SLOW Movement

NY Times: Site Diverts Shopping Money to Charities

December 13, 2009

Site Diverts Shopping Money to Charities

By STEPHANIE STROM

A new Web site lets people donate to charity the money they would have spent on, say, that $44.50 Henley sweater from the Gap — or, better yet, the $250,000 his-and-hers ICON aircraft that Neiman Marcus is selling this year.

BRAC USA, the American arm of a Bangladeshi development and aid organization, started the site, www.whatididnotbuy.org, on Thursday.

“What we’re trying to do,” said Susan Davis, the president and chief executive of BRAC USA, “is emphasize how much you could help accomplish with an amount of money that you might otherwise spend on something you or someone else might not really want or need.”

As of midday Friday, 89 people had contributed roughly $500 using the site, forgoing items like a blender, Champagne, power tools and a flat-screen television.

Lucy Bernholz, a nonprofit and philanthropic consultant, said she saw the new Web site as a reaction to the growth of embedded giving, in which companies promise to donate part of the proceeds from the sale of specific items. “Walgreens will no longer stand between me and my gift, which I like,” Ms. Bernholz said.

Churches often exhort their members to curtail consumption during the holidays and instead spend more on the needy, and the Dalio Family Foundation used to run advertisements that advocated charitable giving in lieu of holiday excess.

Jennifer Buffett, president of the NoVo Foundation, one of BRAC’s biggest supporters, said the foundation, based in New York, had decided to use e-cards and donate the $350 it spent on paper cards last year to support three teachers in southern Sudan. The foundation’s seven-member staff also decided that instead of buying one another Secret Santa gifts, they would put the money toward projects described on the new Web site.

“I’m so excited about the site,” Ms. Buffett said, noting that it had inspired her to swear off taxis and use the money she would have spent to support nonprofit causes. “I’m going to tell all my friends about it.”

She said she had no idea what her father-in-law, Warren E. Buffett, who is known for his off-the-rack suits, might choose not to buy.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

FT: The FT seasonal appeal - Room to Read

The FT seasonal appeal: Room to Read

By David Pilling

Published: November 27 2009 16:58 | Last updated: November 27 2009 16:58

Asha studies on the floor of her bedroom

It was during the 1999 Maghi festival, whose revelries grip western Nepal in mid-January each year, that Asha Tharu’s parents sold her. Asha, who was then five years old, fetched $40. In return for the money, Asha was sent to work for a year as a bonded labourer at the house of her new owner in Gularia, a town near her village of Khairapur.

“I had to get up very early and I had to clean the pots, clean the rooms and wash the clothes,” recalls Asha, now a bright 15-year-old. “I worked all day and I didn’t get enough sleep.”

I have come along jolting, unmade roads from Nepalgunj in western Nepal to meet Asha at her sister-in-law’s hut, a rather beautiful dwelling of unbaked mustard-yellow bricks, more African in appearance than Asian. In the main living area are two large, exquisitely fashioned mud urns built into the walls for storing rice. In the unfurnished room where the family sleeps, Asha sits on the dirt floor and tells me about her new life. She says she is happy in school and that, on the weekends, she works in a brick factory, earning $1.30 for an eight-hour shift. That is enough to buy rice and to help her elder sister pay for school.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

More from Reportage - Nov-24

More than anything, Asha remembers the petty slights she endured during her eight years of servitude, which ended last year when her “master” agreed to release her. “They would give me scraps. I used to feel very hurt by that, receiving the left-overs of guests or the elder family,” she says, glancing occasionally at the dusty ground outside the mud hut where she now lives. “Sometimes I’d get rotten food, or half-stomach food, not enough to stop my hunger,” she says. “They would hit me or shout at me if I dared complain.”

Until she was freed, Asha, an extraordinary young woman with beatific self-composure and a dazzling smile, was a so-called Kamlari girl. The Kamlari system, an extension of a wider caste-based practice of adult bonded labour, is a form of indentured servitude that persists even today on the flat plains of western Nepal, a world away from the beauty of the mountain peaks that draw tourists to this Himalayan republic.

“Bonded labourers work as housemaids or on farms,” says Reema Shrestha of Room to Read, the educational charity that, as part of its work in several poor countries, helps Nepal’s former Kamlari girls return to school. Room to Read, which the Financial Times is supporting in this year’s seasonal appeal, provides counselling and extra tuition designed to help the girls slot back into the educational system from which they have been excluded. It then supports them to ensure they don’t fall behind or, worse, slip back into the world of indentured labour. Those unfortunate enough to remain Kamlari are virtually assured a life of illiteracy and poverty. “Sometimes they are trafficked across the border into India and into the sex industry,” says Shrestha, who runs Room to Read’s education programme for girls in Nepal.

Asha prepares some food for her family

The Kamlari system is, theoretically, illegal but every year, during the Maghi revelries, parents continue to strike contracts to place their daughters in servitude for an annual fee of as little as $30. Most families don’t see their child again until the following Maghi festival when contracts are renewed or renegotiated.

Many parents have little choice since the owners of the fields where they live and work as sharecroppers threaten to turf them off the land, and into certain penury, if they do not comply.

“Some send their daughters because it is tradition,” says Shrestha. “They don’t think of it as a shameful thing.” If they are struggling to keep children fed at home, parents fool themselves into believing that a more prosperous master will give their daughters better food and, perhaps, even send them to school. It almost never works out that way.

While Asha was in servitude she went to school sporadically, if at all. Some of her masters kept her locked up. Others made her sleep outside. Occasionally she was enrolled in school but was rarely able to attend. “There wasn’t enough time to study because of all the housework,” she says. As much as the lack of tutoring, she regrets her lost childhood. “When I went to be a Kamlari, I didn’t get any time to play. I had only work. My master’s children went to school, but I had no one to play with.”

Now she does. Asha is attending classes thanks to a scholarship provided by Room to Read, which also builds schools and libraries. The scholarship pays for Asha’s school fees, textbooks, writing materials and her blue school uniform. Room to Read has so far helped some 800 of the estimated 20,000 Kamlari girls still forced to work in this part of Nepal. The charity runs specially created three- to nine-month catch-up courses to get the girls, many of whom have missed years of schooling, up to a minimum level. Asha is now studying in year seven, where most of the girls are 13, two years younger than her. But she is already excelling. With a flashing smile, and the assured style with which she relates both the tragedies and triumphs of her life, she says simply: “I find maths very easy. I am always the first to solve the problem.”

John Wood, 45, the founder of Room to Read, was a senior Microsoft director until he quit 10 years ago to start the charity. He says it is “ridiculously inexpensive” to place a girl such as Asha in school, an average of about $250 a year. When I catch up with him in Nepal, he has just been inspecting schools and libraries that his organisation built in the foothills of the Annapurna mountain range.

Tanned, unshaven and wearing khaki shorts – he forgot the FT was bringing a cameraman – he is clearly exhilarated by the progress he has seen since he established Room to Read.

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Literacy is key to improving prospects for the poorest

The Financial Times is delighted to be launching the 2009 seasonal appeal to readers. It is in support of Room to Read, which provides educational opportunities for some of the world’s poorest people.

Room to Read builds schools and libraries, publishes local language children’s books and supports girls’ education in south and south-east Asia and southern Africa.

David Pilling, the FT’s Asia editor, has travelled across the region taking a close look at Room to Read’s operations.

Over the next few weeks, he will report on aspects of the charity’s work in the weekday paper, in Weekend FT and on FT.com, which will also feature video reports and audio slideshows.

An important feature of the appeal is that three partners – Barclays Capital, Atlassian and Credit Suisse – have agreed to match readers’ donations up to £600,000 ($984,000) in all. These generous pledges mean readers can support the appeal knowing that their contributions will go twice as far.

The seasonal appeal, which runs until mid-January, has raised nearly £2.4m over the past three years for WaterAid and Camfed International.

Room to Read was chosen for 2009 in a vote of FT staff around the world. The FT believes literacy and access to education form one of the most powerful tools for promoting economic development. John Ridding, our chief executive, is on Room to Read’s board. We hope this appeal will not only raise vital funds for its work but increase awareness of the role education plays in raising living standards among the world’s poorest.

Lionel Barber

It was during a break from his relentless work schedule at Microsoft, when he was in charge of business development for greater China, that Wood first went trekking in Nepal. He was struck by the lack of educational opportunities: libraries without books and classrooms without teachers. What began as his fantasy of bringing books by yak to an individual school – he ended up hauling them up the mountain by donkey – took on a life of its own. Before he knew it, he had left Microsoft to begin a professional charity.

He built Room to Read to last. It would only construct schools or libraries if local communities were on board, a commitment it measured by a willingness to “co-invest” in projects, either in cash, labour or building materials. Even the impoverished parents of Kamlari girls, sharecroppers and subsistence farmers all, are encouraged to find money to pay for the hair ribbons worn by girls to school. “If you simply give stuff away, it is not valued. Nobody ever washes a rental car,” he says, quoting Michael Porter of Harvard Business School.

Room to Read’s model has allowed the charity to grow exponentially. In Nepal, for example, it has already brought rudimentary libraries to one in 10 schools, and it is on its way to achieving the same in Laos, another of the impoverished countries it supports. In the past 10 years, says Wood, who puts a running tally of projects at the foot of every e-mail he sends, Room to Read has built more than 750 schools, established 7,000 libraries containing 5m books, and funded nearly 7,000 long-term scholarships for girls.

From its single-country origins – the charity was originally called Books for Nepal – it has expanded to eight other locations, including Cambodia, where schools, teachers and libraries were systematically destroyed by the Khmer Rouge, as well as Vietnam, Laos, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Zambia and South Africa.

I had travelled to western Nepal from Kathmandu on a small prop plane operated by Yeti Airlines. From Nepalgunj, a town clogged with rubbish and lined with fetid open sewers, we lurched along heavily potholed roads, avoiding lumbering buffalo carts and three-wheeled rickshaws crammed with children on their way to school. After a couple of hours, I visited Man Bahadur Chhetri, whose Friends of Needy Children organisation shares tiny offices with Room to Read in Gulariya.

As well as poverty and a lack of land title, which obliges people to work as vulnerable sharecroppers, Chhetri attributes the Kamlari practice to a culture that undervalues women. Of the bidding process during the Maghi festival, Chhetri says: “Everywhere, we saw landlords and middlemen convincing parents to sell their daughters. It was like an auction for animals.”

