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The Clean and Green Club, November 2022

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: November 2022

If You Appreciate this Newsletter and its Mission, Maybe You’ll Be the One I Hire to Keep it Going
My long-time assistant is moving on to other ventures. I’m looking for someone to take over two tasks from her: 1) Formatting the email (using Get Response) and web (using WordPress) versions of the newsletter each month, and 2) Sending a pre-written birthday message to Facebook friends as their birthdays come up (typically somewhere between 5-15 per day). Interested? Please write to me (shel AT greenandprofitable dot com) with the subject line “Newsletter Formatter” with a bit about your background.
DUMP this Useless Business “Truism” Already—Because It Isn’t True

One-size-fits-all is a myth! Want proof?

  1. A colleague in New York City is trying to drum up support for a citywide education campaign to encourage recycling in New York’s thousands of large apartment buildings. I read her material and thought it’s going to take more than education—because multifamily apartment buildings present challenges that just aren’t relevant in a single-family house, or even a triple-decker with a yard or a driveway. Example: many inner-city apartments (not just in NYC but around the world) are really, really tiny. I’ve seen some that only had one sink in the kitchen and none in the bathroom. Other bathrooms have a triangle-shaped mini-sink that fits into a corner, allowing the bathroom itself to be only a couple of feet wide. I had a friend who used a Murphy bed that folded up vertically into the wall of her one-room apartment, so she could have living space during the day. When space is so scarce, who’s going to devote a big percentage to separate bins for recycling glass, metal, plastic, and paper, plus compost and trash? The suburban solution assumes a garage or at least a large closet and just won’t work in a studio or efficiency apartment with living space of only 200 to 500 feet. Even if you have a bigger place, the average apartment size in NYC is only 702 square feet—with an average monthly rent of (are you sitting down) $4265. If you’ve ever wondered why the tables are so close together in NYC restaurants, that’s why. Every square inch has to count.
  2. Selling to a poverty market. Even the very poor in the US, Europe, or the big economies in Asia would be considered extremely wealthy in much of the developing world. In four countries in Africa, the average gross income is under $1000 US. Since the wealthy are always a little sliver of the population, most residents are surviving on far less than that. So if you’re selling into that kind of economy, you need to re-engineer everything. You’ll be asking how to produce products for 1/10 the cost you’d face in the developed world, how to deal with poor or nonexistent transportation, storage, and dealership network, how to handle government corruption and high security threats, how to get people to pay such a big chunk of their income for your stuff (Among many possible models: no-interest time payments; money recouped from savings; rent-to-own; advertiser or grant support), and how to best support your people on the ground—all without compromising the product or service’s key functionality.

Yes, it can be done—but not with the same models as you’d use in a country where people are far more economically secure. I’ve written a few times about one company that has risen to the challenge: d.light sells solar LED lamps to replace toxic, flammable, and expensive kerosene or go into situations that hadn’t had any artificial light before. That first link has a quick summary of six benefits this product offers to its customers (and some other examples of solving multiple problems with one initiative). The other link is the excerpt from my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World that describes d.light’s business model and accomplishments in more detail.

If this area interests you, I’d also strongly recommend not only my own book, but two other brilliant books: The Business Solution to Poverty: Designing Products and Services for Three Billion New Customers by Paul Polak and Mal Warwick, and The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits, Enabling Dignity and Choice Through Markets by C.K. Prahalad (both links go to my review of the book). The two links about d.light and the Polak review go to full newsletter issues; you’ll need to scroll down. The Prahalad review is its own page.

Next month, we’ll continue looking at one-size-fits-all is nonsense—but from a marketing lens.

Test Drive This Powerful Green Business Certification—No Cost

I’ve been telling you about the Green Business Bureau and the many benefits they offer, including the GBB EcoAssessment™, a very spiffy self-guided software-driven certification process that is very easy to use and much more friendly to small businesses than other certifications I’ve looked at.

A GBB staffer will be happy to demo the assessment tool for you. You don’t have to be a member to see how it works. All you have to do is fill out this 1-minute form with your name, company or organization, email and phone. Your request will be forwarded to a member of the Green Business Bureau staff.

