Interview by Alexis Schroeder

Christopher Washington is founder and Business Manager of SOLVE L3C, an online aggregator of business merchandise from around the world whose bottom line is motivated equally by social impact as by profit. He is an experienced small business manager, fundraiser, and strategic planner who has worked in both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors. Before founding SOLVE, Christopher worked as a Small Enterprise Adviser in Togo with the United States Peace Corps.  There he worked to make at-risk microfinance banks solvent, and in association with local partners, founded Cyber Ave, a for-profit social enterprise focused on training victims of polio in computer services to move them out of abject poverty. In early December, I spoke with Christopher by phone to learn more about SOLVE’s work, sustainable distribution chains, and SOLVE’s goals for the future.

NPi: What is S.O.L.V.E. (Solutions and Opportunities through Leadership, Vigor and Entrepreneurship) and what service does it provide?

CW: SOLVE is a way of doing business. The SOLVE system looks at finding efficiencies in the global supply chain, sharing that knowledge with customers and producers, and affixing a fixed social return on purchase (SROP) index number for each client who is a part of the system. We also intend to help move more people living in the inner-city in the United States towards sustainable careers through the support of sustainable projects in our Fellows program.

It began with my work in Togo, West Africa. I was working with a couple groups that used fair trade practices and also loosely doing business with the West African trade hub. I began to see opportunities for people in America to get involved in the sustainable distribution chain. When I came back to the U.S. after my service I started a project that was essentially looking to be the sales outsourcer for companies trying to get fair trade goods into America. From there, we’ve grown to become a marketplace serving these fair trade groups that works both internationally and locally. We feature sustainable products on our website and allow customers to come and purchase those products. Then, once we have the money in hand, we’ll use that money to fund the makers of those goods as well as different projects in the inner city in America.

NPi: What kind of projects?

CW: Right now we have a partnership with a nonprofit called Engage Community Offshoots, formerly known as The Engaged University, a program at the University of Maryland. This program has an urban community farm. They have done biodiesel work, bike programs, arts programs. They were heavily into wellness in general and targeted underserved communities. We see these programs as being the first step to reach out to individuals not generally involved in the sustainable culture. For our beta project, all of our programs go through Engage Community Offshoots. We’re using them as an incubator, as it were, for our Fellows program… As we create a solid model, we’ll open up to more organizations and hopefully do a lot more projects and receive brilliant candidates for the Fellows Program.

NPi: Can you explain sustainable distribution chain for people?

CW: From what I’ve seen, people go and visit a country—let’s say if they go to Kenya—they’ll go to Kenya and see wonderful artisanal goods. And technically, the way it might start is they purchase a large quantity of those items, bring them back to America, and start selling them to their friends. As that business grows, they start to formalize. That’s typically how most fair-trade businesses in America start. They start from a visit and one person purchasing a lot of items and bringing them back and selling them.

How we see it is, if you have this business in Kenya, how does that product 1) get made 2) get to the customer who initially purchases it (in the rural area of Kenya, do they use a truck or bicycle to get it to market?) 3) get to America and 4) from the entrance point when it’s in America in a storage facility, how does it get to a retail location or to the end consumer? I believe there are a lot of efficiencies that can be had in that process… You may have 20, 30, 50 different people maybe all importing from one country who are not collaborating on it or even aware of one another.

Right now we’re testing the feasibility of managing our marketplace ourselves or attaching our system to a bigger marketplace. Depending on the direction we take, we’re looking at a mobile product upload, which will let people use cell phones to upload pictures of products. This will be useful in terms of sustainable transparency. We’re also looking at creating an overlap so that if we’re distributing products from all over East Africa, how might we group those shipments together to lower our costs, be sustainable, live up to the values that we preach.

NPi: This reminds me of The Fritz Institute out of San Francisco except their work focuses on something called humanitarian logistics.

CW: All these different sectors, they’re very similar. When you talk about a need and fulfilling that need, whenever there’s a demand, you have to go through basically the same steps. The product, its timing and urgency might be different, but I believe there are still certain fundamental steps you need to go through.

