Do you make it a point to purchase from social enterprises?
Most billionaire companies give back to the people by building hospitals and curing malaria. But at the same time, there is a new wave of innovative entrepreneurs that are realizing they don’t need millions of dollars to make a difference in this world. They just need a crazy idea that would actually work, like selling socks, for example. These are businessmen, whom aside from the goals of making money, are concentrating more on helping people.
Adam Long is part of the these new wave of entrepreneurs and the founder of Conscious Step Socks. Other innovators include Oana Toiu of Social Innovation Solutions which offers training and consultancy for social entrepreneurship, and Joshua Ross of Humanitix which funds global education from ticket booking fees. To them, having these social enterprises is their first step in entrepreneurship.
Long’s business philosophy is for socks to save the world, as every pair you buy donates money to different causes such as clean drinking water for a number of months, food for malnourished children, helping LGBTQ rights or even saving the the oceans.
So far, sock sales have provided 27,400 days of HIV/AIDS treatments, 80,775 months of clean potable water, 58,020 planted trees and 26,748 meals. Other than donating to social enterprises, they also support smaller businesses in third world countries such as India, where they have their socks made, and they make sure their employees are in ethical working conditions.
These out-of-the-box thinkers ask themselves peculiar and absurd questions, before actually starting up their own businesses… Can socks save the world? Can new entrepreneurs build their own future? Creative answers coming from out-of-the-box thinking is starting to generate impacts just as strong as the causes these ideas grew out from.
