Moving the Needle -- Growing the Choir

I love to think that a movement of the masses will change the world. I believe it is true. Yet even with revolution as the end game, our strongest attribute is our moderation. In Pathways to Prohibition, Ann-Marie Szymanski highlights how the temperate but persistent effort of prohibionists led to the ultimate radical constitutional changes more effectively than any hardline radicalized activists were ever able to achieve. Yet the fact is that prohibition did not work. Change did not come about on a cultural level as much as was necessary. Perhaps it's because the issue was too contentious, the moderates too radical or the radicals not moderate enough, but one way or another after over half a century of organizing, the outlawing of alcohol did not stick. The masses were not with the movement. Culture had been touched but not changed. We need to learn from this.

Today if we are going to change culture we cannot simply preach to the choir. Just as there were hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, in support of prohibition a hundred years ago, the 21st century is populated with hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, in support of sustainability. But these people alone are not enough. We must reach the next level of the masses. We do this by taking steps in the right direction, not by running ahead leaving behind the people who are responsible for truly changing their actions, beliefs, attitudes and world.

Over the past week Of Rags has been looking at several exciting opportunities that might be described as more mainstream avenues than some of the more activist oriented actions we've taken over the last 18 months. With the concept of moderation in mind, I believe that these opportunities are a step in the right direction. The beauty of our organization is that we can work in between two seemingly different worlds in order to bring them together. Even though our logo is OR it is never an either or situation for Of Rags. Our organizational structure is a hybrid and so are our attitudes. Over the past week I've seen the value of what my team and I can accomplish when we see our role as the bridge between the world of NGO's and the world of high fashion.

The challenge that I have though as the leader of the team is straddling the gap between two diverse crowds. I have to find a stable balance between my passion for changing the world and my interest in the same fashion, marketing and mainstream media that have in large part made the world the unjust place it is today. It is unproductive to think that idealism alone will make any difference. I have to play the same game but with my own rules. The important thing for me to remember is that change is a spectrum.

By shifting the needle bit by bit we will ultimately get people's engines revving to make a difference. First it will be about buying a sustainable product. Then it will be about working to create more sustainable products to replace everything that is not. Finally it will be about changing our daily habits and everyday personal values.

We are not anywhere near our final goal. The choir may be there, but the whole congregation isn't even through the doors yet. Let's harmonize our voices and draw them in with the sound of music just as I've ventured into churches in Harlem and Hohoe, Ghana when I've heard music playing inside. Those moments of wandering and wonderment have been some of the most profound experiences of my life and they did not begin by any radical claim of religious redemption--just a beautiful song spilling out from the windows. So let's get something going that no one can ignore. The rest will follow.

The Sustainability Revolution

From companies and organizations to communities and collaborations, we are businesses that care and individuals ready to take action with our everyday lifestyle—our everyday values. We seek fundamentally to empower the disenfranchised as opposed to just make the wealthy even wealthier.  We’re working to put people before profits so that everyone will have every necessity before anyone has every luxury.  We aim not only to transform boardrooms and the halls of congress, but also ourselves as citizens of a nation and of our World. We know that we must redefine success so that we measure our accomplishments, not by the number of sports cars we’ve purchased, but instead by the number of schools we’ve built. Our collective goal is to meet the needs of today, while ensuring the future needs of tomorrow. We might not know it yet, but we are the Sustainability Revolution.

For around 500 years the word revolution has been used to describe a pivotal moment in a society when the status quo is replaced by a new set of norms. While the exact definition of the word revolution is a much-debated subject, one consistency can be found with only a glance through the history books: the push for change has almost always come from the oppressed. Today we are revolutionizing revolutions and I believe that our approach will indeed make our push for Sustainability sustainable in a way that history has never seen before.