You do have to be a member to actually go through the assessment and obtain certification. Membership is quite affordable, starting at just $212.50 (10 employees or less) once you factor in the 15 percent off I’ve arranged for you no matter how big your business is. To claim the lower price, just visit https://greenbusinessbureau.com/membership-purchase-options/ , choose the number of employees that describes your business, and enter the code Shel15 (no space between the lower-case L and the number 1).

Yes, I will get a commission if you join—and YOU get 15 percent off.

Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.

View highlights from (and listen to) more than 30 podcasts ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.

The Answers Are There

The Answers Are There: Building Peace from the Inside Out by Libby HoffmanThis is a remarkable, super-optimistic book that I wouldn’t even have looked it based on the title, but a colleague I have great respect for not only recommended it but sent me a pre-release copy (publishing date was October 25). It’s all about forming real community in strife-torn lands, in ways that respect and honor and take direction from the indigenous perspective while helping establish resilience in very different ways than the typical First World development agencies try to work. It’s a deeply personal account that’s also elegantly written and remarkable easy to read. I often found myself gliding through 20 or 30 pages at a sitting—not typical of the books I review—even while pausing to take lots of notes.

Hoffman has been working with local peace leaders in Sierra Leone, and especially John Caulker, founder of an organization called Fambul Tok (Family Talk) that has done amazing work in helping that country move through the deep bitterness and resentment following a civil war with tens of thousands of atrocities. Starting in a single village, Hoffman, Caulker, and their colleagues have spiraled out to develop a framework that was eventually accepted by the national government—one resilient enough to help turn the country around during the Ebola epidemic, which hit Sierra Leone particularly hard.

Unlike typical western aid projects, Fambul Tok was at least as much about the process as the result—and because of that, the results have been spectacular.

Some of the key principles and insights:

  • Peace must be in a local context, based holistically in local ecosystems and traditions: not just physical ecosystems, but cultural and spiritual ones
  • No matter how barbarous a crime or series of crimes, reconciliation can happen if space is made for sincere repentance and apology and rebuilding, for listening to the perpetrators AND the survivors, and communally figuring out how to move forward—and sometimes, the most brutal actors can be among the strongest supporters, taking leadership to undo the damage they caused
  • Successful aid/development is not a one-way street from funders and programs to passive recipients; every person has things to contribute, things to learn—and perhaps more importantly, things to unlearn
  • The typical current pattern of development agencies is broken, because it doesn’t recognize that truth, attempting instead to impose a project from the outside, plan out all the details, pilot it and rapidly scale it up, rather than let one emerge organically from the needs—and strengths and capabilities—of the local community, and according to that community’s traditions and initiatives, on a timeframe that makes sense in the local culture
  • Proactively building locally-rooted resilience is immediately empowering to indigenous people who have long felt unheard, unseen, and uncared about—and that resilience is a powerful way to get beyond the next crisis; rebuilding Sierra Leone after the civil war meant it was much more ready to face Ebola
  • Unheard voices may belong to women or others who have not been welcomed into the circles of power—and their leadership can bring deeper changes than anyone would have anticipated before those conversations started
  • Even the most dedicated leaders need to recharge and be nourished, and amazing learning and growth can come out of the spaces and rituals that enable those recharging moments

Hoffman uses a lot of powerful metaphors. Example: As early as page 10, she introduces the concept of repairing the cup (the community) before pouring water (aid) into it, and by page 218, that morphs into a series of nested bowls, spiraling up and out from the local villages through chiefdoms, districts, nations, the world, and whatever might be beyond—which she calls “the idea of wholeness.”

I could easily write another couple of thousand words, pulling out specific quotes and wisdom. But I want to honor the organic nature of Hoffman and Caulker’s work, and not to be just like those western planning and development agencies that impose their own structure on a recalcitrant village instead of coming in expecting to learn as much as they teach—and I don’t want to subject their message and methods to that subtle violence. So I will end simply by saying that anyone who really cares about peace and about ending poverty will find this book well worth the time you put into it.

 

Connect with Shel

Turn Your Sustainability/CSR Report Into Powerful Marketing!  http://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

About Shel

Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.com helps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.

If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription for, too.

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