Here it comes, the new paradigms for ascended society. Have you seen TOMS Shoes? http://www.toms.com/ In 2006 Blake Mycoskie from Arlington, Texas started this shoe company for the purpose of giving shoes to kids in need. TOMS is short for Tomorrow’s shoes and refers to the shoes that your purchase today will make for one of the many children worldwide that go shoeless. Blake’s business model is win – win, the customer gets a great pair of shoes made in the alpargata style of Argentina and a shoeless child somewhere in the world gets a new pair of shoes. This not-for-profit business model is proving to be very successful. TOMS are providing manufacturing jobs in Argentina, Ethiopia, and China and according to their website TOMS requires the factories to pay fair wages and operate sound labor conditions following local labor laws. TOMS has given away over 600,000 pairs of shoes to kids in need in the US, Argentina, Ethiopia and South Africa. Currently TOMS is working to provide shoes to kids in Haiti. On the drawing boards is development for a new rubber boot to protect poor farmers from disease. Blake Mycoskie is planning to expand his one for one business model to other products.
Social entrepreneurship is a brilliant and ascended form of business necessary today to shift the inequities between the richest and poorest of us sharing this earth. Look for many more of these kinds of initiatives to appear. I say also to look for the shift in consciousness from ruthless business practices to more socially conscious and responsible practices. We can already see that big companies try to identify with good causes in the hope of winning customers. I am watching for the time when the entire bottom line becomes transparent and we can see that our corporations have shifted to a principle of co-operation between customer and producer that trims the fat of excessive profit making and executive gluttony. In the monetization of everything we loose sight of the purpose of business and money.
Check out TOMS shoes: http://www.toms.com/movement-one-for-one