The key difference between the Sustainability Revolution of today and just about any revolution of years passed is that our change is demand driven. From as far back as Jesus Christ and the Magna Carta, nearly every revolutionary act has been driven by the people calling for rights for themselves. In the global economic system, these people are the world’s suppliers. The nobles throughout England supplied the King with goods and taxes. The American Colonists supplied the British with cotton and tobacco. The sugar farmers in Cuba supplied the US sweet tooth. Today our Revolution comes not from the people supplying our products, but instead from the people buying them.

I don’t mean to boil down the nuances. The push for change is not at all unilateral. In fact, our Revolution is without a doubt the most dynamic and diverse of any revolution in history. But, in general, it is this demand-side sustainability that will change the world.

Today we are demanding that every product we buy be sourced from fair trade production. At the same time we are ensuring that enough fair trade production is in place to meet this growing demand. We are using our dollars to hold companies accountable for their treatment of people and of our planet. The long run potential for this is to create a society in which it is uncompetitive (and thus unprofitable) not to hold the common good as the highest priority. Yet to achieve this potential we are not doing enough and there are not nearly enough of us doing it.

While giving a presentation for the Of Rags: Sustainable Fashion College Tour this weekend at James Madison University in my birth state of Virginia (James Madison was a key player in writing the US Constitution by the way), I discovered that there was an event called Spring Fest taking place at the same time as our event. Last year Spring Fest, which brings together all of the Greek Life at JMU and surrounding college campuses, led to a drunken riot, the burning of a police car and the arrests and expulsion of several students. While Of Rags brought hip-hopper Genesis Be to perform songs about taking action with our everyday values, Spring Fest this year would culminate with the performance of Wiz Khalifa, a rapper who has become famous for his songs about doing drugs. (“I’m high as fuck. I’m sloppy drunk.” is the chorus of his latest single.) Needless to say, I didn’t stay for the concert or any of the Spring Fest activities, but I’m positive that with the support of the Universities Program Board and the fame of Wiz Khalifa it drew in exponentially more people than Of Rags, the Justice Studies Student Organization and the African Studies Organization got to show up at our event. Yet with practically no budget and the competition of the biggest event on JMU’s campus this whole year, we still managed to draw in around 30 people. Regardless of the turnout, I was glad to talk with students committed to sustainability. But I will not be satisfied until we’ve turned those 30 students at JMU into 3,000 celebrating Sustainability as the highlight of Spring Fest.

Our model of utilizing social media, email and the like to organize shows on college campuses is working, just not as well as we need it to. I think that with the ideological framework of the Sustainability Revolution we will begin to retool the way we grow support. To elaborate on our future and the ideology that crafts it we need to first take a brief look at how we are different from past revolutions.

During the height of previous revolutions, the idea of a better world swept over the masses of people suffering impossible exploitation and drove them to act. American minutemen risked everything on the hope that they would achieve the unknown concept of Freedom. While their bravery is astonishing, to believe that over 230 years later Freedom has been achieved by all men and women created equal is pure ignorance. Even in the United States poverty runs rampant. Slave-like conditions persist. And yet there is more wealth than anywhere else in the world. Between 1776 and today such stark inequality, some might say such grave injustice, has been addressed head-on time after time by revolutionaries with slogans of Marxism.

In Cuba oppressed farmers rallied behind a push for equality. While the fierce revolutionary spirit that entranced the island may have been calling for dignity, respect and equal rights for all citizens, the Revolution of the time did not hesitate to kill the opposition. Where are dignity, respect and equality in that, one might ask? The argument for such violence was based on the idea that to achieve justice the Revolution must do away with all remnants of the mode-of-being that perpetuated oppression. The Marxist ideology of the time was that only by creating a society in which the state controlled the resources would the value of the common good embed itself into the way of being for every citizen so that ultimately no one would act in self-interest, but rather in the interest of others. Class divisions between the handful of landowners and the masses of land-workers would no longer exist, and the sense of collective purpose would unite the country behind the idea of common good.

