At Laughing Lotus Yoga Center, the concept of community is more than common ground. It’s a shared sense of purpose that reveals itself as karma yoga, or rather, the desire to heal and serve the world via selfless service. This desire’s current manifestation is the Laughing Lotus Summit Raffle to benefit Lineage Project—an organization that brings yoga and meditation to at-risk and incarcerated youth in New York. (See below for details.)
What happened was this: Dana Trixie Flynn, owner and co-founder of Laughing Lotus, and I were discussing the upcoming Lotus Summit (a weekend in-house yoga retreat/reunion happening over the weekend of June 14-16) and we decided that it would be the ideal locus to raise money and funds for Lineage. What’s more a raffle seemed the perfect way to involve the entire Lotus community plus local vendors in a grassroots endeavor that would keep kids out of the system and put the fun back in fundraising.
So I called in a few Lotus people to assist me in this endeavor, Lotus teacher Annie Mulgrew, Lotus student Lisa Merkle and Lotus teacher ABC Cooper Chou, and together we put together a cadre of eighteen raffle bags stuffed to the brim with prizes that any New York yogi would want including a one-year unlimited membership to Laughing Lotus, a Breville Juice Fountain Plus, yoga pants by Victoria Keen, cosmetics from Benefit, ten-class card to Broadway Dance Center, Tube Dress by Anne Kothari, three-class card from Barry’s Bootcamp, massages, haircuts etc. Who wouldn't wanna shell out a mere ten bucks a raffle ticket for amazing swag like that?
“What’s fantastic about this raffle is that the tickets are only ten dollars, the contents of each raffle bag are worth 500 dollars and the money the raffle raises is being matched three times by corporate matchers,” Mulgrew says. “So if you buy one ticket, it’s the equivalent of donating forty dollars. This makes it possible for everyone to make a sizeable donation and a difference in a kid’s life. It’s a karma win-win.”
Please help us reach our goal of raising $10,000 so we can give Lineage Project $40,000. Your donation holds a triple value in every sense of the world.
Born in New Orleans and raised in Brooklyn, Emily Stone is a writer and yoga teacher living in New York City. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Hunter College in 2006. Currently she is a senior teacher at Laughing Lotus Yoga Center in NYC and SF where she also teaches teacher training. Books include: Visvamitrasana: Volume I of the Sage Series (Inflextion) and Did Jew Know? Forthcoming from Chronicle Books in the fall of 2013. Up next: writing an ebook about the Hindu sages and gathering oral histories for The Whole Hole.
In the summer of 2012 I had the opportunity to visit Bangladesh for a month with my Global Poverty class from Ohio Wesleyan University. The course was focused on two different ideas. The first half was focused on uncovering the root causes of poverty in the developing world. We studied the conventional Western remedies for the alleviation of poverty in the developing world and, more importantly, why and how these remedies have failed to do just that. At the same time, the class used Bangladesh as an example of a place that is continually trapped in many poverty cycles. Having assembled most of the puzzle pieces it became increasingly apparent that one was still missing: the human factor.
While in Bangladesh our trip was divided into two sections: urban and rural. In doing this, it was easy to compare the two. In Dhaka, the issues of urban poverty, the imbalance between the rich and poor, and the opportunities due to industrialization were very apparent. While in the city we had the opportunity to visit a garment factory, a hospital, shopping areas, as well as NGOs. While in the village for a week, we saw how 75% of people in Bangladesh live. We interviewed ordinary families about education, health care as well as their working situations. In addition, we had time to explore farm fields, the locals schools, health care facilities, marketplace, and a branch of the Grameen Bank, a microcredit institution.
One thing that stood out to me while in Bangladesh was gender discrimination toward women regarding health care. Bangladesh is primarily a patriarchal society where the majority of women are defined by the roles men give them. Upon conducting interviews we learned that starting at an early age, girls abide by what their fathers want, mainly the duration of education and when and who they will marry. When women are married off, they live in their husband’s home and listen to what the husband thinks is right for the woman to do, which usually consists of maintaining the home and having healthy children. With men mostly taking the lead with family life and decisions, the women begin to rely on being told what to do, how to think, and how to approach situations. Women’s ability to voice their own opinions decreases and the likelihood of women speaking up about a health issue, especially about maternal health, decreases with their diminishing self-esteem. If women feel the need to go to a hospital or seek medical assistance, they are compelled to ask permission of their husbands first. Not only are the husbands working which will pay the bills, but they are most often required to be present at hospital appointments to make sure the woman has communicated with and gotten approval from her husband to see a doctor. In my opinion, having to seek approval from a husband further reduces a woman’s likelihood of initiating a conversation to see a doctor which, as we know, has negative effects in prenatal and postnatal care.
