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NY Times: Philanthropy by the Rest of Us

December 22, 2011

Philanthropy by the Rest of Us

By OLIVIER ZUNZ

Charlottesville, Va.

CHRISTMAS SEALS, first sold 104 years ago in a Delaware post office, transformed the treatment and control of tuberculosis, one of the most feared killers of the age.

Just as important, they produced a revolution in philanthropy. At that time, the 1 percent of the late Gilded Age, men with names like Carnegie and Rockefeller, were creating major new philanthropic institutions. Christmas Seals, in a way, was the response from the other 99 percent: by marketing something as inexpensive as a stamp and using the proceeds to attack a major disease, the founders of the Christmas Seals program demonstrated the collective power of the American public.

The idea reached the United States by chance. The Danish-born immigrant Jacob Riis, well known as a pioneer photographer of tenement life, had already seen six of his brothers die of tuberculosis by 1904 when he received a Christmas letter from Copenhagen.

In addition to the traditional postage stamp, it bore a peculiar seal, the brainchild of a Danish postal clerk, Einar Holboll. Rather than rely on a few deep pockets to pay for a new hospital for children with tuberculosis, he sold the seals for two ore (there are 100 ore in a Danish krone) each. Patrons placed the seals alongside regular stamps to raise awareness of the campaign.

Three years later, Riis reported the story of this highly successful “penny subscription” in the magazine The Outlook, urging its duplication in the United States. Riis pointed to the fact that “no millionaire” had yet come forth “to endow” the fight against tuberculosis in America, and went on to say that “no millionaire” was “wanted,” that the job would be “far better done by the people themselves.”

Emily Bissell, a member of The Outlook’s editorial board and an active fund-raiser for the Red Cross, took him up on the suggestion as a way to support a tuberculosis sanitarium near Wilmington, Del. She borrowed money from friends to print the seals, persuaded the Wilmington postmaster to sell them in the post office lobby, and sold the first Christmas Seals in December 1907. Aided by an adroit publicity campaign, she raised $3,000 that first year, 10 times her original goal.

It was such a success that the next year the Red Cross made the seals available in post offices around the country, packaged with the message, “These stamps do not carry any kind of mail but any kind of mail will carry them.” That year, Christmas Seals raised $135,000; by 1916, they raised $1 million, all through purchases of less than $1.

The Christmas Seals campaign demonstrated the philanthropic power of the grass roots. It not only raised money, but called attention to tuberculosis. In a few years, the number of volunteers for the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis soared to 500,000 from 5,000. In 1919, three million child “crusaders” served in the Modern Health Crusade to raise awareness of the disease.

Equally important, this people’s philanthropy mobilized public health officials, attracted the attention of politicians — President Theodore Roosevelt publicly endorsed Christmas Seals — and even mobilized the 1 percent. The Rockefeller International Health Commission joined the fight against tuberculosis during World War I.

Mass philanthropy took off in a wide variety of fields. Community chests sprang up in every major city, and the Red Cross took volunteerism and grass-roots philanthropy to new levels to support the troops abroad. By the 1930s, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt introduced the March of Dimes, volunteers knew how to canvass entire populations in large and small cities alike. Today, it is possible for practically every citizen willing to spend a little money to respond directly and almost instantly to world emergencies simply by sitting down at a computer or picking up a cellphone.

At the same time, mass philanthropy has become increasingly news-driven, as givers respond to earthquakes and tsunamis with an outpouring of resources but then lose interest as these disasters move off the front page. During the holiday season, our phones ring incessantly with appeals from scores of nonprofits. That we give to some of them is critical for our society. But the new ease with which we can transfer money does little to deepen the philanthropic spirit or generate long-term commitments.

What’s missing is both the commonality and intensity of purpose displayed by the original Christmas Seals campaign. Interestingly, these are two qualities exhibited by Occupy Wall Street, a movement that seems unable to harness its members’ sense of outrage to purposeful action.

It might be worthwhile for all those who sympathize with the occupiers of Zuccotti Park and other plazas and squares around the country to learn from the example of the Christmas Seals campaign. We have no shortage of urgent causes that will benefit from the energy of the grass roots. The seals campaign showed that the 99 percent, even when feeling disenfranchised, are hardly powerless to repair the safety net — and even influence the actions of the 1 percent.

Olivier Zunz, a professor of history at the University of Virginia, is the author of “Philanthropy in America: A History.”

FT: Charity begins at the office

Source:  http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0f3efb28-25b3-11e1-856e-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1gcRptTwO

December 14, 2011 11:14 pm

Charity begins at the office

By Andrew Jack

Life savers: Network Rail partnered with Samaritans, which provided publicity campaigns to help reduce suicides

The chief executive of Standard Chartered has many pressing financial issues on his mind but when Peter Sands hosts a conference call with the bank’s senior executives on Thursday, one unusual item will be high on his agenda: its campaign to tackle preventable blindness.

Such sustained, top-level commitment to a charitable cause has helped the bank’s success in raising more than $37m in eight years to fund 2.7m cataract operations worldwide in conjunction with staff and partners, including a donation-matching programme for the Financial Times seasonal appeal this year for Sightsavers.

But StanChart’s Seeing is Believing campaign, which began as an employee suggestion for marking the bank’s 150th anniversary in 2003, has triggered a far broader programme that embraces volunteering and technical assistance. It has also brought substantial benefits to the bank itself and even led to changes in working practices. “It captured the imagination and commitment of staff, and plays to our culture in cementing a very diverse business,” says Richard Meddings, StanChart chief financial officer, who chairs the effort and points to its role in motivating employees and attracting recruits.

Such projects reflect a broader international trend towards more sophisticated partnerships between businesses and charities that go far beyond traditional chequewriting, a process that risks providing only short-term benefits while diverting an organisation’s limited resources.

“We’ve gone from the chairman’s wife identifying a worthy cause to cause-related marketing, with companies extending their brand by engaging with charities,” says Ben Kernighan, deputy head of the UK’s National Council for Voluntary Organisations, an umbrella body for the non-profit sector. “Companies recognise the huge range of skills they have to respond to the community”.

Mr Meddings says StanChart’s partnerships with local blindness charities around the world has led the bank to introduce “speaking” ATMs with Braille keys and to recruit from schools for the blind, especially in call-centres, where impaired vision need not be an impediment. In Uganda it has hired a former employee of a partner charity as an executive.

David Fass, Macquarie CEO for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, says the bank has partnerships worldwide, including the Cripplegate Foundation to tackle poverty in Islington, north London. “It not only provides valuable skilled resour­ces for the organisation, it provides development for staff. They come back more motivated, more creative . . . It broadens their horizons, working with a variety of stakeholders, [and] collaborating and engaging with senior colleagues.”

Building stronger partnerships

● Make a partnership a high priority: consistent top management support works better than diktats.
● Match: contribute alongside employees’ donations, and make it easier and more tax-efficient through payroll giving. 
● Partner for the long-term:one-off seasonal donations can be quickly forgotten and unsustainable.
● Be sensitive: employee polling to select charities may neglect less popular or well marketed causes.
● Identify shared values:common aims and objectives between a company and a charity help establish better partnerships. 
● Provide time and expertise:volunteering and technical assistance can add more than money for both parties.
● Service contracts: charities’ skills and expertise can form the basis for successful commercial contracts.

These deeper partnerships reflect recognition of professionalism among charities, coupled with an urgency to seek financial support during the economic downturn and a shift in the way services are delivered by public and private sector entities alike.

Klara Kozlov, senior corporate adviser at the Charities Aid Foundation, says one shift involves busines­ses hiring charities to deliver services directly. “The charity/business divide is disappearing,” she explains. “There is a move away from the ‘funder’ model of companies give and charities receive, to a relationship of mutual benefit.”

Three years ago insurer Legal & General formed a unit to create links with non-profit groups. “A lot of partnerships are great for a charity of the year, but the company never learns from them,” says Graham Precey, head of corporate social responsibility. “There is a lot of intellectual property in the third sector that would really help our business. We pay charities, which allows us to deliver better services and them to develop a new income stream and build capacity to work with other corporates.”

Identifying Macmillan Cancer Support as one of the most important beneficiaries of L&G’s employee donation programme led to it paying the charity to train 90 of its “critical illness team” in how to deal with calls from customers with cancer.

L&G has negotiated a similar arrangement with Age UK, a charity advising the elderly, recognising that “we’ve got a generation gap, with our 25-year-old employees talking to customers who are mainly aged over 55”.

It also works with housing charity Shelter and funds all three groups for activities beyond its commercial contracts, such as joint advocacy work where they have common interests.

Such innovative approaches can help win funding for groups that work on less popular causes and those with fewer resources to market themselves for employee ballots. One such charity is the Samaritans. “We struggle to get corporate funding because we are not cuddly or sexy,” says Rachel Kirby-Rider, its fundraising director. So she brokered a “commercial partnership” with Network Rail. The UK rail operator has paid the charity £5m over five years to run a programme that aims to reduce the number of suicides on British railways. These human tragedies also distress employees, disrupt passengers and lead to fines for service delays. “The basis is commercial but there are wider benefits,” says Mike Carr, Network Rail’s national safety improvement manager.

The Samaritans has trained station personnel to identify and talk to people they suspect may be contemplating suicide; counselled train drivers following deaths; and run a publicity campaign targeting men aged 30-55, those judged most at risk.

