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Are you into food porn? Well, you don’t have to admit right here right now, but given that there are more than 175 million food hashtags ond Twitter and Instagram, there’s a good chance you’re also part of this phenomenon.

For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, don’t worry--we’re not talking about porn that mixes sex with food, but about people sharing online photos of meals they’re about to eat at a restaurant or homemade food, from Krispy Kreme glazed donuts to peanut butter brownie pizza.

If you want to get a better idea about this phenomenon just go to Tumblr, Instagram or Twitter and search for #foodporn. What you’ll quickly notice is that most of the #foodporn photos on the various social media channels are of food that is not exactly the healthy type and include mostly fast food and fatty, sugary food.

Now, a new website wants to change that, one photo of kale at a time.

Welcome to FoodPornIndex.com, a new initiative of Bolthouse Farms, a manufacturer of juices, smoothies and other items, which is owned by the Campbell Soup Co. This new website is based on an algorithm tracking hashtags and mentions of 24 different food items on social media, where half are vegetables and fruits and half are mostly junk foods. Visitors can see the number of mentions for each item, as well as a tally for each group. As of last weekend, the unhealthy foods counted for 72.2 percent of the mentions online while the healthy foods counted for only 27.8 percent.

The website provides not just a constantly updated tally but also a visualized and fun experience–you can click on every food item and enter into a world of music and fun graphics. Click on "Snack" for example (14,060,297 mentions), and you will see a spiral of snacks zooming in with a warning window at the middle: “Warning: Your computer is being attacked by snacks.” At the bottom of the window there’s a “NOM” button that makes a funny NOM sound every time you click on it. If you click on "Mushroom" (4,098,039 mentions), you enter a sort of psychedelic experience with weird mushrooms floating around accompanied by music that could be part of the soundtrack of Zabriskie Point.

So why did Bolthouse Farms come up with this index?  According to the website, the company believes that: “If we can change the way people think (and post) about fresh fruits and veggies, we’ll make the world a healthier place.” The goal, added Bolthouse executives on the New York Times, “is to remind consumers that a fresh strawberry is just as beautiful as those found in a dessert like a tart—and healthier.”

Is this a marketing gimmick of Bolthouse Farms or an honest effort to level the playing field in an effort to change the #foodporn imbalance? It’s probably a little bit of both--creating this unique index has definitely proved itself to be a smart marketing move, giving the company free publicity on the New York Times, Slate and other media outlets. In addition, leveling the #pornofood playing field also benefits Bolthouse Farms, as more photos of veggies and fruits certainly don’t hurt a company that sells products like fresh carrots and premium beverages and claims to “loudly and proudly celebrate fresh fruits and veggies.”

Still, even if the Food Porn Index is about helping the company sell more of its products, I believe we should applaud it because of the innovative approach it represents. It takes the decade-long fight to get people to eat healthier and reframes it as a fight over social media dominance instead of a fight over education and affordability. What’s behind it is the realization that social media had become an important part of the food culture as for many people. “Showing your food . . . is showing a little bit about your personality and who you are as an individual,” Brigham Young professor Ryan Elder explains.

The importance of this understanding is that the type of #foodporn photos uploaded on Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest is not just a reflection of what people eat but also a mechanism shaping the general public’s perception of food consumption. This is due to the principle of social proof, which means according to Prof. Robert Cialdini et al. that: “One way that individuals determine appropriate behavior for themselves in a situation is to examine the behavior of others there, especially similar others. It is through social comparison with referent others that people validate the correctness of their opinions and decisions. As a consequence, people tend to behave as their friends and peers have behaved.”

In other words, we like to follow the crowd, and when this crowd is posting (and eating) mainly junk food, there’s a good chance we’ll also be posting (and eating) junk food. As healthier food becomes less and less prevalent on #foodporn photos, there’s a greater chance that we wouldn’t feel very comfortable uploading a photo of a quinoa salad we made or the beautiful strawberries we just bought at the farmers market. After all, too many people might think it’s not that cool, at least not as much as pancakes with peanut butter and hot fudge, for example.

I’m not sure to what degree the Food Porn Index can change the balance of power between online photos of healthy and unhealthy food, but it is an effort worth pursuing given our tendency to feel that we can’t really enjoy food unless we take a picture of it and upload it to make sure the rest of the world sees it. If more people will remember that every #foodporn counts as the website puts it, when making a great looking salad or a mouth-watering broccoli dish, there’s still hope to change the landscape of #foodporn photos.

Image credit: Bolthouse Farms

Raz Godelnik is an Assistant Professor of Strategic Design and Management at Parsons The New School of Design. You can follow Raz on Twitter.

Imagine a world where coalitions form to address climate change. Global alignment to reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions slows the demand for coal, while boosting efficiency and clean energy investment and deployment. Carbon prices and cap-and-trade schemes enable investment in carbon capture technologies as the world shifts to low-carbon technologies. This proactive approach to climate change, entitled "Blueprints," was identified by Shell in 2008 as one of three possible scenarios.

