Posts Tagged ‘Fall 2010’

Fall Conference: Women Growing From Micro to Millions

Posted on: December 16th, 2010 by socialventurenetwork No Comments

Written by Tamara Schweitzer

On Saturday afternoon, Nell Merlino, founder and president of the non-profit organization Count Me In for Women’s Economic Independence, led an extremely relevant breakout session for women (and men who want to help them!) grow their micro businesses into million dollar enterprises. Nell led the session with three panelists, all women entrepreneurs who have won Count Me In’s “Make Mine a Million $ Business” competition and all are socially conscious enterprises. The panel consisted of Sarah Endline, the founder of activist candy company sweetriot; Dawn Gluskin, the founder and CEO of SolTec Electronics, which sells obsolete electronics to engineers and manufacturers; and Gina Stern, the founder of d_parture spa, a spa experience designed specifically for airport terminals.

All of these women have encountered struggles and setbacks along their path to growing their businesses, and they shared their experiences and lessons learned with an engaged group of attendees. Nell says one of the obstacles that many women entrepreneurs face is they get stuck in the micro category, and don’t know how to get their business to the next level in both size and revenue. Nell cited a staggering statistic that 70 percent of the 10 million women businesses in this country generate less than $50K in revenue. Additionally, only 243,000 of those 10 million businesses are at a million in revenue, compared to 1 million men who are at a million. However, given the sheer numbers of women business owners (and the fact that more women are starting businesses today than men), the group represents enormous economic potential. This prompted Nell to start the Make Mine a Million program in partnership with American Express, to give women the tools and encouragement to dream bigger. The organization has a goal of helping a million women hit the million revenue mark by the end of this decade. It’s amazing to think about what meeting that goal would mean. According to Nell, it would mean a trillion dollars in revenue for women-owned businesses, and the creation of at least 4 million jobs (assuming an average of 4 jobs created per business).

The Make Mine a Million program has already achieved impressive results (there are 192 awardees to date and 41 percent have reached the million mark), and the women in the room that day proved that it is possible even if the face of incredible odds. And, while achieving that million revenue mark is the immediate goal of Make Mine a Million, the breakout session provided guidance and encouragement on a number of issues facing women business owners today. When Dawn of SolTec Electronics launched her business in 2008, she had a 6-month-old daughter and she was the only one working out of her living room. She and her husband had closed out their retirement funds and she had 10 credit cards maxed out. Just two short years later, she has 15 employees, a 2500 square office, and $2.5 million in revenue. Another encouraging tale of beating the odds is Gina’s, who was on the verge of losing d_parture spa’s best retail location in Newark’s Liberty airport due to a deceitful deal by the Port Authority to take away her lease. Through the support of the Count Me In network and Nell’s guidance, Gina not only fought the Port Authority and won, but her Newark location just got nominated as the most innovative eco concept in airports.

The session certainly generated a lot of lively conversation and will no doubt prompt more women to take control of their economic independence, because as Nell said, “growth is a decision that you can make.”

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Plenary with Katrina vanden Heuvel

Posted on: December 14th, 2010 by socialventurenetwork No Comments

Written by Tamara Schweitzer

As a cap to a weekend that focused on the theme of “Building the Bridge from Passion to Action,” Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation, took the stage on Saturday night to talk about what that action might look like, and what the role of socially responsible business leaders is. Katrina put a lot of faith in SVN members to mobilize people to action. She doesn’t believe that we can have a just and equitable America without progressives and socially responsible business people at the table. Katrina referred to the group as the “enlightened business community,” and those are the people we need to stand up and organize. She talked about the potential of this community to become the antidote to the chamber of commerce.

According to Katrina, real action will be defined by the possibilities of forming public-private partnerships. She said there is danger to letting America be defined by the big banks. One of the ways that we can take action is by taking that leap to forge more relationships with the private sector. “Privatization has too often led to the privatization of profit and the socialization of risk,” she said. Once the conversation gets going, there is an opportunity to start strengthening democracy and what Katrina calls “sustainable politics.”

She pointed to the example of Elizabeth Warren and her recent appointment as the special advisor to the newly formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She says we shouldn’t forget that there are changes like that happening, and the more we get behind these developments, the more the conversation will switch to right vs. wrong in this country.

Katrina added we need to continue rethinking the role of corporations in our society. She talked about the admiration she has for B Lab and the work they are doing in creating a new classification for socially responsible businesses called the B Corp (Better Corporation).

