These and 26 other inspiring case studies of social entrepreneurs can be read about in their own words in The Tactics of Hope: How Social Entrepreneurs Are Changing Our World.

Inspired by a forward-thinking Environmental Economics professor at Middlebury College* (see below) in Vermont, Jake Whitcomb and Andy Rossmeissl turned a class project into a growing business. Together, they created the Brighter Planet Visa™, a rewards-based credit card that provides the opportunity for consumers in the United States to contribute to renewable energy projects and fight global warming with every purchase.



Despite the fact that Jake and Andy didn’t know each other when they started taking the course, they were both drawn to the notion that for the first time in history “the environment” and “economics” were not only being talked about in the same sentence, but in fact taught as complementary subjects. They learned that environmental problems could be solved by implementing an innovative economic lens.

   
Andy (left) and Jake (right), founders of Bright Planet

Professor Jon Isham, who had just finished co-authoring a book called Ignition: What You Can Do to Fight Global Warming and Spark a Movement, focused much of Jake and Andy’s course on service-learning, encouraging each student to develop a business plan or project that moved beyond the classroom. So with 2005 census and credit figures, Jake and Andy sat down with a spreadsheet to get a handle on the numbers, and found an incredible coincidence: through their theoretical rewards program the average credit-card carrying American could exactly offset his or her annual carbon footprint of twenty-three tons.

Moving beyond the excitement of the idea, however, is when their challenges grew to become an incredibly steep learning curve. The young entrepreneurs were confronted with the practical difficulties of starting a business, and even admit, "When we began, we didn't even know...how to retain lawyers, secure health insurance, and hire a bookkeeper. Finding the answers to the nuts and bolts questions are critical and tough."

After presenting the business plan at the Cool Air-Cool Planet conference in New York City, and received some serious feedback from leaders in the field including Bill McKibben, Andy and Jake quit their summer jobs to dedicate fully to the business, starting small by raising $25,000 from family and friends. They then hired a CEO who believed in their vision, teamed with Bank of America, and eventually released the Brighter Planet Visa at the end of 2007.

For more on Jake and Andy’s helpful advice as to how they overcame obstacles in starting their business, read the story in their own words at http://www.tacticsofhope.org/resources.  Brighter Planet plans to offset several million tons of carbon dioxide, or the equivalent of shutting down a coal plant for an entire year, by 2010.


*Testament to the kind of undergrad educational environment (thanks to Professor Isham) that spawned Jake and Andy’s innovative venture, as well as this blogger’s interest in the field of social entrepreneurship, Middlebury College was recently recognized by Sierra Magazine for its leadership in the climate change movement as the “coolest” college in the country. ( ;

In India, Kailash Satyrathi first established RugMark in 1994, and Nina Smith, a Skoll Award winner, launched its program five years later in the United States. The RugMark Foundation, a global fair trade nonprofit, is dedicated to eliminating child labor in South Asia’s handmade rug industry. RugMark has leveraged its fair trade advocacy campaigns to influence consumers and carpet retailers in the world’s biggest market to purchase and sell only those carpets that have been properly certified as child labor-free.



A percentage of the sale price of certified rugs helps RugMark rescue and rehabilitate children they find in the factories, as well as daycare, literacy, formal schooling and vocational training for children who might otherwise be coerced into labor. Nina and Kailash project that with just 15% of the U.S. market share for rugs, RugMark could achieve its goal and stop child labor in the South Asian rug industry by 2020.

Demand for child labor is so high in the countries where RugMark operates that desperate parents often sell their children into bondage, including child trafficking, commercial sexual exploitation, and domestic work. An estimated 14% of children in India between the ages of fie and fourteen are engaged in child labor activities. Rugs are among South Asia’s top export products and a high employment sector from the poor. Child workers come cheaply and sometimes at no cost, driving down wages for adult laborers.

RugMark rugs are made on looms and in factories that are inspected independently for child labor. The rugs are certified with the RugMark TM label, each with an individual number that can be traced though the supply chain back to the loom.

