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Conversations with six alumni who use their entrepreneurship
to support uncommon enterprises for the profitable common good
by Jack El-Hai
Hugo Ciro '87 | David
Schoenwald '71 | Gretel Figueroa Guzmán
'95 | Patrick Condon '92 | Audrey
Arner '73 and Richard Handeen '73
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"We connect the consumer with the producer,
and I think that is a good way to do business," says
Hugo Ciro '87, center, meeting with coffee farmers at a school
in San Miguel, Colombia.
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Hugo Ciro '87,
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'I personally know the names of hundreds
of people who benefit from our relationship, in Colombia,
Bolivia and Peru.'
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Coffee is the second-biggest traded commodity in the world, after
oil. In 1997, the Colombian-born Ciro co-founded Level Ground Trading,
Ltd., a coffee wholesaler in British Columbia that buys from grower
co-ops in Colombia and Bolivia without using middlemen or brokers.
The firm focuses on building opportunities for economically disadvantaged
producers, helping them expand and elevating coffee growing to a
more sustainable activity. To assure that growers can earn a good
living wage, Level Ground pays them substantially higher prices
than those common in the world marketplace, currently about $1.35
per pound, a practice that has not stopped the company from increasing
its annual sales by 40 percent per year to reach its current level
of about $2 million. Ciro travels to visit growers three or four
times a year to build on their relationships. His company recently
added dehydrated tropical fruit and cane sugar to its offerings,
and it is considering further diversifying with other commodities,
such as vanilla and tea. Some 315 retailers throughout North America
sell Level Ground products.
How he began: "At Macalester I studied
economics and business, and I've always had a bit of an entrepreneurial
bug. I immigrated to Canada in 1990, married a Canadian and soon began
working on my desire to make a difference for people in poor countries,
primarily in my own. I have family who live in poverty in Colombia.
I got together with like minds and started a company with the mission
of trading fairly and directly with small-scale farmers in developing
countries. We roast their coffee and then handle the distribution."
Why he does this: "We see ourselves
as market-makers for their products, and as their representatives
in the North American marketplace. And we offer our customers an ethical
choice. Our operation is very transparent, and we don't mind telling
people about our finances. We also like to tell the story of where
coffee comes from. We don't put 'Made in Canada' on our bags--we explain that the coffee comes from the labor and toil of
hundreds of farmers. So we connect the consumer with the producer,
and I think that is a good way to do business. It benefits people
on both ends. Most customers buy our coffees because they are of very
good quality--we roast our orders every day--but
people also feel free about buying our coffee because they like partnering
with us in our direct relationship with producers."
What he gets out of it: "I get the
satisfaction of contributing to the improvement of the lives of people
in producing countries. I personally know the names of hundreds of
people who benefit from our relationship, in Colombia, Bolivia and
Peru. And I know we make a difference in their lives, especially in
the lives of students. The coffee cooperatives use the premiums we
pay to fund 200 scholarships for kids who otherwise might be picking
coffee or worse. Another satisfaction for me is the opportunity to
show that it is possible to do fair trade and still run a profitable
business. I have the privilege of telling and showing people that
fair trade is a very good way of doing business, and that is a win-win."
 David
Schoenwald '71,
Schoenwald manages the New Alternatives Fund, the nation's first
environmentally focused mutual fund and one of the first to practice
socially responsible investing. The fund, which Schoenwald founded
in 1982, invests in companies in the wind, solar-power and alternative-energy
industries. The son of a social worker and a longtime activist in
the American Civil Liberties Union, Schoenwald formed the fund after
previously working as a newspaper reporter, attending law school
and providing legal services to the poor. Although he had done some
legal work with securities filings, he had never managed any investment
fund before launching New Alternatives, whose assets now amount
to over $50 million. For his investors, many of them environmentalists
and long-term customers, Schoenwald has produced an annualized return
of 3.71 percent during the oscillating investment market of the
past five years.
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'Managing the fund gives me a way to express
my interest in social responsibility and the environment.'
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How he began: "At first I got involved with groups
of socially involved investors, who held their first meetings during
the '80s in small conference rooms at Columbia University. Now they
meet in grand hotels where you have to dress up to attend the meetings.
