Honey – a friendly old game

We recently completed a rather exciting project with the UN trying to work out how they might bring ethically produced honey from Mongolia to eco-hungry consumers in the UK. Not our average job, so the team made the strategic decision to start by searching high and low for anyone who might have the slightest idea what we should do.

Having spent a month on the phone to the exceptionally good natured Great British honey folk I now know the difference between a Scottish heather and a Spanish lavender, what the European Third List of Countries is, what to do with Royal Jelly, and why you can charge a tenner for a jar of Manuka! More importantly the beekeepers of Mongolia now know what it will take to bring their products to western shelves and can make an informed decision as to what that will mean to their businesses – all because of the good will of the UK’s very sweet honey community. Many many thanks! Next week it’s onto ethical fitness so if anyone’s got any ideas…

James Baderman

When the host becomes the hosted

Me and some of my ?What If! colleagues have just had the pleasure of leading the Big Boost Summer Academy for the UK’s brightest and best young social entrepreneurs - a week in west Sussex taking them through our thoughts on innovation and leadership and equipping them to better go forth and change the world.

Keeping the ‘gush’ to a minimum – this was a bit of a life changer. The individuals were nothing short of exceptional: hungry, passionate, honest, giving… and together as an entity ten times all that. This came to life wonderfully when we toured London’s social entrepreneurship scene. Walking round Green-Work’s recycling warehouse they stopped en masse to applaud the machinists, in Accenture’s corporate boardroom they banged the tables to thank our speakers, at the Big Lottery Fund they performed a well-mannered but seriously potent ‘pincer’ on the guy who looks after £600m of funding, and in Whitehall(!) they whooped, cheered and generally ‘made some noise’ as Phil Hope, the Minister for the Third Sector, walked into the tradition stooped room – this is the man in government who effectively rules their world. All this commotion was not just them being ‘yoof’, they were operating as a highly effective, sophisticated, collective entity – like some kind of advanced insect colony in a Planet Earth special. They occupied the space where ever they found themselves, and whoever we put in front of them. For our hosts it was disarming, flattering and invigorating all at once, and for the group it was an intensely powerful tool which they wielded well.

They’ve now returned to their projects up and down the UK but I have no doubt they will remain that powerful entity and be flipping tables on anyone who is lucky enough to host them for many years to come. We miss them and their unique energy, but I hear they’re planning to set up youth commission on social enterprise so something tells me it’s not the end!

James Baderman

Design for the other 90%

"Design for the Other 90%" is a new exhibition running through Sept. 23 at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City focusing on sustainable innovation. A few of its highlights will be familiar: The Katrina Furniture Project, the One Laptop Per Child initiative and Lifestraw (pictured), for instance, have both received generous media attention.

In featuring more than 30 innovative tools—each of which addresses issues such as safe drinking water, shelter, health and sanitation, education, and transportation—curator Cynthia Smith hopes to illuminate the critical need for humanitarian design. "It's a call to action," says Smith, who has worked for the Lee Skolnick Architecture + Design Partnership and studied at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "We're trying to show that design can change lives."

While these consumers face many issues—poor shelter, limited medical care, and substandard school systems—developing appropriate solutions is easier said than done. To craft low-cost, high-impact remedies, like the ones featured in "Design for the Other 90%," Smith says innovators must "get creative." "There's more than one way to fix the world's problems," she explains, adding that roughly 2.8 billion people live on less than $2 a day. "We're trying to showcase a variety of solutions."

Read more and see a slideshow of some of the innovations at Businessweek online.

Sight Beyond Seeing

A book of photographs by blind teenagers. The project is the brain child of visual artist and social entrepreneur Tony Deifell, who says:

"Photography wasn't the obvious subject to teach at Governor Morehead School for the Blind.

Even Jackie, one of the first three students to take the class, was incredulous: "What are you thinking, teaching photography to blind people?"

As a photographer, I feared losing my eyesight and began to wonder, "If I were blind, could I still make photographs?""

Pictured is Melody's self portrait. See also, Ways of Seeing.

Speed shopping

A company called ShopText has introduced a system that lets people buy products instantly using text messages, a process that eliminates the need to go to a store or even visit a Web site. For instance, a woman seeing an ad for a pocketbook in a magazine can order it on the spot simply by sending the text code found beside the item through her cellphone.

To use the system, a consumer must first place a phone call to ShopText to set up an account, specifying a shipping address and card account. After that, all purchases can be made by thumb.

When ShopText receives text messages about donations or products, it charges the credit card it has on file for the buyer, then, if appropriate, sends the product from one of its warehouses around the country.

ShopText was started in 2005 within Anomaly, an ad agency in New York, and worked at first with the PayPal unit of eBay to build text-message shopping tools. In November, ShopText was spun off as its own company, and since then it has been busy trying to persuade media outlets and marketers that mobile phone shopping, or m-commerce, stands to become as lucrative as e-commerce. As with all new business launches nowadays, ShopText comes with a social-good element as a core aspect of the brand: its mantra is 'shop. sample. donate'.

“E-commerce only represents a fraction of total retail — the thing that holds it back is it’s tethered to an Internet connection,” said Mark Kaplan, founder and chief marketing officer of ShopText. “The cellphones link products to media. When people get the impulse to buy, they have their cellphones.” And even better, people have their phones with them *all the time*.

Source: New York Times.

Free Internet to save the rainforest

The Brazilian government recently announced that they will make free satellite internet available to native Indian tribes throughout the Amazon region as a way to enhance monitoring, management and conservation efforts. Basically, using tribespeople to as environmental police against threats such as illegal logging.

The goal is to "encourage those peoples to join the public powers in the environmental management of the country," Francisco Costa of the Environment Ministry said in a statement. "The government intends to strengthen the Forest People's Network, a digital web for monitoring, protection and education."

Local governments will be charged with the task of installing telecenters in various places, including deep in wilderness areas on indigenous land, and the federal government will then supply satellite internet connections to those sites.

There are concerns that the arrival of connectivity may erode the tribes' traditional way of life but, as Ailton Krenak, a member of the Krenak tribe as well as the network, told MSNBC,"I don't like computers but I don't like planes either," he said. "What can you do?"

Source: Worldchanging.