The west-end Toronto company reclaims a chocolate legacy that might seem un-chocolatey to many — a healthy, spiritual, dark and bitter-tasting food and drink hailing from Mexico Profundo, the ancient Indigenous Mayan culture of Mexico.

ChocoSol is in the business of selling chocolate bars and drinking chocolates, though its business would more accurately be described as a mission to sell goods or services with a social or environmental purpose.

Even by the standards of a “social enterprise,” ChocoSol’s business model seems quirky. Its unbleached packages feature a Mexican Day of the Dead-inspired skull, with bike chains for eyes and teeth. The company’s “ChocoSolistas” also call themselves chocolate “pedallers” and take pride in using bicycles to transport their display tables and power the blenders that make chocolate drinks at farmers’ market stands across the city. The bicycles brand them as supporters of neighbourhood technologies that feature sweat-equity over bank financing.

ChocoSol founder and owner Michael Sacco, who has a side hustle as a PhD student at Trent University in Peterborough, likes to call the company a learning enterprise, because its staff and customers are learning how to produce and live in tune with the environment. But the real learners may well be today’s conventional businesses that can be taught a thing or two about engaging sought-after youthful customers hungry for food choices that smack of authentic and sustainable experiences.

In its latest Flavor & Trend Forecast, marketing agency THP predicts that in 2020 “brands will need to champion a collective appreciation for sustainability, whole ingredients and minimal processing in order to thrive within this emerging consumer narrative.”

ChocoSol has that whole package down pat.

That’s a way of telling informed customers that ChocoSol’s chocolate comes not from monoculture plantations with reputations for using pesticides and child labour, but from diverse gardens planted with vanilla, achiote peppers, coffee, hardwood and fruits alongside cacao trees.

As a Toronto food policy enthusiast and chair of the Coalition for a Green Economy, I toured these forest gardens with Sacco in 2007. Through “horizontal” trade, ChocoSol cuts out the vertical supply chain relied on by most big companies and deals directly with producers, commonly offering them 15 per cent above the going international wholesale price (up to 300 per cent more for some rarer beans). Relying on face-to-face relationships, direct traders reduce the red tape common with fair trade labels that deal with large-volume producers.

But behind its social, ethical and small-scale artisanal production methods, ChocoSol runs as much on hard-edged business forecasts as integrity and soul.

“They’ve got what all their competitors would die for,” says Barry Martin, owner of the communications firm Hypenotic, which handles ChocoSol’s account, as well as that of many others in the “purpose-driven” space of Toronto food-based businesses.

“ChocoSol makes what people need, does it in a way that’s memorable, generates an experience, tells a great story that makes it bigger than life,” Martin says. “Of all my clients, ChocoSol best expresses the whole range that companies need to strive for” to avoid the downward spiral of competing as a commodity for lowest cost.

Sacco, who brands himself an “ecopreneur,” has raised up the company by its bootstraps since 2006, when he launched with a $15,000 line of credit and $15,000 “from the bank of friends and family.” Purchases from these “bankers” and their contacts probably accounted for most of the $20,000 in ChocoSol sales that year.

In 2019, says Sacco, ChocoSol will clear $1.8 million in sales, half to wholesale accounts — despite the fact it retails for twice the price of conventional chocolate.

The company won top prizes at the 2016 and 2017 Canadian National Competition for chocolate-makers and took gold for its Jaguar Pure, and bronze and silver for its Jaguar Swirl and Crunch, in this year’s International Chocolate Awards.

Jaguar is a ChocoSol standout specialty, inspired by a woman elder from San Pablo Etla, just outside the city of Oaxaca. She took Sacco under her wing when he was a graduate student doing action research on Indigenous food traditions in Oaxaca, the unofficial capital of Mayan corn, cacao and grasshopper-based cuisine.

Struck by Jaguar’s commercial potential to support forest-based peasant-style agriculture in village communities in the Oaxaca region, Sacco developed “direct trade” relationships with small family farmers who sold him chocolate, coffee and vanilla from their communal forest gardens. To support a premium niche market around Jaguar, Sacco and community groups planted more than 50,000 trees yielding the Jaguar species of cacao around tiny villages such as Felipe de Léon.

“Our vision is to reimagine opportunities, techniques and organization models for small-plot intensive and underfinanced producers,” Sacco says.

These forest gardens are an economic boost to villagers and also sink enough carbon in the soil and generate enough plant and insect biodiversity to offset any environmental costs of taking cacao and vanilla beans by boat and train to Toronto.

 

Compassionate cacao

Business analyst Grayson Bass, who’s taught innovation strategies at the University of Toronto and is about to launch an Applied Innovation Certificate program there, thinks ChocoSolistas are spot on the money for a wide spectrum of change- and profit-making economic transformations of the near future.

Sooner rather than later, Bass says, social enterprises “will make the Fortune 500.” Why? Because they have compassion, he says. Compassion is not just a sign of emotional intelligence, he reasons. A “strong compassion muscle” is the precursor to business smarts, he says, because it leads innovators to ask the central question: What good does this do?

This gives compassionate entrepreneurs the edge they need to move up the ladder of innovation, he says.

On the lower steps on the ladder, innovators can optimize — find a faster, cheaper, more effective way of doing the same thing. They can also sustain — keep ahead of competitors by adding new services to an existing device.

At the top rung are disruptive innovators who change the nature of the game. To reach the highest rungs, entrepreneurs need to ask a “why” question, says Bass. That’s where companies such as ChocoSol excel, he says. Their “why” — a passion for a tasty health food that supports peasant producers and environmentally friendly production and distribution — leads them to change the consumer market for chocolate.

“Compassionate organizations have an advantage in solving problems and creating disruption because they have a problem to solve, not just a structure to fit into,” Bass says.

Sacco winces when business people call him compassionate or idealistic. “I don’t want to be called a hippie entrepreneur,” he says. “I’m offering a different value proposition.”

This fall, ChocoSol introduced “Halloween chocolate that isn’t scary” — no child labour and no environmental destruction. But that’s true of all their chocolate, including their seasonal Christmas Cranberry bar, dotted with local organic cranberries, or their Merry-Mint, made with dried mint grown on ChocoSol’s green roof. That roof is where cacao bean shells and other food wastes are composted to become soil to nourish new plants for tomorrow’s bars — the model of a circular economy, where yesterday’s waste becomes tomorrow’s food.

“My biggest challenge is focus,” says Sacco, who struggles with finishing his PhD, on the role of cacao and maize (corn) in Indigenous agriculture, while raising three children and managing an underfinanced social enterprise.

Affinity marketing

There are hidden strengths in a social enterprise, Sacco says. Having a cause helps define ChocoSol’s niche and also helps with customer loyalty, staff retention and developing new revenue streams, such as workshops for students, he says.

“We don’t lose any time selling, persuading or convincing customers to pay extra for real cacao mindfully produced. We work with the willing. That’s affinity marketing,” he says. “Our customers are our ambassadors, which is the best advertising we can afford.”

Sacco would like to see other social enterprises feature hundreds of other overlooked plant medicines that can be vehicles for stories — stories that are often suppressed by the way food is commonly marketed as a no-name and placeless commodity divorced from culture or social purpose.

This vision corresponds with the business scenario laid out to an agribusiness summit in New York in early December. Nick Fereday, of Netherlands-based Rabobank, a major banker to the global food and agriculture sector, predicted that today’s classic “Big Food” brands are doomed.