Chhetri’s organisation has championed Kamlari girls, gaining the release of around 6,000. To persuade sometimes reluctant parents to take their daughters back, his organisation offers them a goat or a piglet, which they can later sell. The animals are used instead of cash so the fathers can’t spend the money on alcohol, he points out ruefully.

“After we have rescued them, we hand them into the care of Room to Read,” he says. “Most of the girls are happy to go to school. They feel free.”

The Kamlari system is so ingrained that it is not easy for an organisation such as Room to Read to have any influence. Yet, by educating girls, Wood says he hopes to break the cycle, one child at a time. “Our goal is to help parents and communities recognise the long-term pay-off to educating their daughters instead of focusing on the short-term monetary benefits of selling them into bonded labour,” he told me.

At nightfall, I am still talking to Asha as she prepares the food for her sister-in-law, who has been working in the fields, and her nephew and nieces. Now dressed in a pink salwar kurta with red trousers, she is bent over an open wood fire cooking a local type of gourd. The rice is already prepared. Later, she will study – for several hours, she says – by the light of a naked bulb.

It is time to take my leave of this remarkable teenager. On my way out I notice a goat tethered in the corner of the room. It is only later that it occurs to me to check where the goat came from. Sure enough, it had been an inducement to Asha’s family to take her back. Properly reared, it will one day be worth at least $60. Asha, you’ll recall, was sold for $40.

David Pilling is the FT’s Asia editor

To make a donation go to the Room to Read special page

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009.

Snow in Salt Lake City

It snowed last night.

It was theraputic to watch the snow flakes falling from the sky...it's beginning to feel like Christmas :)

Mutts: Today is lovely

Nia Nia Nia!

NY Times: Pavement to Parks

September 22, 2009, 10:00 pm

Pavement to Parks

Last Friday, cities and towns throughout the world celebrated Park(ing) Day, an event created to bring awareness to the importance of using and enjoying public space. Witnessing all those swaths of pavement transformed into plant-filled community gathering spaces (Streetfilms.org has a short film of San Francisco’s Park(ing) Day) got me thinking about — given the tangential way my brain works — the process of land-banking.

Top image courtesy ChiPhilly; bottom image courtesy San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Top, (Park)ing Day installation by S.M.P. Architects, Philadelphia; bottom, Park(ing) Day, San Francisco.

Land banking — the strategic acquisition of land in advance of expanding urban development, and the holding on to it as long as possible to maximize profits — is especially pronounced in once-booming, now-busted city centers like Las Vegas, Baltimore and Phoenix, which by the way now has more vacant land than any other major city in the United States. With the economic downturn things have changed somewhat, but there remain huge amounts of empty lots being “banked” in downtowns nationwide, all waiting for a real estate recovery.

Of course, if an entity bought property for future development, it is understandable that they’d want to wait until it began to recoup its value before building on it. But cities across the country are now left to grapple with the grim reality of abandoned lots and buildings that leave gaping holes in our urban fabric.

The downside of this isn’t hard to discern: the streetscape is rendered not only uninteresting and unsightly but unsafe. Pedestrians stay away, and the streets become even less safe owing to a lack of what the urbanist Jane Jacobs famously referred to as “eyes on the street.” With no foot traffic, existing businesses suffer and new ones hesitate to come in. A similar condition emerges in a very different kind of urban setting, where traffic flow exceeds neighborhood capacity, pulling pedestrians off streets because of noise, fears about safety and general unpleasantness.

An innovative and practical concept for new urban parks most directly addresses the latter condition, but I can see it working in the former as well. San Francisco’s “Pavement to Parks” program creates spaces for people by reclaiming excess roadway, through the use of simple and low-cost design interventions. What’s innovative about these parks isn’t so much the design as the implementation. As Andres Power, urban designer at the San Francisco Planning Department explains, because there is no structure in place to do something like this “it fundamentally changes the old impasse of years of planning and just lets the space evolve over time.”

European Pressphoto Agency/Justin Lane Times Square, New York City.

Pavement to Parks was given particular impetus by the success of similar projects in New York City, especially the recent transformation of Broadway from 47th to 42nd Streets, and 35th to 33rd Streets, where plazas and seating areas have been created in excess roadway simply by painting or treating the asphalt, placing protective barriers along the periphery and installing movable tables and chairs.

Similarly, PTP begins with the goal of “transforming a sea of asphalt,” says Power. A pro bono designer (one hopes a budget will emerge to pay designers for their efforts) works on each park (there are 12 scheduled to be finished through 2010; three have just been completed) with the mandate of using materials the city already has to maximize greenery and, says Power, “transform a sea of asphalt.”

This approach diverts resources that would have gone to landfill and keeps the budget of these interventions low. Composted soil comes from city landscaping and plants are either donated or purchased at cost. Volunteers, typically community residents, are mobilized to plant, motivated by the desire to beautify their streetscape and meet their neighbors. And as part of Mayor Gavin Newsom’s initiative to provide edible landscapes throughout the city, fruit trees will be planted at each location. The plantings also add storm water management capacity to streets.

One of the first three pilot parks was created to transform a dangerous and poorly conceived intersection (below) at 28th and San Jose Streets on the outskirts of San Francisco’s Mission District.

Intersection of San Jose/Guerrero before the park. Photo (c) Google Maps.

In 1947 San Francisco planned to build a new freeway here, and in preparation for doing so the city tore down or moved close to 200 homes in this neighborhood. The homes you see above on the right-hand side of San Jose Avenue were lifted and moved back onto their backyards to make room for the project. A protest stopped the freeway from happening, but little could be done in the way of reparations for these displaced families. Half a century later, some of those families are getting their yards back — though now they’re out front.

(Click to enlarge.) Left, San Jose/Guerrero park; right, Showplace Triangle park.

Landscape architect Jane Martin , who designed the San Jose/Guerrero park, had no problem finding treasure in the city’s trash: her park plan uses trees felled in a storm and old air ducting made from stainless steel as giant planters for a broad array of plantings ranging from agave to apple trees. Similarly, REBAR’s design for the park — REBAR is, not incidentally, the creator of Park(ing) Day — at lower Potrero’s Showplace Triangle transforms dumpsters into planters for its South African palette of plants, and uses old surplus granite countertops for bench seating. The first of the three projects involved the least intervention: Public Architecture at 17th and Castro transformed an unsafe and confusing intersection into a sidewalk café by simply blocking the area off with planters.

Though two pedestrian islands were depaved for the Castro project, the Pavement to Parks model is designed to be reversible, and pavement is typically undisturbed. The effort reflects a “renewed interest in what our streets might look like,” says Power, as well as “a pent-up desire to create public space.”

17th and Castro park.

These plantings and plaza aren’t just about aesthetics: the expanding array of planting projects along with other traffic calming measures, dedicated pedestrian enforcement stings and new traffic signals, the collision rate for the 11 blocks on Guerrero between Cesar Chavez and Randall Street, where the San Jose/Guerrero park is located, has been reduced by 53 percent since 2004.

Of the two major public space projects in New York City this year, certainly the High Line has received the most press — and its near-universal praise is well-deserved. But it is the Green Light Manhattan project and Pavement to Parks that I think will have the greatest legacy. The High Line took 10 years and $152 million dollars to complete — that’s not a criticism of the project, but of the systems in place nationwide that force these sorts of projects, and really just about any project, to proceed at a snail’s pace and at astronomical cost.

The High Line, New York City.

Today, people and the cities they live in are short on cash but long on ingenuity (and on boneyards full of discarded materials waiting for inventive reuse). Programs like Pavement to Parks and Green Light Manhattan have an irresistible immediacy to them, and while they may not rival Olmsted or Field Operations (who designed the High Line) in their aesthetic, they make up for it in spirit and sustainability. And remember, these are being done for next to no money.

But back to that land-bank tangent. I know what you’re thinking: “Why give over valuable real estate for a picnic table and a couple of planters?”

You don’t have to give it up; let people borrow it. The barely discernible footprint (and next-to-nothing budgets) of these parks allows for temporality. Just look at the deal brokered for the recently inaugurated LentSpace on Canal, Varick, Grand and Sullivan Streets in Soho. It’s a model for citywide land use in New York and, indeed, any city or town cursed with empty lots; the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council has created an “in the meantime” activity for a vacant site awaiting future development. In the case of LentSpace, the developer, Trinity Real Estate, is providing a three-year lease — and receives a write-off in return. (One hopes Trinity will eventually give in to LentSpace’s request to remove the chain-link fence that still surrounds the space.)

Courtesy Dean Kaufman View of Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s LentSpace.

Some will continue to argue that no, Trinity and others will never get their land back, that this is too complicated, too risky. I’ll argue that the alternative — to let us all live oblivious to the blight that surrounds us — isn’t a viable one. And the idealist in me will point to France, where earlier this month Nicolas Sarkozy announced his championing of a revolutionary way for the world to measure a country’s performance: quality-of-life issues like the environment, leisure time and health sharing the stage with hard economic growth data. I love the fact that this is entering into the global conversation for many reasons, not least that it acknowledges the importance of small yet impactful gestures in our daily lives, like the recent spate of public spaces, created on the cheap, and full of heart.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

ST: Fans of recycling

Sep 19, 2009

Fans of recycling

Unwanted water tubes and plastic crates are part of the decor of a beauty services shop

