Category: social entrepreneurship

business, education, social change, social entrepreneurship, Stanford

My Year of Hopefulness – John Sage and Pura Vida

Christa Avampato

“As co-founder and CEO of Pura Vida, John Sage has helped Fair Trade coffee – coffee purchased at a price that is fair to farmers – become a regular at U.S. breakfast tables and cafes. At the same time, he has helped better the lives of people in coffee-growing regions. In this talk, Sage discusses how Pura Vida uses every aspect of its products, processes, and profits for social good. He also outlines how the company works to improve the health, educational opportunities, and psychological outlooks of children and families in coffee-growing countries. Sage talks more broadly, as well, about how a new generation of socially minded organizations is producing meaningful, sustainable, and lasting improvements to our world.” ~ From Stanford’s Social Innovation Conversations website


I listened to John’s talk recently and was inspired by his story. After leaving business school, he went to the Pacific Northwest to work for a tiny software company named Microsoft. He went on to other consulting gigs at places like Starbucks. Throughout his career, he kept up his friendship with Chris, a business school friend who went back to Costa Rica after graduation to work in the field that would become social entrepreneurship. It is through this friendship, John’s success is the corporate world, and Chris’s connection to the poor in Costa Rica, that the idea of Pura Vida was brought to life. 

During the conversation, John tells a story about a woman who came from Costa Rica to Seattle University to tell her story. She, her husband, and her children had only known a life of picking coffee. Her children didn’t go to school – the family needed them to work so the family could survive. With the fair price that Pura Vida pays for the coffee on the plantation where they work, she and her husband could earn enough money to support the family, allowing her children to go to school. She had a wish for them to continue their education and perhaps to have the opportunity for college that all of the students in the audience at Seattle University have. Prior to Pura Vida, this dream was not even conceivable, much less possible.

The cost for this kind of dramatic change in a child’s life is an extra buck on our cups of coffee. On my Con Edison bill, I give an extra dollar a month to go toward a fund that helps people who struggle to pay their own electric bills. My dollar alone doesn’t help much, but together with thousands of other people it makes an enormous difference. When I go to Barnes & Noble to buy a birthday card, I have the opportunity to purchase a UNICEF greeting card so that a portion of the sale goes to UNICEF. The same can be said of hundreds of other products we purchase regularly. Our tiny purchases in this country have huge implications around the world. And we make most of these purchases without thinking, without even acknowledging that we have an opportunity every day to choose and create social change. With this kind of widespread collective impact, these small decisions are worthy of more of our attention.
change, hope, Obama, social change, social entrepreneurship

My Year of Hopefulness – The Power of Intention

Christa Avampato

This year, I’d really like to get my writing out in front of a larger audience. On January 20th, I was inspired by President Obama who believed in himself, believed in us, and called us to take action. He empowered us to change our lives, change our country and our world. “If it has to be, then it is up to me.” I took this to heart as I watched him take the oath of office. First, I jumped around and did a little dance for joy, and then I set about looking for a part-time blogging gig. 


With the enormous need for content generation, there are a lot of blogging opportunities out there. Most of the ones I found are non-paid, though I found one fairly quickly with Examiner.com, an on-line newspaper with city-specific news that spans a number of areas from art to food to business, and everything in between. It pays its reporters, Examiners, by click which is a fair and reasonable system and in New York, they had a need in their Business Section. Perfect. Exactly what I want to write about. So I pitched to them my angle on entrepreneurship, specifically social entrepreneurship, and the power it has to transform society. They liked the pitch and several days later I got the job. My first posts will appear this week and I’ll put up a short post on this blog every week to reveal the week’s topic and give a very brief overview of what will be up on Examiner.com.

After applying for the Examiner.com post, I put the last few stamps on 8 letters I had written to social entrepreneurs whom I admire. At my friend, Richard’s, urging I composed the letters rather than taking a class on the subject. “Just go out there and talk to people doing the work,” he told me. So I walked out my door to the mail drop box on the corner, said a little prayer, and dropped the letters in. Three days later, I received an email from Pat Christen, the CEO and President of HopeLab, a organization in California that built the video game, Re-mission, to help kids fight cancer. She invited me to come visit when I’m in the Bay Area and we’re in the process of setting up a date and time. (Pam Omidyar, the co-founder of HopeLab, will speak at TED next week.)

