Welcome to Skoll eNews, the Skoll Foundation's bimonthly update on Skoll activities and news in the world of social entrepreneurship!



Paul Rice Turns Shoppers into Activists

After spending an hour with Paul Rice of TransFair USA, you will never be able to buy a cup of coffee again without wondering about where it came from. He has dedicated his life to making sure that small farmers in developing countries are fairly compensated for goods that are produced in accordance with rigorous social, economic and environmental standards.

After the 46-year-old social entrepreneur earned an undergraduate degree from Yale, he landed in the mountains of northern Nicaragua in 1983, passionate about solving world poverty. He thought he would stay a year or two, but wound up living there for 11 years. In some ways, it was an idyllic existence. He rode a horse to work, slept in a hammock and often crossed rivers with all his worldly belongings balanced on his shoulders.

"It appealed to the cowboy in me. I grew up in Austin, Texas," he said, flashing a smile.

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Skoll Award Guidelines Coming Soon

Our Program and Impact team is busy finalizing the guidelines for applying for the 2008 Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship. We will post them on our Web site in late August. Click here if you would like to be notified when they are posted.

Foundation Center Interviews Skoll Foundation CEO

An interview with Sally Osberg, president and CEO of the Skoll Foundation, on "Building the Field of Social Entrepreneurship" is included in Philanthropy in the 21st Century: The Foundation Center's 50th Anniversary Interviews. In her discussion with Mitch Nauffts, who edited the book and regularly edits Philanthropy News Digest, Sally discusses the challenges that social entrepreneurs face and the opportunities that these "tough-minded optimists" see. "The social entrepreneur sees the limitations of an existing equilibrium – the pharmaceutical industry's focus on drugs for developed country markets would be a good example – and offers a new solution with the potential to benefit those not served by the existing model," she says.

The book includes interviews with 15 leaders in American philanthropy, including David Rockefeller, Vartan Gregorian, Jim Canales, Emmett Carson, Diana Aviv and Steve Gunderson, who address topics ranging from catalyzing social change to promoting openness.

The entire 232-page book can be downloaded as a PDF file, or you can request a free copy.

Stories on Social Entrepreneurs Abound

Several film and media initiatives sponsored by the Skoll Foundation have resulted in a wealth of stories about social entrepreneurs that are available to the public. The first project funded by the PBS Foundation Social Entre- preneurship Fund, established a new Enterprising Ideas series on the weekly news magazine, NOW with David Brancaccio, which will feature 16 stories on social entrepreneurs over the next 18 months. The series kicked off with its first broadcast in late May and launched a stand-alone Enterprising Ideas Web site that has information and resources for and about social entrepreneurs, including Skoll Award recipient RugMark International.

The PBS Social Entrepreneurship Fund is intended to enable filmmakers, documentarians and other journalists to produce work that promotes large-scale public awareness of social entrepreneurship and highlights individuals who are pioneering innovative approaches that address far-reaching social issues. PBS is currently reviewing applications for Round 2 of funding, which closed June 1.

A Skoll Foundation grant to Frontline/World enabled the award-winning PBS news magazine to expand its coverage of social entrepreneurs this year by producing seven new social entrepreneur stories. They are available on a dedicated social entrepreneurship section on the Frontline/World Web site. Skoll Award recipients featured on Frontline/World include Sonidos de la Tierra and Room to Read.

The Skoll Foundation has produced eight Uncommon Heroes films, each seven minutes long, that profile Skoll social entrepreneurs. These films premiere each year at the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford University as part of the annual Skoll Awards ceremony and are available on a free DVD upon request. They are also available in streaming video on the Skoll Web site and are distributed via YouTube and selected Web channels.

The films are a practical tool for social entrepreneurs that help them explain their work. They also inspire others with stories about how one person can change the world. Skoll social entrepreneurs featured in Uncommon Heroes films are Ann Cotton of CAMFED International, Mindy Lubber of Ceres, Taddy Blecher of CIDA City Campus, Martin Burt of Fundacion Paraguaya, Amitabha Sadangi of International Development Enterprises (India), Karen Tse of International Bridges to Justice, Victoria Hale of Institute for OneWorld Health, and Blaise Judja-Sato of VillageReach.