By tay suan chiang

About the only thing that is new at the Spa Esprit Group's newest outlet at Wheelock Place may be how you look as you walk out of the beauty services establishment. Little else about the nearly 3,000 sq ft place which houses its three brands - Brazilian waxing service Strip, brow-grooming service Browhaus and facial service Mask - is new. Old furniture and assorted industrial objects such as a sink and plastic pipes have been recycled for the beauty spa's interior decor. A 1950s cake chiller has been turned into a cash register. Discarded kitchen cabinets have had their doors reupholstered with vintage fabric and now store beauty products. Even old copies of The Straits Times were used. Mr Jerry De Souza, the group's creative director and store designer, had initially wanted a display shelf made entirely of papier mache. 'We created three prototypes, which were tricky to build. But they couldn't stand and fell flat,' he says. In the end, the shelf was created using a recycled wooden frame covered with newspaper. Elsewhere, recycled items are purely decorative. The main reception counter is spruced up with repainted old compressor fans that appear like mini windmills. Wooden crates were taken apart then reassembled to create a feature wall. Plastic water tubes make another reception area inside look vaguely like a prop from a science-fiction movie. Mr De Souza has designed more than 30 outlets under the group, including Strip at Suntec City and Raffles Place and restaurants Barracks and Tippling Club at Dempsey. He had all along seen treasure in so-called junk, using recycled material such as reupholstered old chairs in the stores and eateries. This is the first time he is doing it on such a large scale. He says: 'Rather than spend money on new items, I decided to be creative and transform old, disused items.' Going green, however, does not mean going cheap. He says recycling 'definitely costs more as it requires more manpower, such as consultants and contractors to use unfamiliar materials, and more time and effort to get it right'. 'It is challenging to recycle material for commercial uses as the new furniture must be functional and durable for daily use. There are regulations set by the Singapore Civil Defence Force, such as those concerning fire safety, that we had to abide by,' he adds. About $300,000 was spent on renovation, interior decoration and customising old furniture for the store. The sum includes the cost of making prototypes such as the papier mache shelf and buying recycled materials. Mr De Souza says most of the recycled materials were bought from a scrap heap factory in Paya Lebar, where metal objects are usually melted and sold. Items such as the compressor fans cost about $80 each. Ms Janet Lim, Spa Esprit's public relations manager, says the company is taking small steps towards green conservation. She adds that more of the group's stores will be 'going green' in the future. Its second Skinny Pizza restaurant, also at Wheelock Place, will have seats made from restructured bicycle seats and tables made from bicycle wheels. It will open in November. The Wheelock beauty services store opened on Sept 1 and has already attracted the attention of shoppers passing by. Undergraduate Kelly Lee, 20, says: 'It's quirky and makes me think about how I can get creative with what may be junk.' taysc@sph.com.sg

=== Unwanted plastic crates have been resurrected as table legs (above). Old compressor fans (main picture) have been repainted and fitted onto the main reception counter at Spa Esprit's Wheelock outlet. Over at the entrance to Browhaus (above), an old table and armchair have been restored and are now part of the store's furniture. A recycled sink (left) with old-fashioned faucets in the main reception area. -- ST PHOTOS: BRYAN VAN DER BEEK

Copyright © 2007 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved. Privacy Statement & Condition of Access

Non Sequitur: Look at the bright side...

Heh :P

===

ST: I'm done chasing sunrises

I'm done chasing sunrises

This article reminds me of the time when I climbed Mount Kinabalu... not sure how I did it, but I did. And yes, I did see the sunrise. It may not be a relaxing holiday but it was an experience. I was especially fascinated by the flora and fauna on my way up and down. The bud of Rafflesia Arnoldii was quite a sight :) === Aug 16, 2009

By Teo Cheng Wee

Sunrises. Why do we spend so much time chasing them? That was the question I was repeatedly asking, no, badgering myself with two weeks ago. Those of you who read my last column would recall that I was supposed to climb Mount Kinabalu in Sabah. What I did not mention was that the final ascent would be made at the very unearthly time of 2.30am. The whole purpose of this was to make it in time to - as you may have guessed by now - catch the sunrise at the summit. Now I'm not generally a morning person, so I was pretty grouchy about having to wake up at 1.30am to toil away while I'm supposedly on holiday. But that grouchiness was nothing compared to the fear and self-loathing I felt three hours later, as I was struggling up the mountain's dark, ominous-looking cliffs with only my head-lamp to guide me. Nobody was in sight as I had been separated from my group. 'Sunrises? Who needs them?' I thought to myself, ignoring the irony that some sun would have done my body temperature a world of good. After all, we were facing unusually bad weather that day. Rain was lashing down on my nonrainproof trousers. My socks were squishing around in my wet shoes. Winds howled as they swept across the craggy rock surface of the mountain. Without any vegetation to block the winds, those who decided to take on the mountain that morning were hit by gusts of up to 80kmh, our guide would tell us later. I was cold. I was bloody cold. And I would have been cursing away too, if my face and mouth weren't so numb from the biting chill. 'I thought thith wath fuppothed to be an easy climff,' I shouted at an Austrian man I had bumped into. 'Maybe the sunrise will be worth it,' he replied, his mouth clearly more used to such low temperatures. Well it wasn't. When we finally hauled ourselves up there, the peak was shrouded. With the rain still coming down, my two friends and I were in no mood to hang around when we finally met up. We almost turned back immediately after hitting the summit. By the time we got back to the base camp at 8am, we had subjected ourselves to the elements for more than five hours. It would have to take a heck of a sunrise to make up for that. I don't regret doing the climb (oh, such memories will last forever, I'm sure), but as I looked back at the experience, I couldn't help but wonder, as I asked earlier: Why do people chase sunrises? Sunrises are pretty, I agree. But by now I'm getting increasingly certain that they're also pretty overhyped. Yet from young, I have been conditioned to buy into the allure of the beautiful sunrise. Whenever I stayed at an East Coast chalet with my classmates or my family, somebody would inevitably suggest staying up till dawn to watch the sunrise. I should have read the warning signs way back then. After those brief moments of beauty, we always ended up rushing to check out of the chalet while in a semi-comatose state. The one time we came up with the brilliant idea of spending the night by the beach instead, we almost became popsicles, not realising how cold sea breezes can be after dark. And yet I continued chasing sunrises, never stopping to ask myself why. This is the third time I'm climbing a mountain to do so. The first time, like this trip, I got to the summit too early and was shivering until the sun came out. The second time, I got there too late. The sun was out halfway so I couldn't see anything - then I had to spend the next three hours in the blazing sun struggling to the summit. So if there's anything I have learnt from this trip, it's that I probably won't spend so much effort to catch a sunrise again. If I have to get up an hour or two earlier to head to a choice spot nearby, okay, maybe. But to do it in the middle of the night? Forget it. In fact, when I gave this issue more thought, I realised that I've always been a sunset kind of person anyway. When I think about sunrises, I think about, well, labour. The day begins, the world stirs to life - and people go to work. Now compare that to sunsets. As the orange sky dissolves into black, the night has just begun. The cocktails have just arrived, you're ready for dinner by the beach and a long night of fun awaits. It's relaxed. It's laidback. It's the way holidays should be. chengwee@sph.com.sg

Copyright © 2007 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved. Privacy Statement & Condition of Access

WSJ: From the Teeth of the Lion to the Dandelion

Excerpt: Like many words in our language, many of the names of flowers hold clues about their history and relationship to us. The daisy, for example, known for its small yellow blossoms, is quite common throughout the world. Daisies are unique in that they close their golden petals during the night and keep them shut, as if in sleep, until the morning. This peculiar characteristic earned this little flower the name 'day's eye' from speakers of Old English. Eventually, that name was compounded into the word daisy.

===

OPINION
JULY 3, 2009

From the Teeth of the Lion to the Dandelion

The stories behind the names of flowers.

By STEPHEN MESSENGER

This weekend, weather permitting, we will celebrate our nation's independence at outdoor parties across the country. While savoring the barbecue, we should not forget to consider the flowers blooming all around us.

Throughout history and in cultures around the world, mankind has held a deep connection with flowers. From the smallest blossoms emerging from the melting snow, marking the end of winter, to elaborate bouquets given as gestures of love, flowers are unmatched in their ability to please the senses and delight the soul.

They have also been infused with symbolism that transcends their colorful blooms. A poetic regard for flowers is evident even in Neanderthal culture with the discovery of burial sites containing Hollyhocks -- an indication that the Neanderthals too considered it as "holy"' as its name also suggests today.

The names we give to flowers reflect a loftier esteem than the ones we give to, say, vegetables. Broccoli, for example, derives its unappetizing moniker from the Italian brocco, meaning simply a shoot or stalk -- in line with the opinions of countless picky eaters. But the names given to flowers often denote their benefit to the spirit.

Like many words in our language, many of the names of flowers hold clues about their history and relationship to us. The daisy, for example, known for its small yellow blossoms, is quite common throughout the world. Daisies are unique in that they close their golden petals during the night and keep them shut, as if in sleep, until the morning. This peculiar characteristic earned this little flower the name 'day's eye' from speakers of Old English. Eventually, that name was compounded into the word daisy.

Dandelions also derive their name from their characteristically numerous thick and slender yellow petals. It is not so strange for an imaginative observer to equate the dandelion's coarse petals to rows of teeth on a well-fanged beast. This comparison explains its French origin dent de lion, or in English "teeth of a lion."

Some flowers, on the other hand, were named not from their appearance alone, but for their associations with mythology. The iris, a flower which appears in a wide variety of colors, shares its name with the Greek goddess who unified heaven and earth. Aptly, she was personified by the rainbow.

The narcissus flower, too, is said to have sprouted upon the death of its mythological namesake, though there is no evidence that the flower is as self-absorbed. The Virgin Mary also has left her mark on floral taxonomy with the marigold, or Mary's gold. According to Flemish tradition, the flower sprouted from her tears.

Still, other flowers' names offer some insight into their utility in the past. The sweet, aromatic lavender was used to add a pleasant scent to recently washed clothes and to perfume bathwater -- as evidenced by its association with the Latin lavare, meaning "to wash." Calluna, the flowering shrub also known as heather, seems to have been appreciated not so much for its beauty as its handiness as a broom. Its name originated from the Greek word meaning "to sweep."

The Pansy blossom in late summer begins to droop. The flower's name is derived from the French pensée, or "thought" -- the source for the word pensive.

Carnations are also appreciated for their human qualities. Their soft pink petals are likened to the hue of skin, sharing its meaning closely with the word incarnation, "to be made flesh." There are early writings, though, that refer to this flower as coronation, which some scholars believe is an allusion to its use as a garland in Greek tradition.

Flowers are so universal in their appeal that nearly every culture names their children after them. From Ambuj (Indian for lotus) to Zara (Arabic for a blossom), floral names are timeless in their popularity. While millions of people around the world share their names with flowers, the opposite is also true. The Zinnia and Dahlia flowers, for example, can thank the 18th century botanists Johann Zinn and Anders Dahl, respectively, for their names.

Ultimately, the names assigned to flowers reflect less the flowers themselves than our longstanding relationship of love and esteem for them. A rose by any other name might still smell as sweet -- but a flower's name and the story behind it are deeply meaningful, human stories. They are our contribution to one of nature's most cherished creations.

Mr. Messenger is a writer and a linguist.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A11

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit

www.djreprints.com

NY Times: Lending Talent, and Money, on a Micro Scale

June 25, 2009

Small Business

Lending Talent, and Money, on a Micro Scale

By KATE MURPHY

Government agencies and international aid groups have long supported programs that train the world’s poor in how to start and run their own businesses. The training is seen as a way to end hunger and stabilize societies.

But interest in these programs has grown lately with the wider availability of microloans, or very small enterprise loans made to the poor. As with any start-up, these businesses are more likely to survive, advocates say, if the owners have basic operational skills.

