Archive for the ‘Social Entrepreneurship’ Category

Environmental Metrics

Saturday, May 23rd, 2015
Measuring Savings

Measuring Savings

There is an old saying that “what is measured, is managed” so I am always intrigued to see ways of measuring the impacts of small steps we can each take to reduce our environmental footprint/carbon emissions to reduce disaster impacts. This dispenser provides filtered water to employees of a Fortune 500 company. Each floor has one to encourage use. The dispenser is equipped with an automatic sensor. Once you place your refillable bottle underneath the spout, filtered water is dispensed and the small green screen at the top right of the unit tracks the number of refills as “Helped eliminate waste from 13,457 disposable plastic bottles”. The dispenser is an effective reminder of the cumulative benefits of avoiding disposable plastic water bottles that only wind up in landfills.

NuRide is another service that measures and rewards individual efforts to reduce environmental impacts. You can sign up for NuRide and use the service to find a ride-share or a car-pooling buddy. You can also create a free account and enter details of when and where you took public transportation, shared a ride with someone or walked or biked to your destination. You earn points for these efforts and they add up to rewards such as free admission to cultural events or discounts on purchases. I am trying to work out a model of how we would measure improved small business commercial resiliency measures and, in an analytically rigorous way, translate those measures into reduced premiums commensurate with better risk practices. So I find these models helpful and, of course, use both.

Guest Blogger, Alejandro Witschi

Sunday, May 17th, 2015
Back to School

Help From My Alma Mater

On May 17, the Brandeis International Business School honored 244 graduates at its 21st annual diploma ceremony. One of them was Alejandro Witschi, who was a graduate student intern at Prisere LLC last summer. UNISDR’s Regional Office in the Americas published a paper developed by Prisere LLC, to which Alejandro had contributed. We invited Alejandro to contribute a guest blog about his experience, which follows below. We wish him every success as he embarks on his career.

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When I started searching for internships for the summer of 2014, I was looking for something in my field of expertise, banking and risk management. But in a pleasant turn of events I met Donna Childs; she was in need of a graduate student to support one of Prisere’s projects for the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. After an interview, we decided to combine forces for this project, and maybe my background was not the usual for a job of this magnitude, but I had a strong personal attraction to this project.

My interest in contributing to this project relates to a disaster that occurred in my country and my personal feelings. A disaster struck Vargas State in Venezuela on 15 December 1999, when torrential rains and debris flows destroyed thousands of homes, and led to the complete collapse of the state’s infrastructure. The exact number of casualties was difficult to establish due to the lack of reliable census data in the state, but it is estimated that between 10,000 and 30,000 people were killed. My other reason for interest in this project relates to the recent loss of my uncle, a former UN official and former Delegate of the Red Cross International Committee, who helped people around the world for almost 30 years. This motivated my interest in helping people as well, as my uncle did, precisely contributing to dissemination of best practices in disaster risk reduction communications in the Caribbean region.

At the beginning of the project, I reviewed the literature related to the United Nations work for disaster risk reduction in the context of the social and economic developments in the Caribbean region. Then I began to research regional best practices in disaster risk reduction. The process included gathering information from senior government officials in the Caribbean countries, each charged with responsibility for disaster risk reduction, emergency management or humanitarian response. I also interviewed leaders of NGO’s, including the Red Cross, in the Caribbean region. The experience was amazing because all of the participants in the project openly shared their experiences and this is reflected in a final report that I hope contributes to a safer, more resilient Caribbean region.

