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Ask HN: How can we improve the world via creative, compassionate new ventures?

107 points| fogzen | 8 years ago | reply

How can we...

• improve Fair Trade on the consumer or producer side?

• strengthen and expand non-profits or charities?

• educate or help the working conditions of labor (people who work for wages)?

• improve the ecological sustainability and environmental impact of supply chains?

• Expand access and convenience of healthy foods and diets?

• Improve democracy at the organization or government level?

If you're already part of an organization focusing on these things, tell us about it!

70 comments

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[+] DoreenMichele|8 years ago|reply
educate or help the working conditions of labor (people who work for wages)?

I have worked for a few years for a writing service that does this well. I have been trying for some time to encourage people to try to "clone" or borrow wisdom from the model for other types of work:

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-textbrok...

I got myself off the street in part by using the internet to develop a flexible earned income. I am trying to figure out how to spread that model for people like me who have barriers to regular employment:

http://worldwidewebworks.blogspot.com

Improve democracy at the organization or government level?

Improving independence and self reliance of individual workers should improve democracy. The founders of the US believed many independent small time operators were essential to the ability of the people to speak their mind and vote their conscience. Having played a few different roles, I think they are correct. Working for BigCo had a chilling effect on my ability to express myself freely and honestly for fear of losing my income.

Government is not wholly separate from the people and culture. We need independent earners to have independent minds to have real democracy.

[+] themarkn|8 years ago|reply
I'm a manager at a nonprofit serving adults with developmental disabilities. We do a really good job, we work in supported employment, residential, getting out the community, helping with diet, groceries, supervising medications, etc. BUT what we pay our employees is hilariously low relative to the high quality of service we provide, and the standards we hold each other to. They could make the same money at any other entry level job, and often they come to us with 4-year degrees in psychology or something, work with diligence and care, and start at $10/hour. It makes no sense. They end up taking second jobs and putting stuff together to make everything work. Talented, smart, energetic people don't last in the nonprofit world unless they somehow have another source of wealth. They get pulled out into something more lucrative. It's really tough to generate innovation unless you can get the right people to spend years developing domain expertise and then pay them enough to keep pushing in that area. Many nonprofits are already doing the impossible just by existing. I don't know what the most practical way to help this is: everybody always needs more money. How can we pay our employees enough that working full-time for us is a reasonable life choice without them needing to find 20hrs a week elsewhere on top of it and have a shitty life? It's not just a little extra that’s needed. It’s a lot.
[+] Noos|8 years ago|reply
Caring work like this is vastly underpaid and very critical to people's well being. Maybe if someone could lobby for a specific tax credit for people formally working in caregiving for the elderly and disabled to make up for the lower income. Too often these jobs become jobs of last resort and unlike you, not everyone has high standards.
[+] Robotbeat|8 years ago|reply
Start a cooperative enterprise, owned by the workers at all levels, not just the techno-elite founders. With all given an equal vote. Establish small limits on pay disparities (say, never more than 2:1 to compensate for different schooling/certification requirements for doctors or the like).

I second the open source suggestion.

[+] bufferoverflow|8 years ago|reply
So you want to pay janitors way above the market rate or the doctors way below the market rate?

And where did the 2:1 ratio come from? It takes decades to become a surgeon. It takes maybe 20 minutes of training someone to mop a floor.

[+] fogzen|8 years ago|reply
Great point. We can start more cooperative enterprises. Are there good templates and software for the founding and unique management issues of a cooperative enterprise?

If you or anyone else has ideas on that, please share them :)

[+] SethRich|8 years ago|reply
There is never a situation in which it's a good idea to give every employee an equal vote. Employees of various seniority and talent provide varying levels of value to the enterprise.

1. Why should the newly hired janitor have equal voting rights to the CTO that envisioned and built the product or the Machine Learning PHD whose education cost him 10 years and half a million dollars?

2. Personnel counts grow at an exponential rate. If you double your personnel count over a year as plenty of startups do, what's stopping all the new employees from mutinying and kicking out the early employees that have been been working on the business for 5 years?

3. Where's the incentive for founders who face disproportionate risk in the startup stage to build an enterprise that they may eventually own 0.1% of?