Shell has used scenario planning as a powerful business tool for making more strategic choices and being sensitive to uncertainties for 40 years. The "three hard truths" that were the foundation for the three scenarios in 2008 were that energy demand is surging, suppliers are struggling to keep up and stresses on our environment are increasing. The scenario entitled "Scramble" involves a lack of decisive action on climate change, thus coal and biofuels drive growth in developing countries, leading to rising food prices and air pollution, while the U.S. and Canada turn to "unconventional oil projects," such as Canada's tar sands.

In the past, Shell used scenario planning merely as a tool to gain insights but didn't advocate for any particular scenario. For the first time, Shell chose a scenario that it wants to manifest, and it says it chose the Blueprints scenario as being better for both the company and the world. The company announced this, and former Shell CEO Jeroen van der Veer even advocated for governments to impose a price for emissions.

Some large corporations, including the five biggest oil companies, Walmart and American Electric Power, including a price on carbon into their long-term financial plans. However, now years have passed without decisive action, and the Blueprints scenario hasn't been widely playing out. Governments haven't adopted strong climate policies, carbon emissions continue to mount, and climate change is a largely unpopular topic in the media. It appears that the Scramble scenario is actually playing out, not Blueprints, and Shell itself is leading the way.

Shell has invested $6 billion towards drilling in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas in Arctic Alaska, but a recent court ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw offshore Arctic oil leases into question. Shell spent nearly $1 billion annually in Arctic drilling in the last few years, thus it was banking on the Scramble scenario and looking to capitalize off of this scenario. A coalition of native and environmental groups led a lawsuit that has halted Shell's plans to start drilling this summer, thus elements of the Blueprints scenario are manifesting.

Oil produced from Canadian tar sands are another example of Shell banking on the Scramble scenario. Because a lot of energy needs to be used to extract oil from this source, the greenhouse gas emissions are 23 percent higher than from conventional crude.

The proposed Keystone XL pipeline would help deliver hard-to-access Alberta tar sand oil to U.S. refineries. If the production, refining and combustion of 830,000 barrels per day of sands crude oil were actually met, the pipeline would contribute the climate-change equivalent of an additional 5.7 million cars on the road each year , according to a report by the State Department. Shell has invested millions in lobbying for this controversial project, furthering the push towards the Scramble scenario.

Although Shell has publicly stated that it supports the Blueprints scenario, its support of the Keystone XL pipeline, oil production from tar sands and Arctic drilling show otherwise. In the absence of decisive government action to curb climate change, Shell is scrambling to capitalize off of the current scenario.

"I will be one of those persons most cheering for an endless summer in Alaska," Peter E. Slaiby, vice president of Shell Alaska, said at the Arctic Imperative Summit.

Image credit: Shell (upper photo) and Greenpeace (lower image)

While many conservatives and conservative think tanks claim that raising the federal minimum wage would bring only negative consequences, an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) shows otherwise.

The CBO, a non-partisan group that analyzes congressional bills, analyzed the effects of increasing the minimum wage and concluded that it would increase the pay and family income for most low-wage workers. The increased earnings for low-wage workers would be $31 billion, by CBO’s estimate.

Overall real income for all low-wage workers would increase by $2 billion, and real income would increase by $5 billion for workers whose income is below the poverty threshold. Raising the minimum wage would move about 900,000 people above the poverty line. The CBO also found that raising the federal minimum wage would slightly reduce employment by about 500,000 workers, or 0.3 percent. However, changes in the economy for goods and services might offset the employment decrease. As the CBO points out, “The families that experience increases in income tend to raise their consumption.”

During President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address last month, he promised to sign an executive order raising the minimum wage for federal contractors to $10.10 an hour from its current $7 an hour.  A few weeks later, Obama made good on that promise and signed the executive order which affects about 100,000 workers. It will go into effect next January.

Obama is not satisfied with only raising the minimum wage for federal contractors. In both his State of the Union and his weekly address last week he has called on Congress to pass a bill that would raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10. Raising the minimum wage would “lift millions of Americans out of poverty, and help millions more work their way out of poverty–without requiring a single dollar in new taxes or spending,” Obama said during his Feb. 15 weekly address. He added that increasing the federal minimum wage would “give more businesses more customers with more money to spend–and that means growing the economy for everyone.”

An analysis in 2013 by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) finds that raising the minimum wage would “help reverse the ongoing erosion of wages that has contributed significantly to growing income inequality” while providing a “modest stimulus to the entire economy.” Increasing the federal minimum wage to $10.10 by July 1, 2015 would raise the wage of about 30 million workers by about $32.6 billion and create about 140,000 new jobs over the phase in period.

Those who would see wage increases do not fit the stereotypes of minimum wage workers, as more than 88 percent are at least 20-years-old, about 44 percent have at least some college education, only 14.2 percent are part-time workers and more than half (54.5 percent) work full time (35 or more hours a week). And Obama is right in stating that women would be most affected, as the EPI found that women make up 56 percent of low-wage workers. The EPI states on its website that it is a nonprofit, non-partisan think tank created in 1986.