Doing Well by Doing Good, Part 10 of an Occasional Series

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009
Small and Mighty

Small and Mighty

I took this photograph of the Grand Canyon when vacationing in Arizona years ago. It inspires awe to think how the tiny Colorado River carved out this magnificent canyon over thousands of years. It is similar to the entrepreneurial process; a little effort applied consistently over time can yield unimaginable results. If you are thinking of small business as your path to independence, consider the publicity and marketing benefits of small business competitions. My other business, Childs Capital LLC, benefited from being named the 2008 winner of the International Woman’s Entrepreneurship Challenge of the Chambers of Commerce, the 2007 Woman Business Owner of the Year of the National Association of Women Business Owners, the 2006 Optimist Award of the Mirassou Wineries, a 2006 Finalist of the Small Business Advocate of the Year of the National Small Business Association, the 2005 Entrepreneurial Rising Star Award of the Business and Professional Women’s Association, the 2003 Real People, Real Success Award of the U.S. Postal Service and the 2002 Signature Award of the New York City Group of the National Association of Women Business Owners.  This recognition can help your business build its profile and expand sales and it costs nothing to accomplish.

Doing Well by Doing Good, Part 9 of an Occasional Series

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009
School in Guinea

School in Guinea

As this economy prompts more and more people to look at bootstrapping their way to small business independence, I thought it helpful to share my own experience. One of the issues that is quickly surfaced in the entrepreneurial process is the need for more education. As someone else’s employee, your responsibilities are likely narrowly defined. Large corporations have functional departments to deal with every need, whether it be the company website or the marketing department. As a small business owner, you have to become a Jill-of-all-trades and manage everything. And your prior corporate experience has left you unequipped to do it! So you need to learn and need to learn fast. With 50% of small businesses failing in the first year of operations, you have little margin for error. But how do you finance this education when resources are scarce? That is where entrepreneurial creativity comes in. In an earlier blog posting, I described how I took Saturday classes for eighteen months to become proficient in website design. That was part of my education. I took a week-long executive education program at the Harvard Business School, Strategic Finance for Smaller Businesses, paid for by a grant from the Families of Freedom Foundation.  The Foundation provided scholarship assistance to those in the immediate impact zone of the World Trade Center on 9-11-01 for which I qualified.

Thereafter, I participated in Owner President Management, a program of the Harvard Business School for founders of fast-growing entrepreneurial enterprises. OPM, as it is known, met three weeks a year for three years on the HBS campus and was truly a tranformational experience. A Professional Development Grant of the American Association of University Women covered part of the cost. I also participated in “Strategic Thinking and Management for Competitive Advantage” at the Wharton School of Business with my tuition and all expenses paid as the winner of the (ft-summer-school-2003) “summer school” competition of the Financial Times newspaper. The image attached to this posting, by the way, is a sign at a school crossing, showing a boy and a girl holdng hands to safely cross the street. I took this photograph in Guinea, a French-speaking country in Sub-Saharan Africa when I was working on a project there.  “École” is the French word for school. African parents make tremendous sacrifices to send their children to school, where school fees can be quite onerous for the poor. They do so because they want better futures for their children. This image always inspires me.

Doing Well By Doing Good, Part 8 of an Occasional Series

Sunday, June 28th, 2009
Looking for Direction?

Looking for Direction?

For those thinking of making a change towards more meaningful work in the time of economic stress, perhaps my experience may be helpful. The essence of entrepreneurship is bootstrapping. I described in an earlier posting how I leveraged the only resource I had, my time and enthusiasm, to build websites for my business. I did the same to obtain technology resources. My first small business, Childs Capital LLC, was selected as the grand-prize winner in the sales and marketing category of the 2006 Cisco Growing With Technology Awards. This prize included $25,000 worth of Cisco equipment of our choice and we opted for a complete Voice Over Internet Telephony system.  We were the grand-prize winner of the Visa Business Breakthrough for Small Businesses, which provided a $10,000 grant for small business services. We won second prize in the Microsoft Technology makeover award, which offered a $25,000 package through CompUSA and a $25,000 package through Microsoft. We won the Web-preneur award from IBM and American Express, the SAP Small Business of the Year Award and the technology grant of the Amber Foundation.  Winning the Professional Development Grant of the Web Foundation allowed me to take a fully paid course on DVD authoring at the Sony Training Institute in San Jose.  Taking the time to write the essays in support of the applications provided the small business with much needed resources. Incidentally, the photograph here appears on our Intranet as a navigation aid. After putting all of this technology in place, I put it to use and developed a style guide for our Internet and Intranet. I took this photograph of the country manager for Land O’Lakes in Guinea as we pulled our jeep over en route to Labé from Conakry. Reading the sign was difficult; heavy rains caused the metal sign to rust. Why would you have metal signs in a rainy climate? Good question. The signpost was twisted 90 degrees at the bottom, so it would hard to tell the original directional intent. This photo was completely unposed and illustrates the challenges of working in that part of the world. And a great image to capture the meaning of looking for directions or navigational aids. That is what I love about bootstrapping – it really opens your creativity!