“There’s been a realization in the microfinance community that loan recipients are more likely to succeed if they also receive business education,” said Bobbi L. Gray, research and evaluation specialist with Freedom From Hunger, a nonprofit organization in Davis, Calif., that provides financial education in developing countries.

Indeed, the nonprofit research group Innovations for Poverty Action in New Haven, Conn., published a paper in May that found that Peruvian villagers who had received microloans and had been randomly selected to receive business training performed significantly better than peers who had received loans and no financial education.

“Even those who reported having the least interest before getting the training had higher revenues,” said Dean Karlan, a professor of economics at Yale, a founder of Innovations and lead author of the study.

From Botswana to Bolivia, entrepreneurship training has resulted in thriving microenterprises — like soap makers, cocoa processors and handicraft exporters — that would not have existed otherwise. Some programs may gather villagers in huts and use multiple baskets to demonstrate how to allocate capital. Other programs may focus on established but struggling businesses, giving owners DVDs that cover topics like pricing and distribution.

“A good intervention doesn’t treat everyone the same,” said Bruce McNamer, chief executive of TechnoServe, a nonprofit group in Washington that has worked with entrepreneurs in developing countries since 1968 to expand their businesses and foster economic growth in their communities. “How you help depends on the circumstance.”

Mr. McNamer’s group, which works with the United States Agency for International Development and the State Department, provides free business consulting services and also sponsors business plan competitions to identify aspiring entrepreneurs in developing countries. “These are usually people who have started a business but they just don’t know how to get from point A to point B,” he said.

An example is a cooperative of 50 farmers in northern Nicaragua that four years ago was just getting by while cultivating coffee, he said. But the cooperative, with assistance from TechnoServe, turned to other crops, like the starchy staple malanga, that increased their profits. The cooperative now has 250 farmers and has opened its own packaging plant, which employs 80 people. The plant’s products are exported as far as Miami.

Teaching financial literacy and entrepreneurial skills is seen as particularly important to the reconstruction of war-torn regions like Afghanistan and Iraq. “It doesn’t matter if you build roads if one in four kids dies by age 5” because of illness or malnutrition, said Ross Paterson, a self-described business coach and retired Army officer in Keller, Tex.

He has been to Afghanistan 10 times in the last seven years to teach entrepreneurship. It is more important, he said, to give Afghans the ability to build businesses that will provide the income to sustain them.

Occasionally fearing for his safety because of the continued Afghan fighting, Mr. Paterson says he primarily teaches leadership skills by helping the local residents to recognize and successfully work with different personality types, whether colleagues or customers.

While Mr. Paterson’s courses last only a few weeks and are limited to those who speak fluent English, other organizations emphasize the importance of finding and training local people to teach business fundamentals.

“You need people who are going to be there for the long term and who know what really works on the ground,” said Fiona Macaulay, founder and president of Making Cents International, a 10-year-old nonprofit organization in Washington that creates entrepreneurship courses for the disadvantaged and trains the people who teach them.

Continuing mentorship and support are crucial to helping entrepreneurs succeed, Ms. Macaulay said. Her organization also offers networking opportunities for its students. “At a business fair in Jordan, for example, we were able to connect a woman who made cakes with a woman who made boxes to transport the cakes,” Ms. Macaulay said.

Many of those who teach entrepreneurship in remote and impoverished areas say the biggest hurdle is persuading students to believe that there are opportunities beyond, say, selling fruits or trinkets in an open-air market.

“I’d say getting them to identify new approaches and opportunities is the hardest part,” said Harsh Bhargava, a business consultant in McLean, Va., who with his wife, Aruna Bhargava, a sociology professor at Rutgers, started the nonprofit group I Create in 1997 to teach entrepreneurship in India, their native country.

He says many people I Create works with are so downtrodden they cannot envision another way of life. He discussed an Indian woman who was so abused by her husband and in-laws that she lacked the confidence even to look anyone in the face. After a local I Create trainer persuaded her to take an entrepreneurship course, she left her husband and started a grocery store.

Moreover, she successfully sued her husband and in-laws for the return of her dowry and for child support for her son. “She’s now studying to become a lawyer and hopes to work to protect women against dowry-related crimes,” Mr. Bhargava said. “It’s these kinds of stories that make what we do so gratifying.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

FT: Lunch with the FT - Jeff Skoll

Lunch with the FT: Jeff Skoll

By Stefan Stern

Published: June 12 2009 22:53 | Last updated: June 12 2009 22:53

Can you become a billionaire by accident? It seems unlikely. Surely wealth of that kind has to be fought for and won against almost impossible odds. Billionaires, you might think, should be imposing figures, battle-hardened veterans from the financial world.

But if you had asked other diners at The Jam Factory in Oxford on a recent, damp lunchtime to pick out the billionaire in the room, I doubt they would have pointed to the FT’s guest, Jeff Skoll. Slim, slight even, with flyaway brown hair and a short stubbly beard, he looked more like a young academic or artist than a corporate titan. The taller, more heavily built gentlemen (a press officer and some other suited figures) who had arrived with him and gone to sit at a corner table, looked more the part.

Skoll was formally dressed too, but less assertively. He was wearing a dark blue suit, light-coloured shirt and pale blue tie. Having only just arrived in the UK from Los Angeles a couple of days earlier he was still pretty jet-lagged. But this did not explain his quiet demeanour. Skoll doesn’t really do media, you see, only one extended interview a year at best. He was here on sufferance, offering himself for interrogation, to publicise his philanthropic work with the Skoll Foundation (more on that later). Even though he was probably dreading the next 90 minutes, his manners were impeccable. He shook hands, smiled bravely and sat down.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

More Lunches with the FT - Jun-12

The 44-year-old made his money as the first company president at Ebay, the online auction site. He joined the then one-year-old company in 1996 after completing an MBA at Stanford in California in 1995. He wrote a business plan for company founder Pierre Omidyar and stuck around for five years, when he stepped back from the business. Two months after the company’s flotation, in September 1998, Skoll found that his (then) 22 per cent shareholding made him a billionaire. The precise level of his wealth has fluctuated since, of course, and he has sold shares to fund his activities but in March this year Forbes magazine estimated he was worth $1.8bn (£1.13bn).

What would you do with that sort of money? How would it make you feel? Skoll is, I sense, deeply uneasy about the whole thing. He’s really just a nice shy kid from Toronto (mum was a teacher, dad was in business). He didn’t ask to be rich. It just sort of happened.

The venue for our lunch is The Jam Factory, an arty café in the old Frank Cooper marmalade building in Oxford. It turns out to be a good choice. Skoll has crossed the road from the Said Business School, where he is attending his own Skoll World Forum on social entrepreneurship, which is being staged, in Oxford as usual, for the sixth time.

The waitresses are attentive and are soon by our side taking the order. We both opt for the (very good value) £5 “quicky” offer: soup and a sandwich. Skoll goes for tomato and basil soup followed by a coronation chicken sandwich, while I have carrot, parsnip and lentil soup with the gravadlax sandwich to follow. There being no iced tea available – this is England, after all – my guest has to settle for mineral water. I have a ginger beer. One of the richest men in the world is going to have one of the cheapest ever lunches with the FT.

When he left Ebay in 2001, there was only one direction for a reluctant billionaire like him to head in. “I had started to think about philanthropy, which I’d never really thought about before, because I never had any money,” he says. “I was living off room-mates’ leftovers and then all of a sudden I had all this money.” He sounds half-sad, half-amazed. But while he had sincere ambitions to support social entrepreneurship – business people who try and make money working on worthwhile causes – his initial efforts were, by his own admission, patchy.

This changed when Skoll met and briefly worked with John Gardner, who had been the minister for health, education and welfare under Lyndon Johnson, and the architect of his “great society” programmes. “He said something that really stuck with me. I said, ‘Look, I’m trying to figure out my own philanthropy, I have set up a foundation [the Ebay Foundation] and I’m doing different things.’ I asked him, ‘What do you think is the most effective way for philanthropy to make a difference in the future?’ And he said: ‘Bet on good people doing good things.’

“He felt that there were people in society who would be doing things of their own accord, who saw something that they wanted to fix and who needed support. And that really dovetailed with the kind of people that I’d been funding and that had been so interesting.

“There was kind of a wide-open opportunity to give these social entrepreneurs what they needed in terms of funding, and the kind of support they needed, which was flexible and strategic,” Skoll continues. “We formed the partnership with Oxford [the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, founded in 2003 with £4.4m of Skoll Foundation money, which is a research centre and “hub” for innovators], and in 2004 we had our first forum here.”

But surely the marriage between a business school and progressive causes is an odd one? Not at all, says Skoll. As became clear at the first annual gathering: “It was like Woodstock, with all these people that never knew each other existed,” he says. “We didn’t know the forum would be successful at first, but once we saw everyone together and there was just that energy, we knew we were on to something and it’s really been great ever since then.”

The relationship with a business school has allowed Skoll to provide formal MBA education to people who might not ordinarily have been able to experience it. “Much like I needed the MBA to help me advance from a business perspective, the social entrepreneurs could benefit as well. But for the most part they can’t really afford an MBA; nor can they take out two years to do it, hence the centre and our scholarships. It’s a one-year MBA and there are five scholarships for these social entrepreneurs that come into the programme. It’s worked out very well.”

Initially, Skoll feared that, having met up with their classmates, these same social entrepreneurs might head off to Goldman Sachs and McKinsey. “But quite the opposite happened,” he says. “They started to get their classmates interested in social progress, and some of the people who had been planning to go back to McKinsey or Goldman or whatever, have gone off on a different path and got involved with social enterprise.” This rejection of conventional career paths is understandable in the wake of the financial crisis, but the trend was already quite well established.

The business architect of Ebay has doubts about modern business. “I think we’ve entered an interesting window where people have looked at the old model and have realised it just really hasn’t worked that well,” he says. “We’re on a path of huge consumption with the huge risk of debt and the over-use of resources in the world and, as you know, all these terrible world problems like climate change and water scarcity and so on just catching up with us quickly. And the market’s not really factoring that in ... So it’s a good time for social entrepreneurs in this world to be looking at new models.”

Skoll has explained all this fluently and at some length. He is clearly proud of his work. I don’t interrupt, partly because describing it all is helping him to relax, and partly because he appears to have a selection of ready-made answers which he is going to give in any case. I wouldn’t have said that he is enjoying the business of being interviewed all that much. Rather, he counters with the occasional polite inquiry, turning the tables and helping to keep up the illusion that a natural conversation is taking place. The effect is slightly unnerving. And he has only got through about one-third of his soup and half his sandwich. My plate is empty.