While interviewing women in the village we were staying in, we could tell through their body language that they were uncomfortable despite a language barrier; once their responses were translated it was obvious that they had concerns about going to hospitals and seeing a doctor. The people we were staying with told us that the majority of women in their village don’t go to the clinic or seek out medical assistance when having a baby, they are more likely to call their own mother, sister, or friend they trust to help them. The closest city hospital is a three hour boat ride followed by a bumpy four hour car ride, depending on if they have money for a boat ticket and the ability to pay for a car ride to the hospital.
Every night after our daily activities and exploring, we had time to reflect on our time in Bangladesh. Each night I would think about our day and compare it to my life back at home. When we would travel places that would usually take about 20 minutes back at home, it took almost 2 hours due to the lack of infrastructure as well as the large amount of people crowding the streets. Seeing the smiles on the people’s faces when they saw us and heard that we came to Bangladesh because we wanted to was heart warming. It’s one thing to learn about poverty and it’s solutions, but it’s another thing to see it first hand. I think traveling is a great way to see and understand things first hand. Many people read books about poverty alleviation and wonder why the solutions provided aren’t working. When you go into these countries, it isn’t hard to see why they aren’t working. In the case of Bangladesh, there is corruption, natural disasters and a difficult political environment which repeatedly hinders their progress.
Even in hindsight, it’s difficult to look back and find words to describe the roller coaster of emotions I experienced during my time in Bangladesh. I could have never imagined all that was to come when I first applied to that course. I can say, though, that in the end I left Bangladesh a different person than when I first arrived.
Sammi is currently a senior at Ohio Wesleyan University. With a major in International Studies and a minor in Sociology, she hopes to learn more about public health and food security so she can help people in developing countries. In the future, she hopes to have more opportunities to travel to developing countries.
Once upon a time I was a 57th street hairdresser finally living out my long time dream in New York City. There, on the set of photo shoots during Fashion Week, in the midst of cutting edge fashion like I had always longed for… all should have been perfect, yet… something was missing. In my fashion dreams there were no petty political agendas, no worrying about who my real friends were, no difficulties with demanding elite clientele. Nothing could have prepared me for how cutthroat and superficial Manhattan was compared to the smaller suburban salons where I had previously worked.
I mean isn’t it all superficial, it is “beauty” after all. Several years of the New York fashion world left me with a heavy heart and a broken soul. Feeling in exile forced me to think outside the box.
New dreams started bubbling to the surface, I wanted to break free and see the world. I wanted to sit in a cafe sipping chai and watch the world pass me by, maybe get dirty working on a farm, and later meet the little girl I would sponsor in Calcutta. I had not a clue how to execute my new dream. I simply went home after work one night, had a few glasses of wine, and bought plane tickets for a three-week trip to South America. I was off to Ecuador, Colombia and Argentina.
Free of the shackles of beauty, on my trip I tried street foods and hung with indigenous mountain people. I went horseback riding, took salsa and tango lessons, visited a coffee farm, climbed mountains and bathed in natural hot springs. I met so many travelers that were in need of haircuts, it sparked a light bulb in my mind and small flame in my heart. Could I be onto something?
Did my trip satisfy me and leave me refreshed and excited to return to New York? Quite the contrary, it left me yearning for more, to continue my journey.
I began to devise a plan. I’d sell my worldly possessions, add the deposit from my apartment to my menial savings, store my belongings at my parents house, cash in points with my credit card company to exchange for cash. I packed a bag with bare necessities along with my scissors and purchased a one-way ticket to Barcelona. I leapt and hoped a net would appear.
My second night in Barcelona I met an Estonian girl in the bathroom of the hostel. We got to talking and the next thing you know I was cutting her hair in a makeshift pop-up salon right there in a bathroom in Spain. When other guests witnessed this, they all wanted haircuts as well and so my new career began. Meeting people from cities around the world that I had never even heard of and making enough money to take me through Spain, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic and Croatia for three months. I continued on to Vietnam, Thailand and my ultimate destination—India.
photographer: Cheri BaileyMy craft enabled to me to connect to people on a unique level. I met an Australian called Daniel at a meditation course in India, who had long hair that he wore in a ponytail. We took a trek next to the Bagsu waterfall in Dharamsala and gave him a short cropped cut next to wild goats and the water crashing down next to us. In Thailand I cut hair with, instead of a mirror in front of us, a view of the ocean, while both my and my clients barefeet in the sand. I gave an English woman a fringe on a sunny spring day on a farm in the South of France. While going for a swim in the ocean in Vietnam a Canadian woman swam up to me and mentioned she needed a haircut. I never put up signs to advertise my services, the clients came to me. Never in a million years could I imagine that my career would take a turn like this.
