A More Benevolent Mousetrap

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Businesses that boom by treading lightly on the earth

In the United States alone, small businesses (roughly defined as having fewer than 500 employees) make up 99.7 percent of all employers and generate nearly 41 percent of domestic sales and 97 percent of all U.S. exports. The small companies highlighted here, which would be considered a success by most any conventional standard, are experimenting with new business models and incorporating sustainability with high ethical standards to make their workplaces more humane, their products more earth friendly, and their legacy about a lot more than decimal points on a ledger.

Pura Vida
Nonprofit or for-profit -- why choose?

One morning in March 2005, an American University student climbed atop the roof of the student center and unfurled a large banner: "Ideas into Action: Living Wages, Organic, Shade-Grown, Nonprofit. Pura Vida -- The Guilt-Free Choice."

The school was choosing a new coffee vendor, and the students were declaring their preference over another, better-known Seattle coffee company. It was a demonstration from a commercially proven demographic that many companies would have to spend millions to attract.

Cofounders John Sage and Chris Dearnley met 20 years ago while they were attending Harvard Business School. Sage went on to make millions at Microsoft, Dearnley to do missionary work in Latin America. Years later, after a round of golf, Dearnley offered up a bag of Costa Rican coffee and a partnership was born: a 100 percent charitably owned enterprise that combines a profit-driven beverage company and a charitable nonprofit.

Both arms of the business have been successful: Pura Vida sold half a million pounds of coffee in 2005, making it one of the country's largest fair trade sellers; it also contributed $1.4 million to innovative social programs benefiting at-risk children and their families in the countries from which it gets its coffee, tea, cocoa, and chai.

"The power to multiply resources and generate long-term, sustainable returns is unique to capitalism, yet we believe that those same forces -- forces that can take a dollar and multiply it into $100 -- can be used on the nonprofit side as well," says Sage.

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