that can be found on the homepage.

Why should we pay attention to them?

Yarden has under 50 customers in the Bay Area and 98% of the customer satisfaction rate.
Since they grow 50 pounds per every 100 square feet of garden with high maintenance gardening, Yarden encourages their customers to donate their produce to the local food banks and 100% of their customers donate 20% of their produce to the local food banks in Alameda County. They are very excited that their customers are conscious enough to respond to that accordingly.

[Related] You might also be interested in checking out our top 7 socially aware clothing companies to look out for.