Upstarts “are tapping into the consumer trends of convenience, of health and wellness, of being a premium product and all wrapped up in a very, very strong mission statement,” Fereday told his audience of Big Food executives. If the big brands don’t smarten up, “we will see the end of iconic brands,” he warned. “By 2030, everything will be niche and focused on small markets.”

Alison Blay-Palmer, newly appointed UNESCO Chair in Food, Biodiversity and Sustainability Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, agrees that food has what it takes to attract change-makers.

“Food provides a lever to address many intersecting challenges: climate change, biodiversity, rapid urbanization, health, equity, community well-being and more,” she says. “People who can envision how these issues are interconnected understand the potential of food for far-reaching transformation.”

Most of all, having a cause gets Sacco and his team of 25 full- and part-time staff to work every day. “I don’t think you can start with a business plan,” he says. “You need to start with something that calls you, or you’re off to a bad start.”

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The working hum of the silos faded long ago and the bustle of “The Vic” gave way to silence after 122 years of service when it merged with the city’s superhospital at a new site in 2015. All that these structures house now is empty space, something a new local organization called Entremise is fighting hard to reverse.

Entremise was started after its founders struggled to answer why, when there are so many people and projects needing space, any building should sit idle. With funding from and in partnership with the city, the Maison de l’innovation sociale (MIS) and the McConnell Foundation, the non-profit has as its first pilot project transformed a formerly vacant public industrial building in the city’s Griffintown area into a 5,000 square foot co-working space and incubator for a diverse group of tenants (think startups, artists, creative industry companies and other non-profits). Demonstrating what can be achieved with some new paint and fresh thinking, the Young Project has clearly taken the late urbanist Jane Jacobs’ axiom that “new ideas need old buildings” and placed it at the core of its vision.

The Young Project is not designed to last, but the concept behind it is. Before Entremise’s involvement, the city already had cemented plans to demolish the building to make way for social housing. But now, instead of leaving it mothballed during the months and possibly years it will take for that to be realized, Entremise is filling a much-needed societal gap by matchmaking deserving and innovative tenants with affordable, flexible and temporary space. The term for this “in-between” use of buildings is called transitional urbanism, and the Young Project represents this promising idea in action by demonstrating that you can regenerate and requalify urban space in a totally different way. It is a model that Entremise hopes will serve as a paradigm shift in the way we think about urban planning in North America.

“When a building is empty, immediately it deteriorates exponentially,” says social entrepreneur and Entremise co-founder Mallory Wilson. “There are squatters, illegal occupancy, danger for young urban explorers, and drug dealing. If it sits idle for a while, the chances of it being demolished are significantly elevated. You also have sustainable development, heritage, symbolism and history lost. The list is pretty long.”

The costs to owners of an empty structure are also significant as their insurance fees go up, while property values can go down by as much as 18 per cent, according to Wilson. In 2016 alone, six heritage buildings in Montréal were lost forever to fire, another unfortunately common hazard of deadbolting an unoccupied edifice.

From empty Gothic churches and art-deco theatres to mid-century post offices and Victorian-era mansions, Montréal’s portfolio of empty heritage buildings is vast and varied. For Dinu Bumbaru, Héritage Montréal’s policy director, the transitional urbanism model represents a new way for the city to put its heritage to good working use.

“Heritage buildings often are complex situations – they can be very iconic, and they can provide a lot of embedded meaning – they’re more than square footage,” explains Bumbaru on these buildings’ character and personality. “They resonate with people’s minds and hearts.”

According to Bumbaru there is a growing sense in the heritage community that participants in the public, private and non-profit sector need to work together to bring new life to these buildings, make them part of the fabric of their neighbourhood and connect them to the larger urban environment.

“We can have a non-demolition strategy, but increasingly we are looking at a revitalization and repurposing approach to conservation,” says Bumbaru on why Héritage Montréal has a strong interest in taking the kind of approach to buildings that Entremise has been exploring. “Unlike a painting or a sculpture or an artefact that you can put in any safe environment,” he explains, “the way to preserve a building is to use it properly, to occupy it and make it useful. It’s a heritage which is made to earn a living in society.”

The City of Montréal also believes that filling the close to 900 vacant buildings that Entremise has recorded (approximately 120 of which are heritage designated) is ultimately the best conservation strategy for the metropolitan and has made it a part of its Heritage Action Plan. “Initiatives such as the Young Project help maintain safer neighbourhoods and promote Montréal’s economic vitality by providing a lever to businesses that are growing but still need a little help,” says Montréal Mayor Valérie Plante on how the Entremise approach addresses a number of important issues in the city.

What attracted the McConnell Foundation to support the launch of the Young Project was the social inclusion aspect of the venture and the broad potential for adopting the model Canada-wide. Jayne Engle, the program director and lead for the Cities for People initiative at the foundation, says that all cities have unmet social needs, but they also have resources available to address them. Too often though, cities are not adept at best matching the two. “Transitional urbanism fits with what I call seeing the city as a commons,” says Engle. “It’s about seeing the city as a set of shared resources and actually better using them in a way that adds up to collective good.”

The success of the Young Project has its founders envisioning a network of spaces like it throughout Montréal and in all Canadian cities. Maybe one day soon, having any building – no matter its size, type or heritage – vacant for an indeterminate amount of time will be a thing of the past.

The post No vacancy appeared first on Corporate Knights.

Whether they work in healthcare, education, justice or agricultural reform, social innovators savour Skoll World as an opportunity to reflect and recharge – especially in today’s era of me-first nationalism. To revive and refresh your own inner activist, here are seven takeaways from the 2018 Skoll World Forum:

1. The event began with a welcome from Skoll World cofounder Stephan Chambers to “entrepreneurs, artists, activists, investors, scholars, innovators and resistors.” He said, “You make so much that is warm, humane and inspiring… You are a barrier against disinformation, duplicity and destruction.” If nothing else, it’s clear the Trump presidency has given social entrepreneurs a new sense of purpose.

2. Every year, Skoll World presents its Global Treasure Award. Previous winners include Bono, Nelson Mandela and Pakistan’s Malala Yousafzai. This year’s winner was former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, 93, who’s been building homes with Habitat for Humanity while Donald Trump was licensing his name to shiny towers with gold bathroom fixtures. As president, Carter negotiated the 1979 Israel-Egypt peace treaty, and later founded the Carter Center to resolve conflicts, protect human rights and combat disease. (The centre targeted Guinea worm, a devastating tropical disease, when there were 3.5 million cases. Today, the caseload is down to five.)

Carter recalled that upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, he’d declared inequality of income the world’s biggest challenge. Today, he says, the issue is gender discrimination. He says the world is missing 160 million women – mainly due to prenatal screenings that encourage families to terminate pregnancies if they find it’s a girl. “I have pledged, for the rest of my life,” he said, “to devote my time to fighting for the equality of people on earth.”

Carter encouraged his audience to oppose today’s growing intolerance. “I think we have a great opportunity ahead of us, of excitement and purpose in life, as we reach out to people who are different from us and find out how wonderful they are and how much they can add to our own lives.”

3. The philosophy driving social entrepreneurs was best expressed by 24-year-old Alpha Ngwenya of Zimbabwe. Now a business student at Arizona State University, Ngwenya is founder of his own non-profit, Strong Woman Strong Love (SWSL).

