Get Inspired

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.