Changing the world through business is one of Skoll’s two main activities. The other is his film company, Participant Media, which aims to change the world through movies. Founded in 2004, Participant aims to produce “quality entertainment about meaningful issues”. Its notable hits have included Good Night and Good Luck (2005), directed by George Clooney, and the environmental documentary An Inconvenient Truth (2006), which turned former US vice-president Al Gore into an unlikely movie star.

Participant allows Skoll to pursue social and political causes through a mass medium. From modest beginnings the company (which Skoll chairs, supported by a team of executives) is now a serious player, producing 17 films in the past four years, “and we’ll do at least as many in the next two”, he says. Food, Inc is a new documentary about industrial food production; Oceans is an exploration of aquatic life under threat. The current release The Soloist is one of theirs too.

There are principles involved here too. “Every film we do has to deal with an important issue in the world that affects a lot of people,” he explains. “The film could be a catalyst to make change. And it has to be enough change that it would be better than just giving the money to an NGO to do the work.”

But people don’t go to the cinema to be lectured, surely? Even Gore’s documentary broke up the material with informal moments and behind-the-scenes shots. “It has to be entertaining or people aren’t going to watch it,” Skoll agrees, “so you have to start with a good story well told and then the message has to kind of come along with that person.

“Everything that I have been doing has really kind of gone back to that vision that I had as a kid when I used to read a lot of books [George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, James Clavell and James Michener were favourites]. By the time I was a teenager I had a world view that the future might not be a very pleasant place. There would be overpopulation and terrible wars and diseases.”

Sounds like he was a pretty angsty kid. “I really thought what I would do is be a writer. I wanted to write stories that would get people interested in the big issues ... My goal was to get to a point where I could afford to write those stories. That’s how I ended up down an entrepreneurial path. When Ebay happened, all of a sudden there was more than just writing. I realised I could find writers and do movies and TV and other forms of media, and that became the vision: to create a media company around the public interest.”

Skoll has been left a little bemused by some of his movie-making experiences. He felt a documentary about the global social impact of Sesame Street (The World According to Sesame Street, 2005) was bound to be a smash – it wasn’t – while the success of Gore’s extended slideshow took everybody by surprise. What also surprised him was that so many of the actors, writers, agents and producers he has come into contact with have often turned out to have secret pet projects about which they care deeply, but have no realistic hope of ever getting made. Now he is being sent 4,000 scripts a year. “The trick is finding something that is really dealing with an important issue. There’s a creative part, there’s the commercial part and there’s the social part. And making sure all of that is working.”

We have bonded reasonably well over the lunch table. Emboldened, over coffee I unwisely attempt to mother him a bit. So, still not married, I exclaim. “Well, I’ve been single for a few months,” Skoll replies gently. “I was in a long relationship. No longer.”

The ordeal over – his, I mean – he gets up looking relieved, and heads back to his conference, where, of course, Skoll is the (reserved) star of the show, and where everybody wants a piece of him.

He will keep betting on good people doing good things. Keep on being the shy guy who got rich beyond belief then tried to help those who bring clean water to people who don’t have it, or who provide educational opportunities to people who would otherwise be denied them. In all probability, Jeff Skoll’s life will keep on being a bit like the plot of one of his movies – how does The Accidental Billionaire sound as a title?

Stefan Stern writes a weekly column on management for the FT

..............................................................................................

The Jam Factory
Frank Cooper Marmalade building, Oxford

Mineral water £2
Ginger beer £2.50
‘Quicky’ lunch offer x 2 £10
Decaf cappuccino £2.60
Espresso £1.20

Total (including service) £21

..............................................................................................

Nigel Andrews on cinema with a social conscience

PC or not PC, that is the question. Hamlet said it first – or almost said it – and conscience has made cash cows of filmmakers ever since. A good liberal-minded “issues” movie, or one that puts pep rather than piety into political correctness, can fill that delicate space between art and populism. It can fill cinemas too, if the director finds the right blend of storytelling and sermonising. From Dances with Wolves (1990) to Syriana (2005) (on interracial understanding), from On the Beach (1959) to An Inconvenient Truth (2006) (on our endangered planet), from the Mahatma-acclaiming Gandhi (1982) to the McCarthy-vilifying Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), cinema has spent decades teaching us right thinking, or trying to.

Clooney: ‘Good Night and Good Luck’

That three of those films were directed by actors makes a point about screen liberalism, at least in Hollywood: it is part of the face US cinema likes to present to the world. Since the 1960s, for the likes of Jane Fonda, Robert Redford, Warren Beatty and Kevin Costner, it has been a vital charisma component. And carrying their message behind the camera, the last three won Oscars for directing hit movies about man’s humanity or courage and defiance at times of challenge: Beatty’s Reds (1981); Costner’s Dances with Wolves (1990); even Redford’s Ordinary People (1980).

Today George Clooney has taken over the glamorous-radical franchise, finding time for politically engaged movies when not moonlighting as a UN spokesman on Darfur. Before Clooney, actor-director Tim Robbins established himself as a leftist messiah, his film Bob Roberts (1992) combining an old-fashioned liberal attack on political PR – echoing The Candidate (1972) – with some prophetic pre-Bush hints about the ease with which an ill-equipped contender can attain high office.

Yet the star of today’s social-conscience cinema is not the actor turned auteur but the hot-issue documentary-maker from almost any source. These films are flying out at us – An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Eleventh Hour (2006), Age of Stupid (2009) and, this week, The End of the Line (Armageddon comes to the fishing industry) – with a popularity that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. Back then “documentary” meant “death at the box office”.

The only explanation for the success of these serious, starless films is that we have become issue-literate; or that we have realised – a giant leap for movie-kind – that these matters are called “matters” because they matter. To us; to our families; to our future; as well as, happily and amazingly, to the prosperity of the film industry.

Nigel Andrews is the FT’s film critic

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

FT: A fortune coined from cheerfulness

A fortune coined from cheerfulness

By Rebecca Knight

Published: May 19 2009 20:05 | Last updated: May 19 2009 20:05

When brothers Bert and John Jacobs were in their early 20s, they bought a beat-up old Plymouth Voyager minivan – nicknamed “the Enterprise” – stocked it full of T-shirts they had designed, and went on road trips up and down the east coast selling their wares on college campuses.

They covered their costs selling the shirts for about $10 apiece, but it was a meagre existence. They slept in the van, lived on peanut butter and jam sandwiches and every so often would scrounge to buy a pizza or rely on one of their customers to sneak them into a school cafeteria.

“People say, ‘Oh that must have been tough.’ But it wasn’t that tough, we were young and strong,” shrugs John, the younger by three years. “There was a hope it would lead to something big, but we were doing something we liked to do. We were selling our artwork, travelling, meeting new people, and watching the girls go by. On slow days, if the weather was decent, we’d toss around a Frisbee.”

Twenty years later, the Jacobs brothers are still hawking T-shirts and still playing Frisbee. As co-founders of Life is Good, a ­Boston-based apparel and accessories company that last year had sales of $120m, the Jacobses unapologetic­ally peddle a message of optimism and an appreciation for the small pleasures of life.

Most of its merchandise – the company offers more than 980 items, including dog beds, travel mugs and tyre covers – features the company emblem, a stick figure named Jake, enjoying a range of outdoor pastimes: swimming, camping, fishing and golfing, to name a few. The core slogan is “Life is Good” but other taglines include: “Take your sweet time”, “Spread good vibes” and “Do what you like, like what you do”.

Charitable efforts for families whose lives are not so good

As company chiefs, John and Bert Jacobs have perfected the playful approach to doing business. As philanthropists, however, they are very serious about their work.

The company’s charitable efforts began after September 11 2001. The brothers lost friends in the terrorist attacks on the twin towers and company morale was low. “It was hard to go to work at a place like Life is Good when employees were asking: ‘Is life not good?’” says Bert. The company designed American flag T-shirts and donated the profits to United Way on behalf of families whose loved ones died in the attacks.

The following year the brothers chose two family-focused causes: Camp Sunshine, a retreat for children with life-threatening diseases, and Project Joy, which offers play therapy to traumatised children.

They organised an outdoor festival with pie-eating contests, face painting and three-legged races. The Jacobs brothers view their festivals as the ultimate expression of the Life is Good brand. The events, often themed around pumpkins or watermelons, are free. They make money by selling food and T-shirts, and from donations. They have raised more than $4m for children’s charities.

The company has started its own foundation to distribute the money it raises and this year will hold a festival in Toronto, its first outside the US.

To cynical observers, this un­abashed message of cheerfulness may come across as trite. But the brothers – both of whom are six foot five and have a New England mountain-man look, with ruddy complexions and unruly heads of ginger hair – insist that this is a misinterpretation.

“The little things in life are the big things,” says Bert. “If you think you’ll be happier when you get that promotion or that two-car garage, you’re going to be waiting a long time.”

Adds John: “It’s not: life is great, or life is perfect, or life is easy. It’s not an exclamation point. It’s acknowledging that there is bad in the world, but don’t harp on it.”

The brothers grew up in Needham, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. Their father worked in a machine shop; their mother was a homemaker who raised six children (they are the youngest siblings.) They lived in a small house with four bedrooms and describe their childhood as “happy chaos”.

“Despite having limited funds, Mom was always laughing and singing,” recalls Bert. “She is a big part of the inspiration for the brand.”

After college, the two began selling T-shirts at small-town street fairs and on college campuses, and supplemented their income by supply teaching. At first, selling the shirts, which featured abstract art or dancing figures, was just a bit of fun, a “financially accessible way to go into business”, according to John. “But we also wanted to communicate a message.”

During long days on the road, the two discussed bigger ideas. “We talked about the media inundating our culture with negative information. There’s no six o’clock news any more. There’s only the six o’clock murder report,” says Bert. “We wondered: is there something we could create that’s about what’s right with the world, rather than what was wrong? Could we create an icon that could be a symbol of optimism?”

In 1994, on a hiatus from one of their road trips, the Jacobses threw a keg party. At the time, they lived in a flat near Boston; their walls were covered with drawings and they encouraged guests to be as artistic as they wished.

The two noticed that their friends gravitated towards a simple sketch by John: a cartoon face wearing a black beret, a pair of sunglasses and a wide grin. Beneath the drawing, friends wrote things such as: “This guy has life figured out” and “My hero”.