I will state now and forever that I believe in these ideals. From the time I was in pre-kindergarten I have been taught in increasingly subtle ways that doing good for other people is the highest mode of existence. But I profoundly disagree about the ideology. I believe that Socialist ideology as enacted by regimes such as that in Cuba ignores the most fundamental human trait and by unconsciously acting contentiously against this trait the Socialist ideology sets itself up for a battle that it cannot win on a large scale—if even on any scale.

By limiting individual creativity and removing the private incentives underlying the competitive nature of innovation, the Cuban Revolutionary regime led its nation into a stagnate state. As the global economy progressed, the Cuban economy has struggled to keep the pace and has been in almost all cases left behind by many indicators of success. Most importantly the attack against the well-to-do in Cuba led to a harsh class conflict that only intensified the lines between rich and poor, both nationally and internationally. As opposed to utilizing the resources of the wealthy for good, much of Cuba’s wealth was destroyed or forced to flea the country. And without the motivation to innovate, that wealth has in most cases not been recreated.

This is all to say that our strongest attribute as today’s Sustainability Revolution is that we are not forcing power out of the hands of anyone. Instead we are merely demanding that such power be used in a sustainable manner.  The ideology that drives the Sustainability Revolution is the belief that our capitalist system is not a mode-of-being focused on self-enrichment, but rather a tool to empower the disenfranchised—a tool that is in many cases simply not being used right. We must spend time educating ourselves about how we can best use our toolbox to carve our world into a fairer place and then we must act on that knowledge. This is the point of the Of Rags Sustainable Fashion College Tour. We have been working with students at 20 universities to make sustainability a keystone on campus and in the curriculum.

So how do we grow from 30 to 3,000? And as a growing base of consumers how do we make our nation’s most innovative corporations use their businesses for good?

First we need to lower the barrier to entry for involvement in the Sustainability Revolution. We achieve this by showing the growing number of people who are involved and the diverse ways that they take part in meeting global needs of today while ensuring the future needs of tomorrow. If we make it clear to outsiders that more people are getting on board with Sustainability everyday, then more people will indeed get on board everyday. I know that my organization can do a better job of showing this. As opposed to videoing my speech at college campuses, we should turn the cameras on the audience to show that people actually listen and take action based on these ideals! (Check out our podcast series “Conversations with Changemakers” for an example of something we can build off of.) We also need to do a better job of highlighting the businesses that do care about the common good in order to spark competition from other businesses to show that they care even more. (Check out The Fair Trade Sustainable Lookbook and Fair Trade Fashion’s Night Out coming up in September. We need to push hard behind this event!)

Then we need to ask our peers “are you in or are you out?” By framing this challenge, more people will rise to it. We need to remind ourselves that change happens; but it doesn’t happen on its own. We must make the conscious decision to live sustainably everyday in order both to make an immediate impact and to encourage others to do the same. We need to recall the astonishing bravery of past generations and we must remember that we are the change we seek.

So I ask you now, are you in or are you out? 

Contention with the Competition

One of the inspirations behind Of Rags is a story I heard on the radio while living in Honduras for a summer. The story was about Coca-Cola’s investment in several youth centers throughout the small Central American country. Right then it clicked in my mind that business has the potential to do good--not only the potential, but the obligation both socially and financially. It’s nothing revolutionary to consider the fact that the better off poor people become, the more money they have to spend. And the social side of the equation, in my mind at least, is equally as obvious. Yet Paul Hawken (of the high-end gardening store that was Smith & Hawken--very insightful wiki article) depicts Coca-Cola, (the same company that also gave millions to bring the first ever World Cup on the African Continent to life,) as a bandit in his book Blessed Unrest. He also suggests that many major corporations fall under the same criminal code. While he does note that there currently is a shift occurring in the marketplace at this very moment, he describes corporate social responsibility as little more than a footnote on an annual report or a marketer’s tool to overcome bad press. I’m not quite so critical, but after relaxing in the Cartagenera pool of one of the houses owned by the CEO of Coke Latin America, I can certainly say that no executives at Coke are living like Gandhi. 

