Thursday morning’s break-out panels were difficult to choose among. I had every intention of visiting several, but ended up staying the full two hours at the panel called “Hybrid and For-Profit Business Models,” moderated by David Brancaccio, host and senior editor of NOW on PBS.
The room was packed. Tina Seelig, Executive Director of the Stanford Technology Ventures program talked about an international competition in which business school teams are given 5 days and one Post-It pad to come up with a project that “creates value” under any definition. 95% of the projects submitted were social enterprises.
We also heard from Tralance Addy, President and CEO of Waterhealth International (WHI), an Acumen investee. Tralance described a dam - built 40 years ago in his home country of Ghana - which displaced thousands of people during construction. Those people are still waiting for drinkable water today and the government is still debating what to do about it. This kind of paralysis inspired Tralance’s commitment to private-sector solutions.
His firm is a for-profit company bringing affordable drinking water to small villages and slums in India, the Philippines and Ghana by creating small water treatment facilities owned by local communities and operated by WHI. Where government solutions are slow, a private initiative has filled the gap.
Perhaps the most compelling speaker was Priya Haji, co-founder and CEO of World of Good, which offers ethically sourced products through more than 1300 retail stores, including Whole Foods and Wild Oats. World of Good has recently partnered with eBay to build the world’s largest online marketplace for “people-positive” products.
While World of Good is a for profit company, Priya is also co-founder and Chair of World of Good: Development Organization, a 501 (c) (3) focused on creating clear standards (e.g., wage standards) which will hopefully become industry-wide and improve the quality of life for craft producers worldwide.
Editor’s note: World of Good was featured in a recent Stanford Social Innovation Review article about hybrid social enterprises, which we blogged about here.
It was fascinating hearing Priya talk about the dynamics between the for-profit company, which holds the brand, and the non-profit company, which creates the standards for the public good. When asked how she would feel if, say, Wal-Mart created a comparable brand she replied that that would would be just the kind of inspired competition she would like to see. In other words, if the end result is a significant percentage of gift spending going to ethically sourced goods (not the case today), Priya considers that a success whether or not they are World of Good branded or otherwise.
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