NPi: Can you tell me more about the SOLVE fellows program?

CW: Yes, we haven’t launched it yet, but the tentative name is SOLVE Fellows. It’s essential to the SOLVE system. Helping people immersed in poverty get out of poverty by using sustainable practices is what we are structured to do. Think of the Fellows program like a business owner incubator program for the inner-city. The fellows come from community organizations that have already moved them to a certain point in their lives, perhaps those who recently received their GED or graduated from high school, and given them a little bit of apprenticeship training so that now they’re able to get into the workforce at a higher level instead of becoming a lower-paid laborer… What we’re doing is trying to take kids from those organizations while they’re there and excited and create owners instead of employees. Tell them you don’t just have to go to work for somebody, you can become a business owner.

The only way we see our program being able to truly quantify the SROP is by working with these fellows. They’ll help us visit locations, work with manufacturers, and get a really good idea of the supply chain. We’ll team our fellows up with mentors, and as they help our business move forward, they’ll build relationships within the sector. We’ll also help them start their own businesses within the supply chain once they’re ready do so. It’s a way for us to invest in those individuals. We’re taking the inner-city global while trying to move fellows from a labor mentality to an ownership one, and at the same time solve some of the problems that we have with the sustainable distribution chain.

NPi: Other than Engage Community Offshoots, who are your other partners?

CW: Right now we’re working with an organization called E.V.E. (Earths Visibile Energy). They do a lot of advocacy work. They’re going to be working in the inner cities and the prison system with a social business plan competition and will use that as a teaching mechanism. Because most of these kids, once they are released, go back into the streets. That’s our target population. Our target population is locked up. We’re hoping that by next year we’ll be able to receive apprentices directly from organizations like Year Up. We eventually want to open the Fellows program to the general public as well.

NPi: Compared to other organizations doing similar things, how is SOLVE different? How is it unique?

CW: Do you know of any organizations doing the same work we do?

NPi: No, I don’t.

CW: I think that’s a great question. The reason why I asked that question back is that my hope was that there was somebody else out there whom we could partner with [Laughs]. SOLVE works in two separate spheres. The first sphere we look at is urban communities in the United States… And with our Fellows program, we seek out people outside of the typical social entrepreneurship circle. We’re looking for people who have just exited a program, again, that was designed to change their lives. So in urban communities, that’s the fellowship program and we’re perfecting that model.

The second sphere is our international work and on our website, since we are a web-based company. The beta 2.0 website that we have in mind for SOLVE is most similar to eBay’s World of Good. However, the difference between what we are doing and what World of Good or Etsy does—we not only separate products by type and by cause, but then we also add in what we call our social return on purchase (SROP). This is a specific index that we’re creating to quantify the social impact of each purchase. If you make a purchase of $10, how much does that $10 1) affect the community you purchased it from and 2) get used throughout the distribution chain to offset carbon emissions, etc. and 3) makes an impact here at SOLVE? We try to quantify that, and because we’re so involved in the distribution chain, we have access to that information. We can come up with this index more easily than these other companies can. And from what I understand, they’re not interested in actually quantifying [the social return].

NPi: What are some of the obstacles you’re facing right now at SOLVE in terms of development of the organization? Where could you use help?

CW: Web design and coding… We’re trying to design this new site that will allow greater transparency for us to get the information we need in order to calculate the SROP. It will need to be something where a person who has access to the Internet can use the site and at the same time be able to do a mobile upload of photos, brief text, things like this… So the web platform we need transcends various existing platforms. Some of it should be built on Drupal, some of it should be built on another open-source platform. It’s very time-intensive and labor-intensive.

The second major thing is products. One of my friends who I met at The Feast Conference in New York in 2009, Teju Ravilochan from The Unreasonable Institute—he asked me the same question about difficulties. I answered saying we wanted to be bigger than every other online marketplace and he said, “Well, that sounds a bit unreasonable.” [Laughs]. Our goal is to get about 5,000 products initially and ramp up from there. We want to have 5,000 products on our website ready for our beta 2.0 website launch… Our model for growth is most similar to Amazon.com where you can have multiple products of the same type—multiple scarves, for example—from multiple importers… The SOLVE website will give consumers a lot more choice in finding the correct price with the [desired] social return on their purchase. Trying to build that product database, reaching out to organizations that have access to sustainable products—that’s huge for us. We want to sell them on this idea quickly and reach out to their membership because that’s where we’ll grow.