The question that I have is where can we draw the line between reducing harm and optimizing benefit? And if our ultimate goal is to leverage the potential of big business to do good how can we run campaigns of contention against those same corporations? Is there not an element of biting the hand that feeds us? Or is competition different from contention?

My favorite slogan at Of Rags is “What does your shirt do?” When I came up with this I hoped that our consumers would feel the challenge to think critically about the value underlying every purchase they make. I know some of our consumers do this. But at the same time, whenever I come across people entrenched as much in the fashion world as I am in the community development world, I feel I'm often pressured to admit that many fashion companies do give money away and try to make a positive impact on the environment. Some people have even gone so far as to ask me “how can you put that on your shirt, don’t you think we care too?” This question is exactly what I asked myself this week when I read the New York Times article highlighting the growing effort and “coalition” in the fashion industry to go “sustainable.”  (Someone anonymously sent me the article in an email at 6:45 AM.)

Now I don’t mean to sound completely cynical. I really do believe that just about everyone has good intentions. But the fact is that the way the fashion industry works, with corporate shareholders trading bite size pieces of brand names, a shift toward “sustainable” is really only an effort to reduce harm. Even the NYT article makes this clear.

Frankly true sustainability would be convincing consumers not to buy as many clothes as they do when there are so many people who can’t even afford clean water. Doing this is not out of the realm of possibility for Of Rags. But right now we are focused on optimizing benefit with our unique hybrid for-profit/not-for-profit organizational structure. To accomplish this I want our consumers to buy as much clothing from Of Rags as they can afford. More than they can afford even. Eventually I’d like to give out OR credit cards and use the interest rates to run micro financing programs. But that’s another story.

The point is that we are one of several social ventures optimizing benefit. I include cosmetic mega-giant Estée Lauder along with The Body Shop on the list of do-gooders as a note that this can be done on a large scale. And as to size and scale... There IS a HUGE difference between what we do and what Gap does (yes, even the (Red) campaign.) Likewise, there is a massive difference between what an organization such as Rishi Tea does and what Coke does. Yet the fact is that Coke bought Honest Tea, a company based two blocks from where I grew up that is also built on the reputation of integrity and social responsibility. Will that social mission continue now that it is part of a corporate empire? It’s too soon to tell, but I'm learning toward probably not and definitely not in the same way. 

One thing is certain though, competitors do contend with one another. It is in the very nature of the game. And so I will contend with Gap, Wal-Mart, Target and 25 of the other 27 Sustainable Apparel Coalition members to say that while I commend you for trying to reduce your harm, do not dare to think that you can say you are optimizing benefit. The day that your CEOs meet with the seamstresses and have dinner with the screenprinters’ families and walk the cutters’ kids to school, then maybe you can say that you aim to benefit the people who labor away while you enjoy seven-figure luxury. But for now you are merely trying to get ahead of the trends so you don’t get the boot from your shareholders when consumers realize that a red sweater is just a red sweater, but a red sweater that empowers a community is a whole world more!  

Developing Communities

Of Rags is a fair trade fashion cooperative for sustainable development. Seamstresses earn living wages allowing them to provide essential goods for their families. 40% of profits from sales are reinvested into public health and education initiatives in the same area where the clothes are made, giving community members even more reason to strive for the success of the organization. Consumers can see the value of their purchases both stylistically, as the clothes draw from influences across borders, and socially, as each we display the number of products we’ve sold, the number of dollars raised for community initiatives and the amount of wages paid.

I developed the idea to begin this organization after spending what totaled over a year living, traveling and volunteering in parts of the world that show up on World Bank reports as developing or undeveloped. Before beginning Of Rags I had spent the other 19 years of my life living in an upper class family in Bethesda, Maryland—home to many World Bank economists, politicians, high-powered Washingtonians and the residents of what was at one point the relatively low-income apartment complex right across the street from the house where I grew up. While living in Bethesda and attending one of the Nation’s top prep schools, I immersed myself in a world far away.