Two years ago, Ngwenya was volunteering at a women’s shelter in Phoenix. He was cleaning a washroom when a client pounded on the door. She later explained she was in a rush because the shelter didn’t provide feminine hygiene products. So Ngwenya bought 40 pads at a dollar store to donate to the shelter. At his next shift, the woman smiled and said, “Something happened! They have feminine-hygiene products now.” Her positive response inspired Ngwenya to launch SWSL to distribute hygiene products to women’s organizations around Arizona. He also founded a chapter in Kampala, Uganda, to teach women in safe houses to make and sell their own feminine products.

“The fact that I listened to what someone else experienced helped me make this impact,” said Ngwenya. “If everyone in this world starts to care about things that don’t concern them, a lot of things are going to change.”

4. Through its theme, The Power of Proximity, Skoll World urged social entrepreneurs to rediscover their missions, their clients, and each other. The need is all around us, noted Bryan Stevenson, a Harvard-trained lawyer from Montgomery, Alabama. Stevenson founded the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) to represent Alabama prisoners who’ve been denied a fair trial. The EJI also defends anyone facing the death penalty, as Alabama is the only state that denies legal assistance to prisoners on “death row.”

“It is in proximity to the poor, the excluded, the neglected, that we understand things we cannot understand from a distance,” Stevenson said. “Many of us have been taught that if there’s a bad part of town, you need to stay away. Many of us have been taught that if there are parts of the globe where there is conflict and suffering, you should stay far away… All of us need to get closer to the marginalized, the disabled, the disfavoured, the excluded and the incarcerated.”

5. The most harrowing story came during a panel session on the growing use of virtual reality (VR) to tell more compelling stories. One panellist, Raja Ebenezer of Chennai, India, revealed that as a child, he was enslaved along with his parents at a brick quarry after they failed to repay money they borrowed to fund their daughter’s wedding: “The loan was made to trap us in a system we couldn’t escape from.”

Ebenezer and his family worked 19 hours a day making and stacking bricks. Two years later, they and over 100 others were freed in a rescue organized by International Justice Mission (IJM), which protects the poor in the developing world from everyday violence. That includes 40 million people trapped in slavery, and millions more in sexual violence and sex trafficking.

Ebenezer, now a lawyer with IJM, worked with New York City filmmaker Lindsay Branham on a just-released VR experience called The Hidden, which documents the rescue of a family of 10 from a rock quarry where they’d been confined for a decade. IJM founder Gary Haugen hopes this immersive media project will help more people realize this issue is real. “Slavery sounds like a word from another century,” said Haugen. “With 360-degree virtual reality, you’re transported physically to this place that people try to keep hidden.”

6. How can you drive big change? Gwynne Shotwell, president and COO of SpaceX, described how Elon Musk’s space-exploration company evolved from flailing startup to a firm that’s now reusing heavy rockets and planning interplanetary travel. Shotwell’s formula for making change:

• Execute missions that seem impossible.
• Relentless focus on progress and improving every cycle.
• Drive feedback to ensure we learn and fix quickly.
• Superior staff is the only way to achieve great things.

7. Canada had a low profile at Skoll. The sole Canadian speaker I heard was Angela Code, a young filmmaker and human-rights advocate from Whitehorse, Yukon. As a member of Sayisi Dene First Nation, from Manitoba’s far north, Code grew up without running water and drove a dog team to school. “Our people are suffering and living in poverty,” she told a Skoll audience. “We have to work to establish our culture, because Canada has systematically repressed us.”

It was tough to hear Code call out Canada on a global stage. But this was a wakeup call. As Canadians promote social justice and human rights around the world, we still have work to do at home. Proximity starts chez nous.

The post Back to Skoll appeared first on Corporate Knights.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him no, but according to Arthurian legend, his role counselling governments on the costly risks of delaying action on climate change would be more akin to Merlin, King Arthur’s adviser, prophet and magician. But his question of what and who is a corporate knight has lingered, and is in need of some clarification.

First, corporate knighthood is not bestowed solely through devotion to corporate social responsibility (CSR), which is about large businesses responding to the unintended consequences their operations create in the world – such as Shell stepping up its CSR initiatives in the wake of the company’s alleged complicity in the Nigerian government’s execution of activist Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995.

As writer Mallen Baker points out, there have been visionary leaders who have taken risks in the CSR space. But these are models of restraint in many ways, Baker says, because the CEOs always have to convince a skeptical investor community that they’re not “taking their eye off the ball.”

That is one of the reasons Corporate Knights rankings like our annual Global 100 place no weight on philanthropy, which is about giving away (usually less than 1 per cent of profits) rather than creating value.

The noble Knights of the Round Table of King Arthur’s court were no slouches on the battlefield, but they fought for justice and adhered to a moral code of bravery, courtesy, honour and great gallantry toward the vulnerable.

The corporate knights of the 21^st century are not that different at their essence, comprised of noble business leaders (all genders) with a moral code beyond making money to creating value for society, with exemplars like Paul Polman and Elon Musk.

Before elaborating on sirs Polman and Musk, a quick word on corporate “knaves.”

Corporate knaves have no moral code and they do not create value for society. One that comes to mind is pharma bro Martin Shkreli, who bought a life-saving medicine in 2015 before jacking the price up from $13.50 to $750 per pill. “I did it for my shareholders’ benefit because that’s my job,” he explained. “The political risk is being shamed – and shame isn’t dilutive to earnings per share.” Shkreli eventually ended up in jail, although he did make money for many of his shareholders along the way.

Warren Buffett is one of the greatest investors ever, but he is no corporate knight. It’s not that he lacks a moral code, which he articulates as “do nothing you would not be happy to have an unfriendly but intelligent reporter write about on the front page of a newspaper.” It’s certainly not that he hasn’t made money for his shareholders or that he is not generous with his own winnings, which are mostly dedicated to charity under the guiding hand of his bridge partner at the Gates Foundation.

The problem is he has propagated a parasitic business system premised on buying companies on the cheap, stifling competition, cutting costs and making as little capital investment as possible so as to maximize profits. As he puts it: “I don’t want a business that’s easy for competitors. I want a business with a moat around it with a very valuable castle in the middle … the ideal business is one that takes no capital, and yet grows.”

Now that Buffett has thrown his lot in with aggressive Brazilian private equity fund 3G, he is in danger of becoming a corporate raider, as was the case with 3G-owned Kraft Heinz’s aborted $143 billion (U.S.) hostile takeover attempt of Unilever this past summer. 3G’s modus operandi is to acquire, fire, cut, sell and eliminate anything that isn’t nailed down.

Which brings us back to Paul Polman, who had a long conventional career at Nestlé before being passed over for CEO and then jumping to the top job at Unilever. During his reign, he has redefined the purpose of the company to “make sustainable living commonplace,” cancelled quarterly earnings guidance as an affront to the myopia of short-term capitalism and boldly set out to double sales while halving environmental impact. Oh, and the share price has doubled in the past five years. Interestingly, Polman has even banned the term corporate social responsibility.

And there is Elon Musk. He’s come a long way since his dollar-a-day diet in Montréal and internship under Peter Nicholson at Scotiabank in the early ’90s. Musk cites two books that instilled his moral compass: William Golding’s classic Lord of the Flies, whose hero Ralph wants to create a moral code to save humanity from a Hobbesian fate, and Foundation by Isaac Asimov, where one man tries to save the world from a fast-approaching descent into ignorance and warfare by creating an alternate empire in which science, technology and the arts provide refuge to people.

Similar plots run through SpaceX and Tesla, which is making good on its overarching purpose, in Musk’s words, “to help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy, which I believe to be the primary, but not exclusive, sustainable solution.”

