What About Pure For-Profits?

The possibility of a for-profit undertaking social-change work without a linked nonprofit also needs to be considered. While we reject the libertarian argument that every human problem has an economic solution, many social-change issues clearly have economic dimensions that are susceptible to creative business plans.

Hate Bush's hot pursuit of nuclear power? Launch energy-service companies to spread conservation measures, or build local wind farms to take control of your own electricity future. Concerned about the poor, minorities and women having equal access to credit? Create more community banks, credit unions and micro-enterprise funds. Troubled by pharmaceutical prices that make life-saving drugs unattainable for impoverished people across the globe? Start, as several companies based in the Third World did, companies that mass-produce affordable knock-offs of high-priced American drugs.

By some reckonings, we're now on the third generation of socially responsible businesses. The first generation comprised Fortune 500 companies that tried to improve their social performance, often in small ways with large public-relations budgets. Many executives in these companies continue to share best practices through Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), which got started in 1992.

The second generation represents small and medium-size businesses whose proprietors are more eager to align themselves and their companies with progressive causes, and whose CEOs collaborate through organizations like the Social Venture Network (SVN). We applaud the Body Shops, the Ben & Jerry's and the Benettons of the world, each of which manufactures decent products, comports (however imperfectly) with reasonably responsible labor and environmental standards and piggybacks snippets of political education in its advertising. The importance of the millions given by these kinds of companies--Newman's Own, for example, has donated more than $150 million to charities, including many progressive causes--should not be underestimated. But at the end of the day, the core products of each, whether cosmetics or ice cream, are pretty ho-hum, and they are not linked to any particular community.

What has impressed us most is the growing number of local businesspeople who not only "walk the talk" of social justice in the small details of their operations and products but also tout the virtues of local ownership. This third generation is now being led by the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) and by the American Independent Business Alliance (AMIBA). Both emerged in recent years as grassroots alternatives to BSR and SVN, and have mushroomed into three dozen chapters with several thousand affiliated small businesses. Each promotes local ownership of the economy and pushes for new public policies that remove the tilts in the playing field that currently favor badly behaved big business.

One of the founders of BALLE is Judy Wicks, whose White Dog Cafe in Philadelphia is as much a community organizing center as a restaurant. Radical speakers from around the country provide a steady stream of lectures. An adjacent store sells "fair trade" products and will soon be introducing a line of locally made clothing. The White Dog itself embodies principles of social justice and environmental stewardship by paying all employees a living wage, insisting on humanely raised meats and eggs, using locally grown ingredients and running on wind electricity. Twenty percent of profits from the restaurant go to the White Dog Cafe Foundation, carrying on the cafe's mission through nonprofit activities.

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