They felt they were on to something but they needed more consumer research. Their solution: another kegger. They set up an easel in their living room and on it wrote 50 sample mottos for their cartoon figure. Once again they encouraged their friends to leave comments. “Life is good” was the clear winner.

The Jacobses printed 48 T-shirts with a picture of Jake and the winning motto. The next day they set up a booth at a street fair in Cambridge, Massachusetts, home to Harvard and MIT. They sold out in 45 minutes.

“It was all different kinds of people who were buying them: skateboard punks, Harley-Davidson riders, suit-and-tie guys who worked in the financial district, schoolteachers. It was such a broad base,” says Bert.

“In five-and-a-half years of selling T-shirts, we hadn’t seen anything like it,” adds John. “Half-way through the pile, we looked at each other: it was scary. We’d finally found what we were looking for.”

After the initial success, the Jacobses took their idea direct to retailers and trade shows in New York City. They had done this before with previous T-shirt ventures but had had little success. This time, retailers were receptive.

They had found their niche, but had no idea how to run a business. They sent out shipments without invoices; they wrote orders on top of old pizza boxes in their flat; they did not even own a fax machine or a computer.

Kerrie Gross, a friend and neighbour who worked as a paralegal, helped computerise the brothers’ invoices and run their day-to-day operations. “We had a financial guy tell us we’d need to make $250,000 in sales in order to afford to hire an employee. He might as well have told us we’d need to make $50bn,” says John, because it seemed like such an impossibly large sum.

In its first year, the company made $260,000. They hired Ms Gross and a number of other friends who remain partners in the business, in which the Jacobses hold an 80 per cent stake. It earned $1.2m in 1997 and $2m in 1998. Today it has 4,500 distributors operating in 30 countries.

The brothers have no interest in selling their business, or taking it public. In the face of recession, they remain upbeat.

“Whether the economy is up or down, or whether we’re at war, people need optimism,” Bert says. “I think it was Churchill who said: ‘I am optimist. It does not seem to be much use being anything else’.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

Washington Post: Cooked Rice Vocabulary Project

Cooked Rice Vocabulary Project
Making Freerice vocabulary learning more portable

Phil Shapiro
PC World
Sunday, May 17, 2009 4:19 AM

At my public library job I've been talking up the Freerice.com Web site to many elementary school and middle school students who visit the computer center where I work. The site donates rice to a United Nations food program when students click on the correct answers to multiple-choice vocabulary questions. I've been fascinated to see the different reactions students have to using this Web site. One second-grade girl loves Freerice.com, even though many of the vocabulary words are beyond a second-grade reading level. Some fourth-grade boys cannot get any questions correct at the easiest level of Freerice.com.

It occurred to me that without too much effort I could build some free multimedia learning materials that could help those fourth-grade boys have a positive experience with Freerice.com. I was sitting there at my job pondering this question when I received a phone call from a friend of mine, the mother of a twelfth-grade student here in Maryland. Maryland requires all graduating students to perform 75 hours of community service. This is a fabulous law that was put into effect in the early 1990s.

My friend's daughter, Sarah Behnia, was in need of 30 hours of volunteer work by the end of March, 2009, or she would not graduate high school. My friend asked me if I could help her daughter acquire those volunteer hours. As it happens, the Takoma Park Maryland Library, where I work, is qualified to give volunteer work hours for students who perform community service work at the library. So I told my friend, ?Send your daughter down to the library. I'm going to put her to work on a free educational learning materials project. I can guarantee you that your daughter will have some fun working on this project, will learn new skills and will create something very useful for our community.?

Sarah showed up at my place of work at 6 p.m., at the end of my shift. I sat her down at my MacBook and showed her how to use Screenflow, an excellent screencasting program for Macs. She quickly learned how to use Screenflow and was creating narrated screencasts of the correct answers for the easiest vocabulary levels of Freerice.com. We laughed a lot in the process of creating these screencasts. I was particularly focused on this community work not feeling too burdensome.

I then showed her how to export the screencasts using video and audio codecs that would let these screenplays play on older Macs and Windows that I like to place with families in the neighborhood.

At the end of the project, I decided to use iSquint, a free program, to compress these screencasts for viewing on iPods, Sony PSPs, and other portable media devices. I uploaded all these screencasts to the Internet Archive, which provides free Web hosting for such materials. You can view these screencasts online or download them all for offline viewing on computers or portable media players. (The download is a 151 MB zip file.)

Now members of my community--and other communities--can learn some Freerice.com vocabulary using this freely distributable, public-domain learning material. Using an iPod, they could even learn vocabulary while waiting for a bus in the morning, or riding the bus, or waiting at a doctor's office. The people who benefit from this project may never meet me or Sarah Behnia, and that's just fine with me. Creating something of value for others to use is what the Internet is all about. I am immensely grateful to John Breen, the inventor of Freerice.com, and this is my small way of saying thanks.

A couple of next steps in this Cooked Rice Vocabulary Project remain, and I could use the help of about 10 to 20 more people to work on those steps. These steps include: creating a spreadsheet with all of the synonyms in the Cooked Rice Vocabulary Project and then populating that spreadsheet with sample sentences illustrating use of the words. I'd also like to create a pure audio version of the Cooked Rice Vocabulary Project using Audacity. I'm thinking of using Zoho Projects to manage the next steps of this project. Does anyone know of a better Web management tool?

If you know how to use computers and would be interested in participating in those next steps, then send me an e-mail with the subject: Cooked Rice Vocabulary Project--and thanks in advance. You don't need to make any specific time commitment, but I'm looking for people who could volunteer about 4 hours per month (or more) for the next stages of this project.

Phil Shapiro

(The blogger works as the public geek at the Takoma Park Maryland Library and is an adjunct professor of education at American University. He can be reached at philshapiroblogger@gmail.com)

Washington Post: Scratch day - Computer Programming for Kids

Scratch Day 2009 - Computer Programming for Kids
On May 16, 2009, learn more about Scratch, the free programming tool for kids.

Phil Shapiro
PC World
Friday, May 8, 2009 12:19 AM

Sometimes hobbies grow to become much more than hobbies. Some children who are in the school play in fifth grade may decide to study drama in college. After college they may return to their communities to bring the gifts of drama to others. The high school student who shows business initiative in high school may expand that entrepreneurial spirit after high school. As they say, great oak trees grow from little acorns. If this is true, what kinds of acorns are we planting with our youth?

The good folks at the Lifelong Kindergarten at MIT's Media Lab asked themselves that question and came up with this good answer: Scratch. Scratch is a free download (for Mac or Windows) that lets children build their own interactive games, animations, and digital stories. After building their creations, children can share their Scratch creations via the Web. Children can learn from each other, be inspired by one another, and build upon each others' creations.

I first learned about Scratch from a third-grader who had learned Scratch the previous summer at a summer camp. ?I like building things in Scratch,? he explained with tremendous pride. ?I can teach you how to do it, too.? Those are the words we need to be hearing from our youth. I love hearing, ?I've got ideas for improving my Scratch program,? or ?my friend showed me some neat tricks in Scratch.?

Scratch puts children in the driver's seat. They become actors upon the world rather than acted upon by the world. What starts out as a small hobby can grow to become something much more down the line.

To help expand the number of children and adults who know about Scratch, Scratch Day 2009 was invented by the same people who created Scratch. On May 16, 2009, at locations around the world, Scratch will be shown and explained to people who have never seen Scratch before.

To get up to speed quickly about Scratch, check out Darrel Branson's Scratch Resources page.

Darrel is a talented educational technology specialist in Victoria, Australia. The Scratch Tutorials by Students from EXPO For Excellence Magnet Elementary School are particularly well done. You can view them online here or download them all via this link.

A very good Spanish intro to Scratch can be found on Youtube, created by Pacho.

Jose Ramon of Valencia, Spain, created this Scratch overview in Spanish.

Meet the creator of Scratch, Mitchel Resnick in this brief YouTube video and in this longer Google Tech Talk, Sowing the Seeds for a More Creativity Society.

Large oak trees grow from small acorns. Ladies and gentleman, start your planting. Find a Scratch Day event that's near you or create your own Scratch Day event with a single child. And then watch things grow.

Here's my vision. If we include Scratch and multimedia Scratch learning materials on many of the refurbished computers going out to kids who don't have a computer, we'll create no-economic-barriers learning environments that will grow entirely new geek cultures. The people and organizations on CompuMentor's Computer Refurbishers email list is a good starting point for that.

Phil Shapiro

(The blogger works as the public geek at the Takoma Park Maryland Library and is an adjunct professor of education at American University. In his free time he delivers donated computers to children and adults who don't have them. He is one of the organizers of Scratch Day at Takoma Park Middle School, in Silver Spring, Maryland. He is reachable at philshapiroblogger@gmail.com)

Previous blog postings

Exit Newsweek - Enter MAKE Magazine

SketchUp Projects for Kids - Book Review

Where Are the Centenarians in Apple Commercials?

YouTube is a Thousand Times More Interesting than Television

The Apple II Gains Eternal Life in the Web Browser

Take Me Out to Ubuntu

Should Public Libraries Be Welcoming Homes for Ingenuity?

An Easy Way to Introduce Inkscape Drawing Program to Youth and Adults

Your Second Economic Stimulus Check is on its Way

Exceptional Creativity Finds its Way to YouTube

Visiting Google's Cafe Thoreau

Wozniak Dances With Abandon

YouTube Reaches a Billion Video Views per Day

© 2009 PC World Communications, Inc. All rights reserved

Pillow Bear - Boku wa Kuma (I'm a bear)

A day of "a pillow bear" starts. He wakes up to find that "she" is gone. Waiting for her alone, he reads a book, skateboards on a toy car, waters a plant and plays the guitar. Lonely, he says to himself, "I wonder if she is coming home…" and when she is home, he rushes to bed and turns into a pillow again.

		Tsuneo Goda Tsuneo Goda started his directing career in TV commercials. Developing DOMO-KUN, the station identity character for Japan Broadcasting Corporation, led him to move onto the field of animation. Goda is also know for his talent in illustration and children's books. By reflecting his feelings and experiences in every day's life, the titles all have a touch of reality.

English:

 

I'm a bear, bear, bear, bear
Not a car, a bear, bear, bear
I can't walk, but I can dance
I can't talk, but I can sing
I'm a bear, bear, bear, bear

 

I'm a bear, bear, bear, bear
I hate fighting, bear, bear, bear
My rivals are fried shrimps
I bet I was chocolate in my past life
I'm a bear, bear, bear, bear

 

Bonjour! Je m' appelle kuma.
Comment ca va?