Often times, action stems simply from reframing the conversation and by measuring what we are doing by different standards. Rather than focusing on the lack of opportunities, we need to be fighting to make sure alternative ideas are not excluded from our debates. There are huge demographic shifts happening in this country – there are more young people, African Americans, and women that are becoming part of a rising electorate, but much of this shift and the progress that is being made, is invisible to people in power. The Nation is helping build the bridge to action by being a storyteller for the positive steps that have taken place, and to ensure that mission-driven initiatives are heard. The publication will be launching a rubric to look at “models that work” – the idea being to create a platform in the magazine to call out people and initiatives that are succeeding. Ultimately, it is up to us to tell the story the way we want it told.

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SVN 2010 Innovation Awards

Posted on: November 18th, 2010 by socialventurenetwork No Comments

Written by Tamara Schweitzer

One of the highlights of the SVN Fall Conference was the Innovation Awards Ceremony, which took place Friday night and honored six young social entrepreneurs that have proven to be innovators across many different areas of social responsibility. Awards ceremony co-host Bryan Welch of Ogden Publications, kicked off the evening by saying that the awardees represent the new ways that these entrepreneurs are creating value for consumers and businesses. They were chosen because of the role they have played in solving the challenges of our time, challenges that many traditional businesses are unequipped to solve. Fellow co-host and journalist Simran Sethi (and author of the book Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy) talked about innovation as a form of social influence, and that what these entrepreneurs have accomplished has the potential to create both radical and evolutionary change. In the spirit of celebrating their innovative achievements, each of the award recipients had a chance to talk about what they’ve been up to and their hopes for the future.

There was a lot of excitement around Nikhil Arora and Alex Velez, the 23 year-old co-founders of BTTR Ventures. They started their business, which grows gourmet mushrooms from coffee grounds waste, after graduating from UC Berkeley last year, and are some of the youngest social entrepreneurs to be recognized. They represent a new trend of young entrepreneurs purposefully going into the social enterprise space. While Nikhil and Alex are still a very young business and there’s a lot that they still need to figure out, they have made incredible progress in their first year. They now sell the mushrooms to 89 Whole Foods locations in the West, and they sell DIY mushroom kits for people to grow in their own kitchens. They are also putting 10,000 pounds of coffee grounds waste to good use every week.

Tevis Howard, who founded non-profit KOMAZA, is a great example of how widening our perspective beyond what’s happening in the U.S. is an important responsibility of social entrepreneurs. A post-high school trip to Kenya to do malaria research opened Tevis’s eyes to the extreme poverty of the region and planted the seeds for the development of KOMAZA. The non-profit helps to get farmers in Africa out of poverty by working with them to plant trees that in turn allow them to manufacture and sell wood products. He calls the concept microforestry, and his goal is to become the largest forestry company in Africa, and look for ways to transition into a for-profit model. Tevis is changing the lives of many impoverished Africans, not by giving them money, but by giving them the resources to create their own income sources.

Jessamyn Waldman and her non-profit Hot Bread Kitchen has a similar model of enabling low-income women to create better lives for themselves. Jessamyn was not at the ceremony to collect her award (it was her wedding weekend!), but she talked about her business model via a taped video interview. Jessamyn’s goal is to help immigrant women get the crucial skills they need to succeed in the culinary industry. She employs them at Hot Bread Kitchen in Brooklyn, where they bake multi-ethnic breads and also have the opportunity to take classes to develop their business, English and other job skills. After developing the necessary professional skills, many of the employees go on to hold management positions in bakeries or launch their own food businesses.

Both Danny Kennedy of Sungevity and Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins of Green For All are about innovating in the green jobs and green energy industries. They both have a mission of making the green economy more accessible to all. Danny is in the business of solar power and he is innovating the industry in unprecedented ways. Sungevity’s model is about selling solar paneling through an online leasing program, which gives customers the freedom of no money down and of being able to pay for the power over time. The simple model is breaking down barriers for families that might not otherwise have had the means to go solar. His next step is to issue solar bonds to help reduce the financial barriers.

Similarly, Phaedra is working to create more opportunities and jobs for all people in the green industry, hence the name, Green For All. Growing up in a small town in California where the air quality was rated the worst in the nation, Phaedra understood that a healthy environment wasn’t available to all, and that many families didn’t have the choice of improving their lives. Phaedra has partnered with businesses, government, and grassroots movements to make sure neighborhoods like the one she grew up in don’t get left behind in the movement for a greener economy.

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Jonathan Rose: “Repairing the Fabric of Communities”

Posted on: November 17th, 2010 by socialventurenetwork No Comments

Written by Tamara Schweitzer

The opening plenary session at SVN’S Fall Invitational set the tone for an inspirational and enthusiastic weekend. Jonathan Rose, who founded Jonathan Rose Companies, LLC, a real estate development firm that focuses on green urban solutions using a multidisciplinary approach to building and development, took the stage on Thursday night. The session was called “Repairing the Fabric of Communities,” and that’s exactly what Jonathan is doing with his $1 billion worth of projects that range from one of the first LEED Gold commercial buildings in Little Rock, Arkansas to the new Cooper Union green academic building in New York City.

