This post goes out to all of my friends who run businesses or non-profits that employ poor women or men in different countries in order to improve their lives. It has one major point: we need to pay them more.

Many such programs making jewelry or bags or hats or shoes or clothes and selling them in the USA are making a positive impact around the world. I know a number of great organizations in Uganda that are using variations on this model to create life change. They’re doing great work, and I think we can do even more.

In my anecdotal research, I’ve found that most American organizations that operate this way in Uganda set salaries or wages to about 300,000 Ugandan Shillings (UGX) per month. This translates to about $130. And though this doesn’t sound like much to American ears, in Uganda this is way above the local standard.

But I don’t think it’s enough. That same UGX 300,000 is about what it takes to put one student through one 3-month term of secondary school in Uganda. So if a family has three children that belong in secondary school (a conservative number, by Ugandan standards), that entire salary is wiped out just paying for school every term. Nothing is left over for food, rent, healthcare, school fees for other children; much less saving for university tuitions or other long-term goals.

Obviously the math doesn’t work. Families need to eat, need a roof, need malaria treatment when someone inevitably falls sick. So students miss terms and whole years of schooling because of money problems.

We can do better.

There is a level of income below which any positive difference made is temporary, and above which real, transformational, generational change can happen. Let’s call this the True Poverty Line, the line between being stuck at your current economic level and having the chance to break through to prosperity.

Someone earning below the true poverty line might be able to provide some schooling and better food and occasional health intervention, but the impact of these changes is relatively small, especially across generations – the next generation is only marginally better off, if at all.

Those who earn above the true poverty line, however, can afford the big-impact changes: consistent schooling through the tertiary level, dependable healthcare, and savings to pursue future goals. These changes not only have a strong impact in the present, but their impact actually increase across generations, as a new generation of well-educated young adults brings their potential to bear on their families and communities.

If we are serious about making a long-term impact in Uganda and elsewhere, we need to be serious about where this True Poverty Line lies, and we need to cross it. Of course the exact line is different for every family depending on how many children they have, where they live, etc, but we can start by calculating an average figure based on the communities we work in, and being sure to at least hit the average.

If we do this, we will be witness not just to thankful friends given temporary reprieve from poverty, but to transformational, generational change, where families go from extreme poverty to university graduates in one generation. Imagine that future.

I’ve decided to write an annual commencement speech and just published my first one. Read the full text over at my personal blog, and enjoy the excerpt below:

This ability to think critically is a vital skill for succeeding in the world. But I would suggest to you that more vital yet is your decision about how you will use this skill, that your decision about how you will apply your critical insight is one of the most important decisions you will ever make.

As a natural critic, it is very easy to figure out what you’re against, what’s not worth your time, what is bound to fail. But it’s exponentially more difficult to decide what you are for, what is worth your time, what you are going to believe in and support and throw yourself into whole-heartedly.

And it is this much more difficult task of deciding what you are for, that is not only one of the great ingredients of success, but is precisely what the world needs from you in the era of history that you now inherit.

This summer Ember Arts is hiring for three intern positions in San Diego, CA to help us grow our business and our impact in Uganda. To apply, send a note of interest to intern@emberarts.com by May 15.

Sales Intern

We sell our products in 300 stores nationally. The Sales Intern will become a key part of our small sales team, assisting the managers in opening new accounts and building relationships with current accounts.

Key Attributes of a Great Sales Intern:

• You have a deep appreciation for our story
• You’re optimistic
• You love talking on the phone
• Your friends tell you you’re a great listener
• You love helping people solve their problems
• You have experience in Sales and/or Customer Service

Online Marketing Intern

We are building a community of people who love our products and are committed to our story. The Online Marketing Intern will work independently and in collaboration with the Brand Manager to build that community and strengthen the ties within it.

Key Attributes of a Great Online Marketing Intern:

• You have a deep appreciation for our story
• You deeply value relationships among people
• You work independently and get stuff done
• You have a blast with social media, including Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Vimeo, etc.
• You are into fashion and read a number of fashion blogs

Graphic Design Intern

Although our company is over 3 years old, the Ember Arts brand only turns 1 this summer. The Graphic Design Intern will help build the visual language for the brand in collaboration with the Brand Manager.