RugMark’s strategy is replicable as a systemic approach to ending child labor. Kailash and Nina began by raising consumer awareness, and thus demand, for ethically made rugs. Inspectors, teachers, labor rights experts, loom owners, exporters, importers designers, and retailers work together to ensure that no child works on a RugMark rug. Connecting designers to manufacturers is an important step in the cross-continental business. To maintain the upkeep of the manufacturers’ practices, RugMark inspectors make surprise visits to loom and spinning factories, monitoring an average of 64 looms a day, or more than 16,000 a year. If a child is found on a loom or in a factory, he or she is taken to a RugMark rehabilitation center and placed in school. More than 3,000 children attend school with RugMark support. RugMark’s work is having a profound effect. Its certified rugs now represent 2% of the U.S. market. Roughly 30% of imports from Nepal carry the RugMark certification, already demonstrating major transformations within the industry in South Asia.

photos courtesy of Romano, Sam Kittner, and thanks to RugMark

      Vera Cordeiro began Saude Crianca Renascer, or the Children’s Health Association, in 1991, using a new approach to medical care in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to fight poverty and ill health simultaneously. Renascer seeks to break the cycle of poverty that goes, as Vera says, “from poverty to illness to hospital admission to release to readmission. And then often, too quickly, to death.” Renascer addresses the conditions under which the children got sick in the first place, thus seeking to improve the systemic problems of the child's environment, housing, and family life to return a child to a healthy living place.

      Vera started raising money by raffling things from her home. After getting 117 letters with negative responses asking for financial support and grants from all over the world, the biggest breakthroughs came when Renascer began to develop a fast-growing partnership network with Ashoka, Avina, Skoll, Schwab, and PATH. The organization has found its greatest ability to save children’s lives by creating analytical measurements of impact. On a family-by-family basis, Renascer pairs a mother or family with a trained volunteer caseworker to cover all five areas of their own “Action Plan”: health, income, housing, education, and citizenship.
      Renascer works with administrative volunteers, construction workers, psychologists, vocational teachers, pediatricians, lawyers, and general physicians to offer comprehensive plans with assistance, medication, and support. But with a budget of $1 million a year, Renascer does not go deep into all five areas; rather it builds partnerships with other organizations that have specializations in each, while leveraging Renascer’s  impact through corporate sponsorships and marketing.
       A 2004 poll taken of 200 families indicated a 63% reduction in hospital readmissions. Renascer has offered more than 1,700 courses in its five areas of focus. It will add thirteen new centers by the end of 2008.

    

     In The Tactics of Hope, you can learn more about Vera’s journey, in her own words, and how Saude Crianca Renascer developed from its earliest beginnings in a horse stable to full-scale operations in hospitals.

In the weeks ahead, please stay tuned and fasten your seatbelts: this blog, we hope, will transform into a more quantitative, technical, and practical source of information (rather than purely inspirational). If we continue and go ahead, each week will focus on a different chapter or individual social entrepreneur from The Tactics of Hope, and will provide in abbreviated form, a cliff notes version of where they came from and how they accomplished their goals.

So stay tuned, there's much on the horizon.

That being said, the following is a transition entry inviting advice from those of you who may have some great ideas.

After 2 months of traveling abroad in Southeast Asia, I have returned home to reconvene with Wilford about the more technical and practical next steps we want to pursue marketing The Tactics of Hope. It is a fine line, however, as any writer or author will attest, to find the resources and expertise necessary to break the mold from modest to outstanding sales. Tactics tells the stories of 27 world-changing social entrepreneurs, most Ashoka and Skoll fellows, with adventurous narrative and pragmatic guidance, offering readers from every part of the world a literary bridge to engage in social entrepreneurship in ways they can. In other words, the book engages every individual, encouraging each to take action around passion for improving others' lives while earning an income to support their own.

While the critiques and reviews have been hugely successful, the book is suffering from our own lack of experience and financial resource in publicity and book sales. After having breakfast with Bill Drayton in Washington DC before Wilford and I spoke at the Meridian International Center, we were elated to have received the highest approval from the man himself, and the positive support from within the field has continued consistently. But now, we are struggling to find the time and financial resources necessary to move this book from modest readership to widespread public awareness. As all of you Social Edge readers are the most informed of any in the field, and are the "doers" that Tactics seeks to highlight as examples to those having never even heard the term "social entrepreneur" before, this blog seeks your advice. How might we get this book and its many protagonists (all of you!!!) the attention it deserves?

The Tactics of Hope: How Social Entrepreneurs Are Changing Our World could be read in high school, college, and graduate school classrooms everywhere - to support and inspire young people with the knowledge that there are so many new and important opportunities in the world to make a difference. But how best can we make this happen?