Not that he’s keeping score, but Musk’s financial worth is an estimated $16 billion with a lot of his shareholders benefiting along the way. His value to society is priceless.

On a hot, flat, hungry and crowded planet, there is a big market (estimated by the UN at $12 trillion by 2030) for businesses that create more value for society than they take away through negative externalities. This is fertile ground for a rising movement of corporate knights to roam in the quest for a sustainable world.

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But what if the programs aimed at solving those problems don’t work? Or cost too much? Or create unforeseen consequences? How can they be improved?

Only a handful of foundations try to address those bigger questions. They want, not just to solve problems, but to improve the way we solve problems. One of the most interesting is the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (LJAF), which was created in 2008 and reported assets of $1.7 billion (U.S.) at the end of 2015. The Arnolds – he’s a former hedge fund manager whose net worth is estimated to be $3.3 billion – say the LJAF will

systematically examine areas of society in which underperformance, inefficiency, concentrated power, lack of information, lack of accountability, lack of transparency, lack of balance among interests, or other barriers to human progress and achievement exist

and then apply “a rigorous and comprehensive entrepreneurial problem-solving approach” with the “goal of igniting a renaissance of new ideas and approaches applied to persistent problems.” Whew.

Big ideas, to be sure, but this foundation has already made big waves. As part of a wide-ranging criminal justice initiative, LJAF funded the creation of a database that has changed the way judges in numerous jurisdictions, including the states of Arizona, Kentucky and New Jersey and the city of Chicago, decide which defendants will be released before they go to trial. For better or worse – better, in my view – it’s a vivid example of how philanthropy can change public policy, as this story about bail reform in New Jersey explains.

LJAF stands apart because of its commitment to evidence, both to support its own programs and to improve the work of governments, foundations and nonprofits. In 2015, it launched a division called Evidence-Based Policy and Innovation, which, among other things, funds rigorous evaluations that include, where possible, randomized controlled trials (RCTs) designed to figure out whether programs work. LJAF’s evidence-based policy team is currently funding 41 evaluations of programs on a variety of topics, according to Jon Baron, the foundation’s vice president of evidence-based policy.

These evaluations, Baron told me last week, are “aimed at building the body of social programs with strong replicated evidence of impact on important life outcomes.”

Unhappily, that’s harder than you might think.

Most programs, when tested, don’t work

“A lot of programs claim to be evidence-based,” Baron explains, but “many of them overstate their evidence.” When subjected to rigorous tests, many well-intended programs fall short. “Unfortunately,” Baron says, “they (the tests) usually find that the program being evaluated does not produce the hoped-for effects. There’s a very high proportion of disappointing findings.”

Trained as a lawyer, Baron worked on Capitol Hill and at the Pentagon before founding a DC-based nonprofit called the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy in 2001. He joined LJAF in its Washington office when the foundation absorbed much of the coalition’s work.

Given the Trump administration’s disregard for facts, let alone evidence-based policy, I asked Baron for, er, evidence that evidence can change how the government operates. A clear example, he told me, is the work of the Nurse Family Partnership, a nonprofit that provides home visits to low-income, first-time mothers; several long-term randomized trials found that these home visits improve children’s well-being, even 10 or 15 years later.

The Bush and Obama administrations expanded funding for the Nurse Family Partnership, its affiliates and similar programs that provide home visits to pregnant women. Current federal funding is about $400m per year. “There’s no question that the evidence drove the funding, in both Democratic and Republican administrations,” Baron said, adding that not all the programs have been rigorously evaluated.

Meantime, many of LJAF’s evaluations are done with foundations and nonprofits. The Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, for example, has backed Bottom Line, a nonprofit that helps low-income, first-time students get into college and graduate; preliminary studies indicate that the program works, so LJAF is funding an RCT being led by academics Andrew Carr of Texas A&M and Ben Castleman of the University of Virginia. “Bottom Line has some pretty good evidence, but they wanted to produce definitive evidence,” Baron said. The Bottom Line study is expected to cost only $159,000, in part because it relies on existing information that track student achievement. “You can do large, low-cost randomized trials,” Baron says, particularly if they build on existing data. The gains from learning which programs work and which don’t should far outweigh the costs if, subsequently, more money flows to effective programs and less is wasted on those that are subpar.

Two other examples of LJAF-funded evaluations:

• A three-year RCT of a program in Baltimore that provides free eyeglasses to disadvantaged students to improve learning. Partners include Johns Hopkins University, the Abell Foundation and Vision to Learn, a Los-Angeles based nonprofit.
• A seven-year RCT of a Big Brothers Big Sisters mentoring program for young people at risk of criminal involvement. The evaluation will track about 2,500 young people at 20 Big Brother Big Sister agencies across the US.

I asked Baron why rigorous evaluations aren’t more common. Cost is often a barrier, he said, and it’s not easy to find researchers with the knowledge and organization skills to carry out RCTs. But “the main bottleneck,” he said, “is that there’s not a strong incentive yet to build this kind of evidence.” Some funders demand evidence of impact, but many do not. “Evidence of effectiveness, in many cases, is not a main criteria in deciding what gets funded,” he said. Which is a little nutty, no?

To promote evidence-based policy, Baron and LJAF have built a website called Straight Talk on Evidence that aims to “distinguish credible findings of program effectiveness from the many others that claim to be.” It’s very good; you can subscribe or follow the blog on Twitter at @NoSpin Evidence. This week, Straight Talk on Evidence called attention to a well-designed study of a program that helped prevent sexual assault on three university campuses in Canada.

Two concluding thoughts: First, LJAF’s commitment to evidence-based policy comes at a time when the validity of social science research–and, for that matter, medical research–is being questioned as never before. (For more, read last month’s fascinating NY Times magazine story, When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy.) As it happens, LJAF has a separate initiative on Research Integrity that, among other things, addresses what has been called the replication crisis; it’s funding efforts to reproduce psychology and cancer studies.

Second, LJAF’s work on evidence raises questions about whether other large foundations might want to take a similarly expansive approach to improving philanthropy. The Gates and Raikes Foundations, for example, are trying to improve the quality as well as the quantity of charitable giving, Gates through the Giving Pledge and Giving by All and Raikes with Giving Compass. The Open Philanthropy Project wants to empower the effective altruism community. Thinking even more broadly, some foundations aim to strengthen science or promote democracy because, they believe, those forces are the underlying drivers of health, education and prosperity. Such efforts have the potential to do enormous good–although their benefits will prove hard to measure.

Which reminds us that, valuable as it is, evidence cannot answer all our questions.

This article originally appeared on Nonprofit Chronicles

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Chickens. Cows. Cookstoves. Toilets. Solar panels. Job training. Clean water.

Western NGOs dole out lots of stuff to help poor people in the global south become less poor. Do such programs work? It’s hard to know, but when researchers for a series of World Bank studies called Moving Out of Poverty asked 3,991 households in 15 countries how they escaped poverty, just three of those households credited “NGO assistance.” Hmm.

What we do know is that economic growth has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in such places as Botswana, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, South Korea and Vietnam. With a few glaring exceptions–notably China and Vietnam–these countries benefited from democratic political institutions, relatively stable governments, the rule of law, property rights and trade. “Countries need inclusive economic and political institutions to break out of the cycle of poverty,” write Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson in Why Nations Fail, a sweeping 2012 book about the origins of prosperity and poverty.