Many economists agree with the findings of the CBO and the EPI, as a 2013 survey of leading economists by University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business found. The economists surveyed agreed by almost a four-to-one margin that raising the minimum wage has more benefits than costs. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who introduced a bill to increase the federal minimum wage to $10.10, also agrees. On MSNBC's "Morning Joe" show, he said that it's "goofy stuff" to claim that increasing the federal minimum wage will cause workers' hours to be cut or reduce employment. Instead, he said that raising the minimum wage would help the overall economy because minimum wage workers "tend to spend their money."

Image credit: Flickr/The All-Nite Images

Last month we wrote about former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's work with Henry Paulson under the Risky Business initiative to assess the amount of financial risk that climate change poses to the American economy. But the highly committed former mayor is clearly not waiting around to find out the answer.

He has just set out on a new venture, investing $53 million of his own money to try and do something about the sorry state of the world's fisheries. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization's 2006 study published in Science predicted that many ocean fish stocks will be producing less than 10 percent of their peak catch levels by the end of this century.

Already, the U.N. reports that 32 percent of global fish stocks are overexploited or depleted and as much as 90 percent of large species like tuna and marlin have been fished out. The International Programme on the State of the Ocean found that the world's marine species faced threats "unprecedented in human history"—and overfishing is part of the problem. Another part, of course,  is climate change which has raised ocean temperatures and acidity levels, wreaking havoc with coral reefs and other sensitive breeding areas.

Meanwhile, global demand for seafood and fish products is expected to rise by 20 percent in the next six years.

In many places fish protein is now being obtained through farming rather than fishing. But the aquaculture boom has its own problems. It is currently the fastest growing means of food production, with output jumping 50-fold since the 1950s. Today it provides roughly half of the seafood consumed around the world. But among the problems associated with fish farming are disease, which often spreads to wild fish, the proliferation of antibiotics and anti-fungal agents to combat the disease, a significant amount of nitrogen and phosphorus waste products being released into the ocean, natural habitat destruction, and the voracious appetites of carnivorous fish that often require two pounds of fish meal for every pound of fish produced. With all that, the end results is often less nutritious, and, in the case of farmed salmon, dyed pink to resemble their wild cousins.

Still, given the widespread incidence of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity, many experts, including doctors, are recommending more fish in the American diet.

Despite the dire state of things, there are reasons to believe an investment like Bloomberg's Vibrant Ocean's Initiative, can make a difference. Why? Just look at it from a business perspective, says Svati Kirsten Narula in the Atlantic. The difference between what the sea is producing today and what it could be producing if stocks were restored, is somewhere around $50 billion annually. But in order to realize that opportunity, two things have to happen. First, we need to stop subsidizing the global fishing fleet in their quest to get every last fish out of the water. And second, we need to encourage the growth of existing fish stocks by managing them sustainably.

One study, published in Science, found that fishing reform could really make a difference, generating an estimated 56 percent increase in abundance and anywhere between an 8 and 40 percent increase in global catches. A second study, puts the cost of rebuilding at $203 billion, with a profitable outcome in 12 years.

What kind of reforms are we talking about? The current industrial fleet already has the capacity to catch twice as many fish as there are in the ocean today. And some of the methods in use today such as bottom-trawling discards 10 pounds of sea life for every pound caught. Clearly, these types of practices are the very antithesis of sustainable.

A lot of this, says Bloomberg, can be addressed with proper management. Since most of the world's fisheries lie within national boundaries, individual countries can set policy to manage their resources. Bloomberg will be supporting three initiatives with three different partners utilizing three different leverage points.

Oceana, whose motto is “promote responsible fishing,” is an advocacy and educational group. They work with governments to set and enforce science-based limits on the amount of fish that can be caught, and reduce the amount of sea life that is unintentionally caught and killed.

Rare, which operates in the Philippines, focuses more on the 12 million smaller fishermen that work within 10 miles of shore. They work with educating these fishermen on sustainable practices, and the development and enforcement of protected areas where fish stocks can rebuild. They offer fishers exclusive fishing rights in exchange for the agreement to respect protected zones.

EKO Asset Management Partners, works from the financial end of things, working with investors and agencies to “assess, develop and deploy innovative financing strategies that result in meaningful environmental outcomes and attractive financial returns.” Because both local and industrial fishers tend to over-fish for basic survival, with a short-term focus, EKO works to create financial incentives to reward more sustainable fishing practices. These incentives will, hopefully, reward fishermen for implementing changes and allow them to participate in the returns that these changes are expected to bring about.

Says EKO co-founder Jason Scott, about the J-shaped fishery recovery curve, “If the science behind that is true, then this is a really attractive investment."

Image courtesy of Rare: Bloomberg Philanthropies

RP Siegel, PE, is an inventor, consultant and author. He co-wrote the eco-thriller Vapor Trails, the first in a series covering the human side of various sustainability issues including energy, food, and water in an exciting and entertaining format. Now available on Kindle.