Key Attributes of a Great Graphic Design Intern:

• You have a deep appreciation of our story
• You pursue a simple elegance in your designs
• You appreciate our current visual language and would like to augment it
• You rock Photoshop, Illustrator, and other design programs
• You design for both web and print

Also, check out these positions with our friends in Uganda:

Sseko Designs – Director of Operations
http://www.ssekodesigns.com/Director_Operations_Uganda

Krochet Kids – Production Manager
http://krochetkids.org/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2011/03/KKU-Staff-Production-Manager-11.pdf

Most organizations that work with displaced and impoverished women in Africa are non-profits. We chose a different tack: we decided to build a successful business in partnership with these women. Many people have asked us, ‘Why business? Why not non-profit?’ The answer is best presented in three parts: Benefits to our Ugandan Partners, Benefits to Us and other Americans, and Benefits to the World.

(This is not an argument against non-profits. They have a critical place in our world and often do work that for-profit companies simply can’t do.)

Benefits to our Ugandan Partners

We believe that structuring our work as a business is the most beneficial form for the women we work with. Here’s how.

1. Longevity: One of the greatest benefits to our Ugandan partners is that they can work with us for as long as they want. Since non-profit donors are typically most impressed by how many people you’ve helped, non-profits tend to cycle people through programs and ‘graduate’ them, usually with taining to become entrepreneurs. But relatively few people are wired to be successful entrepreneurs. How many do you know? Most people want a gainful, dependable job with opportunities to grow and advance. That’s just what our partnership offers.

2. Self-Reliance. The women we partner with provide for themselves and their families as owners of their own business. We helped them found NUPECA, an independent and self-managed cooperative, which we have since partnered with. Our partners’ sense of self-reliance is reinforced because they know that we’re not a non-profit. That rather than charity cases, they are partners in a successful business venture. To grasp the full impact of this, I often ask the following question: Would you rather your children be beneficiaries of a non-profit or successful business owners?

3. Competition. There is certainly competition in the non-profit world, but it usually falls on the managers and employees of the non-profit, almost never the beneficiaries. In our business, though, our partners stand with us in facing the competition of the marketplace in quality, design, service, etc. If either of us fails to meet competitive standards, our businesses jointly suffer. This competition offers our partners incentive to grow and learn new skills that they will apply in their homes and in all subsequent ventures that they might undertake.

Benefits to Us and other Americans

The benefits of business are not one-sided. Just as it’s beneficial for our Ugandan partners and their communities, it’s beneficial for us and our community, America.

1. Profit. The simplest form of benefit in a business is profit, and we certainly hope to make a fair amount. Ours is a family business, and the prospect of profit allows us to invest single-mindedly in our business, despite worrying economic times. We can be reasonably sure that if we work hard we will make some money, and we’ll be able to pay bills, put money away for future college tuitions, and plan retirements. Just like our Ugandan partners.

2. Ownership. From a business standpoint, ownership means that we’re responsible for the losses and gains, the debts and assets, and the legal obligations of the company. But from a more emotional viewpoint, ownership is commitment, pride, a sense of independence and accomplishment. Just as our Ugandan partners own their own business, so do we. And just as their ownership benefits their families and community, so ours benefits our family and community.

3. Retail. During the last couple years, as the recession battered small businesses everywhere, we had a few store owners tell us that if it weren’t for our products they likely would have gone out of business. They benefitted from our commitment to run a strong, competitive business.

Benefits to the World

The heading may sound bombastic, but I believe that businesses like ours hold immense potential for making the world a better place. Business, after all, is the most powerful force shaping our world. If we use it well, our impact will be enormous.

1. Connection. When you walk down the aisles of your local Walmart do you think about the people who actually assembled all those products, the people your purchase de facto connects you too? I sure don’t. And that’s a problem. Our economic ties to people across the world are some of the most powerful ties we have, but the marketplace has been designed to ignore those connections when we’re shopping. By building a business that makes those connections clear and beneficial in the marketplace, we help to shape consumer expectations and demands about how they want their purchases to influence the people they’re connected to.

3. Money and Talent. Perhaps the greatest challenge in the non-profit world is drawing investment dollars and talented individuals away from the business sector, where there is far, far more money to be made. It’s become common knowledge in recent years that an unholy percentage of Harvard graduates head straight to Wall Street out of college. Why? Despite the desire to do good, our primary drive is to provide for ourselves and our loved ones. By turning profitable business to the work of our common values we can offer top candidates and investors the best of both worlds: the opportunity for profit and the ability to make a positive difference in society.