Most development economists agree. Chris Blattman, a scholar of international development at the University of Chicago, puts it bluntly: “The problem in the poorest countries today is first and foremost politics.” (This, despite the fact that Blattman is best known as an advocate of cash transfers to alleviate poverty.) Blattman and Harvard prof Lant Pritchett, who are both associated with the Center for Global Development, lately have been engaged in a lively debate about poverty alleviation in blogposts (here and here) and on podcasts with Russ Roberts of EconTalk (here and here), all of it inspired by Bill Gates’ enthusiasm for raising chickens; while Blattman and Pritchett disagree on chickens and cash, they share the view that economic growth, supported by the right political and economic institutions, is the best way to alleviate poverty. As Pritchett has said: “Treating world poverty as if it can be addressed programmatically [by chickens, cash transfers or women’s self-help groups] biases attention away from the real solution to poverty, which is having higher productivity economies.”

How, then, can philanthropists, NGOs and governments help poor countries reform their institutions and enjoy the benefits of economic growth? Again, that’s hard to know, but today’s blogpost will spotlight Spark MicroGrants, a small NGO that practices what’s called community-driven development, an approach that invites communities to design, execute and manage their own aid projects–farms to feed families, power lines, schools or roads. There’s growing evidence, according to Spark, that community-driven development leads not just to more sustainable projects but to “stronger governments and institutions.”

“We help to create local democracy,” says Sasha Fisher, the co-founder and executive director of Spark MicroGrants. “People have have a platform to work together. Citizens become engaged and start driving local change.”

Spark isn’t designed to spark political reform, but when you give people a taste of democracy, well, don’t be surprised if they want more.

Founded in Rwanda in 2010, in partnership with the government, Spark works in five African countries: Uganda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Ghana, along with Rwanda. It has financed projects in 150 communities and says that 90 per cent of the projects sustain themselves, two years after launch. In 2016, Spark raised about $1.6 million for its work, with more than 80 per cent coming from foundations; its biggest funders include the CRI Foundation, the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, the Imago Dei Fund, the Peery Foundation, the Planet Wheeler Foundation, the RA5 Foundation, the Segal Family Foundation and the Woodcock Foundation.

Fisher, who is 28, told me that she co-founded Spark after working for an NGO in South Sudan that was trying to build schools for girls. “What I saw on the ground was a lot of failed aid projects—empty school buildings, broken taps,” she says. Many of the people the group was trying to help were longtime refugees who had become used to the “handout mentality.” She traveled to South Africa and India and came upon small organizations that were serving their communities well. “When people get together and drive change, that’s one of the most beautiful things we can do,” she says.

Working with governments or other partners, Spark identifies needy communities and then sets aside $8,000 for each community that local families decide how to spend. Typically, the communities spend six months, meeting regularly, to set collective goals and develop a plan for a project.

Spark’s local staff provide organizational guidance, but little more. Says Fisher: “They’re not allowed to give ideas. That’s illegal in this process. But they facilitate.” Communities are required to have a plan to keep projects running, either through fees or government support.

The program has evolved over the years, to include the goal-setting process and to set a fixed grant size. (Previously, communities were invited to develop projects costing between $2,000 and $10,000.) Most communities continue to meet after Spark has left, and about three in four develop another project, independent of Spark.

None of this is exactly new. In some regards, it replicates the structure of town meetings, which have been going on in New England since the 17th century (and, in some places, continue to this day.) Whether these small-scale experiments in democracy can spread more widely, and grow to impact national institutions–well, that’s hard to say. But at the very least, Spark is giving poor people what they want, and not what western experts decide they want or need.

Community-driven development is being practiced on a much-bigger scale in Afghanistan, Bolivia, Morocco, Myanmar and Nigeria, according to the World Bank. Meantime, NGOs like Accountability Lab are explicitly trying to build inclusive institutions in places like fight corruption and promote a free press in places like Nepal and Liberia. (See my 2016 blogpost, Accountability Lab: Promoting good government, fighting corruption.) And earlier this month, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced grants of nearly $9 million to advance accountability and anti-corruption efforts in Nigeria. These are long-term investments in alleviating poverty that– if they pay off–should do a lot more good than cash or chickens.

The post Reforming institutions through development appeared first on Corporate Knights.

A few things you might not know about Detroit:

So many people are moving into the downtown and midtown areas that worries have arisen about displacing the poor.

When the Detroit Pistons and the Detroit Red Wings move into the new $700m Little Caesars sports complex next fall, Detroit will be the only city in America in which all four major sports teams play downtown.

Some 72 per cent of national business leaders and 83 per cent of local entrepreneurs rate Detroit as an excellent or good place to do business, according to a new survey released last week.

Detroit’s comeback is real, albeit mostly limited, so far, to the city’s core. Still, the changes that have swept through a city that could not pay its bills or deliver basic services just a few years ago have been nothing short of remarkable.

What drove the turnaround? Many things – the leadership of Mayor Mike Duggan, a resurgent auto sector, cohesive business leadership, the rapid growth of Quicken Loans (which employs 15,000 people downtown), a five-year $100m investment in the city from J.P. Morgan Chase and a fierce local pride that never waned, even in the dark days. Philanthropy played an essential role, too.

Capital Impact Partners, a community development financial institution (CDFI) and a major lender in Detroit, has taken investments from government, banks and foundations and turned them into projects that drive economic activity and improve lives. Foundations backing Capital Impact Partners including Kresge, Fisher and Ford.

“Detroit is unique because of the collaboration that has occurred, not only on the philanthropic side, but because the city, community organizations, Wayne State (University) and CDFIs have all  come together,” says Ellis Carr, the president and CEO of Capital Impact Partners. “Everyone believed in the vision.”

I’m writing today about Capital Impact Partners for two reasons. First, there’s been a flurry of interest lately from foundations and other asset managers in what’s typically called impact investing. Impact investing is trendy (ask Bono) but it’s not new: CDFIs like Capital Impact Partners have been doing impact investing for decades.

Second, I’ve got a special place in my heart for Detroit. I lived in Grosse Pointe Park, across the city line, from 1985 to 1991, and reported for the Detroit News and the Detroit for a decade. These were tough times for the city, when it took some effort to Say Nice Things About Detroit – a motto you’d see around town on T-shirts and bumper stickers.

Then things got worse: From 1993 through 2003, no new units of housing were built in downtown Detroit. By contrast, since 2010, Capital Impact Partners has helped finance more than 1,000 housing units, and it’s just one lender among many.

Founded in 1982, Capital Impact Partners has headquarters in suburban Washington, offices in Detroit and Oakland, and a national footprint. It has deployed more than $2bn in loans over the years, supporting affordable housing, cooperatively-owned businesses, dignified aging, health care providers and healthy foods. It also has place-based loan programs devoted to Oakland, Washington, D.C., and Detroit.

A nonprofit, Capital Impact Partners raises its money from banks that have to comply with federal rules requiring them to lend in low- and moderate income neighborhoods, from a Treasury Department CDFI fund (that the Trump administration wants to cut way back) and from foundations, which provide grants or low-interest loans, usually as part of what are called program-related investments.

Ellis Carr explains: “We’re able to bring different types of capital together to bring down interest rates…CDFIs are profitable, but we’re not profit-maximizing. We have to be profitable so that we can continue to lend and invest.” 

Its lending program in Detroit has taken many forms. Early on, when banks were unwilling to lend directly to housing developers, Capital Impact financed such projects as The Auburn, a $12.3m mixed-use development in midtown that includes 58 housing units, including 12 set aside for low income tenants, and eight retail stores, including a bookstore and a Thai restaurant.