There is no mistaking that beauty is my path in life, but over the years my perspectives have changed from worshipping the perfection in glossy magazines to embracing unique flaws as the true and profound beauty. Being in cultures that were not celebrity obsessed and with locals who were not running after an ideal of physical perfection shifted my relationship with hair and beauty. My style when first beginning my career was a contrived beauty with visible highlights and unnatural redheads. I thought wrinkles were gross and everyone needed hair extensions. By the end of my sixth month journey around the world, my nails were polish-less, I had calluses on the soles of my feet from walking everywhere, I realized my skin was fine with out all the creams and lotions after all. The sculpture in Western Europe was proof that I am supposed to have this little buddha belly that I have been trying to suck in as long as I can remember.
I returned to New York with a sense of newfound freedom vowing to never let work take me into a downward spiral again. The intensity of dreams and fantasies can actually stunt your life when the vision is too specific. There are always possibilities that your mind cannot yet fathom.
Let there always be room for the unthinkable.
photographer: Adrian BarryGIGI MANAPAT
Gigi lives in Brooklyn with her boyfriend and her cat. Continuing on her hairdressing path, she runs her business out of Jeff Chastain Parlor in Flatiron. She travels around the world whenever possible and when not possible she travels to all the ethnic neighborhoods in the best city in the world, NYC. Gigi can be reached at gmanapat@gmail.com
One day, in the mid 1970′s, a woman named Sufiya Begum from the rural Bangladeshi village of Jobra told a visiting man of a problem many of the villagers were having. The people, despite being entrepreneurially inclined, were poverty stricken. Local banks refused to lend them money to finance their businesses, claiming that such poor people had no collateral to back the desired loans, and couldn’t be trusted to repay. Having nowhere else to go they were forced to consult local loan sharks who promised to finance their ventures – for Sufiya this was the crafting of bamboo chairs – so long as they agreed to sell him all their goods at a price he would set. Strangely enough, the price always came up somewhat short of the entrepreneurs’ expenses, forcing them to borrow more money, and perpetuating a cycle of never ending poverty. Sufiya spoke of all of this to the visitor and that man, Muhammad Yunus, went on to found Grameen Bank, and change the world.
Grameen Bank is among the oldest, and most successful social enterprises. It was founded on the ideas that conventional business wisdom isn’t always right, and that there is a higher purpose to business than simply maximizing financial profit. There’s a social profit to be had as well by helping people to help themselves out of poverty. Today Grameen Bank lends to more than 7.5 million borrowers. Among those nearly 70% have lifted themselves above the poverty line through their enterprises. Grameen has proven that conventional wisdom can be wrong, with a 98.4% repayment rate on their loans, and has proven that a non-exploitative social enterprise can be financially viable, with profits posted every year of its existence except ’83, ’91, and ’92. Grameen Bank is now part of a larger family of nearly 30 socially responsible enterprises working across a spectrum of problems – access to clean water, healthy food for children, and rural cell phone communication – and is doing a tremendous job in each. What follows is a look at the five key strategies they have found to be necessary for success among their ventures. For full access to their engaging and informative write-up, click here. And for more info on Grameen Bank’s evolution and experimentation in first-world countries check our their film To Catch A Dollar which can be rented on youtube for $4.
Strategy 1: Challenge Conventional Wisdom
The ability to challenge conventional wisdom, to take an accepted idea and entertain the thought of turning it on its head, is among an entrepreneur’s most important skills. This doesn’t mean you must always reject the conventional way of doing a thing. It would likely be difficult to sell all your email contacts on the idea of communicating via, say, smoke signals, because that’s just not conventional right now. But always remember that the only reason we moved past smoke signals in the first place is because someone had the audacity to ask if it could be done better. Entertaining non-conventional ideas is the only way to move forward.
Grameen Bank, and it’s sister organizations have done this time and time again. When they first started, the conventional idea was that you could not offer a loan to someone without collateral. Collateral was all that motivated a person to repay. What Yunus and his associates did was alter the way the loan worked from top to bottom. Rather than a large loan being given to a single person, borrowers needed to create groups of five. The first two would be given a loan, and only when they successfully adhered to the repayment schedule (itself changed to small weekly payments rather than large monthly ones) would the remainder become eligible for loans. To maintain eligibility, the entire group needed to continue making payments on time. In this way every member was invested in every other person’s success. This group support, combined with the associated peer pressure not to fail, has led to a 98.4% repayment rate among people who were considered unfit for even the slightest trust.