Follow RP Siegel on Twitter.

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) rank companies all the time: Greenpeace rates electronics companies for environmental responsibility in its Guide to Greener Electronics, and the World Wildlife Fund’s Palm Oil Buyers Scorecard classifies corporations by their efforts to use sustainable palm oil. But no one has evaluated NGOs for their influence, credibility and effectiveness–until now.

GreenBiz Group, publisher of GreenBiz.com, released its first-ever GreenBiz NGO Report at its annual GreenBiz Forum in Phoenix this week, asking 200 companies–about three-quarters of which have a revenue of more than $1 billion–to scrutinize 30 of the largest NGOs.

“For years, we’ve seen corporations rated, ranked and reviewed by a wide range of NGOs. This is often part of a name-and-shame campaign compelling big brands to make big changes,” said John Davies, GreenBiz’s vice president and senior analyst, in a press release. “We decided to turn the tables and have sustainability executives rate leading NGOs.”

If you’re looking for a simple No. 1 through No. 30 ranking of NGOs, you won’t find it in this report, although Davies wrote on GreenBiz.com that this type of list is a goal for future versions. Instead, NGOs are classified into four categories: trusted partners, useful resources, brand challenged and the uninvited.

Only three NGOs–The Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund and Environmental Defense Fund–garnered GreenBiz’s top ranking of trusted partners: They’re corporate-friendly, highly credible organizations with long-term corporate partnerships and numerous success stories.

Greenpeace, Oxfam, Natural Resources Defense Council and eight other groups were categorized as useful resources–highly credible organizations that have created helpful programs and services for their corporate partners.

“Brand challenged” NGOs–organizations that were found to be credible but not very influential–included the Union of Concerned Scientists, Environmental Working Group and Basel Action Network. Groups that are not well known or viewed as critics rather than partners fell into the most undesirable ranking–“the uninvited”–such as Earth Justice, Earth First and Rainforest Action Network.

While it’s too early to gauge NGOs’ response to the GreenBiz report, it is clear that GreenBiz developed the study not to “name and shame” advocacy groups, but to help them in their efforts to change corporate behavior and policy. The report doesn’t simply rank the nonprofits, but provides insight into how and why the business community wants to partner with NGOs.

The report surveyed GreenBiz’s 3,200-member Intelligence Panel, representing both large and small businesses in a wide range of industries, and received a 7 percent response rate.

When asked on which issues business panelists wanted to collaborate with NGOs, both large and small companies identified the same top three priority areas: climate change, community engagement and energy (both renewables and energy efficiency).

The majority of business panelists surveyed also indicated that they prefer to work with NGOs in long-term partnerships, while less than half said they engage with NGOs on short-term projects. Only 4 percent reported that they do not collaborate with NGOs in any way.

Interestingly, the report examined the effect of “name and shame” tactics by NGOs: Earth First activists chaining themselves to trees to prevent logging or Greenpeace staging a breakup between Ken and Barbie to protest Mattel’s packaging sourced from rainforests. More than half of the panelists surveyed said their companies had been the target of an NGO campaign in the past five years, and 6 percent reported that the nonprofit’s threatened action was withdrawn once they agreed to work with the group.

Nearly half of panelists viewed “name and shame” campaigns as neither helpful nor harmful, and 20 percent actually found the campaigns to be highly effective in motivating their company to change its policies. Only 5 percent thought the campaigns were harmful to their companies.

The report concluded with advice to NGOs from GreenBiz’s business panelists on collaborating with corporations--recommending NGOs develop a comprehensive understanding of an industry, product or supply chain before trying to lobby for change and to approach a company with a clear objective and concrete solutions. The panelists also cautioned nonprofits against generalizing all companies as anti-environment and asked that they don’t reward companies that make unattainable commitments and goals.

Whether or not this advice is welcomed by NGOs, Davies makes a strong case that advocacy groups should take heed.

“Our network members cited a number of examples where they feel business is moving faster than many NGOs and consultancies,” he wrote on GreenBiz.com. “… Company execs aren’t just looking for help with their CSR reports. They’re looking for specific expertise to support their sustainability goals.”

You can read the full GreenBiz NGO report here.

Image credit: Pierre Baelen, Greenpeace

Passionate about both writing and sustainability, Alexis Petru is freelance journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area whose work has appeared on Earth911, Huffington Post and Patch.com. Prior to working as a writer, she coordinated environmental programs for Bay Area cities and counties. Connect with Alexis on Twitter at @alexispetru

Fast food and wages

According to a 2013 study sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley’s Labor Center and the University of Illinois, the cost of public assistance to families of fast-food workers is roughly $7 billion a year; more than half (52 percent) of families of fast food workers are enrolled in one or more public programs (compared to 25 percent of the total workforce).

Of that $7 billion, McDonald’s employees received the most help: More than $1.2 billion in public assistance each year, from 2007 through 2011. In light of this, Bloomberg Businessweek recently observed that McDonald’s had become one of America’s “biggest welfare queens.” Congratulations, taxpayers. We are effectively subsidizing McDonald’s’ profits!