2. Proof of Concept. Global business over the last 60 years has been a giant Race To The Bottom: lower wages, lower costs, lower standards. It’s been taken as gospel that this is the only way to succeed. Our business acts as a proof-of-concept that with new generations and new markets this is not the case, that a business built on our common values of fairness, compassion, and respect for the earth can and will succeed. Both wizened executives and young entrepreneurs can look to businesses like ours as case studies for building ethical businesses, and hopefully they’ll do it even better than us.

Guest post and photos by designer Emily Grace Goodrich

Whenever we come to Acholi Quarters for a meeting or for design training sessions, Christine, the manager of the bead-making program, never fails to call beforehand with the reminder, “Your lunch is here.”

Lunch is usually a small feast that the women take turns preparing and delivering to Christine’s house, and though the food is wonderful, there is only so much space in my stomach. Over the months here I’ve worked on perfecting strategies like putting only the tiniest amounts of food in my bowl so that I can make it to the obligatory third serving. But following each meal, Christine still likes to joke, “Ah, you people. You eat so little.”

After my first visit to Uganda, I was very sorry not to have learned to cook a few of the local dishes, so this time around I made certain to let the women know I wanted to learn. Acen Lucy, a younger woman with bright eyes and a contagious smile, was first to volunteer.

Lucy lives in a small, comfortable cement home with a wide veranda. The front part of the house serves as a sitting room with a sofa, a television set, a shelf of dishes and other necessary things. Lucy invited me to sit on a bench on the shaded front porch, which she shares with her next-door neighbor. She decided to teach me to make malakwang, a type of greens that are usually cooked in a ground nut (peanut) sauce and served over white sweet potatoes.

We began with the greens themselves, tearing the leaves from the stems while the coals heated up in the outdoor charcoal stove she keeps on the porch for cooking. As we worked our way through the basket of leaves, I asked how long she’d been in Acholi Quarters. Lucy explained that she’d been brought there from the North when she was fairly young by an organization that connected her with a sponsor to pay her school fees. Her father had died, and her mother “was not there,” so she came alone with just her twin sister. When she reached the Senior-2 level in secondary school, her sponsor stopped paying her school fees, so she left school and began working long hours in the rock quarry, until she was invited to be a part of NUPECA and make jewelry for Ember Arts.

She finished her story about the same time we’d finished the basket of greens, and she moved on to toasting the sesame seeds in a clay pot on the stove, and then the raw ground-nuts. As those cooled, she chopped sweet potatoes and put them to boil in another charcoal stove, then into another pot added chopped greens, water, chopped tomatoes, and dried fish — her own special addition.

As we worked, Lucy’s firstborn daughter, two-and-a-half year old Tracy, jumped back and forth across the gutter in front of the porch, laughing and making faces at me with the neighbor girl, Jackie. As Tracy ran around and chattered away in Acholi, Lucy laughed and remarked that her daughter is “too stubborn.” But when I commented that she also seems very smart, Lucy shared proudly that her daughter is doing very well in the nursery school that she attends.

When the ground nuts had cooled, we rubbed them to remove the papery red skins, then mixed them with the toasted sesame seeds. Lucy disappeared around the corner for a moment, then returned with a flat stone to grind the seed and nut mixture to a paste. After a few minutes, she handed the smaller grinding stone to me to try my hand at it, but after several attempts without much progress, she laughed and offered to finish the rest, grinding everything twice until it made a smooth paste.

By then, the greens had finished cooking, so she poured the cooking water into another clay pot and added the seed and nut paste to make a sauce. Tracy knew to hover around the cooking area at all the right moments and ran off with both a small chunk of raw sweet potato and the empty bowl of ground-nut paste, which she and Jackie licked clean.

Into the bowl of sauce went some small gray rocks, “it is like salt, but it is not salt,” Lucy explained. Next she mixed in the cooked greens, then transferred the food to a serving dish. We sat down in a circle on the porch with Tracy and Lucy’s neighbor and her two daughters, sharing the meal from a single bowl like one big family under the short curtain of drying paper beads lining the porch.

Those same paper beads, soon woven into beautiful finished jewelry, will allow Lucy to continue providing good meals for her growing daughter. And they’ll allow Tracy to continue on with her education, an education payed for not by a distant sponsor, but by her own mother, a successful business woman and member of a growing cooperative. This is a recipe for dreams come true.

1. On the back of an African man’s motorcycle, a man you’ve never met before, as he weaves you through traffic that looks, feels, even smells like chaos.

2. On a stack of mahogany planks in a wood worker’s shop, the ground soft and undulating with sawdust and shavings.

3. Inside the cavernous speeding hulk of a resurrected Chinese bus, now rechristened the “White Cock,” in a locally clear reference to poultry.