Author Tim Ferriss is famous for this kind of thinking. If you’ve never heard of him before I strongly suggest you head on over and check out his website where you’ll find articles on everything from language learning and marketing, to sales and body-building which all seem to break the rules on what’s possible. His books are fantastic too, and have been gifted to more of my friends and family than I can even remember.
Strategy 2: Create Strategic Partnerships
This is another tactic culled straight from the business world, which has crossover appeal no matter what field you work in. Simply put there’s no such thing as a self made man or woman. Even Henry Ford admitted that his most important skill was the ability to get the right group of people into a room.
Cooperating gives you access to resources and knowledge you never had before. For Grameen, this meant partnering with the cell service provider Telenor when working to bring communication access to rural Bangladesh. Remember though that partnerships are about two groups bringing something to the table. In this case, Telenor brought the know-how for building a cellular network, and Grameen brought its decades of experience in developing world markets. Identify those people or groups you think could provide strong opportunities to your enterprise and then, this is the important part, figure out what it is you can offer them in return.
Strong partnerships provide another opportunity too: Barriers to entry for your opposition. Now I know that to some this may seem counter to the good-willed nature of Social Enterprise. But remember that while you may not be competeing for market share in the traditional corporate sense, you are competing against those people who would exploit your market for their own profit. Recall the loan sharks already active in the village of Jobra. It is through strong strategic partnerships, and innovative enterprise structures that you seek to cut off the access of people like this to your market.
Strategy 3: Experimentation
Experimentation is crucial because your business, or project doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Multiple forces – pricing, promotion, distribution network, etc – affect your success. You must constantly observe how changes in each affect overall success in an attempt to find an effective way of doing things. It is one thing to promise yourself that you’ll pay careful attention to such things. It’s quite another to design and run a formal experiment. According to a fantastic article in the Harvard Business Review (Register for free to access the whole piece, including 7 rules for business experiments) a business experiment requires two key ingredients to be useful.
First, it needs a control group, or a group that experiences no change, to serve as a comparison for those that do. Without a control, you can’t establish causality, you can only guess at it. Second, you need a feedback loop. This is another way of saying you need to choose something to measure. There are two types of measurable responses that the article discusses – behavioral, and perceptual. Perceptual is how a member of the experimental group thinks they will respond to your change. This is often obtained via surveys, but can be unreliable if you’re experimenting with an unconventional idea. People may simply not be able to fully grasp, or project accurate feelings for, what you’re talking about. The second, and more conclusive type of feedback is behavioral. This measures someone’s actual response to a change. Planning ahead of time allows you to put measures in place to collect accurate feedback, and maintaining a control group allows you to compare the effects of your experiment more assuredly.
In 1996, when Grameen partnered with Telenor to bring cellular phone service to rural Bangladesh, they received a business forecast from a UK consultant which projected the market to be a paltry 250,000 subscribers in the first decade. They proceeded though, knowing that only experimentation could yield accurate results, and by 2005 had an astonishing 8 million subscribers. That figure rose to 40 million by 2008. In terms of accuracy, experimental data trumps forecasts every time.
Strategy 4: Value Stakeholders, Not Just Shareholders
This is one of the key principles which sets social business apart from conventional. Every business has stakeholders, that is people who have interest in the company’s performance. Conventional business models tend to favor shareholders, who have breathed life into the company through stock purchase, and expect to see a return. But social business recognizes their responsibility to the larger whole. The other participants in the business who may not fit the traditional role of shareholder, but definitely have something staked in the business’s actions. They can include employees, who would otherwise be jobless, clients who rely on the business for a particular good or service, even the general public is considered a stakeholder, and must be taken into account when making business decisions.
R. Edward Freeman, a professor at Darden University in Virginia, is particularly well known his pioneering of stakeholder theory. He literally wrote the book, contributing the chapters on stakeholder theory to the world’s first Dictionary of Corporate Social Responsibility. Below is a fantastic video introduction to the concept, and its application in the real world.
Strategy 5: State Your Objective Clearly
Most of these strategies are useful whether you’re running a non-profit, a for-profit, or a social enterprise, but this one is particularly important to the social enterprise when large sums of cash hang in the balance.