Jan Levy, head of Three Hands, a consultancy advising businesses on community engagement, praises such projects but cautions that effective partnerships require shared values, which risk being forgotten if “companies treat charities like cleaners”.

Sir Stephen Bubb, head of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations, says: “[The charity] can’t just be a subcontractor. You have to be involved in the way the contract is put together, and have ways to raise and deal with issues. But the marriage could be a really winning combination.”

Ms Kirby-Rider concedes that a direct donation of £5m from Network Rail would probably have been spent on other projects for the Samaritans such as new systems to allow callers to phone the counselling service for free. But she remains very satisfied with the project. “This is a commercial partnership that saves lives and enabled us to do things we would not have been able to do,” she says. “Network Rail staff are really excited about it, so you can achieve charitable and organisational objectives.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

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NY Times: First, Make Money. Also, Do Good.

 

August 13, 2011

First, Make Money. Also, Do Good.

By STEVE LOHR

CORPORATE social responsibility efforts have always struck me as the modern equivalent of John D. Rockefeller handing out dimes to the common folk. They may be well-intentioned, but they often seem like small gestures at the margins of what companies are really trying to do: make money.

As well they should, an argument most famously made by the Nobel laureate Milton Friedman decades ago. He called social responsibility programs “hypocritical window-dressing” in an article he wrote for The New York Times Magazine in 1970, titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.”

But Michael E. Porter, a Harvard Business School professor, may have an answer to the Friedman principle. Mr. Porter is best-known for his original ideas about corporate strategy and the economic competition among nations and regions. Recently, however, he has been promoting a concept he calls “shared value.”

Earlier this year, Mr. Porter and Mark R. Kramer, a consultant and a senior fellow in the corporate social responsibility program at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, laid out their case in a lengthy article in the Harvard Business Review, “Creating Shared Value: How to Reinvent Capitalism — and Unleash a Wave of Innovation and Growth.” Since then, Mr. Porter and Mr. Kramer have been championing the shared-value thesis in conferences, meetings with corporate leaders, and even a conversation with White House advisers.

Shared value is an elaboration of the notion of corporate self-interest — greed, if you will. The idea that companies can do well by doing good is certainly not new. It is an appealing proposition that over the years has been called “triple bottom line” (people, planet, profit), “impact investing” and “sustainability” — all describing corporate initiatives that address social concerns including environmental pollution, natural-resource depletion, public health and the needs of the poor.

The shared-value concept builds on those ideas, but it emphasizes profit-making not just as a possibility but as a priority. Shared value, Mr. Porter says, points toward “a more sophisticated form of capitalism,” in which “the ability to address societal issues is integral to profit maximization instead of treated as outside the profit model.”

Social problems are looming market opportunities, according to Mr. Porter and Mr. Kramer. They note that while government programs and philanthropy have a place — beyond dimes, Mr. Rockefeller created a path-breaking foundation — so, increasingly, does capitalism.

The shared-value concept is not a moral stance, they add, and companies will still behave in their self-interest in ways that draw criticism, like aggressive tax avoidance and lobbying for less regulation. “This is not about companies being good or bad,” Mr. Kramer says. “It’s about galvanizing companies to exploit the market in addressing social problems.”

The pair point to promising signs that more and more companies are pursuing market strategies that fit the shared-value model.

Several years ago, executives at General Electric began looking across its portfolio of industrial and consumer businesses, eyeing ways to apply new technology to reduce energy consumption. They were prompted by corporate customers voicing concerns about rising electrical and fuel costs, and by governments pushing for curbs on carbon emissions.

The result was G.E.’s “ecomagination” program, a business plan as well as a marketing campaign. In recent years, the company has invested heavily in technology to lower its products’ energy consumption, and the use of water and other resources in manufacturing.

To count in the program, a product must deliver a significant energy savings or environmental benefit over previous designs. G.E. hired an outside environmental consulting firm, GreenOrder, to help in measuring performance. To date, more than 100 G.E. products have qualified, from jet engines to water filtration equipment to light bulbs. In 2010, such products generated sales of $18 billion, up from $10 billion in 2005, when the program began.

“We did it from a business standpoint from Day 1,” says Jeffrey R. Immelt, G.E.’s chief executive. “It was never about corporate social responsibility.”

Technology has opened the door to markets that have shared-value characteristics. For decades, I.B.M. sold its computers, software and services to city governments around the world, though mainly for back-office chores like managing payrolls. But the Internet, the Web, electronic sensors and steady advances in computing have helped transform I.B.M.’s role, as it now helps cities track and analyze all kinds of data to improve services.

“We’ve moved from the back office to the core mission of cities — managing traffic, monitoring public health, optimizing water use and crime-fighting,” says Jon C. Iwata, a senior vice president.

I.B.M. is now working with about 2,000 cities worldwide as part of its “Smarter Cities” business, which began three years ago. One advanced project is in the sprawling city of Rio de Janeiro, where I.B.M. is designing a computerized command center. It is intended to pull data from dozens of city agencies, as well as weather stations and webcams. One assignment is to closely track heavy rainfall and to predict its impact — where flooding might occur, how traffic should be rerouted, and what neighborhoods may need to be evacuated. The goal is to predict and prepare for the kind of mudslides and floods that killed hundreds of people in April 2010 and left 15,000 homeless.

THE evolution of low-cost Internet and mobile phone technology has also let Intuit pursue opportunities with shared-value attributes. The company offers free online income-tax preparation software and filing services for lower-income households (now earning $31,000 or less). Since 1999, nearly 13 million people have taken advantage of the service.

The cost is relatively inexpensive for Intuit, as the service exploits the efficiency of online distribution; the charge for paying customers is $20 to $50. And the program blurs the line between charity and marketing, because millions of people who are sampling the company’s product, may well become paying customers as their incomes rise.

In India, Intuit has begun offering a free information service for farmers that can be accessed on any cellphone. Part-time workers check crop prices at local markets and send the information to Intuit. The company then relays the latest, local price quotations in text messages to subscribing farmers. As a result, the farmers can make smarter decisions about when and where to sell their produce.

The service in India began last year, and 300,000 farmers now use it. In follow-up surveys, farmers report that their earnings are up 25 percent, says Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit and chairman of the executive committee. The company, he adds, is testing ways to make money off the service, perhaps with text ads for simple tractors and fertilizers.

Mr. Cook points to other new business forays that are part of the same strategy. One is an Intuit health debit card for American small businesses that want to pay for some of their employees’ medical care but cannot afford conventional health insurance.

“We look for places we can use our strengths as a company to help solve big problems,” he says. “You can call that shared value if you like. But I look at it as the business we’re in.”

Project Happy Feet: PHF Slipper Race - It's Happening! :)

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Project Happy Feet: PHF Returns to Siem Reap

Source: http://www.projecthappyfeet.org/beta/?p=1138

PHF Returns to Siem Reap

in News by Deborah — June 27, 2011 at 1:41 pm | 0 comments

At least once a year, PHF returns to the countries that they have been supporting to feel the ground, perform their audits and relook at the programmes it hopes to embark to support the local community. This ensures that we are not only kept up to date with the latest developments in the country and note the changes that have occurred but also to ensure that our programmes and projects are most relevant and helpful to the local community.

The following chronicles our trip to Siem Reap from 21 – 26 June 2011:

DAY 1

ConCERT

Our trip started out with a meeting with ConCERT (Connecting Communities, Environment and Responsible Tourism) – a non-profit organization based in Siem Reap that connects local NGOs that need help to the people who can provide the help they need. ConCERT not only provides information about these local NGOs, but also ensures that these NGOs are well managed, financially transparent and work in partnership with the local people – key criteria for PHF as we are selecting the NGOs we plan to support.

Through its Founder and Chairman, Michael Holton, we find out about the realities of the ground and how some NGOs have been set up but have soon exploited the system to benefit themselves instead of the local community. He shared with us tips of caution as we proceeded to identify organizations we hope to work with (on top of those we already have planned to support).

Read here more about Responsible Tourism as shared by ConCERT.

After much reading up and research, we arranged to meet up with This Life Cambodia and Trailblazer Foundation.

 

DAY 2

Visiting Angkor Thom Village with Shinta Mani

We started out Day 2 of our trip bright and early with a trip to the villages in the Angkor Thom district – the villages that touched the hearts of co-founders, Grace and Deborah on their first trip to Siem Reap, that got PHF all started.

Shinta Mani, a boutique hotel that runs itself as a social enterprise, arranged the visit for us. It was a surreal experience for all of us once again as we went from family to family to understand the situation they were in and how Shinta Mani has helped them improve their lives by installing water pumps or building a concrete home for shelter over their heads.

Through the visit, we learnt that majority homes in the Angkor Thom district look old and dilapidated because the Apsara Authority (which protects the area in and around the Angkor Wat area) forbids any form of construction in areas that fall within the zone surrounding the Angkor Wat. Since the Angkor Thom district falls within this zone, the villagers thus can only do minor repairs to their homes.

Making a Difference with MaD Cambodia

Lunch was one with a difference as we headed to the MaD Eatery to meet up with Founder of MaD Cambodia, Phillip Starling.

Not only was the lunch wonderfully delicious, it was also one without any price tag on the menu. We simply paid what we thought was worth the price, and the money goes towards funding the activities of the MaD Cambodia. A novel idea indeed.