Our first media initiative, The New Heroes, is still available for purchase from PBS, which produced the documentary series hosted by Robert Redford. It tells 12 dramatic stories of social entrepreneurs, each 20 minutes long. The series was funded with a $1.7 million grant to Oregon Public Broadcasting, which reports that the initial broadcast in 2005 reached 4.4 million people and is expected to reach 10 million to 12 million viewers over the four-year life of the project. Lesson plans for teachers that coordinate with the stories and tips on raising socially responsible children are among the offerings on the PBS New Heroes Web site.

Girl Scouts Take On 'Challenge and Change'

For the second summer in a row, Girl Scouts in grades 9 through 12 are learning to become social entrepreneurs as part of the "Challenge and Change" program funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to inspire teen girls in rural communities to help their home towns. Girl Scouts from across the U.S. participate in five days of leadership training that includes watching stories of social entrepreneurs filmed for the Skoll-sponsored The New Heroes documentary. The girls then decide which issue they would like to tackle, develop a sustainable solution, and recruit a community team and adult champion to help put it into action.

Last summer Girl Scouts from 22 councils in 16 states participated in the program, developed in collaboration with the Learning Innovation and Technology Consortium. One girl from a small town in northern California convinced the owner of a local bowling alley to allow her to plan positive activities for teens in a youth center added on to his business. In Hannibal, Mo., Girl Scouts designed an indoor skate park to give teens a healthy outlet. In Charlotte, N.C., program graduates are working to preserve a building that is significant in local African American history and turn it into a technology training center.

This year Challenge and Change is reaching girls in 13 states, including post-Katrina Louisiana and a Native American reservation in northern Montana

Susan Cippoletti, project manager of Challenge and Change for Girl Scouts of the USA, sees a transformation in girls and their communities as a result of this program. "The girls work in partnership with local leaders to develop sustainable projects which benefit the community as a whole. The best part of my job is meeting many girls from across the country before they begin their training, and then a year later meeting them again as young social entrepreneurs making a difference."

For more information about Challenge and Change, contact Susan at (212) 852-5038 or email her at scippoletti@girlscouts.org.

Skoll Awardees Explain ‘Green’ Lingo

All the attention to "going green" is generating new terminology. Mathis Wackernagel, executive director of Global Footprint Network, explains that the term "carbon footprint" refers to the carbon dioxide generated whenever human activities involve the burning of fossil fuels. The carbon footprint is 50 percent of humanity's overall "ecological footprint," which measures how much land and water area a human population requires to produce the resources it consumes and to absorb its wastes under prevailing technologies.

Global Footprint Network and others are trying to address "ecological overshoot," which occurs when humanity's demand on nature exceeds the biosphere's supply, or regenerative capacity. Meanwhile, TransFair USA defines another ecological term, "greenwashing," as "when companies engage in minimal efforts toward social or environmental responsibility in order to enhance their public image."

Mark Your Calendar

The dates for the 2008 Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship have been set. The conference will take place March 26-28 at Oxford University in England. The theme will be "Social Entrepreneurship: Culture and Context."

Click here to view videos from this year's Forum and to sign up to be notified about the 2008 conference.

The Skoll Foundation Is Hiring!

We're focusing on the future and are staffing up to meet our needs. Please check out our Job Listings. We're currently seeking a Marketing Program Manager who will play a major role in managing the annual Skoll World Forum and a Web Marketing Manager for Social Edge.

Paul Rice Turns Shoppers into Activists

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Paul worked on dozens of agricultural projects developed by well-intentioned people sitting in offices in Washington, D.C., London, Paris and Geneva who were spending hundreds of millions of dollars to alleviate poverty. "My experience was very disappointing," Paul said. "Our work and those dollars fell short of the task of helping people on the ground develop their own capacity to solve their own problems. More often than not, we were re-creating dependency on foreign aid. The focus was decidedly on production. Someone somewhere along the way forgot that supply and demand have to cross at some point, and that if you double supply and don't double demand, prices may actually go down and farmers may be driven into debt as a result of your well-intentioned efforts."