Doing Well By Doing Good, Part 7 of an Occasional Series

Saturday, June 27th, 2009
A Better Future

A Better Future

One of the most memorable projects of my first business was working in Guinea for Land O’Lakes. You likely recognize that company as a brand of butter, cream and other dairy products. What is less well known is that Land O’Lakes consists of more than 1,000 member-cooperatives serving more than 300,000 agricultural producers. Land O’Lakes members assist international development by sharing their expertise in farm-to-market agribusinesses. The farmer-to-farmer model is critical to providing technical assistance to small-scale farmers in developing countries, including Guinea, a French-speaking country in sub-Saharan Africa. Its fertile soil and sunny climate notwithstanding, the country imports about 80% of its food. Improving the productivity of the agricultural sector, which consists almost entirely of small family farms, is critical to the country’s efforts to lift itself out of poverty. I worked on a project with Land O’Lakes in Guinea to assist in technical training and human resource development. Although Guinea is one of the most desperately poor places on earth, the experience was very uplifting. This is one of my favorite images; a photograph I took in Conakry, the country’s capital. The juxtaposition of the dirt road and poor sanitation with a glamorous marble mosque that would look at home in Beverly Hills captures the country’s dilemma. This little girl is smiling because she is on her way to school, a rare treat for girls in her part of the world, where illiteracy rates are about 80%. The smiling optimism of the child captures the look of a better future, which is why this is one of my favorite photographs.

Doing Well By Doing Good, Part 6 of An Occasional Series

Thursday, June 25th, 2009
Women At Their Best

Women At Their Best

Warrilow & Co., a consultancy that advises corporations in marketing to small businesses, recently reported that 29% of small business owners are more tenured than people realize.  Roughly one-third of small business owners reported that their businesses grew out of “ramp-up, not start-up”. They maintained their traditional employment while incubating a small business on the side as a secondary source of income. Only when that business could sustain the proprietor as a primary income source did he or she formally incorporate the business at which point it was officially recognized in the small business statistics.  So many small businesses are more mature than they appear and often grew out of the owner’s personal passion or hobby.  That was certainly my experience and frankly I think it is a less risky approach than trying to jump into the entrepreneurial waters after losing traditional corporate employment. This is particularly true in a market as choppy as this one.  I would advise would-be entrepreneurs to think about securing an income stream while putting their small business plans in place over the longer haul.  That is what I did as I explored my passions by doing volunteer work for charitable projects while being employed elsewhere full-time. Then when I was ready to start my own business, I had a clearer sense of direction. This photograph, by the way, was a gift to me and to the other women recognized by Glamour magazine as “Women At Their Best” for the charity work we had done for our respective causes.

Doing Well By Doing Good, Part 5 of an Occasional Series

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009
Lion of Lucerne

Lion of Lucerne

I took this photograph when I lived in Switzerland and worked for Swiss Re. It is the Lion of Lucerne, commemorating the valor of the Swiss in battle. Mark Twain described it as the “most moving piece of rock in the world”. I took the photograph to show the small pond in front of it, to convey the serenity of the space. The two German women tourists facing the rock give a sense of scale. I learned a great deal about life and health insurance, property-casualty insurance and reinsurance from my experience at Swiss Re and Swiss Re, my former employer, became a client of my small business. Poor people in the developing world usually lack access to basic financial services, such as insurance to protect against contingencies. A drought affecting the small family farm, or a flood, can be catastrophic, as can illness or unemployment. The poor typically don’t have insurance for life, health, property or unemployment to provide coverage. One of the areas in which my business worked was to try to develop such solutions that would be cost-effective on a micro-scale for many small policyholders.