These two experience taught me about the power of intention. It is fine to hope for fortuitous events, turns of good luck, and the realization of a dream. But after we acknowledge that hope, it’s time to roll up our sleeves and get to work. My mom loves the saying, “God helps those who help themselves.” Hope does, too. If we want change, particularly social change, the journey is best started by looking in the mirror and asking ourselves the question, “What am I willing to do to make a difference?”  
career, entrepreneurship, hope, social entrepreneurship

My Year of Hopefulness – How Can I Best Serve

Christa Avampato

“How can I best serve?” It’s a question that a lot of people are asking on Inauguration Eve. The whole nation is looking up, wondering what is possible, and how they can make what’s possible not only probable but certain. I hope they continue to ask that question long after January 20, 2009 passes, and more importantly I hope we will all take action. I’m hopeful that people all around the country are not only making a pledge, but also recording and sharing their pledge publicly to hold themselves accountable for fulfilling it. To see what celebrities are pledging to do – and the range is surprisingly large with some promising to reduce their use of plastic and others promising to volunteer in their communities on a weekly basis – visit http://www.myspace.com/presidentialpledge  


For my pledge, I am publicly admitting for the first time that it is my wish to open a design firm that creates products to improve the lives of those in the developing world. I am inspired by the work of organizations like The Full Belly Project and One World Health who took skills from their lives in the private sector and used them to help other people improve their own lives. This year I will spend time devoted to learning more about this field, traveling, and serving in my community. 

I thought I needed to go back to school to learn about this new field and my friend, Richard, told me he thought I could learn more by just getting out there and doing it. Today, I dropped 8 letters into the mail, addressed to social entrepreneurs whom I admire, and asked them if they’d be willing to have me visit them and talk to them about their organizations. These letters were also Richard’s idea. So we will see what comes of them. 

This time in our history is about knowing who we are, hat we stand for, and where we can have the greatest, most meaningful impact. My best self doesn’t live in a grey cubicle at a large corporation churning out product for the wealthiest 10% of the world population, a population I have little interest in developing product for. Someone has to do this job, and I’m grateful for the opportunity, though in the long-run it’s not for me. I’ve been feeling badly about this realization in the past few weeks and I have been more than a little angry with myself for it – maybe I’m too difficult, maybe I’m too contrarian, perhaps I lack commitment, or maybe I’m just too stubborn and egotistical to work for someone else. 

And then I read an article about David Kelley, the founder of IDEO and the Standford d.school, and the same day came across another story about Danny Meyer, the restaurateur. Both of these men realized that after a while they didn’t fit the corporate mold so they struck out on their own. David Kelley’s exact quote is, “I had an intuition I couldn’t survive corporate America. I hated the hierarchy and just wanted to work with my friends.” After reading that, I stopped feeling so badly about my latest realization regarding my career and my personality. With David Kelley and Danny Meyer, along with countless other entrepreneurs, I am in good company. 

This whole journey we take in our careers is to learn how we can best serve, how we can make the most significant impact, how we can make this world better for us having been here. I realize that I can’t start my own business tomorrow, and maybe I can’t even start it next year given the tough economy, but I can begin to move toward it, small step by small step. I can be conscious of making choices and decisions that support this long-term goal and am grateful that I do have a job now that helps me afford to live while also providing me time to work on my future career. So while I’ve been lamenting the fact that I don’t yet work for myself, I recognize that this is all part of a larger plan. 
community service, hope, Seth Godin, social entrepreneurship

My Year of Hopefulness – All the ways you can serve

Christa Avampato

I am thrilled to see that MLK Day is being made into a holiday that celebrates and promotes service. (And it’s shocking to me that all Americans do not have that day off – I hope that will change.) Seth Godin published a list of ways to give back that day, and every day for that matter, that covers a wide spectrum of time investment. By no means is it definitive – it gets the creative juices flowing. There a lot of ways to give and a lot of organizations who need the help. 

From Seth’s list, I love the idea of creating a Wikipedia page for charities that we care about that may not be so well known. That’s what I plan to do. I will also dig in and do some research on social entrepreneurship in the hopes that my transition to that field and to building my own business is not all that far away. I know that it’s possible to do well and do good at the same time, with the same efforts, and I’m going to find a way to do that. 
blogging, charity, Ning, nonprofit, philanthropy, social entrepreneurship, social network

Just Begin

Christa Avampato

I marvel at how much time it takes people (and I am as guilty of this as anyone) to get going on a new idea. Have we done enough research? Have we thought through every possible scenario? Do we have enough money? What if it doesn’t work out? These are only a handful of questions we might ask ourselves as we consider a new venture, relationship, job, or even a hobby. How do I even know where to start? As Mary Poppins said, “Start at the very beginning.”

To this end, I have two things I’d really like to accomplish in my career this year: I’d like to become more familiar with the social entrepreneurship field and I’d like to get my writing out to a wider audience. Today, my first blog post on a site other than this blog is being published. I joined the blogging team at the Literacy ‘n’ Poverty Project, an organization that promotes literacy and adult education as tools to fight poverty and promote social change. I’ll be publishing on their site twice per month and my writing will focus on social change and poverty alleviation efforts.

To get involved, visit the site at http://www.literacyandpovertyproject.com/. The organization also has a group on the Ning social network that you can join: http://literacyandpovertyproject.ning.com.

apple, art, education, extreme affordability, museum, philanthropy, social entrepreneurship

My Year of Hopefulness – Social Entrepreneurship and iTunes U

Christa Avampato

By trade, I am product developer. I design and build product for American consumers, mostly wealthy ones. While I was in business school at Darden, if I could have chosen any career, this is what I would have chosen. In fact, it is what I have been doing my whole career in a variety of industries – I was building programs, theatre productions, communication plans, and fundraising concepts. However, up to that point I didn’t give much thought to the idea that what we do is just as important as how we do it and whom we do it for. 