 

I'm a bear, bear, bear, bear
I get sleepy in the winter, bear, bear, bear
At night I say "Goodnight, Mr Pillow"
In the morning I say "Good morning, Mr Pillow"
I'm a bear, bear, bear, bear

 

At night I say "Goodnight, Mr Pillow"
In the morning I say "Good morning, Mr Pillow"
I'm a bear, be, be, bear
Ar, ar, bear, bear

 

Romaji:

 

Boku wa kuma kuma kuma kuma
Kuruma ja nai yo kuma kuma kuma
Arukenai kedo odoreru yo
Shaberenai kedo utaeru yo
Boku wa kuma kuma kuma kuma

 

Boku wa kuma kuma kuma kuma
Kenka wa yada yo kuma kuma kuma
Raibaru wa ebi furai da yo
Zense wa kitto chokoreeto
Boku wa kuma kuma kuma kuma

 

Bonjour! Je m' appelle kuma.
Comment ca va ?

 

Boku wa kuma kuma kuma kuma
Fuyu wa nemui yo kuma kuma kuma
Yoru wa "oyasumi, makura-san"
Asa wa "ohayou, makura-san"

Boku wa kuma kuma kuma kuma

Yoru wa "oyasumi, makura-san"
Asa wa "ohayou, makura-san"
Boku wa kuma kuku kuma
Mama kuma kuma

FT: Time to look and listen

Time to look and listen

By Harry Eyres

Published: May 2 2009 02:04 | Last updated: May 2 2009 02:04

Many people seem to believe that the way to make the most of time is to cut it fine. Arriving at the very last minute means not wasting precious seconds that could be spent in a more productive pursuit than loafing around at some airport terminal or railway station – or worst of all, a waiting room.

This often carries an element of pride or machismo – waiting is for wimps. But what does not wasting time really mean? It seems to mean putting time to some profitable use or intensive cultivation: getting the highest possible yield out of it. But this attitude could lead to the ultimate waste of time; the whole of time turned into a wasteland in which no moment can be enjoyed for its own sake.

Somehow what works for salami (the fine slicing) does not succeed with time. I like time in thick slabs. When time is too finely sliced, it does not taste like time at all. If you cut all the fat off it (to adjust the metaphor), it takes on an ominous and unrelenting aspect – you feel there is never enough of it. If I cut it too fine getting to the airport or station, I spend the whole journey in an anxious stew, waiting for the tube train or bus to get stuck in a tunnel or a traffic jam on the North Circular Road.

According to my no doubt rather peculiar calculus, this results in a double loss of time. First of all, the journey itself is lost, as a stretch of enjoyable time. But leaving enough time to arrive early means not only that the journey is salvaged from the dread of last-minute, fatal delay, but also that a chunk of potentially creative time is released at the point of arrival.

The other day Ching Ling and I, on our way to visit friends, arrived early at a country railway station. Nothing much was going on there; a man arrived to pick up his daughter; we watched a group of young Chinese lads waiting for a minibus; a man with a comically friendly dog, tail wagging so hard it could be used as a source of renewable energy, turned up at the ticket office. There was a wonderfully desultory feel about things, which you rarely get in the city, combined with the haunting scents of early spring, a thrush somewhere repeating its evening song.

The minutes we spent there could certainly have been considered a waste of time. There was no particular point to them; they had figured in no schedule or timetable; they were a chronological anomaly. But they stick in my memory as some of the most precious in the past few weeks.

Thank goodness the poet Edward Thomas was not too fixated on the timetable when his express train stopped unexpectedly one June afternoon at the country station of Adelstrop. The word he uses is “unwontedly”, which implies not just that the stop was unscheduled, but that it broke the crust of ordinary, chugging, routine time and opened a portal into something different.

The sudden stop meant that Thomas was able to appreciate where he was, and where he never expected to be, rather than being moved ever onwards on smooth rails towards an ever-receding goal.

What he saw and heard was nothing special; an empty platform, a man clearing his throat, the ordinary flowers and trees and haycocks and one of the commonest birds of English summer.

But the minute Thomas spent at Adelstrop station left an indelible impression; it printed an essence of summer time in the English countryside on his visual and aural imagination. Above all that minute had depth – depth that transformed the sense of place and history.

Instead of the flat landscape you see through a train window passing at high speed, a succession of unrelated “views”, Thomas experienced the mysterious profundity of place. The place suddenly became part of him; he was planted within it, rather than being rushed through it; he became, as a perceiving being, the centre and the heart of it.

Being at the centre means perceiving concentric circles radiating outwards. And the sense that best perceives those subtle gradations of nearness and farness, which hearkens towards them, is the sense of hearing, not the sense of sight. We are used to being eye-centred (not to mention I-centred), to directing our eyes almost as an extension of our hands, to grasp and grab. Hearing works in quite a different way. We are powerless to direct our ears; we must allow sounds to come to them.

Edward Thomas, in the unexpected lull of time, allows the sound of the blackbird’s song to come to him, and he hearkens towards it. At that moment comes the epiphany. The blackbird’s call, in its contentment and plenitude, summons “all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire”, and with them a profound sense of English geography and history, of gentle hills and valleys, stone villages, a university city and a cathedral one, woods and fields, in their most benign and peaceful aspect. Not a waste of time at all.

harry.eyres@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/eyres

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

BusinessWeek: Making a Profit and a Difference

Social Entrepreneurs April 3, 2009, 3:00PM EST text size: TT

Making a Profit and a Difference

As the economy reels, enterprising individuals who apply business practices to solving societal problems are gaining support from public and private sectors

By Stacy Perman

Social entrepreneurs—enterprising individuals who apply business practices to solving societal problems, such as pollution, poor nutrition, and poverty—are now 30,000 strong and growing, according to B Lab, a nonprofit organization that certifies these purpose-driven companies. Together, they represent some $40 billion in revenue.

The idea of blending a social mission with business is not new. One of the founding forces behind the movement, the Ashoka Foundation, since its inception 1981 has granted multiyear living stipends to support more than 2,000 fellows dedicated to finding answers to a host of social ills through business ventures. Indeed, the concept of building a profitable business model in which doing good is an intrinsic part of the business and not just a philanthropic sideline has been gaining ground in recent years. Sally Osberg, president and chief executive of the Skoll Foundation in Palo Alto, Calif., another guiding force within the social venture community, says the number of institutes, universities, and organizations that are now tapping into social entrepreneurship has mushroomed since former eBay (EBAY) President Jeff Skoll established the foundation in 1999.

Now, as the economy reels, both the government and the private sector are looking for inventive ways to bring back prosperity, and many are counting on these entrepreneurs as a powerful tool for change. "Social entrepreneurship correlates to this growing realization that entrepreneurs are the key to a vibrant economy and to solutions that are badly needed," says Osberg. It's not all pie in the sky, says Bo Fishback, vice-president for entrepreneurship at the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, Mo. "Many social entrepreneurs have shown they can accomplish their mission," he says. "They can deliver on the social good and report a cash flow."

Not surprising, then, that they've caught the attention of such venture capitalists as those at Acumen Fund, a nonprofit that invests in companies that try to alleviate poverty, and Bay Area Equity Fund, which backs businesses aiming to make social or environmental improvements to San Francisco's needier neighborhoods. (See these additional resources for entrepreneurs seeking funding sources that back social ventures.) President Obama has even suggested starting a new government agency to help socially conscious startups gain more access to venture capital.

Who You Like Best

In January, we asked readers, staffers, and members of the social venture community to nominate candidates whose trailblazing companies, in operation for at least a year, aimed to turn a profit while tackling social ills. The 200-plus nominations we received included such entrepreneurs as Alex Mittal, whose Philadelphia-based Innova Materials makes antimicrobial products for private industry, then uses revenues from these efforts to develop water purification systems for the developing world. Kirsten Tobey and Kristin Richmond, founders of Revolution Foods, deliver nutritious lunches to more than 100 schools (that's 20,000 meals a day) in low-income areas in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Rachel Sterne, another social entrepreneur, encourages those living under repressive regimes to post their own reportage at her profit-sharing Web site, Groundreport.com. You can take a look at each of the 25 ventures we profiled in our slide show, then vote for the business you feel holds the most promise.

Some attribute social models pioneered by small outfits to the social responsibility efforts espoused by large corporations. For instance, about three years ago, Wal-Mart Stores (WMT), the world's biggest retailer, launched a program to promote sustainability, urging its many vendors to produce ecofriendly products while encouraging its consumers to buy them. General Electric (GE) made its green mark manufacturing high-efficiency incandescent light bulbs, and such manufacturing giants as Clorox (CLX) have begun to roll out their own lines of "green" cleaning products. In March, Cadbury (CBY), manufacturer of England's top-selling chocolate bar, announced a deal to use 15,000 tons of Fair Trade certified cocoa from Ghana by the end of this summer for its popular Dairy Milk bar. The company said the move would improve the standard of living of thousands of Ghanaians by tripling the sales of cocoa farmers there.

One of this year's finalists, Daniel Lubetzky, founder of $25 million Peaceworks, which works as a catalyst for peace by encouraging joint snack-food ventures among people of different backgrounds in volatile regions around the world, says it is not enough to impose an artificial business model on a social issue. Lubetzky, who was awarded a $1 million grant from the Skoll Foundation in 2008, says that doing good alone will not ensure success. "I had an earlier company that totally tanked," he says. "I didn't understand the product line well, but I was passionate about the mission. The failure taught me that one can't advance a social mission if the business model doesn't sell. You can't just sell a social mission. You still have to come up with the best product with the best prices." Given the current economic climate, that rings particularly true.

For a look at all 25 businesses, flip through this slide show. More elements of this special report are available in the related-items box on the upper right side of this page.

Perman is a staff writer for BusinessWeek in New York. 

===

Do-Gooders Who Spread the Dough 

Greyston Bakery, which provides job opportunities for the "unemployable" gives 100% of its profits to the Greyston Foundation, which supports numerous community development projects in Yonkers, N.Y.

Fortune: Products for the other 3 billion

Products for the other 3 billion

A new breed of idealistic technologist is building ultracheap baby incubators, medicine dispensers, and solar-powered lamps. Welcome to entrepreneurship circa 2009.

By Michael V. Copeland, senior writer

April 1, 2009: 11:44 AM ET

(Fortune Magazine) -- Jim Patell is perhaps the only member of the faculty at Stanford Graduate School of Business to come to class sporting police-issue cargo pants with a black Benchmade knife clipped to the right front pocket.

