As I sit, uncomfortably squished between a very large Kenyan woman and the hot metal side of the van, the woman’s frightened child sitting on my lap, there is only one thought coursing through my mind: be thankful you have the window seat.
Rewind eight months, and I am sitting in my cozy apartment on Vancouver Island opening up my laptop, preparing for a Skype interview with a man I’ve never met, for a job in a field I have no experience in. I’m an actor by trade — I went to college for it, and that has been my main source of income for the last three years. But when an opportunity came up for an internship with a new social enterprise called JusTea, I decided to put theatre on the side for a little while.
Why did I leave my chosen field in search of a nine-to-five volunteer office job? Let’s backtrack a bit.
It first hit me on a trip to New York City in 2007. Looking around and above me, I could see hundreds of thousands of people and offices. Hundreds of thousands of people working, but for what? The thought struck 17-year-old me like a ton of angsty-teen philosophical bricks: with so many people working, why isn’t the world a better place? If not to improve things for humanity and the world, what’s the point?
Businesses should solve problems, right? Not cause them?
The very nature of a business is to solve a problem, and the employers and employees within that business are there to improve things within the organization. Generally speaking, whether it’s a product, or a service, management issues, or work-force productivity, people are employed to improve things. So businesses should solve problems, right? Not cause them?
I don’t need to tell you what effect the oil industry has had on the environment, or the banking industry on wealth distribution, or the fast food industry on health. These are all disastrous problems caused by industries in search of economic performance at the expense of social performance.
But enter the “social enterprise,” which Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter describes as a business that creates social value in tandem with economic value. In essence, it’s a business that makes a profit by benefitting society and humanity as a whole. Win win.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Make a career of humanity. Commit yourself to the noble struggle for equal rights. You will make a greater person of yourself, a greater nation of your country, and a finer world to live in.” Obviously, the world was a different place when he said this, and he was referring to the civil rights movement in the United States, but the message of dedication to improving things for everyone still rings true.
If you had told me that day in August of 2013 that within a year I would be a full time employee of JusTea, travelling to Kenya and to the World Tea Expo, I would have laughed. I also would have said, “OK, yup, where do I sign?”
The trip to Kenya gave me a new perspective on things, and further reading and research has only strengthened that. Here are a few of the lessons I have learned.
Aid money to Africa isn’t working. Trillions of dollars of aid has been pumped into different parts of Africa, and many nations are poorer now than ever.
Economist and author Dambisa Moyo uses the example of the local entrepreneur who makes a living and hires other people by manufacturing mosquito nets. He and the others are then put out of work because an American celebrity donates 100,000 nets to the area — which end up falling apart a year later. The locals are left jobless, and pretty soon without the mosquito nets.
Businesses can tackle problems that charities and NGOs can’t because of scale. Porter makes the case for social enterprise by explaining that businesses create wealth by selling a solution to a problem at a profit. It is this profit that allows the business to grow, and create more solutions to more problems.
“We will persevere because we are Kenyans.”
This is something that one of our team members said to me when we were facing setback after setback in the tea kitchen. I asked him if he was feeling discouraged or disappointed, and that was his response. But he also said, “We have not yet achieved our goals. But this does not mean we are not happy. We Kenyans are happy, and we will work hard to achieve our goals.” I explained to him that in North America, people are often unhappy because they are not where they wish to be in life. “Oh,” he said, shaking his head. “That is very sad.”
We have not yet achieved our goals. But this does not mean we are not happy.
The mission of JusTea is to create sustainable employment and fair wages for Kenyan tea farmers. They do this by supplying the farmers with the tools and training necessary to process tea on their own farms, and then purchasing the tea from them at fair prices. I was lucky in that I could see first-hand the effect JusTea has already had on the community where we are working in Kenya.
Like I said earlier, I’m an actor, and I’ll always be an actor. But as Richard Branson said, “If someone offers you an amazing opportunity and you’re not sure you can do it, say yes — then learn how to do it later.”
If you have an opportunity to work for a social enterprise, I suggest you take it. If you have an idea for a profitable way to help people, I suggest you try it. “You will make a greater person of yourself, a greater nation of your country, and a finer world to live in.”
Photo by Daniel White.