Global Forces at Work

That's just what happened in 1990, when globalization caused world coffee prices to drop. Coffee farmers were starving. Paul started Nicaragua's first farmer-owned coffee export cooperative with a band of 24 brave souls who knew how to grow coffee but nothing about selling it. They had no money, so they each delivered 10 huge sacks of coffee. "We discovered that there were these crazy traders in Europe – they called themselves Fair Traders – who were willing to pay us a great price for this coffee: $1.26 per pound. By comparison, the local market price at that point had plunged to 10 cents per pound," Paul recalled. After export costs and other expenses were deducted, Paul netted back a dollar per pound to the farmers. As they stepped forward to receive their payment from Paul, the farmers began calling him "Pablo Un Dólar" (One Dollar Paul).

Paul knew that he had hit on a solution for empowering the poor that respects the forces of the global marketplace. As the cooperative grew, he faced a dilemma. His wife is Nicaraguan, and there were plenty of reasons to stay in her native country, but he was aware of the opportunities elsewhere. "I realized if I stayed, I would serve 10,000. But if I came back to the United States, I could serve 10 million," he explained.

In 1998 he launched TransFair USA, opening the doors in a converted ball bearing factory in Oakland, Calif., with a staff of one: himself. Today the organization has a budget of $9.5 million and a staff of 52. The organization has licensed more than 600 companies in the U.S., including heavyweights such as Costco, Sam's Club and Whole Foods, to sell goods with the Fair Trade Certified label to thousands of markets. The array of goods offered includes tea, cocoa, fresh fruit, sugar, rice and vanilla.

Brand Recognition Soars

A recent study showed that TransFair USA has tripled consumer awareness and purchasing of Fair Trade Certified products within the last four years. Buyers know that the logo means that every product can be traced back to a grower who has received a fair price for goods produced under fair working conditions with attention to environmental sustainability. Annual audits are scrupulous; some take as long as two weeks.

In its first eight years, TransFair USA has delivered nearly $100 million in additional income to farmers, funds that have allowed them to add irrigation systems, send their children to school, fix up their homes and buy mules to help transport sacks of coffee. Without mules, the farmers have to lug heavy sacks on their own backs up and down mountain trails.

The income has transformed people's lives. One example is Yolanda Rivera, a young woman from Northern Nicaragua whose father, Santiago, pulled her out of school in the second grade because of financial problems. Santiago was a coffee farmer who had worked all his life to buy two acres of land. When he started selling to the U.S. Fair Trade market, he began earning enough extra money to send Yolanda back to school  She recently sent a photo taken at her high school graduation, where she stood next to her beaming father. "Thanks to Fair Trade, I'm the first person in my community to graduate from high school," she wrote. Yolanda is now in college and is a local celebrity when she comes home for visits.

Expanding Its Reach

With help from the Skoll Foundation, TransFair USA is well on its way to achieving its goal of generating $150 million per year for farmers by 2009. Paul attributes much of the organization's success to partnerships with large corporations and alliances with environmental, student and consumer organizations. He is actively planning to expand to new markets and add new products, guided by data gathered during extensive market studies.

There's still a huge market waiting to be tapped. In the U.S. alone, the organization estimates that only 20 percent of consumers know what Fair Trade means. Those who do get satisfaction out of taking a positive action to help the environment and help guarantee fair wages and working conditions for small farmers.

"Fair Trade is about doing the right thing – not talking about it, not thinking about it, but doing the right thing," Paul said. "Because it's the right thing to do, I've dedicated my life to this company."

And if you want to offer a toast to him as he continues to pursue his vision of helping small farmers earn their fair share in the global marketplace, he'd just as soon you did it with a Fair Trade Certified cup of coffee.

TransFair USA is located at 1611 Telegraph Ave., Suite 900, Oakland, CA 94612. Telephone: (510) 663-5260. Email: info@transfairusa.org. To find stores where you can buy Fair Trade Certified productions, go to TransFair USA's Web site at www.transfairusa.org. To directly support TransFair USA's work to benefit farmers and farm workers around the world, visit http://www.transfairusa.org/content/about/donate.php.  A new collaboration with Google allows you to navigate the globe using Google Earth to view Fair Trade Certified farms in Latin America, Africa and Asia.