If you have ever even thought of starting a business on your own, you would not think this is a good idea.

[+] j-collier|8 years ago|reply
An issue not mentioned: Animal Welfare. According to the ASPCA (https://www.aspca.org/animal-homelessness/shelter-intake-and...) over 6.5 millions companion animals enter shelters in the US alone every year.

Family Pet Project is making it easier and safer to find resources as a struggling pet owner who may need to find an appropriate place to live, assistance with a pet's medical care, and even rehome a pet if there is no other option.

https://familypetproject.com

It's an issue that affects people more than they realize given that the average euthanasia for animals is around $300 and over 4 million animals are put down in shelters in the US every year. The US government could probably do better than spending ~$1.2B taxpayer dollars on euthanasia annually.

[+] ilovetux|8 years ago|reply
I've been working on a project I'm calling "Business in a Box" which is based on the idea that the consumer oriented interface to our economy has been radically optimized while the comercial interface has been obfuscated thereby artificially limiting participants.

Basically, we would offer packages designed to get someone up and running with a profitable business in a short time. This would include training, equipment and supplies. The goal would be profitability not complete financial independence.

Some examples would be carpet and upholstery cleaning, micro-farming, retail, micro-manufacturing and more.

Each business would be an open source franchise where anyone could utilize our training and business plans, but for a small annual fee they could use our name and supply chain.

If people are able to provide for themselves in some way they are much less likely to remain in a dead-end job living paycheck to paycheck.

[+] Razengan|8 years ago|reply
Some of the problems that I, personally, see/face in the world:

(They may just be problems with me and not necessarily the World™️, but I wish there were [better] services and tools to help with them.)

• It's too hard for [self-employed] people in "third-world" countries to relocate to and contribute to better countries if they don't have all the paperwork (employment and sponsorship from companies, college degrees), often not even if they do have the paperwork, even if they're willing to pay exorbitant money for long-term residency and can prove they can support themselves.

• It's too hard for introverted people, with no social life, to find partners.

• For quite some time, the amount of "content" – art, fiction, other media – available in the world has long since exceeded what one person can discover and peruse in the average human lifespan.

• The success and failure of everything is determined on how much money it makes. Too many good things get aborted because they can't make enough money fast enough, and the definition of "enough" keeps increasing at an unrealistic rate.

• Not enough people are asking "What are we doing to ensure that we expand beyond our home planet?" and "What are we doing to ensure we don't destroy ourselves?" – Questions I believe every intelligent civilization must keep asking itself if it is to be "successful."

[+] dvasdekis|8 years ago|reply
I'm the founder and of Holdgreen (holdgreen.com), a not-for-profit that allows investors to offset the carbon produced from their equity portfolios. We're based in Australia, and there are 3 of us now.

The technology works and is scalable, but getting the opt-in tickbox on the websites of pension funds has been very difficult, mostly due to industry lethargy. We've been trying for 18 months to find a pilot fund who would be willing to put us on their site.

Holdgreen is my effort at the OP - preventing people from harming the earth in a way they're not presently conscious of, by giving them new information and an easy way to respond. It hasn't been easy in the slightest.

[+] GreeniFi|8 years ago|reply
I run a company which provides a credit scoring system for banks which helps them include environmental and climate criteria in credit decisions. Our underlying motivation is that if we want to create sustainable supply chains, the incentives which shape them need to line up with our objectives for them. Credit scoring which compels businesses to behave more sustainably is a massive incentive towards this.

We have had recent success with big banks starting pilots with the system. But it's been a big struggle.

How would I encourage new ventures in this space. Very simple: make money available in the same way YC does. A veritable spigot of seed, early stage and growth capital that isn't always looking for immediate returns, but for new ventures to demonstrate their assumptions hold true.

When I sell my business, which is my aim, this is what my profits will fund.

[+] kgiddens1|8 years ago|reply
TL:DR

TLDR - new investment models / Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation originally was designed as a vehicle for pure charity and changed their investment model such as offering loan guarantees versus one time donations. https://hbr.org/2012/01/a-new-approach-to-funding-social-ent...

There is a need for social ventures to seek these types of investments to fuel their revenue / impact growth such as through social impact bonds and more.