Our lunch meeting with Phillip and his partner, Concetta, was not only informative but delightful. One who speaks his mind and believes in approaching problems in a non-conventional way, Phillip shared with us the good things they were doing for the Prolit Village – ranging from providing after-school programmes that teach not only life skills but also stimulates the mind, to introducing a novel idea of compost toilets that not only prevents pollution, but also provide a rich source of organic fertilizers for the local farmers.

Phillip welcomed us to visit the Prolit Village anytime we wanted. “We don’t have to get the poor people to show you that there are really poor people there,” he said in a tongue-in-cheek manner, referring to some NGOs who stage poverty in order to benefit from unassuming kind hearts.

Purchasing Slippers at Phsar Ler (All Market)

Rattana from Shinta Mani picked us up from our the MaD Base Camp and together, we headed with her to the local’s market where things are whole lot cheaper than if we had gone to the old market (where tourists typically visit). There, she efficiently made her bargain and we purchased 130 pairs of slippers (sponsored by staff members at Robinsons) for the school children we were planning to visit the next day.

Getting in Touch with Siem Reap Hostel

We had recommended some of our friends who had made the trip earlier to Siem Reap to put up at Siem Reap Hostel since it provided very affordable and clean accommodation. Not only was the location pretty near the Old Market, the hostel also has recently put together programmes that are helping the local community and we wanted to find out more.

Tiani, General Manager at the hostel, met up with us and briefed us of the small programmes they have begun to undertake, specifically supporting the efforts of Green Gecko, a home for street kids, as well as their micro-financing project for Tuk Tuk drivers.

She highlighted that perhaps one of the needs for the local community was to provide skills-based training to ensure they not only are equipped with technical skills (e.g. construction, electrical, plumbing), but also the safety awareness so that they do not harm themselves.

 

DAY 3

Slippers for Sambour School

Our friends from Shinta Mani met with us, and together we made our way to the Sambour School in the Angkor Thom district. Shinta Mani supported the construction of the school previously and has been supporting the school in whatever ways they can since.

During the long (and very rocky) journey, we learnt more about our Shinta Mani friends, Kol (Front Office Manager) and Saoline (Culinary Instructor). Both Kol and Saoline were beneficiaries of the programme at Shinta Mani. Years ago, they had undergone the training provided at Shinta Mani which selects individuals from underprivileged communities, and puts them through a training programme in either culinary or front of house skills. During the programme, they had also learnt the English Language.

Today, both Kol and Saoline are both very successful individuals who have managed to escape the poverty cycle and even managed to bring their parents from the village to stay with them in the city. It was certainly heartening for us to see them now trying to give back to the community in what way they could.

At the Sambour School, we promptly unwrapped the slippers and put them on the feet of the 130 children there, something we were glad we were able to do since at least 95% of the children were without footwear. Some even needed our help to put on the slippers – it seemed it was the first time they were wearing footwear in their lives.

Sala Bai with Shina Mani

Since Shinta Mani was under renovation (it is expanding its hotel to accommodate more guests and a bigger training school for its trainees), Kol recommended we have lunch at Sala Bai, a restaurant with a concept similar to Shinta Mani (or KOTO in Hanoi).

We invited our friends at Shinta Mani to join us for lunch, during which we learnt more about their lives, and their future plans.

Grace collected a load of industry related books from her colleagues from Temasek Polytechnic, and these were donated to Shinta Mani to stock up their new library for its trainees. Kol and Saoline received the books with gratitude, commenting that they were really good books for the trainees who were to come in.

Meeting with This Life Cambodia

If there was an organisation that we’ve met that was the most structured, we’d say it was This Life Cambodia (TLC).

During the meeting with Mr Sen Se, TLC’s Assistant Director, Ms Chea Borany, Programme Coordinator and Mr William Brehm, Research, Evaluation and Monitor Officer, we learnt about the comprehensive programmes that they had, in particular the lower secondary school development programme where they empower the community to better the education provided at the public schools. We loved the idea that whichever programme TLC embarked on, there was an exit strategy – which meant they plan to make the system self-sustaining, or one that allowed the local community to continue the work themselves.

The programme came complete with a breakdown of objectives, tasks and checklists, complete with who in the community was responsible for each task. The local community was held accountable and for that reason, gave them a sense of ownership of the programme.

 

DAY 4

Taom is Developing Well

We headed to the St John’s Church in Siem Reap to meet up with Fr Stephanus and Thon, who was overall in charge of the developments of the 6 villages that the church supported. In particular, we had wanted to know about the developments in Taom, the village that received the most support from friends of PHF since 2008.

We were heartened to know that the library that was built there was utilised not only by the children in the Taom village, but those in the nearby regions as well. The two ladies who were receiving our scholarship to be trained in pre-school education will be graduating and will be starting lessons for the younger children in the village.

The next plans for the village is to look into a water sanitation project as well as to equip the area with electricity – perhaps using solar panels. It gave us room to think about how we could support their efforts.

At the end of the meeting, Deborah presented USD 790 – part proceeds from the Chefs for a Cause project to Fr Stephanus to support the rice soup programme that runs once a week across 8 learning centres for 6 villages.

Innovative Ideas from Trailblazer

Our meeting with Mr Rattana from Trailblazer Foundation turned out to be one which was highly informative.

Mr Rattana promptly brought us to their backyard after a brief introduction – it was here that all their hard work laid.

Trailblazers help the local community (specifically the Sras Village, which was identified as one of the poorest villages in Siem Reap) by introducing innovative ideas that help them sustain in their own environment. For example, they research and experiment on crops that can grow well in their local soils, and if successful, introduce the crops to the community of mostly farmers, who can either grow them for sustenance or for sale. They take into consideration things like duration of growth, ease of growth and cost of growing the crops. They look into possible demands from restaurants and hotels to ensure that while they are producing a supply, there is also a corresponding supply. We were especially impressed to see how they have begun to experiment the growth of mushrooms using saw dust from rubber trees.

Mr Rattana also showed us how they produce a filtration system at their backyard that allow villagers to gain access to potable water. The innovative invention requires no electricity and provides clean water almost instantly, thereby reducing illnesses relating to drinking unclean water. Costing USD 50 each to install, Trailblazers charge USD2.75 per filtration system to the household that requires it. This money however doesn’t go towards Trailblazer but towards a community fund that functions as a micro-loan facility to villagers who need it.

 

DAY 5

MaD Cambodia’s Outreach at Prolit Village

We had arranged to visit the Prolit Village after our meeting with Phillip from MaD Cambodia. Rith, our local guide, came to pick us up on his jeep and brought us to the MaD Base Camp. From there we met up with General Manager, Songhy, who led the way to the Prolit Village in the Puok District some 25 km from the Siem Reap city centre.

The journey brought us to feel the air of the country side (literally!) as we were duly bathed in a cloud of red dust on the way to the village.

Once there, Songhy showed us how their team, who have been working at the village for the past 8 months, installed water pumps, a task we learnt that wasn’t as easy since it wasn’t always that they could find a water source. Sometimes, even after hours of drilling and finding a water source, the water cannot be used as it contains harmful substances. The team will then have to find an alternative source and the drilling begins all over again.

Songhy also showed us how the compost toilet worked. We were surprised that the toilet wasn’t foul smelling despite not having any means of flushing.

At the village, we also visited the learning centre, as well as saw the growing of the Moringa plants, which offered a rich source of protein, minerals and vitamins to the villagers who were more often than not malnourished.

Visiting Little Angels

Our guide Rith invited us to visit his farm after our visit to the Prolit Village. On the way there, we stopped by the Little Angels Orphanage, set up by his friend Sery Rathana, an orphan himself who had lost his parents during the Khmer Rouge regime.

Sery had set up the orphanage to help mostly boys who have lost either one or both parents. Besides ensuring they go through school, have three meals a day and a bed to sleep on, Sery also teaches the boys the Khmer art of carving on cow’s hide. It was clear that the boys there loved what they were learning as they earnestly punched through the cow’s hide, creating pieces of art. “I tell them, if they don’t go to school, I won’t teach them,” Sery said smiling.

We scoured through the place and took our notes. It was clear that Sery had a heart for these boys he is genuinely helping. But he could do with more help from us, and we were eager to create a better learning and living environment for him and the boys at the orphanage. We were inspired by him – a local who felt that he was in a better position than others and wanted to help those who were worse off then he.

Visiting a Friend’s Farm

After a visit to the Prolung Pottery and Weaving Centre, Rith drove us towards his farm.

“Welcome to my farm,” he said proudly as he drove us into the compounds of his farm. Off the main road, the one hectare piece of land was surrounded mostly by large fields and a flowing river. The breeze was surprisingly cool as we stepped out of his jeep.

Rith proudly introduced us to his wife and then, his family of poultry – from chickens (at least five different breeds!) to ducks, to geese and even a turkey! He explained how he bred his free-range poultry, and how he had learnt to rear the poultry himself by attending free courses conducted by NGOs.

“That’s my fish farm,” he pointed to a big pond of still water.

“There’s fish?” we asked.

Rith began beating his drum and all of a sudden hundreds of fish started splashing out of the water. We learnt that Rith beats his drum each time he feeds his fish with a mix of feed he cooks himself.

We were surprised when Rith invited us to sit in a hut by the fish pond.

“Let’s have lunch,” he said, pointing us to the hammocks he had bought on the way to his farm.