Carr says: “CDFIs were able to de-risk the transaction and bring in outside capital.” Because Capital Impact Partners is more willing than commercial lenders to take risks in service of a social mission, its lending can help spark a neighborhood’s revitalization. “We can create enough investment and proof of concept, so that the money center banks can them come in,” he says.

The CDFI has also made loans to Detroit charter schools, to a child care center and to an assisted living facility, Carr says. It supports small businesses, too, by, for example, backing a statewide fund called the Michigan Good Food Fund that invests in small businesses that provide affordable, healthy food in poor neighborhoods. Last fall, the fund made $75,000 grants to a startup called the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, which is developing a grocery store, cafe and community space, and to a nonprofit that wants to expand the Northwest Detroit farmers’ market so it can operate year round.

—

A shift to the neighbourhoods

Capital Impact Partners seeks to do all this work in ways that promote inclusive neighborhoods, meaning that they should accommodate a mix of well-to-do, middle class and poor people. Last year, it published a report looking at ways to address the impact of Detroit’s revival on poor people who are being displaced from their homes.

Some critics say that the city’s recovery “has been highly uneven, resulting in increasing inequality.” Capital Impact Partners and its foundation allies agree that attention must now shift to the city’s sprawling, poor neighborhoods. J.P. Morgan Chase. too, committed another $50 million to Detroit earlier this month, as the Free Press reported.

Because quantifying impact is an issue for impact investors, I ask Ellis Carr how Capital Impact Partners measures the effect of its work. “This is the holy grail that everyone struggles with,” he says.  Right now, Capital Impact Partners tracks outputs – how many units of housing are built, how many students are educated, how many visits are made to a health clinic – but it can’t measure outcomes, i.e., how people’s lives have been changed. Nor can it isolate its own impact from the work of collaborators. Impact investors can’t expect to see how “this dollar is doing exactly that” because too many forces come into play.

I also ask Carr whether foundations could do more to support CDFIs. The top 50 foundations hold about $250bn in assets, according to the Foundation Center, and only a sliver is devoted to program-related or mission-aligned investments.

“We, as CDFIs, are very interested,” Carr says. “Even a small portion of the endowments that exist today could be used for domestic community development. That would unlock a tremendous amount of capital for us to lend.”

This is an opportunity for foundations that is largely being missed. Foundations that care about poverty ought to deploy all of their resources – not just their grants, but their investment assets and their knowledge – to alleviate poverty. But they don’t. Nor do they tend to collaborate well.

So there’s lots for the philanthropic community to learn from Michigan’s foundations and the intermediaries that they support–not just Capital Impact Parters, but Invest Detroit, another CDFI, and the New Economy Initiative, a $100 million project to support entrepreneurs.

As Detroit Mayor Duggan says in the video below: “What the CDFIs in this town have done, they’ve brought about redevelopment at rates I never thought I’d see.” Nice.

The post One key piece of the Detroit turnaround? Philanthropy appeared first on Corporate Knights.

It was quite the mood swing for the Skoll World Forum, a global meetup for social entrepreneurs inspired by Canadian Jeff Skoll, who was eBay’s first president and now spends his time founding organizations that address global social, medical and economic ills. In its 15th year, Skoll World adopted the tough-love theme, “Fault Lines: Finding Common Ground.” Attendees were in a cautious and defensive mood, given the rise of Trump, Brexit, and us-versus-them politics.

In her opening remarks, Skoll Foundation CEO Sally Osberg tackled that struggle head-on, expressing the hope that “exposed fault lines” may actually encourage change, by drawing attention to unsolved problems and forcing activists to listen harder, think more creatively and develop more innovative partnerships. Here are seven takeaways from Skoll World 2017 that suggest the future is still social:

1. Entrepreneurs are redefining the nature of business. The conference opened with an interview with Hamdi Ulukaya, founder and CEO of Chobani, the New York company behind America’s leading yogurt brand. Ulukaya challenged the notion that businesses exist only to turn a profit. Born into a Kurdish farming family in Turkey, Ulukaya has made a point of hiring refugees (they now make up a fifth of Chobani’s workforce), and he created the Tent Foundation to help refugees around the world. Ulukaya also believes in sharing; last year he promised that when Chobani becomes a public company, he will gift 10% of his own shares to his employees.

Ulukaya told forum attendees that he is trying to build a business based on fairness and generosity – principles he learned from his mother. “I never thought I would get involved with business. I was always thinking I was on the other side,” he said. He shares critics’ anger at unsavoury business practices, but says his job at Chobani is to be “a competitive innovator, and channel that anger into the marketplace. The good people have to win.”

Ulukaya’s work proves that good examples can make a difference. Through Tent he has cajoled 70 companies, from Accenture to Zynga, into donating money, services or technology to support refugees. Business, he says, “is still the most effective way to change the world.”

2. Embrace your critics. Another trailblazing speaker was Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank. Founded to promote prosperity in the developing world, the bank has often been criticized for encumbering poor nations with unwanted projects and bad economic policies. Kim himself was one of those critics. As a physician and co-founder of a not-for-profit that delivers health care to the world’s poorest regions, he opposed the World Bank’s “trickle-down” economic policies and called for its complete abolition.

As president, Kim redirected the bank’s resources to combat the 2014 Ebola pandemic when conventional health-care organizations were slow to act. Later, he brought health experts together with the reinsurance industry to create a new “parametric” insurance program that will free up emergency funds at the first sign of future pandemics – supported by insurers in hope of reducing the life-insurance and business-interruption claims that generally follow epidemics. “The incentives are aligned,” announced Kim, “so this [the slow response to Ebola] will never happen again.”

3. Serious Celebrity No.1. Jeff Skoll ended the first day by handing an “Honorary Skoll Award” to Don Henley, founder of the Walden Woods Project, formed to protect Henry David Thoreau’s historic Walden Pond, near Boston. You may know Henley better as co-founder of The Eagles. “The first songs I learned on guitar when I was 13 were Eagles songs,” said Skoll. In accepting his award, Henley took a serious turn. He noted that Thoreau, as writer of both Walden and an anti-slavery essay called “Civil Disobedience,” is considered a founder of both the environmental and social justice movements: “two distinct yet related sets of moral imperatives.”
4. Fighting fake news. Day 2 started with an example of how philanthropy can counter intolerance. As part of a special panel on “The Future of Media,” the Omidyar Network, a social investment firm established by Skoll’s former boss, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, announced a US$100 million fund to support investigative journalism, strengthen independent media and counter the spread of misinformation. As panel moderator Pat Mitchell noted, “You can’t have a free and open society without free and open access to information that is reliable.”
5. Reach out and touch someone. You don’t have to be a philanthropist to make a difference. Just do what you can, when you can. That’s the message of Dorcas Mensah, a 24-year-old Ghanaian studying international development at the University of Edinburgh. She told the conference that when she was invited to do an internship at a London bank, she lacked both the professional clothes and spending money to make the right impression. “I couldn’t show up in jeans,” she said.

Two strangers came to her rescue. A business owner she knows only as “Mr. Biney” gave her 500 pounds for clothes and the occasional tea. And a woman she never met, calling herself “Auntie Sheila,” paid for a shoe-shopping spree. Mensah’s challenge to the Skoll attendees: Recognize your power to help others. “Be Auntie Sheila, be Mr. Biney: people who are not afraid to help others. Let your light shine.”