Grameen Phone, an enterprise undertaken by both Grameen Bank and Telenor, began with a unique structure. Rather than selling phones and data plans to each individual villager, many of whom could never afford them, the phones were sold to entrepreneurs called Grameen Ladies. These ladies financed their phone, and the purchasing of bulk minutes through loans from Grameen Bank. They would then rent the phone on a per minute basis to anyone in the village that needed to make a call. The model was an instant success, and quickly grew to surpass all projections of its size. As it grew the idea arose to give the poor the majority shares in the business, allowing them access to its profit margins. However, Grameen’s partner Telenor didn’t agree with the idea and refused to sell. Ever since then, Grameen has been very careful to spell out its objectives before entering into any kind of partnership.
Define your objectives as clearly as you can. In this day and age, when the snuggy is a multi-million dollar idea, its possible to find someone to buy into anything, as long as you’re clear about your goals. Forget whether they’re realistic or not, and don’t be afraid to dream big. Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank, has gone on to receive a Congressional Gold Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a Nobel Peace Prize, Sydney Peace Prize, Seoul Peace Prize, and 50 honorary Doctorates Degrees from schools in twenty countries. These are but a sampling of many, many more honors and awards he’s been recognized with. All of this the result of a simple idea, to lend a woman named Sufiya – from the rural village of Jobra – $27 to buy her freedom from poverty.
Ethan is a traveler and a story-teller. He is the creator of An American Afoot, where he does all his own stunts, despite public concern for his pretty face. He's got a passion for entrepreneurship, especially when it's working to solve social problems, and hopes to use stories to inform and inspire others who want to make a change.
There are lines everywhere. Lines being drawn, crossed, walked around, and even erased when necessary, or when someone has the power to do so. There is an ugly, unjust line that isn’t serving any of us, and killing many who live below it. This is the poverty line. Today, 1.2 billion people around the world live at or below the poverty level, and they exist on $1.50 per day. This sounds unfathomable, but it’s a real fact and a real crisis. To address the issue, the Global Poverty Project created the Live Below the Line campaign challenging everyone to spend five consecutive days eating and drinking on just $1.50 per day.
The challenge runs from April 29 to May 3rd. I started a couple of days early on behalf of UNICEF. Since I’m traveling most of this week, I figured it would be wise to begin the challenge while I’m stationary and more in control of my schedule. So far, so good.
My breakfasts have consisted of oatmeal, bananas and honey. For lunch, I’ve been eating a baked potato a day, and for dinner I’ve been gobbling up half a cup of rice mixed with vegetables.
Am I hungry? A little. Am low in energy? No. Am I truly living below the line? No. To do that I would need to experience living without a roof over my head, clean running water, sanitized food, and a number of other elements I’ve taken for granted, which would be viewed as luxuries to people surviving in impoverished communities across the globe.
Am I becoming more and more conscious about what my body consumes, and how gluttonous and wasteful I normally am? Oh, yes. There is no need to eat nearly the amount of food that I ingest on a regular basis. The sugar, the large portions, the plastic and paper packaging of food, and the money that goes into it all is JUST. SO. EXCESSIVE.
Someone asked me if I felt that participating in this campaign was life-changing. I don’t know that I would describe the experience as such, but I will say that it is life-affirming and awakening. I have so much to be thankful for, and I don’t count my blessings nearly enough. To have a voice, the ability to write, and the means to pursue all my heart’s aspirations is a gift. More so than that, it’s a miracle. I say this because I entered the world without a family. Fortunate enough to be adopted, I’ve lived a charmed life. There were times that I struggled. There were times I was broke. But there has never been a time that I lived below the line, and that is because of the good will and compassion of others.
So, this just makes me wonder. If thousands of people collectively bestowed their good will and compassion to those in need, could’t more miracles arise?
There are people across the globe, some in the backyards of our very own cities, who have no voice because no one is listening. And if they continue to endure living in poverty their children will grow up in poverty, and their children’s children will be raised in poverty. And these crimes against humanity may lead to those children leading lives of crime, in order to survive. Counter-productivity, the loss of goods and services, and the tragedies that occur because of such extreme aridity are just a few reasons to combat destitution to the best of our ability.
While the Live Below The Line campaign is about engaging our moral fiber to benefit those who cannot help themselves, its potential impact can transcend that monumental summit and shift the human condition. Global poverty affects all of us, and we can all do something to squash it.
Thanks to everyone who has donated so far, we’ve already surpassed my initial fundraising goal. Thank you and good luck to the thousands of people around the world who are participating in the program starting today. It is an absolute privilege and honor to be in your company. Together, we can erase the poverty line and make miracles happen.
EMILY STONE
Mission.tv
