Ordinarily, we write these Tuesday Tracts to feature people who promote social justice through enterprise.Elegant Roots Blog

Today, though, it’s about the nature of social enterprise. Social enterprise blurs the distinction between “not-for-profit” and “for profit” entities. For-profit social enterprises, though organized to realize a profit, are not organized to maximize profit. Rather, the moving force is the notion that commercial viability through the opening of markets for economically marginalized people creates a strong, resilient and vibrant level of security and stability that improve all facets of life: nutrition, health, independence, education, etc.

The elegant notion at ElegantRoots.com, from which we take our name, is that a people’s traditional arts when applied to a commercially viable design creates a win-win for artisan and recipient. But only when a market can be opened and maintained for the resulting product. The artisan wins, enjoying a traditional lifestyle and a growing independence, rather than being forced into the ever growing but not sustaining large urban sprawls. The purchaser wins by having a nonpareil product from the touch of an artisan’s hand.

Creating a market for these products extends the benefits of globalization to people who have been otherwise left out.

But I promised you a fish story.

You know the old proverb: give a person a fish and you feed her for one day, teach a person to fish and you feed him for a lifetime…. Well, social enterprise pushes this further: Buy fish from a person at a fair price and you improve lives in a community immeasurably in innumerable ways beyond a full stomach.

Especially when you apply the long tail of the internet. E-commerce is the perfect way to create a market big enough for these wonderful, but specialty products.

Where do the social enterprisers come from? Typically, some event gives them exposure to a need and they organize their lives to fill it. That’s the story of Richard Speedy of Julio Pagliani bringing to an updated world the jewelry beading of the indigenous Tarahumara of Mexico’s Sierra Madre. It’s the story of Nadine Storyk Curtis of Be Sweet bringing to the world scarves and shawls from the mohair textile traditions alive in women’s collectives in South Africa. And of Marie So and Carol Chyau of Shokay International creating a luxury market for the incredibly soft yak-down produced by Tibetan herders.

And the same is true for next week’s Tuesday Tracts featured social entrepreneur, Ellen Dorsch of Creative Women, bringing to the international market the textile skills of women of Ethiopia, Swaziland, and now, Afghanistan.

This is what ElegantRoots.com is founded on. We exist to extend the market for the Tarahumara of Mexico, for the South African women, for the Tibetan herders of western China, for the last family-run cotton mill in the USA, for jewelry designers who work with recycled materials, for all the artisans …. for people, planet, profit for all — the Triple Bottom Line.

Later.