6. Serious Celebrity No. 2. The Skoll Foundation presents a “Global Treasure” award to extraordinary people addressing pressing problems. This year’s winner was Bono, lead singer of U2, for his co-founding of non-profit organizations fighting AIDS and poverty. Bono and Skoll are also co-founders of Rise, a new social impact fund that will invest in worthy businesses such as health care and clean energy, or housing and education in developing economies.

In accepting the award, Bono noted that “Capitalism is not immoral, but it is amoral. You have to tell it what to do.” Asked by Skoll how he reconciles serious activism with the life of a pop star, Bono said he and his bandmates agreed early on that the only way to justify their commitment to music was by working on social issues off-stage: “That gave us permission to be in the band.”

7. It all comes down to politics. Harvard business professor Michael Porter ended the conference by warning attendees they had to pay more attention to the self-serving structure of politics. Porter, who specializes in competitiveness, says he began looking at politics last year only reluctantly. “I never thought government was important,” he said. “I thought it was a sideshow. But it’s not. We need government to make good choices.”

Porter reached this epiphany after he and his Harvard colleagues reviewed all the painstakingly researched, cutting-edge advice they had given governments about promoting prosperity – and found none of it had been adopted. While he studied the U.S. scene, he said the same general problems can be found throughout the world: ongoing failures to reform health care, taxation, education and infrastructure to ensure that people prosper along with corporations. Porter’s conclusion: “Our system is not designed to deliver solutions. It’s designed to advance the interests of the system itself, starting with our political parties.”

To fix the system, Porter said, we need campaign-funding reform, new processes for selecting candidates and ranked-choice voting (which lets voters pick second, third and fourth choices). None of this will come from the politicians, he warned: Voters must demand it. “We can change the way political systems work. But it’s not going to happen naturally.”

It would be an exaggeration to say that Skoll World attendees left Oxford with a spring in their step; there was too much work ahead. But the annual progressive clambake ensured that no one would be doing it alone.

The post It’s a Skoll world appeared first on Corporate Knights.

People have migrated for millennia, mostly to escape poverty. Between 1880 and 1930, more than 27 million immigrants entered the US, most from Europe. Some six million blacks left the rural south for cities in the north and midwest between 1910 and 1970, in what’s known as The Great Migration. More recently, Hurricane Katrina prompted one of the biggest resettlements in American history.

Migration is “the simplest and most effective antipoverty program. Pretty much everyone wins,” says Nancy Birdsall, the founder and former president of the Center for Global Development, a Washington think tank.*

And yet, when governments, foundations and nonprofits talk about alleviating poverty, they typically don’t talk about migration. The UN has produced many thousands of words about its sustainable development goals, mentioning migration only in passing.

This is an enormous missed opportunity, argues Michael Clemens, a Harvard-educated economist and a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. Clemens has been making that argument for more than a decade, notably in an insightful 2010 paper called A Labor Mobility Agenda for Development. He writes:

The globalization of labor—greater mobility for workers across borders—quickly and massively raises migrants’ living standards toward those of rich countries…No known schooling intervention, road project, anti-sweatshop campaign, microcredit program, investment facility, export promotion agency, or any other in situ [in place] development program can surely and immediately raise the earning power of a large group of very poor people to anywhere near this degree.

To his credit, Clemens has been doing more than opining. Working with Sarah Williamson, the executive director of a small NGO called Protect the People and the nonprofit US Association for International Migration, and with funding from the Open Philanthropy Project, Clemens guided and then studied a small-scale effort to bring Haitian farmworkers to the US on temporary visas. It enabled the Haitians to rapidly and dramatically increase their earnings.

“Migration does something that’s almost magical,” Clemens told me. “It immediately transforms the economic productivity of a person.”

Last year, some workers stayed in the US long enough to bring home $5,000 to $20,000, according to Williamson. Some invested that money in school fees for their children. Others had new homes built for their families.

“Our program built more houses in Haiti than the Red Cross,” Williamson says.

Alas, after two years, funding has dried up for the Haiti project. That, it seems to me, reflects a dismal lack of imagination among philanthropists, who have poured many millions of dollars into Haiti and don’t have a lot to show for it. (See this and this and this.) Temporary migration, by contrast, has delivered benefits not only to Haitian farmworkers but also to the US economy –and, importantly, it has the potential to sustain itself after reaching scale. Yet its backers struggle to raise money. What’s wrong with this picture?

I have a soft spot in my heart for immigrants. My grandparents and my father were refugees from Nazi Germany who came to the US in the 1930s. I have good friends who are immigrants. The fact is, as  Clemens has written, “where you are born, not how hard you work, is today the principal determinant of your material well-being.” That strikes me as deeply unfair.

So what was the US response to the earthquake that devastated Haiti in 2010? Many Americans opened their wallets, the US government provided relief and recovery aid, NGOs and aid workers poured in–but Haitians were told to stay put. Hillary Clinton, who was then the Secretary of State, said: “Ordinary and regular immigration laws will apply…which means that we are not going to be accepting into the United States Haitians who are attempting to make it to our shores. They will be interdicted. They will be repatriated.”

Clemens, writing in The Washington Post, urged the Obama administration to admit more Haitians. Haitians were then ineligible for H-2A or H-2B visas, which are designed to admit low skill workers temporarily. In 2012, after securing bipartisan support from Florida US Senators Nelson and Rubio, Clemens, Sarah Williamson of Protect the People and their allies persuaded the Department of Homeland Security to add Haiti to the list of countries eligible for temporary H-2a visas.

But raising philanthropic funds to support Haitian migrants proved difficult. Clemens or Williamson or their partners approached just about every big NGO or foundation working in Haiti. “They weren’t interested in anything related to migration,” Clemens said. Including the Clinton Foundation, I wondered? “All of them,” he said.

—

A grant from the Open Philanthropy Project

Eventually, Protect the People and the US Association for International Migration secured a $1.4 million grant in 2014 from the Open Philanthropy Project, a collaboration of GiveWell and Good Ventures, the philanthropic arm of Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna. They pitched a simple idea: Farmers in the US who needed labor but were unable to hire locally would to be matched with workers in Haiti, who would spend two to 10 months in the US and then return home wealthier.

Open Philanthropy had initially hoped that the grant, in its first year, would generate $1 million in additional income for Haitian farmworkers, while laying the groundwork for larger flows of Haitian farmworkers in the future. Things didn’t go according to plan, as Open Philanthropy reported with admirable candor:

The project encountered a number of obstacles, and ultimately fell well short of this goal. Recruiting employers for the Haitian workers was more challenging than anticipated, though by June 2015 our understanding was that the project had received job orders for 95 workers. However, a variety of regulatory barriers in the U.S. and a number of workers’ visa applications being rejected by the U.S. Embassy in Haiti led to only 14 people being able to participate in the program, for an average duration of ~2 months. Accordingly, our current estimate is that the project led to only ~$53,000 of gross income for the participants.

We think there is a decent chance that the project simply encountered bad luck in 2015 and would have been more successful going forward.

Undeterred, Open Philanthropy made a new grant of $550,000 to Protect the People early in 2016. This time around, more Haitian farmers–58 in all–came to the U.S., with some working on a large greenhouse operation in Alabama and others harvesting apples in Oregon.