Just after my graduation I moved back to New York City sans job. By the end of June I had a good job offer to start in July in the field of innovation, exactly what I wanted, and was free to spend a fair amount of time bumming around my old haunts, wandering, and reacquainting myself with a city that I had not lived in full-time since 2001. One afternoon I found myself at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. They were running an exhibit called Design for the Other 90%. At the time I did not realize that this exhibit and my strong belief in community service would start me on a course that would begin to dominate the way I view my future and my career.

Now a year and half out of business school, a light bulb has gone off for me. I have spent all of this time thinking that I needed a really brilliant idea to start an entrepreneurial venture, and that starting my own business mean a complete about-face from all of the work I have done in the past. In actuality, becoming a social entrepreneur is an amalgamation of all the work I have done to this point, and mixing it up with personal passions of history, culture, and volunteering. As Steve Jobs says, “Looking back, we are able to connect the dots of our lives.” And that is exactly the process I currently find myself in. 

I have been doing some research to find a class to take on the subject. Columbia has a few, as does Pratt, the New School, and NYU. Though none of them have exactly what I’m looking for. They either treat the subject as part of a nonprofit management masters, a business class, or as part of the sociology curriculum. One woman from NYU suggested I take a class entitled something like “How to become a female entrepreneur.” Can you imagine? It was essentially a class on how to write a business plan. I was telling my friend and mentor, Richard, about these classes and his response was, “I don’t suggest that. You would be completely bored.” He’s right.

And then I remembered an earlier post I wrote on this blog about iTunes University. Apple collected a wide variety of classes and lectures from the world’s top universities and put them on-line. For free. And sure enough, Stanford’s Center for Social Innovation had an entire series posted with exactly the material I was looking for. Did I mention that it was free. And it’s mobile so I download the lecture into iTunes, put them on my ipod, and away I go. I spent the afternoon walking around, doing my errands, and being inspired by the ideas and experiences of the brightest minds in my chosen field. 3 birds (exercise, errands, and learning) with 1 stone. 

I also learned that I don’t need a degree to do this work. (Good thing since I can’t afford one!) I have and am currently amassing the knowledge and experience I need to do this. And rather than take a class or apply for a fellowship in this field, Richard encouraged me to sit down and write letters to the social entrepreneurs I admire most. Ask them if I could visit their organizations and spend half a day with them learning about their work. A handful of plane tickets and my time will teach me a whole lot more about this field than a once-a-week class for four months in a lecture hall. It’s also cheaper and places an emphasis on networking with people doing the work I aspire to do. I may have just found my mountain…
books, charity, entrepreneurship, nonprofit, philanthropy, social entrepreneurship

The other 86%

Christa Avampato

“May you live in interesting times.” ~ Chinese proverb


Every week I am mystified by an IBM ad that consistently appears in Business Week. It’s part of their “Stop Talking Start Doing” campaign and in large bold type it predicts, “86% of the world population will live in emerging markets by 2050.” As a product developer, this is a fascinating statistic that will be critical to my future success. 


The majority of those who consume products I will create going forward will not be from my heritage, my culture, or raised in my country. Aside from the big four, known as the BRIC economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China), places such as Egypt, Mexico, Poland, South Africa, South Korea, and Turkey will becoming increasingly big players. And the companies that are succeeding and will continue to succeed are companies that most of us have never heard of: Concha y Toro, MISC, and Sasol.   

What is exciting for me is that these markets will demand a decent percentage of products that fall into the “extreme affordability” category, and this means that we may soon be coming into a time when social entrepreneurship will reign supreme over the activities of large multi-national corporations. If we pair that prediction with the closer relationship that has emerged between government and business, it becomes a perfect (good) storm for product developers like me who want to do well and do good at the same time. Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times Columnist, wrote his Christmas column about a recent book on this very subject. The book, Uncharitable, discusses the moral dilemma and possible solutions for nonprofits who find themselves in the midst of this struggle to bring in funds and do good in the world.  

What I think is a tremendous opportunity is the role that international nonprofits like UNICEF, Doctors Without Borders, and Mercy Corps can play. They have been working for decades in emerging markets. They can and should be a tremendous resource to entrepreneurs and start-ups looking to expand their business into those markets. These social entrepreneurs will provide better services and goods for the people they work so hard to help, and they can generate additional income streams for their organizations through a consulting practice on emerging markets. 

I recently viewed Steve Jobs’ 2005 commencement speech at Stanford. His message is that we can only connect the dots of our lives looking backward. In order to move forward, we have to trust our intuition, we have to have faith that we can build our own road, and we have to believe that the dots will connect eventually, somehow. I am beginning to finally see how the dots of my patchwork life and career will connect – through this field of social entrepreneurship that leverages all of my experiences, all of my education, and all of my contacts, passions, and beliefs. Indeed, we are in the midst of interesting times.