Usually we associate with brands based on our experiences with their products. After a while we know what brands we like and use brand names as a heuristic to make purchasing decisions easier. Occasionally when a brand has an exceptional story, the brand actually becomes the product. That seems to be the case with Holstee, a New York, NY based company that focuses on “lifestyle design with a conscience.” The only reason I had heard about them is that they’re often on Fab.com, yet there are a ton of people who have bought a printed version of the Holstee manifesto to put on their walls (see the manifesto here). The brand has literally become the product. Some may write off Holstee as an online store for “hipsters,” but the “People, Planet, Product” approach has a lot of meaning for a lot of people, and it’s enabled Holstee to grow their business.
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Although getting money to fund a startup company isn’t what I called easy, there’s a pretty standard process for seeking investment. When it comes to starting up a non-profit, the process isn’t often so clear. This can make finding funding seem impossible. However, there are some smart people who have taken the venture capital model and adjusted it for the non-profit world. One of these organizations is New Profit, which is based in Cambridge, MA. They were founded in 1998 and they focus “on supporting innovative social entrepreneurs who have brought a pathbreaking, big idea to life in an innovative organization.” They do this through their philanthropy fund, which has funded a ton of non-profit organizations. (I’m having trouble determining whether New Profit is actually a non-profit, but philanthropy funds usually are.)
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Volunteering is a great thing to do during your job search. It’s an opportunity to do good while building valuable skills and putting yourself to work doing something (which is always better than nothing when you’re job searching). Obviously volunteering isn’t only for people who have time on their hands, yet many non-profit organizations treat it like it is. Why would you have a top notch software developer running around picking up trash when he or she could be fixing a few bugs on the organization’s website? Why have a brilliant investment banker building a house when he or she could be managing the organization’s endowment? If the volunteers want time away from work and would prefer to do something different, that’s totally cool. But what if they want to offer pro bono services? Where do they find organizations who can make the best use of their time? Catchafire is a New York, NY based B-Corp (a for-profit company with a social mission–we actually featured jobs with B Corporation) that aims to fix this problem. They want to “make it easy for every professional to use their skills for good, and to make it easy for every nonprofit and social enterprise to access and effectively use pro bono as a way to build capacity within their organization.”
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One development that I’ve become more and more aware of since I graduated college is that of social entrepreneurship. The startup culture doesn’t apply solely to for-profit ventures. The tough thing about starting your own non-profit is getting money to run the organization. Early stage businesses can either grow organically by selling products or get investment at the cost of a portion of future revenues. Early stage non-profits don’t have as many options because most donors only want to give money to established non-profits that have a track record of doing good things with the money. That’s where New York City based Echoing Green steps in. They invest in and support “outstanding emerging social entrepreneurs to launch new organizations that deliver bold, high-impact solutions.” Since Echoing Green is already an established non-profit, they’re able to raise money to support upstarts that already have top notch founders and world changing missions, but not much else.
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As a member on the Board of Advisors for a startup non-profit, I know how hard it is to get things going. Building a website, raising the first $1,000, and writing a “business plan” are all huge challenges that separate ideas from real non-profits. And that doesn’t even include getting started on the good work that is the organization’s mission. The first few years are filled with ups and downs, and leaders of non-profit startups can use every little bit of extra help that they can get. One way that they can get that help is to work with Sparkseed, a San Ramon, CA based non-profit organization “that exists to develop the next generation of social entrepreneurs and increase their impact on society.” It’s an incubator/angel fund for early stage, student-led social ventures (both for-profit and non-profit).
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Homelessness is pretty terrible, but the problems that it leads to can be even worse. One of those problems is often AIDS. Housing Works is a New York City based non-profit that “provides homeless and low-income New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS and their families with housing, meals, medical care, drug treatment, social support, employment opportunities and other lifesaving services.” The cool thing is the scale that they’re doing this on—they are “the largest community-based AIDS service organization in the United States.” That means that since 1990 they’ve served more than 20,000 New Yorkers.
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Believe it or not, over the past week One Day, One Job has been coming to you from a lodge on the banks of the Grand Cascapedia river in Quebec. As I’ve learned this week, fishing for Atlantic Salmon is extremely difficult, even though you can often see the fish right in front of you. In some pools there appear to be plenty of fish, but none of them will bite. That’s probably a good thing considering the fact that the estimated annual run on the Bonaventure (where we’ve been doing our fishing) is only about 1,500-2,000 fish. That means that if I catch and release my daily limit of two fish, I’ve caught .1% of the entire run. Even though we’d really like to, we can’t even think about killing one of these fish to eat—they’re too precious. Luckily, CleanFish is a company (and a B Corporation, you know what that is now!) that offers sustainable seafood that we can eat. They’re based in San Francisco with offices in Gloucester, MA and Los Angeles, CA as well, and they’re changing the way that we eat seafood.
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Last week we featured FitBit, a company that was recently announced at the TechCrunch50. This week we’re looking at another startup that was announced at the conference. It’s called GoodGuide, and it’s aiming to be “the world’s largest and most reliable source of information on the health, environmental and social impacts of products and companies.” GoodGuide is pretty easy to use – you can input a product name to see all of the details of the product’s world impact, or you can look at a class of products to find the “goodest.” For instance you can look up Fantastik All Purpose Cleaner with Bleach specifically or you can just look at the ranking for household cleaners. It’s a great concept. They’re also apparently going to offer an iPhone application so that you can look up products as you shop for them in the grocery store; although, GoodGuide would probably prefer that you buy them online through their affiliate links.
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Update: Better World Books has contacted us with a coupon code offer for our readers. To take advantage, click here.
Better World Books is a company that we came across while we were looking for non-profits to write about on the weekends. They are part of a new breed of companies that are considered “for profit social ventures.” This means that Better World Books operates with all sights on making money, but they donate their profits to non-profit organizations such as Books for Africa, Room to Read, and the National Center for Family Literacy. It’s an interesting business model that is optimized to enact social change in away that many non-profits aren’t. We think the future will be full of companies with a similar structure.
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