Doing Well By Doing Good, Part 4 of An Occasional Series

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009
My First Website!

My First Website!

As many Americans are re-evaluating their career decisions at this difficult time and contemplating entrepreneurship as a solution, I thought it might be helpful to share my own experience. After a more traditional corporate career, working for the Swiss Reinsurance Company in Zurich, Switzerland, I returned to the U.S. for family reasons. My mother had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage as a consequence of a ruptured aneurysm and I took some time off to care for her and for my father as well. I was starting my own small business to marry my experience in insurance and finance with the needs for social insurance and access to finance for the poor. And so I founded Childs Capital LLC. Actually, the original name of the business was Chrysalis Capital LLC, but another Chrysalis had filed to trademark that name just a few days before I did. Because of the long backlog in entering applications at the Patent and Trademark Office, the existing Chrysalis did not come up when searched. No matter. I kept the logo we had designed and went with Childs Capital instead since no one could protest the use of my own name. The image shown here is the prototype for the homepage of the website I designed and built for the business.

Being an entrepreneur and a small business owner is really all about bootstrapping and skill-building. As a corporate employee, you specialize in a particular role. As an entrepreneur, you have to be a Jill-of-all-Trades. For me, this involved, among other things, learning how to design and build a website. The September 11th Fund provided training grants for owners of small businesses in the immediate impact zone of the World Trade Center on 9-11 (sadly, we qualified) to take certain professional training programs. I enrolled in the Desktop Publishing and Website Design Certificate Program at the Continuing and Professional Studies Division of Baruch College within the City University of New York. The September 11th Fund provided the tuition waiver. For eighteen months, while running my business, I spent nearly every Saturday from 9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. in  classroom learning website design. Classes met from 9:00 to noon, with a one-hour lunch break and then an afternoon class would follow from 1:00 – 4:00 p.m. Completion of the certificate required that I take classes in Adobe Photoshop, Quark XPress, Typography and Fonts, HTML coding, Dreamweaver, Adobe Illustrator, Javascript – 12 classses in all. A grant from the Sumasil Foundation paid for the software I purchased. And that is how I learned to design and build a website. I did all of the illustration, photography, design and coding myself. I find one of the most enjoyable aspects of running a business to be broadening my skills sets, as everything I do in support of the business is a labor of love. And now I have mastered WordPress for this blog!

Doing Well by Doing Good, Part 3 of an Occasional Series

Monday, June 22nd, 2009
Swiss Puppets in Heimatwerk

Swiss Puppets in Heimatwerk

Research shows that longevity is positively correlated with having a purpose in life. For many people, the current recession is a challenge to re-examine the purpose and meaning of work. After reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about professionals performing volunteer work to transition into new careers, I thought I would share my own experience of merging my interests in the non-profit sector with my corporate career to start my own business. As an investment banker working with insurance industry clients, I was given the opportunity to join one of them. I relocated to Zurich, Switzerland to become a senior executive of the Swiss Reinsurance Company. This photograph, by the way, is one I took of a shop window in Zurich. It is Heimatwerk, a shop of hand-crafted Swiss goods. While working at Swiss Re, I continued to volunteer my time and business experience for charitable projects, including working with Opportunity International. I served on its Board of Governors, helping with fundraising and other needs. Opportunity International is a non-profit organization sponsoring microfinance operations in 25 developing countries. Microfinance is the provision of small-scale loans to poor people to allow them to start their own businesses and work their way out of poverty. Opportunity International was my introduction to microfinance. I could see the connection between the work I was doing for Swiss Re and the need for broader social insurance protection for the poor who are employed in the informal sector.