The big brokerage firms see socially responsible investing as a
niche to get into, and the spirit that people had at the beginning
is no longer so apparent. I started out investing in American solar
and clean-energy companies. But many of those went bankrupt, which
was a real bummer. My only option was to invest overseas--in Denmark,
Spain, Australia, Japan and New Zealand--where there is greater
interest."
Why he does it: "I came to Macalester
during the Vietnam War, at a time when everyone was politically attuned.
I was a philosophy and English major. We went to voter registration
organizing in Mississippi and went out to protest the war. Later,
while I was working in private law practice with my father, we decided
to start this fund. It was just after the time we had a series of
oil shocks. There was a big fuss over nuclear power, with people chaining
themselves to the fences of nuclear power plants. These were times
when energy was a big issue, and because I come from a general liberal
background, I decided it was time to try investing in alternatives.
My rationale was that there wasn't anyone else doing it, and it is
viewed as socially responsible by people who are involved in the larger
social responsibility movement."
What he gets out of it: "Managing the fund gives me
a way to express my interest in social responsibility and the environment.
I can show my political attitude in a way that lets me make a living.
It's hard at this point for me to think of anything else I can work
at."
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| "There's a large underserved community
of people without access to conventional banks, " says
Gretel Figueroa Guzmán '95. She's pictured in Brazil,
where she was doing a market study. |
Gretel Figueroa Guzmán
'95,
| 'I was never interested in helping Bill Gates
become richer.' |
Figueroa Guzmán, who grew up in St. Louis as the child of
Guatemalan parents, works for New York-based Women's World Banking,
a nonprofit network of 36 institutions around the globe that assist
low-income women who operate small businesses. WWB helps its member
institutions offer loans and financial knowledge to women entrepreneurs
to enable them to expand their businesses. So far the organization
has helped provide microloans averaging $356 to more than 580,000
clients. Figueroa Guzmán is in charge of WWB's relationships
with its Latin American and Caribbean affiliates, particularly ones
in Brazil and Bolivia. She travels extensively, providing financial
and microlending expertise, much as someone working for a management
consulting firm might. In addition, she sometimes helps the affiliate
lobby its local government for changes in the law that would help
grow the market of financial services for small women-run enterprises.
How she began: "At Macalester I had a triple major
in economics, anthropology and international studies. After college
I began working for Prodem, a microfinance organization, in Bolivia.
After a year of working with them and watching the industry in Bolivia
grow, I tried to get conventional banking experience that would
be useful to contribute to the next stage of development of microfinance,
but I went through the interview process and learned that people
advance in that industry by working longer and longer hours and
making bigger and bigger deals. Their motivation is making wealthy
people wealthier. So, instead, I went to work for Oxfam in Europe.
I got my graduate degree [an M.P.A. from Princeton], then started
working as a program officer for Pro Mujer, an international microfinance
organization with programs in Latin America. I came on with WWB,
a much larger organization, in 2001."
Why she does it: "I was never interested
in helping Bill Gates become richer. Through WWB we assist people
who are sweeping the streets to have the money to buy a pushcart or
wheelbarrow to pick up more refuse. There's always a challenge ahead,
another level they can rise to, and we give them the capital they
need to grow and improve their livelihoods. There's a large underserved
community of people without access to conventional banks. We go for
the people who need us the most. As for the affiliates we work with,
we try to help them hold onto their main principles as they grow.
They're sometimes under a lot of pressure to dilute their social mission."
What she gets out of it: "It's enormously
satisfying. I have friends who work the same incredibly long hours
for a larger paycheck. But I feel I have a better purpose, to make
smaller institutions stronger, to push people's thinking that poor
people are really bankable and that their businesses work. My days
are never the same, and I know at the end of the day that what I do
makes a huge difference for women everywhere."
Patrick Condon '92,
Condon, an economics and history major, founded Finished Basement
Co., a design-build firm specializing in basement finish, in 1998.
