Impact: Rethinking The Rules of Engagement

The world’s problems are complex, so why do we think their solutions will be simple?

Three years after starting Not For Sale it was clear that we could continue to utilize the same “solution” over and over again, but not actually make tangible strides towards our mission of ending modern-day slavery.

Ironically, perhaps even sadistically, we could have continued to do this work that on the surface appeared wonderful to most. We could have continued to receive praise and accolades all while meeting the definition of being a “good” nonprofit organization.

Believe me it's a healthy ego boost.

But *we* knew that we were not coming any closer to our audacious goal of stopping human trafficking -- or even necessarily contributing to a bigger picture model for doing so.

We could have continued to help pass laws or to provide services to survivors literally forever, but we were not actually stemming the tide of people being exploited in the first place.

Please don’t get me wrong, this work is not bad or wrong. Not in the least. It definitely has it's place. In fact we continue to work directly with survivors, it is still core to our current, but now larger, impact model.

But back in 2010 we knew something was wrong. Not just with our approach, but the entire anti-trafficking space.

Someone much smarter than me once likened a cycle where you repeatedly get the same result as the definition of insanity.

In the case of the anti-trafficking space we aren’t just getting the same result, we’re losing ground to traffickers every single day. We are losing. And we're losing badly.

Is it possible to be more than insane?

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I must admit, when starting Not For Sale I thought that the only tool we had at our disposal to stop slavery was something called a non-profit. In retrospect, I’d argue that I wasn’t right, and that I also wasn’t wrong.

It's still a simple shorthand most of us use today: “I want to do good, go start nonprofit” or “I want to take care of myself and my family, go work for or start company.”

It’s wrong. The impact of this binary thinking has incredibly grave consequences.

To address the world’s greatest problems we need *all* of the levers of social and economic change at our disposal working together at full throttle, and doing so with intimate interconnectedness.

Crucially, this challenge to go bigger, think wider, and break previously held paradigms means that we must fully understand the broader picture with which we operate within.

The reasons for social ills like forced labor are many; driven by interconnected system failures that drive populations toward the lowest common denominator of human existence.

For example, I'm often asked what I think of human traffickers.

It's not the case of every trafficker but there are many situations, especially in places where extreme poverty prevails, where the line between exploiter and exploited is closer than we care or want to realize. It doesn't fit our need for clear lines between good and bad. There are many situations where you are either the perpetrator or the perpetrated, due to the fact that broader social, cultural, and environmental context has eroded or is nonexistent.

Slavery rarely grows under a singular diseased tree; it flourishes in a large corrupted underbrush.

It might be easier to raise charitable dollars on the back of a cutting story about evil people -- and, yes, they do exist -- but a model that works on the root causes of slavery must address the multitude of factors that lead to the crime in the first place -- which often effects more than the victims themselves.

To address this crime, and other large social problems, it is time we utilize an equally robust and multifaceted business model to turn the tide.

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It might be odd to think of the 228th fastest growing private company in the United States in 2017 according to Inc. Magazine is a project of an non-profit, but that’s exactly what REBBL is.

REBBL is a company that was built from the ground up to *be* the impact that my organization, Not For Sale, knew was needed to stop trafficking before it could occur. REBBL can produce impact that Not For Sale, could not have necessarily created on its own, given the real limitations of the nonprofit 501c3 model.

That is not meant to be a damning statement about my organization or nonprofits overall. I mean this only to state a fact that nonprofits are not usually the best vehicle for scaling profit making ventures -- with the lone exception possibly being hospitals and medical systems.

When we launched REBBL, a beverage company, we didn’t recruit a non-profit all star to start the company with us, we flexed the muscles of a holistic, multi-tiered business model that included a way to attract new forms of (for-profit) investment capital and top flight beverage talent. This took the form of our co-founder Palo Hawken and early-stage sales guru Michael Steele.

Even more amazing, when my business partner David Batstone and I met Palo he had already been dreaming for years about a killer brand concept: Roots, Extracts, Bark, Berries, and Leaves. REBBL. Palo was driven by a desire to bring long lost herbs and life-giving ingredients to the shelves of everyday Americans. There could not have been a better match!

Earlier this year REBBL raised $20 million and it is valued at close to $100 million. The competition to invest in the company was fierce. In fact the company was forced to turn away what amounted to tens of millions of dollars. What non-profit would ever be in position to turn down that amount of funding? None. Of course, REBBL is a for-profit company, but the point is that Not For Sale spun-off a for-profit company that is still linked to the mission of the organizationally both legally and culturally.

We created an interconnected business model that allows us to *also* raise investment capital (in addition to donations via Not For Sale), which in turn enables us to grow our impact via REBBL *and* Not For Sale.

When we started REBBL it was up to Palo to create the best damned product on the market. He did.

And it was and continues to be on to David Batstone and I to ensure that the company itself is oriented in a way that is dedicated to a cultural curiosity to constantly strive to improve its own businesses practices for good. It was up to us to attract investors that were willing to see the company as a means to grow impact *and* sales.

(The old adage “you are what you eat” is true when it comes to investment. Eventually you will come to resemble the ethos of the people you receive capital from. You can count on it. Choose what you eat wisely.)

The way we built REBBL from day one was to explain to our lawyers at Latham & Watkins that we needed to create a structure that ensured impact would stay at the heart of the company as it grew. We needed to "lock in" that the company itself would be a model of how to scale impact. And that Not For Sale could count on a consistent revenue stream flowing back to it on all sales to support our ongoing work with survivors of human trafficking.

To get to this place we had to overcome an ideological perspective that nonprofits and for-profits should have little-to-nothing to do with each other; perhaps other than nonprofits begging from companies for financial support -- yikes, hard pass please!

In fact these two distinct organizations have an important role to play in conjunction *with* each other that, if done right, can make them much more powerful and effective.

REBBL and Not For Sale can and should interplay in deep and meaningful ways, by defining roles together that leverage the strengths of each model, and mitigating the weaknesses of the other -- with a shared vision to make a positive impact on the planet and its people.

We must abolish the false choice between "good being relegated to the nonprofit" and "pure self-centered profit-making is all businesses can do" before we can hope to end something as complex and horrific as modern-day slavery.