Having an "alternative market" or marketplace in this sector for SMB's would go a long way to improving the world in my opinion. What are your thoughts? Does anyone know of such a marketplace?

[+] retreatguru|8 years ago|reply
To answer your first question, we can improve the world by helping with the evolution of consciousness. This unfolding of wisdom is what underpins all other good endeavours.
[+] davidjnelson|8 years ago|reply
These are also a good start:

> On September 25th 2015, countries adopted a set of goals to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all as part of a new sustainable development agenda. Each goal has specific targets to be achieved over the next 15 years.

> For the goals to be reached, everyone needs to do their part: governments, the private sector, civil society and people like you.

>Do you want to get involved? You can start by telling everyone about them. We’ve also put together a list of actions that you can take in your everyday life to contribute to a sustainable future.

http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-develop...

[+] purplezooey|8 years ago|reply
One word. Housing. Do something. It's getting bad.
[+] Noos|8 years ago|reply
its only bad for knowledge workers in boutique cities. It's actually dirt cheap to own housing in many areas otherwise. It costs 500k just to get a condo in flushing, ny, where a 3 bedroom house in many CT areas is 100k. The issue is wealth should not concentrate as near as it does geographically, and we need to get over the idea of packing everyone into cities and spread out into towns more.
[+] gt_|8 years ago|reply
I hope others will share if they find this totally silly. It’s more of a response to observations.

I am from Portland, OR writing from eastern kentucky, where I have family. This region is feeling the hurt. I put a lot into a hobby of media and culture studies, and am unconvinced of many platitudes from libertarian or liberal academics, but am open to all perspectives. In so many words, impacts of culture in a broad sense continues to undermine nearly any efforts like these listed. Whether the measurements are misled, or new problem is exacerbated, or the effort just completely falls flat, I am going on what continues to stand in the way: problems in broad cultural discrepancies that amount to fear. I can’t overlook the cultural fabrics of religious communities (I am far from religious myself) and the lack of any counterpart in contemporary American life. How can this help us now?

I think it’s no secret rural communities are being ‘left behind’ but the last thing they (seem to) want is your charity. They don’t want urban education and they don’t want urban food, but they are all addicted iPhones. So what do we change if we can’t change them?

Urban/Coastal America can change itself. Our efforts to boost lives we look down on are well-intentioned but continue to fail.

I don’t have a quote on hand but Tyler Cowen suggests we ‘mix it up’ closer to home. Defend weirdos and affect your own culture for the better, in sometimes uncomfortable ways.

Off the top of my head:

MBAs, start investing in young artists, like in the Renaissance. Unapologetically enforce your opinions and even politics on them. Have fun with it. Anything could happen.

Wanna teach programming? Rent out a rural community center for your class and make the drive (or flight) each week. The impact will justify the investment. Maybe don’t make it fun for everybody.

Campaign in rural communities against social media use. Use billboards and flyers, like the locals. Use scare tactics (honest ones) that override cultural discrepancies.

Actually hire people outside your “cultural fit” and people from rural areas. If you can’t believe in anyone outside a given character mold, why expect others to?

[+] Noos|8 years ago|reply
Well, it would help if assistance isn't conditional on nor about spreading the holy gospel of Portlandia to the savages in the lower provinces. A little less cheekily, how much of what you want to do is actually helping their real needs as opposed to what your idea of their needs and behavior are or should be, and is about transmitting your culture onto theirs to replace it.

Cultural imperialism is an issue in the USA, for all of the lack of focus on it. The portlandian thinks the solution to rural problems is programming, bike lanes, and electric vehicles.

[+] dietervds|8 years ago|reply
One rather general suggestion I have is to pick a company to work for that does some of the requested points. It doesn’t have to be non-profit or volunteer work only.

A few years ago I joined a company called Sunfunder [1]. They (we) provide financing to solar energy companies in Africa and SE Asia. Lack of financing is a major blocking factor there to get clean energy out.

I can honestly say I’ve never been more happy in my life than now, knowing that my entire workweek is contributing to something good.

[1] http://www.sunfunder.com

[+] ww520|8 years ago|reply
Build local high speed internet. Some wireless version would be good. WiMax?