Within a few minutes, lunch was served – Char-grilled chicken with rice and black chicken soup – a meal that was simple but homely and delicious. We were touched by his gesture of hospitality. It was clear that Rith didn’t treat us like a usual client, but as friends.

Over lunch we learnt of Rith’s plans to use his farm as a means to train less fortunate Cambodians in farming. His daughter came to join us and we were glad to hear that he has invested much in her education. “Big investment,” he chuckled as he looked at his two daughters.

 

DAY 6

Goodbyes

Rith came to pick us up from the hotel to send us to the airport.

“Thank you for helping us Cambodians,” he put his hands together in gratitude as he waved us goodbye. “Please keep in touch and come back. We can do a lot more together.”

Certainly.

Our trip this time didn’t involve us visiting village after village giving out handouts, yet it was equally if not more fulfilling and inspiring. We noticed a change in the local scene since our visit to Siem Reap in 2008. The local community is a lot more motivated to get their fellow counterparts out of the poverty cycle.

At some point, the credible NGOs realised that handouts could possibly create a culture of reliance. They realised that it made no sense to develop a system that was imposed on the local community, or went against the government. They realised that if they really want to help, then they should do so by empowering the local people – teach them a skill, give them a job, let them have a sense of ownership, let them make decisions as a community, provide platforms for change to better their lives, let them try, let them experiment and through that process, allow the change to take place.

What this means for us is that we need to re-look at how we support our friends in Cambodia. Sometimes, it’s not as simple as giving slippers or donate clothes, or decide to build a library or paint a wall of a village school. When we do extend ‘help’, perhaps we should first ask ourselves, “Are we really helping them?”

We can certainly do more together. But first to think of the best way how.

Visit the photo gallery of our trip on our Facebook Page here!

Project Happy Feet: Finding the right fit

My feeble effort in helping to spread the word for Project Happy Feet via this blog.

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Source: http://www.projecthappyfeet.org/beta/?p=1140

Excerpt: Giving help is easy, but giving the right kind of help – just like finding a pair of slippers that fit at that point in time of a growing child’s life – requires a lot more.

Finding the right fit

in News Reflections by Terence — June 26, 2011 at 11:16 pm | 0 comments

 

“I think size 8,” Deborah calls out, and Grace quickly unwraps a smaller pair of slippers. The other pairs on the floor are sizes 8, or 8 and a half, or 9 – too big for this little girl standing before them with her toes wriggling gingerly in anticipation. She’s been watching the other kids get their pair and awaiting her turn.

Deborah fits the pair of slippers on, and though this is not your regular Cinderella fairy tale, it feels equally magical to see her little eyes light up. A perfect fit!

“Aw-kung,” the little girl shyly whispers the Khmer word for ‘thanks’ with her palms together, and with a quick bow of her head, runs back to her seat…

Project Happy Feet had returned to Siem Reap, Cambodia in June 2011. Like previous trips to Siem Reap and Hanoi, the team brought money raised through its fund-raising efforts to support education-related programmes run by local NGOs. And of course, to buy slippers for school-going children without footwear.

So prior to visiting Sambour Primary School in the Angkhor Thom district supported by Shinta Mani, the team made a trip to Psar Ler (‘All-Market’) with a list of feet sizes and a matching quantity to buy 130 pairs of slippers with all the money collected by staff members of Robinsons in Singapore.

The next morning, in no more than an hour, the 130 pairs of slippers were given out to all the students of the school who came from within 5km – all of them barefooted.

Indeed, giving slippers has become an easy way for us to communicate what Project Happy Feet does (and what a great way to start the whole conversation about giving aid to the underprivileged in developing countries). Afterall, that is how Project Happy Feet started in the first place – with an inspiration to have every little pair of school-going feet covered and protected on their way to getting an education, which hopefully helps them get out of the poverty cycle. And truth be told, slippers – along with other school supplies like uniforms, stationery, scholarships, nutritious meals and bicycles – are still very much appreciated and needed. And they go a long way in giving relief.

But we all know that slippers and other gifts are really just short-term relief.

To alleviate the problems of poverty, we know the community needs to carry out sustainable programmes that empower themselves through capacity-building. They need to find a way to work together amongst themselves and with their government towards being self-reliant and independent of foreign aid.

And that’s why apart from giving out slippers, we’re really all about supporting organisations that have sustainable programmes that make real impact. We want to know what the community really need, and find a way to help them, not just give for the sake of giving.

On this trip, we’re glad to have met with several organisations that seem to fit what we are looking for, many of which have great programmes that are sustainable and create real impact.

For instance, This Life Cambodia has clear 3-year plans to help the community take ownership of their own problems, and supports them by teaching them how to lobby and press the government for accountability. It even has an exit strategy so that the organisation can diminish its own presence within the community over time.

MaD Cambodia drills the ground for families to have clean water and grows Moringa plants for transplanting onto village soil so families can have access to nutritious meals by growing them in their own backyard.

Trailblazer Foundation conducts various research and development programmes into agriculture and water filtration to help families increase the success of their crops and have access to drinking water (removing up to 98% of bacteria).

Still there are others like The Little Angels Orphanage and Leather Carving Workshop (run by a former orphan) and Prolung Khmer Pottery and Weaving Training Centre in Bakong Village teach traditional Khmer handicraft skills which not just give the underprivileged youths a means to make a living, but also preserves their heritage.

With so much to do and can be done for the underprivileged in Cambodia, and with limited resources and sometimes limited information, we need to work very hard to decide which organisation and programme(s) to support. But which one should we choose? Which one meets our stringent selection criteria of having strong foundation, strong track record, strong corporate governance, and more? Which is more needed by the community? Why this one and not the other – which seems equally crucial? Which one should we support? Which is the right fit? Deciding on an organisation and a programme to support is certainly no walk in the park.

Giving help is easy, but giving the right kind of help – just like finding a pair of slippers that fit at that point in time of a growing child’s life – requires a lot more.

Economist: Applying the world's business brains to housing the poor

Schumpeter

A $300 idea that is priceless

Applying the world’s business brains to housing the poor

Apr 28th 2011 | from the print edition

FRIEDRICH ENGELS said in “The Condition of the Working Class in England”, in 1844, that the onward march of Manchester’s slums meant that the city’s Angel Meadow district might better be described as “Hell upon Earth”. Today, similar earthly infernos can be found all over the emerging world: from Brazil’s favelas to Africa’s shanties. In 2010 the United Nations calculated that there were about 827m people living in slums—almost as many people as were living on the planet in Engels’s time—and predicted that the number might double by 2030.

Last year Vijay Govindarajan, of Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, along with Christian Sarkar, a marketing expert, issued a challenge in a Harvard Business Review blog: why not apply the world’s best business thinking to housing the poor? Why not replace the shacks that blight the lives of so many poor people, thrown together out of cardboard and mud, and prone to collapsing or catching fire, with more durable structures? They laid down a few simple guidelines. The houses should be built of mass-produced materials tough enough to protect their inhabitants from a hostile world. They should be equipped with the basics of civilised life, including water filters and solar panels. They should be “improvable”, so that families can adapt them to their needs. And they should cost no more than $300.

Mr Govindarajan admits that the $300 figure was partly an attention-grabbing device. But he also argues that it has a certain logic. Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank, has calculated that the average value of the houses of people who have just escaped from poverty is $370. Tata Motors has also demonstrated the value of having a fixed figure to aim at: the company would have found it more difficult to produce the Tata Nano if it had simply been trying to produce a “cheap” car rather than a “one lakh” car (about $2,200).

Related topics

• Amos Tuck School of Business Administration

The attention-grabbing certainly worked. The blog was so inundated with positive responses that a dedicated website, 300house.com, was set up, which has attracted more than 900 enthusiasts and advisers from all over the world. On April 20th Mr Govindarajan launched a competition inviting people to submit designs for a prototype of the house.

Why has a simple blog post led to such an explosion of creativity? The obvious reason is that “frugal innovation”—the art of radically reducing the cost of products while also delivering first-class value—is all the rage at the moment. General Electric has reduced the cost of an electrocardiogram machine from $2,000 to $400. Tata Chemicals has produced a $24 purifier that can provide a family with pure water for a year. Girish Bharadwaj, an engineer, has perfected a technique for producing cheap footbridges that are transforming life in rural India.

Another reason is that houses can be such effective anti-poverty tools. Poorly constructed ones contribute to a nexus of problems: the spread of disease (because they have no proper sanitation or ventilation), the perpetuation of poverty (because children have no proper lights to study by) and the general sense of insecurity (because they are so flimsy and flammable). Mr Govindarajan’s idea is so powerful because he treats houses as ecosystems that provide light, ventilation and sanitation.

Numerous innovators are also worrying away at this nexus of problems. Habitat for Humanity, an NGO, is building durable houses of bamboo in Nepal. Idealab, a consultancy, is on the verge of unveiling a $2,500 house that will be mass-produced in factories, sold in kits and feature breakthroughs in ventilation, lighting and sanitation. Philips has produced a cheap cooking stove, the Chulha, that cuts out the soot that kills 1.6m people a year worldwide. The Solar Electric Light Fund is demonstrating that you can provide poor families with solar power for roughly the same cost as old standbys such as kerosene and candles.