At the same time, it should come as no surprise that the fast food industry pays its employees a paltry wage. The Berkeley study found that “[m]edian pay for core front-line fast food jobs is $8.69 an hour, with many jobs paying at or near the minimum wage.” The federal minimum wage in the United States is even lower, at $7.25 an hour (though President Barack Obama recently called raising the minimum to $10.10 an hour a “top priority”). Assuming full-time employment, a minimum wage salary amounts to an annual income of roughly $15,000 per year. The poverty line in the United States is $23,000 per year, or $11.33 an hour, well higher than both the federal minimum wage and the fast food median.

Living wages and corporate social responsibility

A minimum wage employee living 30 percent below the poverty line is certainly not earning a “living wage,” which Merriam-Webster defines as “a wage sufficient to provide the necessities and comforts essential to an acceptable standard of living.” Whether a wage can be defined as “living” depends on one’s place of residence, and MIT offers a useful calculator for making these determinations. In New York City, for example, where the minimum wage was just raised to $8 an hour, a living wage is $12.75 (for a single adult); in San Francisco, the minimum wage is $8 but a living wage is $12.83 (for a single adult). While a number of different companies and localities have recently raised their minimum wage levels, the federal government still cannot even agree that raising the minimum wage is a good idea.

Some international instruments appear to codify a right to a living wage. Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example, requires “equal pay for equal work” and sets forth a human right to “just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity.” Article 7 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights requires “fair wages” and “equal remuneration for work of equal value without distinction of any kind.” Yet, the primary CSR guidelines have avoided--or even “systematically excluded”--embracing living wage requirements. They are not a part of ISO 26000 (arguably the "definitive" CSR standard), for instance. Nor are they mentioned in the OECD Guidelines for Multinationals or any of the ILO’s eight “fundamental” conventions.

One result of this exclusion is that McDonald’s and other American corporations must simply meet the woefully inadequate state or local minimums. Another result is that multinationals are able to pay radically disparate wages to workers across their geographical operations, with those located in “developing” nations receiving significantly lower relative wages than their counterparts in America.

All of this, of course, maximizes “shareholder value,” leads to record corporate profits and delivers cheap goods to consumers, but does so on the back of an underpaid workforce.

The role of America's food policy

So what if McDonald’s were required to pay a living wage? According to Businessweek: “Based on recent restaurant financials, if payroll costs doubled”--in other words, if McDonald’s decided to double its wages--“and other expenses didn’t decrease, menu prices at McDonald’s would have to go up about 25 percent to offset the increase. That would mean paying up to an extra $1 for a Big Mac, likely sending price-sensitive consumers elsewhere.”

When I read that I’ll admit I had a naive image of consumers abandoning the fast-food industry in droves, opting instead for healthier alternatives. Unfortunately, even if consumers were entirely priced out of fast food and no equally cheap and unhealthy alternatives emerged, America’s food policy would have to undergo a radical transformation in order to encourage healthier eating.

Current farm policies in the U.S. are antiquated and destructive and the primary culprit is the farm subsidy. The subsidy, conceived as an emergency stopgap during the Great Depression, has grown into an “apparently inviolable institution” that continues to metastasize. According to Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, in the 1930s, when 40 percent of Americans lived in rural areas and farm incomes had collapsed, the subsidies served an anti-poverty function. Now, however, they mainly serve to encourage the overproduction of soybeans, wheat and corn. The result is corn that is dirt cheap, which in turn means high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated fats and corn-fed meats are dirt cheap as well. In other words, the stuff on the fast food menus and the stuff that leads to diabetes and obesity is also the stuff that is most affordable.

McDonald’s profits, then, are buoyed not only by the absence of living wage requirements, but by taxpayer largesse in the form of public assistance to employees and food laws that drive down the prices of their core ingredients. Of course, changing American food policy would require an epic shift in the way our democracy functions. We can support farmers markets, encourage those markets to take food stamps and support nutritional education programs, but food policy in this country is pretty entrenched.

In the meantime, then, the CSR community should push for the inclusion of living wage requirements in companies’ internal policies and in the relevant guidelines.  Not only would that make an immediate impact on the lives of the millions of low wage workers, but it might even encourage a change in the way we eat, too.

Image credit: Flickr/desrowVISUALS.com

By Charukesi Ramadurai

When Delhi-born Ashmeet Kapoor, 28, returned to India after seven years in the U.S., he knew that he wanted to start a social venture based around energy or agriculture. However, this electrical engineer, with a master’s degree in entrepreneurship from Brown University, an Ivy League institution, was also aware of his own ignorance about rural India, having only experienced it from a distance.