NPi: What have you personally learned doing this work?

CW: To measure twice, cut once… to take my time. I’ve also had difficulty because I’m passionate about this. When I started this project, it began as an idea and then it started to snowball. I always wanted to keep it open in such a way that it wasn’t always me generating ideas and feedback. In the beginning, I would talk about these things, but wasn’t actually living them. I’d talk about something and then go home and write two documents about it and not ask for anybody’s input. Through mentorship over the course of the last year and a half and talking to different people like Ashoka fellows—people who have actually gone around the world and implemented projects on a massive scale—they’re telling me they could use my input… They ask everybody for input because you don’t know where good ideas are going to come from… And it hurts to receive criticism, but it helps as a founder to remove yourself from the idea. I think some startup founders can get too personally involved. Your personal value gets tied up in the value of the organization. Making that separation has been important for me so I can say, I am a person in and of myself and that’s good, and this project is a whole other thing that really should be a collaboration.

NPi: What keeps you coming to work everyday?

CW: It’s simple. I live in Washington D.C. in a predominantly African-American section of town. When I walk outside of my apartment I really see the 34% unemployment in the black community. I see it every day. When I have a friend with me and we walk into a Chinese restaurant, I see her get harassed because she’s the other… Every time I talk to a school-age kid and they can’t tell me where they can go to buy fresh food, but they can tell me where the drugs are. I talked to a woman recently who had never seen fresh spinach in her life. These are distribution things.

One of the things we’re working on with Engage Community Offshoots right now is creating an urban farm. I’m interested in how we’re going to distribute those products. I’m helping them figure out a system to distribute food into what we call a food desert, in which people don’t have access to fresh vegetables. So I’m taking this global concept and making it more local… For me, it’s not even an option. It would really be hard not to keep doing this work. I would have to be blind, deaf, not be able to touch anything, void of all senses. I’m glad I enjoy the work. [Laughs]

NPi: What advice would you pass on to young leaders or would-be leaders?

CW: I was at a panel at George Mason University, and one of my good friends, he runs an organization called FrontlineSMS. What this project is trying to do is micro-finance through mobile currencies, sending out loans by mobile phones… So we’re at this conference and my friend was asked this same question. He said, you know what, just like Nike has that slogan, “Just do it,” I like to change it up a little bit. Instead of “Just do it,” or JDI, I like to add an F, so it’s JFDI. [Laughs] Not to be vulgar, but you just have to do it. You have to say, I have to do this and this is going to happen. But don’t be so arrogant that you don’t solicit help. You can’t have tunnel vision. I think you can have tunnel vision when you’re creating something, but you shouldn’t be so narrowly focused on your project that it can’t change. Because your project is going to change three, four, five times in its first year or two. You have to be flexible and still go out there and do it.

How to Get Involved:

1) Shop. Visit the SOLVE store and shop this holiday season on www.solve.coop! We will use the money to create the new website, formalize our SROP index, and fund projects in the inner-city, beginning in Washington D.C.

2) Collaborate. We are building a robust advisory board for 2010 to help move our project along. Please assist SOLVE by sharing your expertise. We are looking for technical experience in logistics analysis, web design, marketing, legal, and management.

3) Recommend. Do you know of a wonderful product that should be added to our beta website? Let us know! Email us at info[at]solve.coop.

4) Support the cause. Fan us on Facebook or Follow us on Twitter to stay in the loop!

Tags: artisanal goods, community development, engage community offshoots, fair-trade business, global artisans, green, green jobs, logistics, socially responsible business, SOLVE, supply chain management, sustainable distribution chain, urban farm

This entry was posted on December 13, 2009 at 5:57 pm and is filed under READ. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.