Profits and other problems

These thinkers, like the advocates of the $300 house, must solve three huge problems to succeed. They must persuade big companies that they can make money out of cheap homes, because only they can achieve the economies of scale needed to hit the target price. They need to ensure sufficient access to microloans: $300 is a huge investment for a family of squatters living on a couple of dollars a day. And they need to overcome the obstacle that most slum-dwellers have weak or non-existent property rights. There is no point in offering people the chance to buy a cleverly designed house if they have no title to the land they occupy. Solving these problems will in turn demand a high degree of co-operation between people who do not always get on: companies and NGOs, designers and emerging-world governments.

However, the exciting thing about the emerging world at the moment is a prevailing belief that even the toughest problems can be solved. And a similar can-do moment, in the late 1940s, offers a striking historical precedent for the application of mass-production techniques to housing: as American servicemen flooded home after the second world war to start families, Levitt & Sons built Levittowns at the rate of 30 houses a day by mass-producing the components in factories, delivering them on lorries and using teams of specialists to assemble them.

Some emerging-world governments are beginning to realise that providing security of tenure is the only way to deal with the problem of ever-proliferating slums. And big companies that face stagnant markets in the West are increasingly fascinated by the “fortune at the bottom of the pyramid”. Bill Gross of Idealab reckons the market for cheap houses could be worth at least $424 billion. But in reality it is worth far more than that: preventing the Earth from becoming what Mike Davis, a particularly gloomy follower of Marx and Engels, has termed a “planet of slums”.

FT: The fate of the last giant pandas of China

The fate of the last giant pandas of China

By Henry Nicholls

Published: September 17 2010 22:20 | Last updated: September 17 2010 22:20

A panda cub in the Wolong Valley, China

In China’s rural west, embedded in the crumpled mountain range that rises up to the Tibetan plateau, is a small town called Baoxing. Here, daily life is dominated by the mining ­industry. Rusty trucks bring in vast hunks of raw marble, freshly hewn from the surrounding mountains. Factories along the roadside cut them into ­perfect worktop slabs destined for distant designer kitchens. A thick film of white dust coats everything, including the huge Baoxing River, which carries the dust off through a seemingly infinite series of hydro-­electric dams towards the Yangtze.

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This much is typical of the frenetic pace of industry across China, a country whose economy has been growing at a staggering pace for ­decades. But Baoxing deserves special attention, for the steep, bamboo-clad slopes above the town are part of the best-preserved panda habitat on earth. Roadside artisans reflect this, fashioning miniature pandas from small chunks of marble, stone models of the live animals that dwell in the hills. In Baoxing, two sides of China are on show: one determined to extract prosperity from the natural world and another intent on conservation even at the expense of development.

As an exclusively Chinese animal and one that has, since the 1950s, emerged as the country’s “national treasure”, the giant panda tells us much about the progress of modern China. It was through this valley, in June 1935, that the Communist Party of China’s Red Army passed on its “Long March” to escape the Chinese Nationalist party. One of the few to survive the year-long, 6,000-mile ordeal was Mao Zedong, who carried the CPC to power in 1949. Within a decade, the giant panda was well on its way to becoming a national ambassador. It was perfect for the job: rare, beautiful and, importantly for Mao, it carried no imperial baggage whatsoever.

Painting the panda was not only acceptable during the Cultural Revolution, it was positively encouraged, and by the 1960s its alluring black-and-white form had become synonymous with China. Better still, the west had become increasingly obsessed with the species, thanks largely to animals collected in the vicinity of Baoxing. In 1869, Père Armand David, a French missionary, found specimens there that became the basis for the formal scientific description of this species. In 1936, Ruth Harkness, an American fashion designer, brought the first live panda, Su-Lin, out of China, a 3lb cub who ­captured western hearts.

Edwin Heath visits one of the pandas given to the UK by China in 1974

Mao, quite sensibly, exploited this interest with gusto. Between 1957 and 1983, he gave away more than 20 animals – most of them sourced from the mountains around Baoxing – to foster ties with a string of carefully chosen countries. Most famously, he gave a pair to Richard Nixon, Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, after his historic visit to China in 1972. The UK also benefited from panda diplomacy when, following prime minister Edward Heath’s visit to China in 1974, London Zoo received Chia-Chia and Ching-Ching.

Mindful of China’s increasingly open stance towards the west, the World Wildlife Fund requested permission to study the creature which inspired its logo. But during rounds of intense negotiations in late 1979, it transpired that the privilege would cost the charity $1m, money that China put towards the construction of a state-of-the-art breeding facility near the Wolong Nature Reserve, several hours’ drive north of Baoxing. It was a price worth paying, as the research collaboration between China and the WWF, which began the following year, greatly increased our knowledge of the life of the panda in the wild.

At the same time, in keeping with China’s increasingly tough economic stance, the CPC stopped giving away pandas and moved instead to an explicitly commercial model, renting out pandas to foreign zoos on lucrative short-term loans. In 1998 the policy changed and pairs of pandas started to leave China on long-term loans, which improved the chances of reproduction in captivity. Today, China is so self-sufficient that it could happily run the panda show alone, but these loans still make sound financial sense. Most US zoos with pandas, for example, currently pay $500,000 a pair annually to show off these rarities. However confident the Chinese might feel about their own economy, it’s hard to see why they would turn down this revenue.

. . .

As China’s prosperity has grown, so the environment – with the giant panda as its public face – has been moving up the political agenda. There has been a lot of work to do. Between the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, vast swathes of Chinese forest were felled, including about half of the giant panda’s natural habitat. This deforestation is thought to have played a big role in the devastating floods that spread across the Yangzte River basin in 1998, killing thousands and costing tens of billions of dollars to repair. Without trees to sponge up rainwater, Sichuan’s bare mountainsides funnelled it directly into the river system.

China responded to this crisis with some of the world’s boldest environmental initiatives. The Natural Forest Protection Programme, a nationwide logging ban launched in 1998, put in place tough new measures for the protection of forests and halted most commercial logging in the upper reaches of the Yangtze, the heart of panda country. In addition, ­China’s Grain for Green programme has converted crops on steep slopes to grass and forest. Since 1999, when pilot projects began in Sichuan, Gansu and Shaanxi (the three provinces that still have wild pandas), China has spent $40bn on the programme.

A marble statue of pandas in the centre of Baoxing addresses the town’s twin concerns of mining and conservation

It’s hard to know how successful these measures will be in preventing more flooding, but they have certainly improved the plight of the panda. Before the nationwide logging ban, loggers were reluctant to acknowledge that the forests they worked in were home to pandas, as to do so would have endangered their livelihoods. With the ban in place, however, pandas ­suddenly became an asset, as the same workers looked for other sources of income. This helps to explain why the number of protected areas dedicated to giant pandas leapt from about 20 before the ban to more than 60 today, with several more being added every year. It also made it possible for China to propose the mountains around Baoxing as a Unesco World Heritage Site, one that occupies one million hectares embracing seven nature reserves, nine parks and almost 30 per cent of the world’s wild panda ­population. With more than 5,000 plant species – about the same number as there are in France – the Sichuan Giant Panda Sanctuaries World ­Heritage Site has richer botanical treasures than those found anywhere else outside the tropics.

But China’s ambitions for its underdeveloped west do not sit comfortably with these impressive green achievements. In 2000, the Western China Development Plan got under way, a huge initiative to pull the western half of the country up to the standards of the relatively developed east. China makes bold claims for its environmental protection as it goes about this massive project, but there are real tensions at play, and the devastating Sichuan earthquake of 2008, which left some 90,000 people dead and at least five million homeless, has made it all the harder to pursue development and conservation simultaneously. China must now rebuild the infrastructure of this fragile region – ruptured dams, fractured roads, entire towns. What impact will this have on pandas?

China is fortunate in being able to avoid the destruction of flora and fauna that characterised the industrial revolutions in Britain and other western countries. There are signs that it is determined not to make the same mistakes. It is in places such as Baoxing, where China’s raw industrial spirit meets its precious, fragile ecology, that we will find out if they ­succeed. Pandas have been living here for thousands of years. At the last official census a decade ago, there were just a few hundred left in the region. The chances of seeing one are virtually nil, so why bother to try to save them? The answer, surely, is the powerful symbolism of the giant panda, which rests on its continued survival outside captivity. Lose the panda in the wild and modern China will have lost its own identity.

Henry Nicholls is author of ‘The Way of the Panda: The Curious History of China’s Political Animal’ (Profile).

What’s your view? To comment on this feature please e-mail the FT Weekend Magazine at [email protected]

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

FT: Great food at bargain prices

Great food at bargain prices

By Charles Campion

Published: August 28 2010 00:24 | Last updated: August 28 2010 00:24

Clink restaurant in Surrey

Just before we sat down to lunch, one of the chefs announced he was leaving. For most head chefs, such news would be an excuse for a bout of cursing, but Alberto Crisci – the man in charge at the Clink restaurant in Sutton, Surrey – was as pleased as punch.

For as well as being well-designed and boasting an ambitious menu, friendly service and amazingly low prices, this restaurant happens to be inside a prison. Its mission, since opening in May last year, is to train prisoners so they can find work in the catering trade when they are released.