To remedy this he went on a 15-day, 8,000 kilometer train journey across India–the Jagriti Yatra, meaning "Journey of Awareness." For the past five years, this project has been taking 400 to 450 young people, chosen from thousands of applicants, to 12 destinations in India. On the journey, these yatris (translated as ‘travellers’) meet successful social entrepreneurs, in order to learn techniques which they can apply to their own business ideas. The role models come from a variety of backgrounds: Anshu Gupta of Goonj in New Delhi, for instance, works with clothing for the underprivileged, while Dr. S. Aravind of Aravind Eye Care in Coimbatore provides quick turnaround, low-cost eye surgeries. All mentors must have been running a commercially viable social enterprises for a minimum of 10 years to be selected for the scheme.

The Jagriti Yatra team argues that social enterprise is the key to long-term sustainable development in India. This is borne out by a recent report by WWF, ‘Green Game-changers’, which claims that small business and social enterprises in India and other parts of Asia are tackling local and international challenges in a variety of innovative ways, sending "ripples across the globe." In particular, many entrepreneurs are embracing a concept known as, “Jugaad,”--the creation of innovative solutions to problems using fewer resources (see ‘Frugal plenty’ in the Green Futures special edition India: innovation nation).

However, no matter how frugal they are, in the absence of mentorship and guidance many small businesses struggle to get off the ground. Byzantine bureaucracy, corruption and infrastructural challenges can all take their toll on fledgling operations. In fact, India ranks among the world’s worst countries in terms of encouraging entrepreneurs: 166 out of 183 countries, according to World Bank figures from 2011. A poll conducted by Gallup in 2012 seems to bear this out: nearly half of the 5,000 Indian adults surveyed said that the government was a significant stumbling block to starting a business, while only 37 percent of current business owners and 28 percent of those seeking to start a business said that they knew someone who can offer advice about business management.

This is where a project like Jagriti Yatra can make a difference. It helps young entrepreneurs to identify market needs and make business plans, and offers insights into the challenges of starting a social enterprise and the skills needed to keep it economically sound. This process often continues long after the train journey has been completed. In Kapoor’s case, Jagriti Yatra set him up to spend six months at Deoria, a village in Uttar Pradesh, where he leased land and interacted with farmers to understand their lives and their problems.

This led to the creation of Jagriti Agro Tech (note the homage in the name), which supplies organic fruit and vegetables online under the brand I Say Organic; the produce is sourced from farmers in five surrounding states, connecting them directly to markets. Kapoor received Rs.10 million (roughly $161,000) from his family to start the business, which now employees 20 people. The absence of middle-men has allowed him to pay farmers 25 percent more than market rates for their produce, and he is now in conversation with external investors, promising a five-fold growth of the business.

Extended placements like the one Kapoor benefited from are just one of the ways Jagriti Yatra provides follow-up support. During last year’s journey, participants were asked to form teams and present business ideas; 15 of these teams were then selected and called for a follow-up meeting session called Biz Gyan Tree (meaning the "Tree of Business Knowledge") in February. Here, mentors helped the teams to refine their business ideas, trained them in formal business plan writing and provided leads for financial investment.

Ben Kellard, head of sustainable business at Forum for the Future, says social enterprises need a wide range of skills and knowledge in order to be successful, from the kind of business planning advice that Biz Gyan Tree offers, to guidance in understanding consumer needs. “They also need to learn rapidly in order to refine their offer and business model to ensure it meets the need and makes money,” he adds. “The Jagriti Yatra project is a great example of how to help social entrepreneurs gain these skills and apply them, setting them up for success.”

In the last five years, more than 225 yatris have started their own social enterprise, and roughly half of them are already established in small towns and villages. “By taking a national perspective, the ‘travellers’ will get insights into how they could grow their enterprises beyond their state borders," says Kellard.

Rema Subramanian, partner with Ankur Capital, an angel fund that invests in social enterprises, including Daily Dump (also featured in India: innovation nation) is also enthusiastic about the scheme: “Most of us lead cocooned lives with our version of problems and solutions. A journey like this opens up our minds to the realities out there.” She isn’t worried about a lack of formal business training among the aspiring social entrepreneurs, given that most do not come from business backgrounds. “A sleek PowerPoint presentation or Excel spreadsheets with fancy business plans have very limited value if the entrepreneur has not actually got their hands dirty," she adds.

Aditi Prakash certainly takes a hands-on approach to her business: She makes designer handbags from traditional Indian textiles that have been largely forgotten by modern generations. As Prakash began experimenting with her bags, a friend participating in a trade fair in New Delhi suggested sharing a stall. With the help of a local tailor she managed to make 100 bags, which sold exceedingly well. Prakash now works with three skilled tailors and provides livelihood to dozens of women from the village. More than 400 Pure Ghee handbags, each of them entirely handmade, are sold across the country every month.

Prakash’s most recent collection of bags, called Allika (‘weaving’ in the local language), was made by weavers in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The bags are made solely from organic cotton and organic dyes like indigo, and are one of Prakash’s bestselling ranges. Another collection called Mashru–meaning "permitted" in Arabic–uses a fabric popular among the Muslim community of Gujarat. Since the religion forbids them from letting their skin touch anything made from animals, the fabric is glossy silk on the outside and cotton on the inside.