4. In the Dickensian office of the production manager of the country’s largest printing business, the large windows in every wall allowing the Indian manager clear view of his dominion.

5. On a small wooden stool usually reserved for elders, watching the gray-cloth-covered corpse of a friend be carried into a dark hut as a young girl dances and a row of happy ducklings waddle by.

6. In a house or a hut, on a wooden chair or a couch, a woman kneeling in front of you, pouring water over your hands in preparation for the meal that she has spent all day preparing for you.

7. On the hot red ground amidst piles of crushed stones, surrounded by women teaching you proper stone crushing technique, your penance for asking to take their photograph.

8. On the inflated lip of a yellow raft, being sucked voraciously down into a standing wave that has stood for all time, and will soon fall victim to hydroelectric development.

9. On a small worn white swimming dock leaning out from an island on a fathomless crater lake, your feet sending shockwaves thru a reflected perfect sky.

10. In the waiting room, or in the room waiting. So much waiting in so many rooms.

When you move to Uganda you get a whole new set of neighbors. When I moved to Gulu in 2006, my neighborhood was suddenly full of people displaced by war, wives who had lost husbands, children who had lost parents, most surviving various states of poverty.

At the same time I was exploring ethics and had become fascinated by the elegant, powerful formulation recorded in the Gospels: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

This simple phrase seems to carry in it a vast sea of ethical instruction. The same ethic appears in religions and cultures throughout the world. This principle, it seems, is foundational.

But what does it mean? Practically speaking, what am I supposed to do?

That’s what I have been asking myself since I got all those new neighbors. Though I can’t offer you the complete answer to that question, there is one conclusion that I’m pretty sure of:

Helping people achieve their dreams is one of the best ways to love them. Maybe the best way.

Love your neighbor, it says, as yourself. And how do I love myself? I get up every morning and try to make my dreams come true. I try to build the world that I want to live in.

There is perhaps nothing more definitive of human beings than our capacity to dream, and to bring dreams to life. It’s the central human magic.

So loving my neighbor as myself means supporting her in making her dreams come true, at least in part, and as I think more about it, maybe in large part.

That’s our commitment to the women of NUPECA, our partner co-op here in Uganda. Our fundamental goal in partnering with them isn’t to overcome poverty or put food on the table or put kids in school, though those are great steps along the way.

Our fundamental goal is to help our Ugandan partners achieve their dreams. After all, we’re neighbors now.

Economic Choices in the Face of Extreme Poverty

You have $1,000 to give away.

In front of you are two women, both widows with families, both living in extreme poverty. If you split the money evenly between them, both will be able to feed their families until their children are grown, both will be able to afford a little bit of healthcare, but neither will be able to properly educate their families. If you give all the money to one woman, it will transform her family forever through nutrition, healthcare, and great education, but the other woman and her family will be left in extreme poverty.

What do you do?

A somewhat more complex version of this problem is faced constantly by non-profits and socially-oriented businesses. Need is great, our resources are limited. Do we spread our resources thinly across as many households as possible? Do we invest deeply in a few lucky families? Do we find some sort of middle-ground?

It’s a gut-wrenching choice. The stakes are literally life and death.

At Ember, we invest deeply in a limited number of families to catalyze transformational, generational change. This means that we work with fewer women than we could, each of those women makes more money than she otherwise would, and instead of basic improvements in nutrition and living conditions, we drive towards deep, long-lasting change, especially university education for their children.

Why? Because we believe that a Ugandan will do more for Uganda than we ever could. And if we provide a platform upon which Ugandan kids can stay healthy, get educated, access opportunity, and become successful leaders, they will transform their communities in more ways and over longer periods than we could hope to do ourselves.

Still, the choice is not easy. It means saying no to people who need and deserve our partnership, people who will go on living in extreme poverty until they find some way out of it.

But instead of watering down our impact to bring them in immediately, our goal is to grow, to work deeply with more and more families and communities, and to see, eventually, the long-term change that new local leaders will create. To help create a new community in which we are no longer needed, only loved.

Last night a great conversation and a poorly timed cup of coffee kept me up into unreasonable hours. I checked my email before bed and found a request from one of my colleagues: Could I come up with a one-sentence soundbite that could be easily shared with busy business people, like rising life expectancy or something?

It’s a good idea – people often don’t have time for longer stories. But last night I couldn’t think of what that line might be. This is what I wrote back.