Again, though, obstacles arose–difficulty in obtaining the visas from the US consulate in Haiti, higher than expected startup and transportation costs. Open Philanthropy declined to fund the program again this year. Williamson says the program needs “a really patient donor” who will give it time to scale. In fact, there’s evidence that the market, once established, will support temporary migrants: The state department reports that more than 108,000 H-2a farmworker visas were issued in FY2015, most to temporary workers from Mexico, Jamaica and Guatemala, who are connected to US employers by labor brokers.

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Mixed results

What, then, are the broader lessons to be drawn from the Haitian migrant project?

First, benefits to the Haitians were substantial, as predicted. In 2015, the first year of the project, poor farmworkers who earn about $147 a month in cash income in Haiti were able to earn about $2,300 a month by working at a plant nursery in Alabama or harvesting apples in Oregon. What each worker ordinarily earned in a week in Haiti, he was able to earn in the US in a couple of hours, as Clemens and Hannah Postel of CGD write here.

Second, it seems highly unlikely that migrants are taking jobs away from Americans. To employ workers with H-2a visas, employers must certify that they can’t find Americans to do the work. Interestingly, Clemens studied the use of migrant workers by the North Carolina Growers Association, which is far and away the largest users of H-2a visas in the country. Here’s what he found happened at the height of the Great Recession, according to a report from the CGD and a pro-immigration group called the Partnership for a New American Economy:

In 2011, there were on average 489,000 unemployed people in North Carolina and approximately 6,500 available farm jobs offered through the North Carolina Growers Association. Despite the fact that each of these jobs was in or next to a county with over 10 per cent unemployment, only 268 of the nearly 500,000 unemployed North Carolinians applied for these jobs. More than 90 per cent of those applying (245 people) were hired, but just 163 showed up for the first day of work. A month in, more than half had quit. Only 7 native workers – or 3 per cent of US workers hired – completed the entire growing season.

For better or worse, Americans won’t do these jobs. (Why that is, and what it says about our country, is a topic that I hope to explore in a future post. I’ve just begun reading Tyler Cowen’s The Complacent Class, which addresses that question.)

Third, the US economy benefited from the Haitian migrants, just as it does from other migrant farmworkers. If migrant farmworkers were not available to do the work, it wouldn’t get done. Farmers can’t raise wages high enough to attract US workers and still profit from selling cucumbers, Christmas trees, whatever, according to Clemens.

Philanthropy can play an important role in enabling migration beyond Haiti.

“I hope it will inspire philanthropists to think about opportunities,” Clemens says. “Farm work is just one of the ways to offer life-changing opportunities in a mutually beneficial way.” He has written, for example, about potential “global skills partnerships” in which rich countries create training programs in poor countries. “It’s enormously cheaper to train nurses in Morocco, Malawi or Moldova than it is in Germany,” he says. Some newly-trained nurses could go to Germany, where there’s a shortage, and others could stay home.

In the US, meantime, a coalition of foundations has pledged an impressive $125 million to Flint, Michigan, much of it to serve children who have been poisoned by the city’s water system. But, writing in Alliance, Timothy Ogden says: “It is striking, given the situation, that none of the funds allocated are to help the children of Flint by helping them leave.” Yes, it is striking. It would be smart to structure government benefit programs in ways that make it easier for people to move within the US to find new jobs–and to somehow encourage the jobless to find the “get up and go” that has driven migrants for centuries.

The post Migration appeared first on Corporate Knights.

But although people of color are more likely than whites to live in polluted places, they are much less likely to volunteer on behalf of these causes than whites. This lack of diversity renders green groups less effective.

As someone who researches environmental volunteerism, I understand that these nonprofits are often responsible for protecting vulnerable communities. They were among the first to demand accountability in 2015, when news of the lead-poisoned water supply in Flint, Michigan, shocked the nation, for example.

With the Trump administration rolling back environmental regulations, these nonprofits need all the help they can get. That makes it more important than ever for them to do a better job of recruiting volunteers of color.

Growth without enough diversity

The number of environmental groups has increased in recent years, growing nearly 20 per cent from 11,233 in 2003 to 13,283 in 2013.

Despite this growth, people from communities of color engage in environmental volunteerism at lower rates than whites, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2015, for instance, 3.1 per cent of white Americans volunteered for green causes, while only 1.6 per cent of Latinos and 1 percent of black Americans did so.

This racial divide is unfortunate since environmental injustices often disproportionately affect communities of color. According to a recent national study by researchers at the University of Minnesota, people of color are exposed to deadly airborne pollutants at significantly higher rates than whites. And a recent study by Michigan authorities found that systemic racism helped trigger Flint’s water crisis. More than half of the city’s residents are black.

Why, then, don’t more people of color volunteer for environmental causes? Here are three possible reasons.

First, as the civil rights era wound down in the late 1960s, some people of color feared that environmental advocacy would shift focus away from civil rights issues – like integration. Some of these activists, however, may not have fully recognized that environmental justice issues were also civil rights issues.

Second, the people who recruit volunteers for environmental organizations work for them. And the best way to recruit diverse volunteers is to employ a diverse staff with whom a wide range of people will easily relate. Yet, as Dorceta E. Taylor, the director of diversity, equity and inclusion at the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan, revealed in a 2014 report, people of color are severely underrepresented in this workforce. Nearly 90 percent of new hires in these groups from 2010 to 2014 were white.

Third, many environmentalists make little effort to reach out to people of color based on flawed assumptions regarding their level of interest in these issues. As Taylor said in an interview with Grist, an environmental news website,

“The perception that people of color don’t care about the environment has existed for a long time and has been debunked for just as long.”

A better explanation, perhaps, may be that the environmental movement has not tried hard enough to engage African-Americans, Latinos and other people of color.

A key to success

Why should environmental groups recruit nonwhite volunteers? Primarily, because volunteers make it possible for them to succeed.

Canadian researchers have found that volunteers are the second-most important resource needed for environmental nonprofits to effectively achieve their missions, after funding.

This is likely even truer of environmental nonprofits working in communities of color. These nonprofits must not only achieve their mission, they must also earn the locals’ trust.

Clearly, environmental nonprofits should aim to recruit volunteers from the communities, in the communities and of the communities they assist.

Motivating volunteers

How can environmental nonprofits recruit and retain volunteers from communities of color? My research may offer some insight.

While studying volunteer motivations, particularly for environmental causes, I’ve learned that people volunteer for many reasons. Some want to make new friends. Others want to give something back.

Although understanding motivations can help recruit more volunteers, few nonprofits assess what motivates people to volunteer for them.

To attract more volunteers of color, though, environmental nonprofits must first understand volunteer motivations – and the perceived barriers – of people from these communities. People of color are motivated by feelings of connectivity. This suggests that using imagery of people from communities of color engaging in environmental activities may encourage more volunteerism.

In other instances, simply tinkering with communications styles may not suffice. In my study exploring factors that influence environmental volunteerism among Canadian young adults, I found that these nonprofits attracted more volunteers when they aligned motivations with assigned tasks. For some nonprofits, this may require that they entirely redesign their volunteer programs.

For example, volunteers eager to learn more about environmental justice issues will feel let down if they’re stuck in an office stapling papers. A better fit: opportunities to do outreach alongside staff members in poor and minority communities.

Effective recruitment starts not by designing programs for these communities, but by listening to them. Environmental groups need to learn what motivates volunteers of color and to identify and overcome their perceived barriers to volunteering.

Unless they change their ways, green organizations will fail to attract more volunteers of color – often the very groups they intend to serve.

A version of this article first appeared on The Conversation

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