Prakash, a graduate from the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, is also passionate about recycling and makes it work for her commercially. “In the name of recycling, people make and sell things which look dull and are poorly finished," she says. “When I cut the cloth for my bags, my women sort through the bigger pieces and create a colourful patchwork out of it.” These limited edition bags–the Tutti Frutti collection–have also proved popular with her customers. “However,” she adds, “I would never cut out cloth just to make a patchwork bag.”

In Bangalore, the Information Technology capital of India, Kuldeep Dantewadia’s organization, Reap Benefit, works with school and college children to “make green a habit” from a young age. The aim is to encourage students to make an impact on their immediate environment by reducing and managing waste, while using natural resources responsibly. They also help educational institutions–and increasingly corporates who are taking their sustainability aims seriously–to go green. Dantewadia candidly admits that the young people Reap Benefit works with were initially cynical about their approach because “we were talking about concepts like global warming that they could not relate to at a personal level." However, the enterprise is clearly doing something right: They have now worked with more than 60 schools as well as numerous corporate clients.

Reap Benefit also designs waste/water management, carbon footprint management and energy optimisation solutions, and helps organisations with auditing. It acts as a consultancy for educational institutions too, training staff in waste, water and energy management techniques. Dantewadia claims his business has evolved in an organic not a planned-manner. Profits from work with corporates and private schools, and sales of environmental products like composting enzymes, are ploughed back into the business, making for a circular business model–an approach that Prakash has also adopted.

According to these entrepreneurs, exposure to a business ethos was one of Jagriti Yatra’s biggest contributions to their success. Prakash says, “When I went on the yatra, I was selling bags but not really running a business. But we would come back every night and we would have to analyse the business plans of the enterprise we visited. That gave me an understanding of how successful entrepreneurs were doing it.”

The journey also gave them an insight into some of the most pressing needs in rural areas of India. “It opened my eyes to the fact that providing a livelihood was more the need of the hour than bringing in services to rural areas,” says Kapoor, “which is why I thought of I Say Organic.” While Dantewadia claims he “came across so many new conversations and perspectives about my country, which I kept thinking over, long after I got off the train. I realized that there was no one right approach to development work.”

There is considerable potential for social enterprises in India to foster change, but the problem has always been for such projects to sustain themselves commercially. This is compounded by a cultural hesitation to discuss money matters. However, by unapologetically focusing on this aspect, Jagriti Yatra has provided a platform for participants to see how a social project can work successfully as a business. As Prakash says, “In my business, I always wanted to balance the social and commercial sides because I never saw myself purely as a do-gooder. For the first time, I got a sense of how this is possible.”

Image credit: Jagriti Yatra, Joseph Bastin/iStockphoto/Thinkstock

Charukesi Ramadurai is a freelance writer and journalist from India.

By Tolulope Ilesanmi

I remember an Economics term paper I wrote while studying for my MBA at McGill, where I proposed that the solution to the conflict between maximization of shareholder value and sustainable development is love, as opposed to self-interest.

I argued that self-interest creates diminishing returns and makes booms and busts inevitable because it works from the premise of scarcity, even if there is obvious abundance, which drives the need to maximize. Love is infinitely generative and works from the premise of abundance, even if scarcity is apparent. Love is inherently creative. Love is content with apparent scarcity and nothingness because it works from the invisible to the visible. Self-interest focuses on what exists and attempts to maximize it, for obvious reasons: All we see is all there is. Self-interest caps our intelligence while love uncaps us.

I left the MBA with the thought that without shifting to love, we are doomed. Our best solutions become weapons of mass or self-destruction where self-interest rules. I believe our greatest need is a heart shift from self-interest to love.

Instead of going into a traditional MBA domain, my wife and I chose instead to start a cleaning company because it was very simple–remove dirt. I also thought that since self-interest makes us pay less attention to the seemingly non-existent, there must be something in this humble activity we are missing. Although I struggled with my identity as a cleaner, I thought that if driven by love, it is okay to not be an investment banker or a consultant or an entrepreneur in a flashier domain. It is okay to be a cleaner, if what we need to shift is the intangible, held in our hearts.

Love causes beauty to emerge from dirt.

I started to see cleaning as an obvious metaphor for addressing the challenges in our world. I started to see how the profound simplicity of cleaning contrasted with our complicated way of addressing our significant challenges. I concluded that "cleaner" was not my job but my calling. In retrospect, I was self-cleaning. I had to. The effectiveness of cleaning rests on intermittently turning inwards. A dust cloth is only effective as long as it is regularly cleaned. It is another way of saying, "We must be the change we seek in the world." Love is not love if it does not work from the inside out.

We now see cleaning as a practice--a practice in love and empathy, a practice in making a difference, cleaning the intangible, shifting paradigms, crossing thresholds and boundaries, facing and cleaning messes, experiencing humility as prerequisite for wisdom and innovation, and a host of other practices. I now see cleaning as a simple and practical model that at least complements the models I studied in MBA class.