The rapidly growing company now has 28 employees in Denver, 7 more
in its newly added Eagan, Minn., office and annual sales of more
than $10 million. What makes the company distinctive, Condon says,
is a culture that seeks to bring out the best in people.
| 'I look at our role as a company as an opportunity
to have a positive impact on people's lives.' |
How he began: "In the first three years, we had incredible
growth. We had a ton of press for pioneering the basement finish
industry. But we also had a dark side, if you will. We had some
homeowners who weren't really happy, and internally we had a lot
of conflict between departments. So we had a company retreat. It
wasn't really intentional but the retreat was the birthing of our
company culture. We really take time to develop people, coach them,
push them to do better work. We demand accuracy, timeliness, organization
and complete work--we have a credo that we live by--and all of this
has a very positive impact on people's lives. [For example], we
want to 'be unreasonable.' What we're saying is that we'll actually
finish the job on time--that's 'unreasonable' in the construction
industry. We also want to respect and empower others to fulfill
[the credo]."
Why he does this: "From a financial
standpoint, the objective of the company is to turn a profit. But
I look at our role as a company as an opportunity to have a positive
impact on people's lives. I've had people outside our company, like
our tradespeople, tell me that they're happier because of the demands
we've put on them for performance and for the support we've given
them. Our employees, subcontractors, clients--they all
feel the impact."
What he gets out of it: "One of the
things that I got from my Mac education was seeing my life as a conduit
for change within the world. A lot of my friends went on to work at
nonprofits, joined the Peace Corps or went to work for labor causes.
I chose to be an entrepreneur. For me, I can't think of making a bigger
impact on the world than creating financial and personal growth for
our employees and contractors. We directly impact the lives of hundreds
of people a year, and as we grow our hope is to have a positive impact
on tens of thousands of people.
"I talked to Garrett Boone, the co-founder of The Container
Store. It's been ranked first, second or third in Fortune
magazine's annual list of '100 Best Companies To Work For' for five
years in a row. The Container Store is one of the most profitable
retail outlets in the country. They pay their employees twice the
average rate, give them 10 times the training and create a positive
environment for everyone. A cultural model like The Container Store
is what we're emulating."
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"We wanted to live more in keeping with
our values," says Audrey Arner '73. She and Richard Handeen
'73 are sustainable farmers in Montevideo, Minn.
(c)KEN METER
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Audrey Arner '73 and Richard
Handeen '73,
Just outside Montevideo, encircled by fields of conventionally
grown soybeans and corn, lie the 270 acres
of Moonstone Farm, owned by Audrey Arner and Richard Handeen. For
the past 12 years, Moonstone has produced grass-based beef using
methods of cattle raising that hearken back to the old nomadic traditions
of managing animals grazing on pastures instead of feeding them
dry grains. The result, Arner and Handeen believe, is beef that
is nutritionally superior to the grain-fed variety. In addition,
Arner and Handeen strive to practice what they call perennial polyculture,
an effort to improve the land and build the financial health of
their business by increasing the diversity of their harvest, reducing
topsoil erosion and ending annual seeding. They market their produce
directly to about 200 individuals, families, retailers and restaurants,
half of them in the Twin Cities. In late 2004, Arner and Handeen
represented the Minnesota-based Land Stewardship Project at Terra
Madre in Turin, Italy, the first world meeting of sustainable and
environmentally friendly food growers.
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'This has everything to do with the quality
of food and the pleasures of the table.'
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Arner on how they started: "We became interested in
reconnecting with the land as part of the '70s back-to-the-land
movement, and in 1973 we began farming on land that Richard's great-grandparents
had homesteaded in 1871. It was a time of social upheaval that helped
propel us to a land-based lifestyle. Our farm was then like the
others around us: part of a vast rotating culture of corn and soybeans.
That provided us with a decent living for a number of years, but
we wanted to live more in keeping with our values. So we changed
to organic production, but we were still raising traditional row
crops. We were witness to the increasing use of fossil fuels and
the erosion of the topsoil. To address those problems, we saw that
we needed to learn the lessons of the prairie as it existed before
the arrival of Europeans to this part of the world. We made the
change to grass-based cattle production beginning in 1992."
Arner on why they do it: "We want
to leave the land in better shape than it was when we encountered
it. But we're also working in the service of the people who benefit
from our food. This has everything to do with the quality of food
and the pleasures of the table."
Handeen on what they get out of it: "A lot of the
direct personal reward comes in our contact with other farmers who
are on the same path as ours. When we're learning together or interacting
with the people and businesses who buy our products and are enthusiastic
about what we're providing, we realize that these are not abstract
relationships. They're real."
Jack El-Hai is the author of The Lobotomist: A Maverick
Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness,
a biography of pioneer psychosurgeon Walter Freeman.
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