The brainchild of Crisci, who formerly worked at Mirabelle in Mayfair, the Clink seats up to 80, with 10 prisoners working as waiters, and nine more in the kitchen. The project is a joint venture between High Down prison and the Clink Charity: the prison provides the dining room, kitchen, light and heat, while the charity pays the wages of two members of staff (both ex-prisoners, or “graduates”, of High Down who have returned to work full-time, one in the kitchen and one front-of-house). The charity also pays the food costs and collects payment from the diners in return. In the first year, this venture has not only helped motivate and train a number of chefs and front of house staff, it has also broken even.

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This is a restaurant underpinned by the right kind of values when it comes to the cooking as well as the philanthropic mission statement – vegetables and herbs come from the prison’s five polytunnels and are picked daily a couple of hours before they are needed; meat is sourced from local suppliers; fish comes from a day boat working off Selsey Bill, in West Sussex. When we had lunch, the advertised “fresh Selsey black bream grilled with fresh herbs and lemon butter sauce” had been replaced by a “gratin of Selsey crab” – very fresh, and very rich, served in the shell, with the crab meat on top of a layer of oyster mushrooms – this is the kind of menu change you have to make when your fisherman fails to catch fish! The “braised shin of beef in red wine with button onions” was very good – cooked to that gluey point but still retaining some texture, and richly flavoured. What’s more, at the Clink the dish also has a rather competitive price tag of £4.50.

Local Surrey restaurateurs must be grateful that though the Clink is open to the public, getting a table isn’t entirely straightforward. The tables are usually full of prison staff and visitors, and groups from organisations such as local councils, charities and food and community groups. Members of the public can book, but the prison must be able to verify the names of people coming, to avoid security risks. You need to bring photo ID and must leave your mobile phone at the door (as well as any scissors, knives, aerosols or chewing gum), but this is a small price to pay when in return you have the real treat of a very decent lunch for under a tenner.

Francis, a staff member at Clink restaurant

And though the Clink is unique in being behind prison gates, it’s far from alone in training future chefs while offering high quality cooking at recession-friendly prices for diners canny enough to seek them out. The Hoxton Apprentice in north London, for example, not only trains the long-term unemployed, but also offers “Hoxton pie of the day” for £9.95, or “Arbroath smoked fishcakes” for £6.95: forgiving prices for one of London’s trendier neighbourhoods. A couple of miles away, in King’s Cross, the environmentally aware Acorn House trains chefs under the auspices of Shoreditch Trust, a community regeneration project, and offers freshly cooked seasonal food, with three courses for £24.50. At training restaurants that have achieved a high profile – at Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen (which now has branches in London, Amsterdam, Cornwall and Melbourne), for example – you will pay top dollar but can console yourself with the knowledge that you are supporting a worthwhile project. The staff are disadvantaged young people who might have been homeless, unemployed, or overcoming drug or alcohol problems.

Many catering colleges run restaurants that are open to the public and it is worth seeking them out (check the opening times as most of them close during student holidays). In London, the Vincent Rooms at Westminster Kingsway College offers an admirable set lunch (£24 for three courses à la carte in the Escoffier Room, or about £15 in the Brasserie), while at the Pillars Restaurant on Thames Valley University’s Ealing campus you can enjoy three courses for £12.

One of the oldest student-staffed dining rooms in Britain is the Brookes restaurant at Oxford Brookes’ department of hospitality, leisure and tourism management. Each year 90 students will spend time in the restaurant, which has been running since the 1960s. The food at Brookes is ambitious and priced at £14.50 for three courses and £11.50 for two. Starters such as “warm crab and pineapple timbale, cucumber concassé with lemon grass and chervil velouté”, and “ham hock terrine with Cheddar fritter and cherry tomato compôte” set the bar high. Mains such as “crisp pork belly, sauté fillet, on a cider and bacon cream with roast apple purée” and “pan-fried sea bass with crayfish bisque, crushed new potatoes and summer vegetables” are elegant on the plate and deliver the requisite big flavours. In autumn, Brookes is to get a makeover with even more emphasis on local food culture, provenance and sustainability.

With most businesses single-mindedness is a key virtue, but it seems that when it comes to restaurants, a secondary agenda can be a valuable addition.

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www.theclinkonline.com

www.hoxtonapprentice.com

www.acornhouserestaurant.com

www.fifteen.net

www.thevincentrooms.com

restaurant.business.brookes.ac.uk

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010.

ST: Why is giving so hard?

Think

Home > Think > Story

Jul 18, 2010

Why is giving so hard?

When one has to spend money in order to raise money, it just doesn't add up

By Lee Wei Ling

I was feeling tired and listless, so I scanned the pages of Reader's Digest. I chanced upon a story of Mr Joachim Franz.

He had cycled 130km and walked 50km a day in a race from Cape Town to Johannesburg in South Africa. He stayed in the race even when his Achilles' tendon became inflamed and was in danger of tearing. His excuse for this mad endeavour was to raise funds to fight HIV/Aids. For his extraordinary dedication, Reader's Digest named him European of the Year last year.

Today, his job description reads 'health emissary'. To quote Reader's Digest: 'Joachim Franz has clout, whether he's looking for help for the girls in Nepal rescued from forced prostitution, or for an audience with the Pope, or for a washing machine and an electrical hook-up for Sister Abigail who looks after 20 orphans in South Africa.'

In 2008, Mr Franz collected 400,000 euros (S$712,000) by performing physical feats. The money goes to assistance programmes throughout the world.

But why must Mr Franz torture himself physically in order to raise funds for charity? Can't the organisations and individuals who donate money to him, donate directly to the causes or organisations he champions? If the causes deserve support, why should he torture himself to prove that they do? How do the causes benefit from Mr Franz running or cycling long distances?

Ironically, to make his physical feats possible, Mr Franz has to incur the cost of a supporting network. A United Nations programme on HIV/Aids has endorsed his charity activities, and more than a dozen sponsors lend him financial support. It is generous of them to do so, but all this money would have been better spent if it had gone directly to the causes Mr Franz supports. Why spend money unnecessarily in order to raise money?

But what Mr Franz does, and the way the public and media respond to his effort, is not unusual. Many others have used the same method to publicise their causes and thereby raise funds for them.

That people need to do this goes entirely against common sense. But perhaps they are not appealing to logic or common sense. Perhaps they are making a naked appeal to our sympathies.

That would explain why people with physical handicaps performing difficult stunts make a bigger impact at such charity drives than others. When they try a commonsensical approach to raising funds - like simply asking people to donate money - it doesn't always work. Whereas, when they make dramatic public gestures - like propelling a wheelchair across hundreds of kilometres - they raise considerable sums of money, though they may have to incur financial costs in the course of performing their stunts.

Irritated by the absurdity of it all, I discarded the Reader's Digest and picked up that day's Straits Times. But splashed across the front page of the newspaper that day was a story recounting the chaos caused by an Icelandic volcano spewing ash into the atmosphere. Now that the airline flights that had been cancelled earlier following the volcanic eruption were resuming, there was evidently debate in Europe as to whether officials had overreacted by grounding the airlines.

The resulting inconvenience and financial loss received more media attention than the 2,000 people who died just a week earlier following a 6.9-magnitude earthquake in a remote Tibetan region of Qinghai province, in north-western China.

Why does it seem sometimes as though we have lost all sense of what is important in life? Perhaps I was feeling irritable that day because I had got up on the wrong side of the bed that morning - only I sleep on the floor, not a bed. Whatever it is, I think we should, like the boy in the story, dare to say to the media: 'The emperor has no clothes!'

The media knows how to play the psychological game and make us turn our attention to whatever it wishes. What concerns the media is not really freedom of expression; what concerns it is the freedom to dramatise whatever issue it desires.

Indeed, in the United States, the media has its own self-serving code of conduct: for example, to toe the line that Singapore is a ruthless authoritarian state. Any journalist or columnist who dares to deviate from that point of view is shunned.

For example, I know of an American columnist who was dropped by his newspaper after he wrote an article about Singapore that put us in a favourable light. So much for the US standing up for freedom of expression.

Those of us who are of sound mind should never just be passive receivers of information. We should think and judge for ourselves, not follow blindly in whatever direction the media shepherds us. Not to do so, as is often the case, would lead us to adopt a distorted view of the world.

A world in which owning a Montblanc Timewalker GMT Automatic or a Prada handbag is worthy of our aspirations. A world in which helping the less fortunate - really helping them versus helping them so as to make oneself appear a hero - is something we might condescend to do after we have satisfied all our consumerist desires.

Wake up before life has passed us by and, in our last moments, it suddenly dawns on us that we have lived in vain.

The writer is director of the National Neuroscience Institute. Send your comments to [email protected]

BusinessWeek: C.K. Prahalad, 1941-2010

Tribute to C.K. Prahalad

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Global Economics April 22, 2010, 11:00AM EST text size: TT

C.K. Prahalad, 1941-2010

The late management expert was a thinker who told companies they could boost profits—and benefit the poor—by crafting products for them

By Susan Berfield

C.K. Prahalad, who died Apr. 16 at 68, was hell-bent on shaking managers free of what he called their "dominant logic"—deeply held assumptions about the world. He was a provocative thinker who regularly came up with startling insights that would send executives scrambling. During his 33-year career as a business philosopher, a professor of strategy at the University of Michigan's Stephen M. Ross School of Business, and a well-paid consultant, Prahalad developed theories that have become so commonplace it's easy to underestimate the impact they had at the time. In 1990 he argued that businesses should focus on their "core competence"; corporate strategy has never been the same. Prahalad's insistence that companies engage the billions of potential consumers at the "bottom of the pyramid" was controversial in 2004. Today it's global economic conventional wisdom. His dictum that customers want a greater voice in what they consume has gone from cutting-edge to cliché in six years.