In high school I was determined to become fluent in Spanish, so I watched Telemundo and Univision everyday after class. I even subscribed to the Spanish packet on Cable in order to tune in every afternoon to Franscisco el Matemático, and other Colombian TV Programs. I also volunteered as a tutor at a community center for primarily Hispanic low-income youth.

I’m not really sure why I did all of these things. At first my determination to learn Spanish was motivated by my romantic interest in a young lady from Venezuela who I met during a summer program at one of the world’s top universities. But I think there were other causes—the desire to fit in with a certain group of people? The desire to stand out from another? Did all of the history lessons and storybooks of change makers in my Quaker school’s curriculum actually rub off on me as they were intended? What it was that opened my eyes to another world right in front of me, I cannot say. All I know now is that my interest in something other than my familiar environment has matured into a passion for changing that very same environment.

Around the time I started Of Rags a year and a half ago I launched this blog. And when I launched Of Rags, I wrote this post http://www.theparallelworld.com/2009/10/of-rags-to-riches.html explaining my theory behind the failure of development. To elaborate on this I’ve created a couple of diagrams:

Development fails in that it breaks the circle. What happens when social programs try to run without jobs and the national industry to support them? All the money comes from one side of the equation. There is no circle. It is not sustainable.

This is of course one of the key points in the call for change of writers such as Dambisa Moyo and NYU’s Bill Easterly (who doesn’t hold office hours against department policy but who does rightfully claim that the best economic outcome is when private good is equal to social good), who have made a lot of money stating the obvious about why poor people are poor.

Arturo Escobar was one of the first of these writers. Easterly and Moyo owe him their houses (and Jeffrey Sachs lives in a brownstone on the Upper East Side while arguing the contrary point), but well beyond the typical self-inflating AidWatch style debates, Escobar’s Encountering Development brings several key points to the table…or page, really. A few of these points are listed here:

1. "Development relies on setting up the world as a picture, so that the whole can be grasped in some orderly fashion as forming a structure or system (56).” This point is furthered by the fact as Escobar explains it that development is based primarily on economics which use simple models to sum up complicated situations.
2. That labor once defined the value of a product, but soon value was redefined by utility. (64)
3. That development and social service institutions are the main players in the developing world whereas they are just one of many players in the developed world. And that development professionals educated in the US and England often plan with the toolbox most familiar to them seeing only that development institutions such as the federal works program made a great impact in US history, but disregarding the context in which these program took place.
4. “According to de Janvry, industrialization in the world’s periphery depends on the availability of cheap labor, which is maintained chiefly thought the provision of cheap food and the exploitation of the peasantry and urban working class. The requirement of cheap labor is imposed by the “laws of motion” of capital globally and its contradictions…The result is a structural situation in which a “modern” sector—based on a combination of multinational, state, and local capital---coexists with a “backward,” or traditional, sector, the chief function of which is to provide cheap labor and cheap food for the former. Because the dynamic sectors of the economy produce for export or for the modern sector, there is no real need for consolidating an internal market that would encompass most of the population.”
5. Anthropologists frequently only have unilateral conversations.

The conclusion I draw from all of this is that development functions outside of the consumer economy. In the name of capitalism, a centrally derived socialist system is set up with connections to the “free market” only at the highest levels. Development planners do not see themselves as part of the system they are planning. More importantly as Marx would point out and as Escobar outlines courtesy of de Janvry in the above point 4, consumers don’t see producers. It’s as if community didn’t exist, only numbers on a page. No friends, neighbors, colleagues, loved ones, family or traditions, just columns of GDP, GINI, and HDI.

This is where development traditionally fails.

With Of Rags community is what makes us different. We are grounded in building pride among community members about the work that they themselves can do to deliver on the populist political promises of healthier living conditions, better education and job opportunities. We plug some of the most marginalized producers into the global market place. We put consumers and the people who make their clothes as face-to-face as a computer screen will allow.