We summoned the courage to invite "non-cleaners" into immersive cleaning experiences in order to use cleaning as a model and container for addressing individual, leadership, organizational, societal and global issues. After all, if our models are not moving us forward, what is the harm in trying something different? We started with executives and now introduce cleaning as practice in schools and organizations as a multi-dimensional immersive educational and organizational practice, a leadership development tool and a model for cleaning - changing the intangible.

We had the audacity to come up with this definition, from which we continue to mine:

"Cleaning is the process of removing dirt from any space, surface, object or subject thereby exposing beauty, potential, truth and sacredness."

This definition is based on the belief that beauty, not dirt, is the reality, and the purpose of cleaning is to allow the beauty to re-surface each time we clean. Love sees beyond the dirt and patiently works to uncover the underlying beauty, while self-interest tends to see only dirt and to get as much as could be gotten as quickly as possible. With both individuals and organizations, we work on the premise that the wisdom and expertise they need is already within. We are only there to uncover the potential that is often not apparent.

True cleaning is synonymous with love.

How can we address our environmental challenges as cleaners? How can we educate as cleaners? How can we manage organizations, institutions, social programs, cities and governments as cleaners? How can we parent, relate, consult or lead as cleaners?  I will be talking about this more at the upcoming Social Enterprise Alliance Summit. Hope to see you there!

Tolulope Ilesanmi is the founder of Zenith Cleaners who will be leading a plenary entitled “Building an Economy on Love” at the upcoming Social Enterprise Alliance Summit in Nashville, TN April 13-16.

Birmingham-based Unity Trust Bank, Midcounties Co-operative and The Phone Co-op have become the first businesses to be accredited by the new Fair Tax Mark, the world's first independent accreditation scheme to address the issue of responsible tax.

The Mark, which has been developed by a team of tax justice campaigners and tax experts, shows that a company is making a genuine effort to be open and transparent about its tax affairs and pays the right amount of corporation tax at the right time and in the right place.

The accreditation of the Fair Tax Mark pioneer companies comes at a time when recent polling from the Institute for Business Ethics has found that corporate tax avoidance is now the number one concern of the public when it comes to business conduct.

Margaret Hodge MP, and Chair of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee is a keen supporter of the initiative. "The reaction to the revelations about the tax practices of big names like Starbucks, Amazon and Google shows that this is an issue the public really cares about. Given the choice, many people would prefer to give their custom to a responsible business that does the right thing and pays its fair share of tax," she commented. "The Fair Tax Mark helps give them the power to make that choice, and seeing customers vote with their feet is perhaps the most effective deterrent there is to companies engaging in tax avoidance or other irresponsible practices."

Current estimates suggest that whilst the public sector budget is being slashed, corporate tax avoidance in the UK is currently running at £12bn every year, a sum which would fund the training of almost half a million midwives and pay the salaries of half a million teachers for a year.

 

Picture credit: © Emeraldgreen | Dreamstime.com

Apple’s recently released supplier responsibility report contains good news concerning conflict minerals. The report confirmed that as of last month, all “active, identified tantalum smelters” in the company’s supply chain were verified by third-party auditors to be conflict free. The report states that the company released a list of smelters and refiners in its supply chain whose tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold is conflict free “so it’s clear which ones have been verified as conflict-free.” The electronics industry only uses a “small percentage” of tin, tungsten and gold, according to the report. Apple will continue to require that its suppliers only use conflict-free verified tantalum and will continue to monitor its suppliers’ smelters.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the second largest African country, conflict minerals are often mined through forced labor, debt bondange or child slavery. Conflict minerals fund militias in the DRC who terrorize local populations. According to the non-profit organization, Walk Free there has been much progress to rid the electronics industry of conflict minerals. Intel announced recently that all of its new microprocessors will be made conflict minerals free. Intel CEO Brian Kraznich urged other companies to do the same. Perhaps much of the progress can be attributed to a section of the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 (Section 1502) which requires companies to publicly disclose their use of conflict minerals from the DRC. The SEC adopted the rule in 2012.

Greenpeace Energy Campaigner Tom Dowdall released a statement congratulating Apple for its “increased transparency about its suppliers.” Dowdall characterized increased transparency at Apple as “becoming a hallmark of Tim Cook's (the CEO of Apple) leadership at the company.” He urged “Samsung and other consumer electronics companies” to follow Apple’s example “so the industry can exert its collective influence to build devices that are better for people and the planet.”

Instead of avoiding minerals from the DRC, Apple instead opts for supporting “verified supply lines and economic development in the region,” as stated in the supplier report. Apple is driving its smelters and refiners to comply with the Conflict-Free Smelter Program (CFSP) or an equivalent third party audit program. The CSFP is part of the Conflict Free Sourcing Initiative, and focuses on what it calls a “pinch point” or a “point with relatively few actors” in the global metals supply chain. The CSFP uses an independent third-party audit to identify smelters and refiners that source only conflict free minerals and publishes the list on its website. Apple also works with non-governmental organizations, trade groups, government agencies and other groups to keep pressuring and driving for real change

Photo: ENOUGH Project