Prahalad was born in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu in 1941, one of nine children. He learned his bookish ways from his father, who was a judge and Sanskrit scholar. Prahalad studied at the Indian Institute of Management and then at Harvard, where he received a PhD from the business school. He intended to settle in his homeland but found nationalist India of the 1970s inhospitable to his global outlook. He returned to the U.S., where he could roam intellectually.

Prahalad had eclectic interests: bird migratory habits, historical maps, the spread of languages. He wasn't especially gregarious, but when he traveled, which was often, he tried to pry useful information out of everyone he met. He was always looking for connections and patterns, hoping to predict change.

As a teacher, Prahalad nudged his students to stretch their minds. As a consultant, he demanded his clients do the same. When he arrived for a weekend with senior executives at Royal Philips Electronics (PHG) in the early 1990s, he told them he had just read a news report that Philips was heading into bankruptcy. "Forget what we are supposed to talk about. There is a major crisis," Prahalad recounted in a 2006 BusinessWeek profile. "You had better figure out what you are going to do about it." Within a few hours the executives had drawn up ideas for a radical restructuring. Then Prahalad admitted he had made up the whole thing to spur the team to think creatively. "His style could be mean, but effective," Jan Oosterveld, a retired Philips executive, said at the time.

Among Prahalad's last works was a column in the April Harvard Business Review. It concluded with this thought: "Executives are constrained not by resources but by their imagination."

Education

Indian Institute of Management, Havard Business School

Work

Management Guru/Business professor, University of Michigan

Key Insight

Billions of consumers await at the "bottom fo the pyramid"

Berfield is an associate editor at BusinessWeek .

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.

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: Soapbox - the rise of social enterprise

Soapbox: the rise of social enterprise

Published: June 14 2009 22:07 | Last updated: June 14 2009 22:07

By

Chip Feiss

Is it possible that a whole new, distinct fourth sector is developing right before our eyes? The modern business world has up to now comprised the private for profit, public/government and non-profit sectors. But today there is a blurring of the lines between these sectors. There is also a burgeoning global movement, known as social enterprise, which straddles all the other sectors.

But, first, if social enterprise is to become the new fourth sector it will need to overcome some structural challenges. The first is one of definition. The term “social enterprise” has been imbued with many different meanings and become associated with other catchphrases such as “sustainability”, “green” and “corporate social responsibility”.

I define it as a for-profit/non-profit or hybrid business, using private investment to work on common-good social problems.

Virtually daily there is news of another social enterprise initiative, as individuals and institutions such as business schools, where courses on social enterprise are among the most popular, explore alternative ways to create financial and social value. Those involved in launching these new enterprises clearly reject Milton Friedman’s perspective “that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits”.

Although experiencing a huge upsurge in interest and visibility globally, social enterprise is still in its nascent stages. Today it can be characterised as a fragmented sector filled with many small-scale enterprises struggling with scale. Growth and scalability are important concerns for all businesses but maybe more so for social enterprise, in that the scope of the social problem(s) it is trying to solve is so large.

Innovative work is being done to reach scale, including the development of corporate structures, tax policy that considers the social benefit delivered by social enterprises, the design of systems to measure social value and impact, the creation of social capital markets for improved financing of social enterprises and the development of funding sources and investment instruments.

The establishment of social enterprise as a distinct, flourishing sector faces many challenges, but history is encouraging. Concerns over income inequality, environmental degradation and social justice have prompted people to search for and experiment with new ways to do business.

The recognition by many people of the failure of business and public policy to deal with these issues adequately has led, among other things, to the global proliferation of non-profit organisations. They have doubled in number in the US alone in the past 15 years.

This same awareness motivated people to align their investments better with their values and gave birth to socially responsible investing, which has also seen dramatic growth. In the UK, funds invested with a socially responsible focus have grown from £1bn to £764bn ($1,260bn, €897bn) in 12 years. The opportunity for social enterprise is huge. The Monitor Group estimates that this could be a $500bn-a-year sector within five to 10 years.

There are, of course, those who question the efficacy of social enterprise, including US President Barack Obama’s economic adviser Larry Summers, who wrote: “It is hard in this world to do well. It is hard to do good. When I hear a claim that an institution is going to do both, I reach for my wallet. You should too.”

While I also believe it is hard to do well and/or good, I am encouraged by social enterprise, which appeals to a larger part of the human spirit and experience than some of the traditional business models.

Social enterprise is not meant to replace the other sectors but is another way of dealing with common social problems that have not been successfully addressed to date. Is it possible? When history collides with motivation and opportunity anything is possible.

Chip Feiss is a senior fellow at the Center for Business and Government at Harvard Kennedy School of Government

www.ft.com/soapbox

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 [email protected])

FT: A crash course in emerging technologies

Excerpt: What Singularity University can do with certainty is to create an atmosphere where people aren’t afraid to dream. You can’t pre-script innovation. You can create an environment where you bring together the best and brightest from disparate fields and very often interesting things will happen.

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A crash course in emerging technologies

By David Gelles

Published: April 24 2009 11:27 | Last updated: April 24 2009 11:27

Singularity n. A point of infinite density and infinitesimal volume, at which space and time become infinitely distorted according to the theory of General Relativity. According to the big bang theory, a gravitational singularity existed at the beginning of the universe. Singularities are also believed to exist at the centre of black holes.
– The American Heritage Science Dictionary

In a spare one-room office at Nasa’s Silicon Valley campus, a small band of futurists is plotting to save the world. The means are not a revolutionary technology or a new world order (though both may be byproducts). Rather, a new, pseudo-academic institution called Singularity ­University is going to solve our grand challenges: poverty, hunger, energy scarcity and climate change. Among others. Through a combination of techno-optimism, wide-eyed idealism and belief in the perfectibility of human beings, these well-connected geeks are creating an institution meant to legitimise their most extreme thinking.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

More from Reportage - Nov-24

Forgive them for dreaming big. We’re in, after all, the cradle of the personal computer industry, the neighbourhood that brought forth Hewlett-Packard, Apple and Intel. The Googleplex is just north of SU’s office, Yahoo’s campus just south. Nasa tests the wings of its spacecraft here. Stanford University is up the road. And the Singularity team has landed some of these titans as partners in its endeavour.

Nasa offers more than office space: it’s the host, and will grant access to its specialists and facilities. Pete Worden, the director at Nasa’s Silicon Valley-based Ames Research Centre, is an enthusiastic supporter and brought the university on campus. Meanwhile, Google, the first corporate partner, has contributed $250,000 – and Google co-founder Larry Page attended the first meeting on the university last autumn. As one Singularity staffer said: “Here in Silicon Valley, we’re at the centre of the vortex.”

On a crisp February morning, I made the 45-minute drive south from San Francisco to Ames, hoping to understand how Singularity University might change the world – and why it had backing from such an illustrious group of supporters. After passing through a heavily fortified guard booth, I steered into the heart of the Ames campus, a tranquil collection of sandy, Spanish colonial-style buildings with well-manicured lawns. The stateliest of these structures, topped with a bell tower, is the Lunar Sciences building, where (funnily enough) scientists study the moon. Singularity University is coming together on the ground floor.

. . .

The office has all the trappings of a technology start-up: frisbees and footballs scattered about, a corner full of free snacks and drinks, and a communal table around which all members of the team work. Salim Ismail (his blog’s title: “You’ve Got Ismail!”) is the school’s executive director and a veteran of several technology-based start-ups. Forty-something with a bald pate and an easy smile, Ismail describes himself as “passionate about business, entrepreneurship, technology, skiing, wine [and] tennis” with “a side hobby in metaphysics and philosophy”. In other words, he’s the archetypal Silicon Valley male.

The Singularity University’s founders at the Lunar Science Institute

Ismail and his team are scrambling to get ready for Singularity University’s first nine-week course, set to commence on June 29. More than 1,200 applicants have expressed interest in attending; 40 will be selected for the first term; $25,000 a person covers tuition, room and board. The inaugural class will be a mix of graduate students and businessmen and women with time to spare. Classes are eight hours a day, six days a week.

During the first three weeks of the programme, students will receive an introduction to the school’s 10 main areas of study, including artificial intelligence and robotics, biotechnology and bioinformatics, and futures studies and forecasting. In the same way that a liberal arts education delivers an overview of literature, history and social theory, Singularity University intends to give students a crash course in subjects such as neuroscience and “human enhancement”. The second three weeks of the programme will give students a chance to study, in-depth, a subject new to them. An expert in nanotechnology, for example, might take on energy and the environment. “The biggest innovations in the world happen when you cross two disparate fields,” Ismail says. “[Johannes] Kepler looked at the moon and the tides and thought they may be connected. Today, people are doing 3D ‘printing’ of human organs using stem cells.” Linking early astronomy to stem cell technology is a bit of a stretch, but sure, intellectual cross-pollination can spur on innovation.

Will this model really vary so vastly from ordinary higher education? “Unfortunately, today’s graduate education is very narrow,” says Peter Diamandis, one of the school’s founders and the chief executive of the X Prize Foundation – which administers multimillion-dollar prizes for advancements in space, automotive and genomics technologies. “You become an expert on a particular channel on a nerve cell. That’s great, it allows you to go down deep, but there’s no place that allows you to step back, look at the big issues, and think.”

