Author Archives: Annie

(posted on behalf of Asha John)

What can I say about the Net Impact conference…It was everything I imagined and more. I knew before I even went to Net Impact that I would be extremely intrigued by the subject matter because I spent lots of time looking at the schedule of events. The topics included Microfinance, Fair Trade, Green Investing, Ending Poverty in Africa, volunteering abroad, the future of Wind Power and many more. The most challenging time of the conference was deciding which session to attend.

There were two speakers that truly inspired me – Darell Hammond and Vail Horton. Darell is the Founder and CEO of KaBoom! From the age of 4, he was raised in a group home. His positive experiences playing at the playground pushed him to devote his life to building playgrounds all around the U.S. Vail Horton is the CEO of Keen Mobility, a company that is devoted to various products made for elderly, injured or disabled individuals. His story brought tears to my eyes. He was born without legs and his parents gave him up because they could not handle the responsibilities that came with raising a boy with no legs. His adopted mother encouraged him to look beyond his disability. Instead of feeling
sorry for himself, he pushed himself to excel in life. He is now happily married with beautiful kids and a very successful business that he started. For someone who was born without legs, he has accomplished more than most people I have encountered. It was quite inspirational!

If you want to hear them, go to this site and start at 23:00 http://vimeo.com/31578354

If you want to hear any of the other conference main speakers, here is the link: http://vimeo.com/channels/netimpactconference/

One misconception of Net Impact is that it is only geared for people interested in Sustainability. This is definitely not true! The range of topics is quite broad, so most people could find at least one or two topic sessions that they would find of interest. I personally think that everyone should attend at least one Net Impact conference because the future of the people and the planet require efforts of everyone.

-Asha-

I actually wore my Birkenstocks to Net Impact – but only in the car.  Business school is a huge change of culture for me, so the weekend in Portland – like all of Core – was about learning to speak a new business language.

Like Garth and Matt, and arguably everyone at the conference, I chose sessions I hoped would teach me to communicate with impact.  One such session that really surprised me was on Friday afternoon called “Cross-Sector Partnerships: Community Impact Case Studies.”  I was excited by the title but somewhat skeptical of the panelists: PepsiCo and Timberland??  I am definitely not enthusiastic about a career in the corporate world.

At least, I wasn’t.  Amy Chen from PepsiCo was my highlight panelist of the weekend.  I care a lot about sustainable food and community development, so it was easy for her to excite me by introducing her initiative at PepsiCo: the Global Nutrition Group and a social enterprise called Food For Good.  Although I never would have said it four months ago, there is undeniable value in housing a social enterprise with business profits as a secondary goal within a money machine the size of Pepsi.

At a weekend I dedicated to learning to communicate with impact, Amy stood out as a powerfully skilled communicator.  She, and her co-panelist from Timberland, who was also great, spent the panel reminding us that effective, sustainable partnerships were rooted in open communication and respect for partners large and small.

It can be easy to fall into vocabularies of intangible benefits and generalizations when making a case for sustainability, but she (and oh so many others at the conference) brought an enviable fluency to her arguments, making the business case for environmental and social sustainability.

And it didn’t take metrics or technical vocabulary to convince me of the value of partnerships and social enterprise.  The big lesson here was the power of thoughtful, passionate, educated experience as a driver for successful change; familiarity with the languages of financial accounting or corporate strategy was evident, but they obvious key to their success lied elsewhere.  These women were speaking an accessible language, and that is what made them successful as corporate partners to individuals and grassroots community organizations.  “Setting transparent expectations” is valuable for a corporation entering a risky agreement with a potentially unstable community group, but it is just as valuable for the neighbors who may fear a corporate invasion of their local resources and goals.  Design thinking came up as an effective tool to bring corporate resources to effectively implement relevant solutions to local problems, bridging gaps in perceived needs and values of the different partners.

These claims are easy to accept at a human level, but they are just as effective to make a business case for partnerships in communities.  I took away equally important lessons in communication as I did in methods for establishing successful business relationships, but I’ll end here with a few of the latter:

• Set transparent expectations appropriate to the project’s and partners’ scope with self-sustaining goals for longevity beyond the partnership, with benefits and metrics to track the project’s impact
• Remember that humility is key; respect the realities of your potential partner’s abilities, as well as valuable knowledge and power in the community.
• Plan for sustainability beyond your project’s timeframe; you might leave the community as a partner, but the community will stay there and you can’t leave it hanging, as will the memories of your company’s involvement.

I am especially interested in food sustainability because of its integration of all “branches” of sustainability.  Sustainable agriculture is a hotbed of innovative, ecologically sustainable practices.  Many of the most sustainable agricultural practices are embedded generations deep in indigenous cultural practices, valued by those cultures for their sustainable, integrated benefits to environment and community.  And as food fulfills the most essential need for sustenance, enacting political and economic policies that ensure production and equal access to it is essential to sustaining peace and justice worldwide.

Unfortunately, even many of those in the industry of sustainable food evidently fail to recognize the importance of that social sustainability and its integration into any solutions for our global food crises, if the panel that brought me to tears is any evidence.  It was called “Feeding the World by 2050 through Sustainable Intensification.”

Perhaps I should have expected the worst from a panel that included representatives from DuPont, a fertilizer company, and Smithfield Foods.  However, the description promised a look at food security through an innovative method called “intensification,” and the rest of the conference had proven I should listen to many representatives from these big corporations an open mind.

The panelists spent 75 minutes arguing the way to feed the world was through monocultures, which have demonstrated tendencies to destroy soil health and are inherently less resilient to natural disasters; genetically-modified crops and fertilizers bought on credit that increase worldwide dependencies on American economic systems; and a rejection of many cultural practices that have fed indigenous populations – and their ecological homes – for centuries.

Near the top of my notes for this session I scrawled the words “greenwashing” over a few lines about Mosaic Company’s mission.  Then when Dennis Treacy from Smithfield asserted that people around the world just want American food and more of it, I became even more suspicious of the “sustainability” being proposed by the men at the front of the room.  When Jason Clay of the World Wildlife Fund claimed “You tend to make better decisions when you have fewer dollars to spend,” I couldn’t help but think of the decades of social and political upheaval around the world with roots in malnutrition and famine being a pretty convincing rebuttal to that claim.

Chris Lambe from Mosaic Company was probably the most insulting, however, when he argued that establishing a credit system for Mayan farmers to buy American fertilizers would get them out of debt.  He ignored the fact that before many Mayans were bribed with short-term dollars and cents to switch diversified crop production to fields of single strains of corn, they had fed entire communities by planting crops in rotation and in strategic combinations that ensured sustainable soil richness, resilience to disease and damaging weather conditions, and culturally embedded practices that ensured the entire community was engaged and fed by the fruits of their labor.

It is certainly true there is no easy solution to the growing food crisis.  And the panelists did claim that collaboration and infrastructure were keys to success.  (Food distribution is an area of particular personal concern, domestic just as critically as international.)

However, I was and remain shocked that there was no effort by the moderator or conference organizers to balance the scientifically innovative approaches proposed by DuPont, Smithfield, and Mosaic with anything resembling true, global ecological, social, or economic sustainability.