Patell differs from his B-school peers in another way too: Instead of teaching in a lecture hall filled with diligent students typing away on laptops, he operates out of Stanford's design school, where he teaches a class called Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability. His classroom looks a bit like your typical high school wood shop crossed with the lobby of the United Nations. Whiteboards are covered with scenes of village life and subsistence farming in Ethiopia, India, Nepal, Rwanda, and parts of Southeast Asia.

The pictures are a reminder of the class mission: to teach a new generation of entrepreneurs to use their business and engineering smarts to design and sell products - profitably - for the developing world.

No mere do-gooders

Two such budding entrepreneurs are Nedjip Tozun and Sam Goldman, founders of D.light Design. D.light makes cheap, solar-powered lights to replace the kerosene and diesel lamps so common in the developing countries of Asia and Africa. Tozun and Goldman met in Patell's class in 2006 and quickly connected over their mutual passion for helping the poorest communities tap into basics, like light, that the developed world takes for granted.

For smart, ambitious students of Tozun and Goldman's generation (they are both 29 years old) professional success and saving the planet aren't mutually exclusive. Patell's class is supercompetitive; people regularly are turned away because there's not enough space. Some of the students - a mix of would-be MBAs, engineers, and designers - truly are do-gooders, but a fair number think building good, cheap products is a skill any corporation would value.

"General Electric is not dumb - it looks at these markets too," says Seth Silverman, a civil and environmental engineering graduate student in the class who focuses on technologies for Ethiopia. "But these environments are so hard to work in that its attention is spent elsewhere. We can fill that gap, with an approach that goes beyond a fast profit motive."

Often that approach involves combining cutting-edge technology with widely available products that are moving down the cost curve. D.light, for example, marries next-generation light-emitting diodes (LEDs), proprietary power-management tools, and increasingly cheap solar panels.

As a result, D.light is able to offer poor communities an affordable alternative to kerosene, which is ubiquitous but hazardous. The quality of the light isn't good, it emits pollutants, and it's just plain dangerous. "You travel around these villages, and everyone has a story of a child being burned or a house destroyed by fire," says Tozun, speaking by phone from his office in Shenzhen, China. "And yet in some places we found that people were spending 15% to 20% of their income on light." The world's poor spend about $38 billion a year on kerosene for lighting, according to the International Finance Corp.

The D.light lamps sell for about $25, steep for someone earning $1 per day, but the D.light team quickly found that the quality of light was so good that people with the D.light lamps were able to do more work at night and increase their income. Two families in New Keringa, a village of 47 families in southern India, took the plunge on D.light lamps. Says Tozun: "All of a sudden the two families were able to work at night," mostly weaving banana leaves into plates. "Their average monthly income increased from $12 to $18, and they could save the time spent traveling to buy more kerosene." Within a few days the entire village had sprung for the lights. "These people are great customers if you give them a clear value proposition," Tozun says.

Empowering would-be customers is one of the mantras of Patell's class. Each year some students, like Goldman and Tozun, take their ideas and try to build businesses. Patell doesn't expect every student to start a company, but he does demand that every product in the class offer poor consumers tools for their own microenterprises. "We want to design things so that a farmer can decide to leave his farm and support his family selling water pumps or drip-irrigation tubing," Patell says. "We want things to be sold at a price that covers the cost of manufacturing and distribution."

The next cellphone

Capitalists in Silicon Valley are starting to take notice of the projects coming out of the Stanford course. In November, D.light secured $6 million in funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Garage Technology Ventures, among other venture capital firms, to ramp up production and get its lamps into markets, initially in India and Africa.

At first $6 million doesn't seem like a lot of money. And selling $25 solar lights in the developing world is not typical for firms like Draper Fisher Jurvetson, best known for backing Hotmail and Skype. But the financiers think D.light can model itself after another successful enterprise in the developing world: the cellphone industry. Device manufacturers - Nokia (NOK) in particular - are selling millions of handsets in rural parts of India, China, and Africa, places that in many cases don't have centralized electricity. But even some of the poorest of the poor will pony up several months' salary for the benefits of connectivity.

"Fortunes have been made on the back of that cellphone business," says Bill Reichert, managing director of Garage Technology Ventures. "A decade ago you wouldn't have imagined you could target these populations, but there is real business opportunity in introducing the right technologies."

Reichert believes that D.light's lamps are just the beginning: The company could expand into other solar-powered devices, even the energy business. "Is it a billion-dollar business? Probably not," Reichert admits. But could D.light become a well-run, profitable enterprise? That's absolutely the goal of Patell's class: D.light and its counterparts are out to improve lives and make money. If they also happen to enrich their investors, that's icing on the cake.  

Kallang River...

Special moments.... wonderful memories... Nia nia...

5 April 2009 - 6.50pm

5 April 2009 - 7.23pm

FT: Community approach to create a dream farm enterprise

Community approach to create a dream farm enterprise

By Annie Counsell

Published: March 28 2009 02:00 | Last updated: March 28 2009 02:00

For some people, running their own business is a dream. For others, it is a mission. In Tim Waygood's case, it is both.

Nestled in the rolling hills and fields of North Hertfordshire, Church Farm's 175 acres are piloting an "Agrarian Renaissance" - a far-reaching project to create a traditional, mixed, sustainable and high-welfare food and farming system. Waygood enthusiastically describes it as a "place for wildlife, beauty, diversity, community and people, as well as a place to produce authentic local food".

Still in its infancy - the cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, geese and ducks arrived just a year ago and the organic gardens and new orchards have yet to bear fruit - the farm buzzes with human activity and the livestock graze contentedly. Schoolchildren arrive to feed the chickens and pigs, located near the bucolic village centre of Ardeley with its historic church, thatched cottages, pond and village stall selling the farm's eggs.

On first appearances, it seems to be a rural idyll, but much more lies behind the scenes. Waygood was driven to establish the project - along with other like-minded locals, family members, friends, and backing from organisations (such as the Royal Veterinary College) - "to build a sustainable, resilient source of great food for us and the community". He says: "Sustainable means drastically reducing fossil fuel inputs from farm to fork, by creating a diversified, localised food system."

Waygood wants to involve households and investors to help create a secure, affordable, sustainable lifestyle which is an alternative to supermarket dependence.

He is passionate about finding an alternative to agribusiness, supermarkets and the corporate food industry. "I am dreaming with my eyes open," he says. "Things can happen, and there is room and enough money in the food chain for us. Tesco, for example, has to pay for HR (human resources) departments and run huge offices. It also incurs massive freight costs. The wheat cost of a loaf of bread - at farm gate prices - is only five pence. We can compete."

Waygood is a social entrepreneur - and one part of his big picture is already taking shape.

"Agrarian Renaissance exists to create replicable models and therefore create change," he says. The furthest forward is "Rural Care" which involves former drug addicts, mentally ill patients and the disabled who come to the farm for work/therapy and interaction, as well as imbibing the whole picture of nature and wildlife.

This generates income from Social Services, engages people in the project, provides positive benefits and contributes to the community as a whole.

"With care farming, this is one example of a win-win model and an early success," he says. "We intend to lower the entrance hurdle for other farmers, growers and/or therapists from £50,000- £100,000 to £5,000-£20,000 to set up.

"This division has become cash positive after four months and we expect it to provide an income of between £15,000 and £20,000 for others who take up this 'social franchise'. Work is in progress, but we will not be rolling this out until late summer."

"Overall, we have invested over £800,000 to date, financed by remortgaging my house, cashing in all Peps and Isas and a bank loan. We aim to raise up to £20m over the coming 25 months," he adds.

Rural care

Support needs	Clients per supervisor	Pricing per day (£)	Pricing per hour (£)	Group size/daily
Low	4	57	12	228
Medium	3	87	18	261
High	1	142	29	142
Average	2.7	95	19	210
Source: FT research

The figures look daunting, but Waygood has a background of success and a hard-nosed business instinct. He jokes that he managed to get a degree in agriculture from Reading University by not being there. "I was known as the 'ghost'," he says.

While doing a paper on "rural diversification", Waygood was busy putting it all into practice, hence not attending lectures. He established MotivAction - a team-building/corporate entertainment company on the farm premises that his grandfather took on in 1958 - Church Farm.

Waygood says that it took from 1987 to 1994 to make a profit, but then turnover went from £2m to £10m in a few years as people bungee- jumped on board. The venture even included Russian cosmonauts.

A stint at Harvard Business School and, later, a bout of pneumonia changed Waygood's outlook. Sweating and crawling to the bathroom, he thought "what if I had only two more years to live? Setting a self-imposed deadline of two years, Waygood said: "I want do something for my children. I want to say I have done something."

So Agrarian Renaissance was born in 2007.

Waygood's mission is to reduce carbon inputs - "we are eating oil and nitrates" he says. "Taxpayers are paying to clean up the mess."

The first year has not been easy - but people, investors and other interests are buying in. However, future projects are much more capital intensive.

"The returns to myself and others as major investors and lenders to the enterprise are capped - loans, for instance, are capped at 4 per cent above base rate," says Waygood.

"We are recruiting and looking for a 'magnificent seven' team of interested investors and entrepreneurs to help create and prove viable, sustainable and ecological alternatives to the existing supermarket/agri-business mono-culture."

Local food success offsets sales fall

Early indications from retailers have suggested that the huge annual sales growth enjoyed by organic foods for 15 years may be coming to an end. Organic food represents 2 per cent of the UK’s food market, with sales of about £1.7bn.

Sales of organic produce soared by 26 per cent a year on average between 1993 and 2008, but this is set to fall to 7.5 per cent in 2009, according to Mintel, the market researcher. However, that rate of growth is still more than double that of the general food market, organic proponents point out. Three out of every four households in the UK now buy some organic food, according to the Soil Association.

In 2002, only 30 per cent of all organic products were supplied by the UK. But by 2005, the Soil Association estimated that approximately 66 per cent of all organic primary produce sold by multiple retailers was sourced in the UK, demonstrating that more and more people are now beginning to appreciate the value and quality available in the organic marketplace.

Only 4 per cent of UK farmland is run organically and organic food represents 2 per cent of the UK’s food market.

Nevertheless, sales of locally produced food have been doing well as supermarkets have promoted them as a healthy, and environmentally sound option. Consumers are aware of the difference between local and organic, but perceive better value in locally produced food.

UK farmers can also look to the fall in sterling for some cheer. Its depreciation against the euro has made many agricultural imports more expensive compared with homegrown food.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009