On the theme of repairing the fabric of our communities, Jonathan urges that the solution to our overpopulation problems, climate change, oil dependence, and the abundance of poverty, lies in our cities. Jonathan proposes several solutions for how we can repair our economy by rebuilding and reorganizing our cities. First, he says that there needs to be huge investments in infrastructure projects. One of the ways to combat suburban sprawl and create a revival in our country’s cities is to create the infrastructure to support it. This means better access to public transportation, that is integrated to a much greater extent in our communities, and that will service more cultural, educational, and social institutions. Investing in infrastructure such as regional high-speed rail systems will not only create jobs, but it will also provide for richer lives for residents. Bringing people back to cities is also crucial to the development of more public transportation. Jonathan says we need the density of urban multi-family units to fuel the demand for mass transit. He believes it’s important to build local knowledge that mass transit is a liberator, and if transit systems are properly integrated into our communities, we will be making an essential step towards economic revival.

The types of developments that we build are also an important aspect of repairing our communities. Jonathan Rose Companies employs something they call multi-use properties, meaning the development serves several purposes beyond the incorporation of green building methods and sustainable materials. Jonathan discussed the example of the Via Verde project that’s currently being developed in an area of the South Bronx. The residential units will provide affordable housing for both low-income and middle-income families and is designed to encourage residents to spend more time amongst nature, as well as promote wellness. There are community garden spaces where residents will be able to grow their own produce, the multi-level design will prompt residents to get outside and walk more, a health-oriented retail space will create jobs, and live-work spaces will also facilitate community connections.

Jonathan also made the point that building green does not necessarily mean a greater cost of development. The Jonathan Rose Companies are finding ways to use the indigenous properties of a building to create energy savings. Something as simple as the placement of windows and ventilation ducts, can increase circulation and insulation, and can be done at a cost equivalent to any other development. Needless to say, we were all very inspired and energized by their work.

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Van Jones: “Beyond Green Jobs: The Next American Economy & The Politics of Hope”

Posted on: November 12th, 2010 by socialventurenetwork No Comments

Written by Tamara Schweitzer

Despite the early Saturday morning start time, there was a packed room when Van Jones took the stage on the second day of the SVN member gathering, and he did not disappoint. After a tough year of scrutiny and speculation following his September 2009 resignation as the green jobs advisor to the Obama White House, Van Jones came to SVN with a renewed spirit and optimism, and his message about keeping hope alive despite the dismal political atmosphere definitely resonated with all.

Van, who is the founder of Green For All, Color of Change, and the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, acknowledged the feelings of disillusionment – and even depression – that seem to have taken over the country in the past couple years. “There is a level of pain in this country,” he said, “and there is a hope deficit right now.” Usually when these feelings arise, Van says people are quick to point fingers and blame our leader. They are upset and angry because the president hasn’t made all the changes that he promised, or because they are questioning the political agenda of the White House. Van believes the loss of faith in Obama has actually enabled extremist groups like the Tea Party to come to power and make inroads as much as they have. Too many people in this country are focusing on what hasn’t happened or gotten accomplished, and that is becoming destructive. Van reminded us that Obama’s campaign was never about “Yes I Can,” but rather it was “Yes We Can,” and that we shouldn’t blame one person if we are unhappy about the level of change that has taken place.

We need to take some collective responsibility for making things happen. Van says social entrepreneurs of all people out there, should understand that change is not easy. Many have had to fight against the odds – against misinformation, against ignorance – to change the status quo and accomplish what they have. “What we have to understand as a movement is that change is harder than hope,” Van said. Especially during this poignant time — and on the eve of the midterm elections — it is up to us to be leaders and visionaries within our own circles and start to change the mindset of the majority. If we don’t believe in our president, Van said, then that has a negative ripple effect throughout our communities.

Instead of dwelling on the pain, we need to look at how far we’ve come. Van believes that SVN represents an important success story about American enterprise and entrepreneurship that’s full of courage and innovation. But, we aren’t doing a good enough job of broadcasting that story. He says we can’t sit back and wait for Barack Obama to give a speech about what we’ve accomplished with the green economy, although there is plenty to be proud of. Because of President Obama’s policies, we now have 80,000 people working in the wind industry (as many as in coal mining), and 36,000 jobs that are supported by the solar industry. Additionally, there are 3,600 renewable energy projects happening in 46 states. Van ended by telling the group that the best thing we can do is to be cheerleading for our cause. “The movement that we’re part of needs to grab a microphone,” said Van. “Let’s get that mic back and not wait for one guy in the White House to let the country hear itself sing again.”

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