This is all great. But we represent 0.0000004% of the annual dollars flowing into development. Other community-based development programs are for the most part similar specs of dust in the scheme of things. Even fair trade in total represents no more than a 300 million dollars industry. While the 50billion dollar aid industry is only 10% of the annual dollars flowing into armed forces. Creating substantial systemic change based in one community at a time will take a very very very long time. Yet it’s no coincidence that I’m talking about the value of communities.

Community, whatever the word really means, is what motivates me to type out a blog post on social change at 3am. Seeing the faces of the people for whom many development agencies only see numbers is what drove me to think outside of the box and start an organization in partnership with a Ghanaian artist and designer. Whether those faces were through the TV or in a corn field in Honduras, I saw from a relatively early age that there was something more going on behind the scenes of the poverty that Children International shows in the ads asking for a dollar a day. I worked with the Water Committee and the Youth Action Group in the small town of Coalaca. I saw that there were organizations on the smallest level working to build a kitchen at the village school and holding soccer matches to raise funds for a new community center.

Five years later this is still my inspiration. Tattooed on my side are the words “vida verdad amor.” Life truth love—The same words one of my friends in Honduras said to me when I left to return to the comfort of my recently renovated house in Bethesda. She told me “No tenemos mucho acá como tu tienes allá, pero sí tenemos vida, verdad y mucho amor. No te olvides de eso. Pues nunca te vamos a olvidar. --We don’t have much here like you have there in the States, but we do have life, truth and love. Don’t forget that. We’ll never forget you.”

Talking face to face. Asking “…y como fue que llegó a la USA?” Listening. Sharing. All those healthy values that they taught in the storybooks really must have worn off on me somehow. But I don’t know if it was in the classroom. My experiences are unique, but I’m not alone in my knowledge of the world and of community. Almost every single person I know who has travelled in the same way I have, shares the opinion that change must come about on both ends of the spectrum for any one end to be sustainable.

Tuition for Peace institutionalizes community-based development and face-to-face sharing. The idea is to put college aged people into unfamiliar environments where they volunteer in whatever capacity they are able. Their volunteer service would be facilitated by a college scholarship drawing in many ways on the ROTC program for the “all volunteer” military. Not only will this solve the failure of development and the current economic system, but it will also open the doorway to jobs and career opportunities that students otherwise would not have the interest in or the access to. If Tuition for Peace were implemented tomorrow, twenty years from now development would reflect the value of community to its very core.

But if one thing is clear to me at this point it is that even the best idea isn’t getting anywhere without a community supporting it from the start. In the case of Of Rags, we have the Labadi Town community in Ghana and we are growing our community here in New York. With Tuition for Peace I find myself a lone voice sounding a drowned out call to action. Yet there are two ripe communities to which I am yet to turn.

My focus with Tuition for Peace is on finding a small community of people like myself—four or five dedicated believers. From there we will target communities that would benefit the most from the program—high schools, where the threat of college tuition looms large.

But I’m yet to figure out one elemental aspect and that is whether or not those core believers will be all, or even partly, located in New York City where I am. If they are not all located in New York, then one key question remains—a question, not put too lightly, that may determine the fate of the world—is our belief in community enough to bring us together if we are not face-to-face?

I'm interested to see how Paul Hawken treats this subject in his book Blessed Unrest that I'm reading for next week.

Competitive Advantage, Competitive Change

Sometimes I wish I had a tube connected to my head that would just take my thoughts and write them down. Now is one of those times. I've got an exam tomorrow/today at 8am and let's see it's 1:31am already. I studied a little, but it's Econ, which is mostly logic. Logically, our economy is screwed up, but more on that in about 36 hours. Instead of studying, I thought a lot.