During the final three weeks of the programme, students will reconvene and focus on “one of the big, hairy challenges facing mankind”, such as hunger, climate change or energy scarcity. One lead contender for the first year’s challenge was how to administer telemedicine in remote parts of the world – but that has been eclipsed by the vaguer, Miss America-esque question: “how can you positively impact one billion people in a decade?”

As part of my tour, Ismail takes me around the Ames campus, or at least those few parts of it we are allowed to enter. At the west end of the complex, Nasa’s kilometre-long wind tunnels (the largest in the world) test the aerodynamics of aircraft and spacecraft. Nearby, control centres support Nasa missions such as the Kepler project, which is searching for habitable planets beyond our solar system.

A former zeppelin hangar and retired aircraft at the Nasa Ames campus which houses the Singularity University

But beside these high-tech marvels stand some true technological relics, reminders of how quickly the future becomes the past. To the east, flanking a runway, are three gargantuan zeppelin hangars. The largest is a Modernist revival behemoth and one of the biggest freestanding structures in the world, decrepit after years of disuse. On the edge of these installations is a series of dilapidated offices; next to one, the nose of a retired military jet rusts in the California sun.

Singularity University was inspired by the success of the International Space University, founded in 1987 in Strasbourg, France – by Diamandis. Through a similar series of courses and projects, the ISU aims to prepare students for work in the space industries – everything from space engineering to space policy and law. What began as a quirky programme for aspiring astronauts has evolved into a well-respected, accredited institution. A few years ago, Diamandis and the inventor Ray Kurzweil, a longtime friend, wondered if they could do the same trick again, with a school educating students about emerging technologies. Using Kurzweil’s 2005 book The Singularity is Near as a sort of founding document, they got to work, and last year secured a lease at Nasa and a team of three full-time employees and 30 largely volunteer faculty members. It is set up as a non-profit-making organisation, with Kurzweil as the chancellor and Diamandis the executive director.

A few days before visiting Ames, I caught up with Diamandis at San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel. Diamandis was attending the Cleantech Forum, a gathering of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists hoping to cash in on green technology. Diamandis also sees a market here – who doesn’t? – and hopes SU can contribute. Yet he may be a bit more extreme than his fellow forum-goers: technology won’t just solve our energy needs, Diamandis argues, but all the world’s problems. “People think there is always going to be hunger,” he said. “Well, no. That’s not true. There doesn’t always have to be hunger.” Rather, in the near future, nanobots – minuscule robots capable of performing exceptionally complex tasks – will be able quickly and cheaply to produce food from raw materials, say algae or dirt.

“What is food?” he pondered, lounging on a sofa in one of the hotel’s dining rooms. It was early in the morning, but Diamandis, a short, muscular man with wavy hair and eyes that fix on you like a tractor beam, declined coffee or breakfast. “It’s the rearrangement of atoms in a form the body can take in.” Design a machine that can rearrange dust into an apple, and voilà! – hunger is eradicated.

The term “the Singularity” was popularised by Kurzweil and is now a catchphrase, in tech circles at least. It describes “a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed”, according to The Singularity is Near, which has become a veritable bible among futurists. In it, Kurzweil speculates that by the middle of this century, artificial intelligence will surpass human intellect, and enhanced humans will work in concert with super-smart machines to manage the world’s resources.

Singularity University founder Ray Kurzweil believes that one day the world will be dominated by robots – perhaps successors to “QA” (for Question/Answer), pictured here, the new telepresence robot from Anybots

Kurzweil, a 61-year-old former whizz kid from New York City, has a rosy view of world domination by machines. Tiny robots will create abundant energy and food while reversing pollution and climate change. A technological utopia will ensue. Some critics – those who concede he might be right about technological change transforming the human experience – worry that smarter-than-human robots will turn on their creators, and that a malicious artificial intelligence will wipe out mankind (Kurzweil doesn’t rule out the possibility, but thinks it unlikely). Other critics read about his desire to achieve immortality (he takes hundreds of dietary supplements a day), or his questioning of whether the speed of light is an immutable limit (he thinks not), and decide they’d rather not engage in the argument.

And yet while a race of intelligent robots to rival humans is still the stuff of fantasy, machines are advancing at impressive speeds. Earlier this month, a robot at Aberystwyth University in Wales formulated a hypothesis about the genetics of bakers’ yeast – without intervention by its creators. Then, the robot carried out experiments to test its theory. Back at the Singularity offices, Ismail says: “This is going to happen in an increasing way, but how are we going to manage it? We need to be a step ahead of it. SU’s mandate is to understand and manage it in a more proactive way.”

Every year, the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a Silicon Valley-based non-profit organisation, hosts a summit focused on the future. Mainstream academics, professionals, entrepreneurs and pundits attend. More mainstream yet, The Singularity is Near is now being made into a film (directed by Kurzweil – who also stars in it). But many people who preach the Singularity are involved with more controversial movements. Transhumanism, which aims to “extend human capabilities”, takes the Singularity as one of its intellectual pillars. Many “Singulartarians” are also advocates of cryonics, the process of freezing a recently deceased body in the hope that future medical technologies will be able to revive it. Kurzweil is signed up to be frozen at his death.

Diamandis takes great pains to say that the school is a stand-alone ­venture, not affiliated with any of the other books, groups or events that also claim the Singularity moniker. “The term ‘singularity’, for me, is a catch-all phrase meaning that we’re dealing with exponentially growing technologies that have huge and powerful implications for humanity,” he tells me. “I am not promoting or predicting what people might call ‘The Singularity’.” Ismail and his team also try to distance themselves from the diehard Singulartarians, despite their many overlapping affiliations.

The week I visited Singularity University’s offices, technology seemed to have let down both Nasa and Google. On the Tuesday, a Nasa satellite meant to study global carbon dioxide emissions failed to reach orbit, scuttling the $278m mission – just when the government institution needed to persuade the new US president of its merits. The next day, Gmail, Google’s e-mail service, experienced a two-hour outage in the middle of the European workday, disrupting productivity and calling into question an increasing reliance on web services.

Technology, as if people outside Silicon Valley need reminding, remains unreliable, and machines, even when running smoothly, remain subject to human error. Bill McKibben, an environmentalist who has spoken out against rapid technological change, told me he was reserving judgment on Singularity University until it was under way. But he seemed sceptical of its ability to effect serious change. He said its success would largely depend on whether “the students who end up there want to solve actual human problems, which can sometimes benefit from technology, usually in tandem with lots of other changes. Or if they are sci-fi, afraid-of-dying types dreaming of the next big score to be made.”

. . .

McKibben also cautions against overlooking ethical concerns amid the heady frenzy of innovation that Singularity University hopes to cultivate. “It’s important to have real, meaningful debates before we cross important lines – germline genetic manipulation, for instance,” he said. “The technical ability to do this stuff confers no special insight on whether it should be done. I trust the visceral revulsion against ‘designer babies’ more than the smooth assurances of the boosters of the sleek future.”

McKibben is certainly not alone in his reservations – and since Singularity University was first announced to great fanfare this winter, both Google and Nasa seem to have begun shying away from their involvement with the school. Worden, the director of the Ames center, one of the University’s founders and the man who got it housed on Nasa’s campus, turned down repeated requests to be interviewed for this piece. In fact, no one from Nasa would speak on the record about Singularity University.

Google, meanwhile, denied repeated requests for an on-the-record interview with a spokesperson. Finally, after encouragement from the SU team, the company offered up Chris DiBona, a specialist in open-source computing and Google’s point person for dealings with the school. DiBona seemed excited about the opportunity to work with an interdisciplinary group. He felt like his speciality, network computing, really could help deliver telemedicine in remote parts of the world. But even DiBona was mindful of the university’s strange pedigree. “Some of the stuff feels very science fiction to me,” he said. “But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There’s an idealism that speaks well of the university. When you try to work on the future, you’re going to be wrong sometimes. A little zaniness goes a long way.”

For all the sci-fi overtones, the projects that come out of Singularity University will be well-intentioned, and it seems unlikely that any malicious artificial intelligence will be designed in the halls of Ames Research Center – or at least in SU’s corner. When pressed, Ismail backed away from the assertion that Singularity University would be delivering deployment-ready solutions to problems like hunger and energy scarcity. “If we do nothing else,” he says, “just to bring people up to speed on all these advances is an accomplishment and a full-time job.”

What Singularity University can do with certainty, he says, is create an atmosphere where people aren’t afraid to dream. “You can’t pre-script innovation,” he said. “You can create an environment where you bring together the best and brightest from disparate fields and very often interesting things will happen.” But that begs a question: is Silicon Valley a place where anyone is really afraid to dream big? Must you pay $25,000 for the privilege? The big dreamers, it seems, may be the Singularity University team, hitching a ride on a popular catchphrase and harnessing it to corporate funding, government aid and a steady revenue stream from wealthy students.

Before I left Ames, Ismail loaded me up with swag. He gave me a calendar from Nasa showing pictures of the cosmos, a copy of The Singularity Is Near signed by Kurzweil, and a handful of Singularity University refrigerator magnets – a refreshingly simple technology, reliable, very human, and timeless.

David Gelles is a reporter in the FT’s San Francisco bureau

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. 

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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.