The last few days have been quite inspiring. I watched The Social Network (on the Amazon on Demand online video service). It made me feel both motivated and a little frustrated too for not having a quick-fix, go-viral, be-all end-all solution to the world's problems. I went through several NYU Reynolds program worksheets for the Business Plan Development Team. These asked questions that may seem obvious, but when asked al together in their particular style make me stop and analyze my approach to Of Rags and just about everything a little more critically. I also met with some cool fair trade business people and worked with a web designer on some tech details for the upcoming new Of Rags website.

But enough with the boring stuff. The thoughts that I'm looking to put into words somehow revolve around the fact that in my experience as a consumer I have frequently faced a decision about opportunity cost. I see this cost as an individual--what it costs me. I remember specifically an experience I had a few years ago shopping for new winter weather clothes. I went to Banana Republic where I saw a beautiful red striped sweater. It was 180 dollars. Then I went next door to the Gap where I saw different color striped versions of an OK sweater. Each version was 45 dollars. Being me I bought two of the OK sweaters and a bunch of pants and other shirts until I spent around 360 dollars. I walked home thinking "wow, for the price of two sweaters I got two sweaters two pants and three shirts (and I shouldn't have spent so much money.)" Beyond sounding like a crummy example from a textbook, my point is this:

Never once in my consumer process did I think about the opportunity cost of where my dollars were going and what opportunities they represented for other people. Instead I thought only about what opportunity I had to get one thing versus numerous other things--even if those other things are, do I buy a shirt or do I give ten dollars away. Never once had I seriously considered do I buy a shirt that pays fair wages or do I buy a shirt that employs sweatshop labor? There was no reason for me to consider this because there was no easy alternative to the sweatshop labor, or at the very least the profit driven relatively poor labor conditions somewhere in Asia or Central America. What I found was that all compassion was removed from the marketplace.

The environmentalist movement is the first time that any of these habits have really started to change. But even so, a Compact Florescent Lightbulb doesn't really tell me how it was made, it only tells me I'm saving on my electric bills, which somewhere in the back of my mind I equate to less green house gas.

The magic combination is having a sweater somewhere quality-wise in the range of OK to Beautiful that markets itself not on having red stripes, because there are half a dozen stores in half as many blocks that carry the same look, but instead that markets itself on where the consumer's dollars go.

If with Of Rags we can come up with a system that shows our potential consumers exactly how much of the purchase price of each item in their shopping cart goes to pay living wages and how much goes to community initiatives, then our product is no longer just sweater. It is a sweater that puts food on the table for a family. The opportunity cost of buying a different sweater from another company becomes more than not getting our version of basically the same thing. The cost is not feeding a family.

So with this in mind we will soon launch our website that will include a unique ticker showing the number of products sold, dollars raise and wages paid. This is just a prototype of what I hope we can create one day. My goal is to figure out how to include this same breakdown of wages and community reinvestment for every product that we sell at the moment that we sell it. This way consumers will see what each of their purchases amounts to the second that they spend money with Of Rags.

(An unauthorized sneak peek at the new Of Rags website.)

Perhaps my blog is not necessarily the best place to announce this plan. But I figure if someone can steal this idea and implement it faster and better than my team and I can, then at least we'll be competing on something of more value than whose red stripes look cooler on the mannequins. It's this competition of social value that the consumer market lacks. It is this competition that will breed innovation and it is this competition that will ultimately change our world. ...so long as the competition is honest.

Forging a Foundation

A call to action is only as good as the people who hear it, and we've got to listen to be heard. In the Civil Rights Movement, whether the action was registering to vote, sitting in at segregated lunch counters, boycotting stores or just talking about making a difference, the call was sounded most clearly through face-to-face dialogue. While the telephone, the postal service and certain newspapers spread word of what was occurring in towns like Greenwood, Mississippi to other areas throughout the United States, the forums that instigated action took place in churches, social halls, barber shops and in people’s homes. Spurred on by Sam Block and other SNCC activists, Greenwood residents discussed how they could uphold their constitutional right to vote and their basic human right to a dignified existence. In the book I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, Charles Payne charts the course of change that occurs through each discussion. Be it in a mass meeting, or on door-to-door canvassing activities, every time people engaged in conversation they built trust, community, confidence in themselves and buy-in to the cause. This laid the foundation for the actions that broke the chains of segregation.

Fifty years later we must rebuild that foundation. As we’ve added more forms of communication, mainly the Internet, to our repertoire of organizing tactics, too frequently have we forgotten what it means to share stories of personal experiences and aspirations in a face-to-face conversation. At least this is what I have observed over the past year as I have tried to organize my peers and colleagues around a cause. With some help from one or two supporters and the power of today’s connectivity at my fingertips, I have organized visits to 15 of the nation’s best colleges and universities in order to promote sustainable consumerism. At first I thought it would be easy to leverage this network into support for the concrete goal of passing legislation to open up volunteer opportunities as a way to help pay for college. But quickly I realized that standing in the front of a room with a microphone and speaking to my peers is not the same thing as sitting in a circle and sharing stories and ideas in conversation with one another.

While there is some value in preaching to the choir, the opportunity that I am now aiming to create is a forum where every voice can be heard distinctly. I believe that only with this approach, the same approach that kept Greenwood fighting for freedom even when run down by injustice, will individuals truly take action on any scale of significance beyond just nodding their heads in ascension or clicking a button online. If we congregate as a group of supporters for a cause, but do not listen to one another’s voices, how can we expect that we will believe in each of our own unique stories and set of values enough to keep taking action on an individual level until we achieve our collective goal? This is a matter of faith—not in any higher power, but in ourselves. And as we share our stories, ideas, values and opinions gained from our own experiences we will also be able to craft a more universally accessible call to action and a more comprehensive strategy to reach our goal.

With today’s 24-hour network news cycle and 140-character thought process, it is easy to fall into the trap of seeking change overnight. I am only just beginning to pull myself out of that trap through a course of reading and guided thinking in much greater depth than I’ll bore you with. To truly live up to the clichéd promise of the 21^st century and give voices to the masses, we have a bigger chunk of work cut out for us than I think many people would like to admit. We’ll have to go into classrooms, church basements, and community center meeting halls over and over and over in order to develop a dialogue well beyond the complexity of a Facebook newsfeed. But if we forge these traditional tactics with our contemporary connectivity, then we can create not just a movement, but a revolution.

Marketing the Truth

Over the past 18 months or so I've learned a lot about running an organization. I've probably learned more about what not to do than anything else. One thing that I've discovered is that, as far as most people are concerned, the information that an organization publishes about itself, whether nutritional facts, how its products are made, or what it does with its money is the only information that most people looking into the organization will ever know. Even most journalists don't do more investigating than looking through a press release. This puts an enormous amount of power in the hands of people running organizations--power in the form of trust. Consumers, whether of products or information, trust that what an organization says it does is indeed what it does. When an organization is honest a great relationship between the organization and its consumers is formed.

Yet there is a huge potential for an organization to abuse that relationship since effectively it is its own authority. It takes someone with a combination of experience, time and some inside knowledge to know that sometimes what organizations say about themselves is not true. Over the past 18 months I've gained such experience and inside knowledge--at least in a particular field. Today I look more critically at information published and think of it from a marketer's perspective. I've come to ask myself scrutinously how is this spun, exaggerated or otherwise just made up?

I know that I don't stand alone with this critical perspective and I know that I must turn it around toward myself and my own organizations with just as much of a laser eye, because the biggest lesson that I've learned over the past 18 months is never to represent my organization dishonestly.

Trust is the most powerful form of relationship. It is a power that must be used responsibly because it is a power that can be lost in just seconds. Yet the potential that lies in truth is infinitely bigger than anything dishonesty could ever come up with. So we as both producers and consumers must challenge ourselves to seek out the truth. We must respect our mutual intelligence and realize that all of us are humans. None of us is perfect. Let's be honest about that so that we can share the benefits of a strong and lasting relationship.