Living Fair

Laborfair and Jenna Raby Nominated for Social Venture Network's Innovator of the Year Award

Dear Team Laborfair, Investors, Supporters, Friends.

This week, I was notified that I am nominated as one of the 12 finalists for the 2008 SVN Innovator's Award. Founded in 1987 by Josh Mailman and Wayne Silby, Social Venture Network (SVN) is a nonprofit network committed to building a just and sustainable world through business. SVN members are part of an expanding global network of pioneering entrepreneurs who are helping to transform the way the world does business.

Last year's ten Innovation Award winners included, among others, Tom Szaky, CEO and Co-Founder of TerraCycle, and Priya Haji, CEO and Co-Founder of World of Good so I'm simply thrilled to be considered in such excellent and well-respected company.

A link to the press release for about the 2008 Innovation Awards can
be found here:

 Laborfair is an amazing collaboration of individuals: our committed, mission-driven, for-profit investors, our resilient, highly capable and intelligent core team and experienced advisors, and the whole amazing collective of entrepreneurial service providers and motivated site users who meet on our platform and assist in each other's lives daily.

Without every one of you, this nomination would not have been possible. Thank you, and most importantly, thank you Jose Arocha and Team Laborfair.

I'll keep you posted on the outcome, let's hope we win!

All the best and with gratitude,

Jenna

Dance lessons with local teachers, that's just the beginning

Last weekend a friend took me to this fantastic salsa club in San Francisco and got me all excited to start dancing again.  I'm from NYC, salsa is an institution there. For 2 years, my Friday night consisted of heading uptown to the Bronx in a yellow cab only to return at 6 am in a gypsy cab on Saturday morning with incredibly sore feet, a sweat-soaked dress, and a smile from ear to ear. In those days, I took learning salsa, merengue, cumbia, and tango, very seriously. I had to be good, at least respectable with my steps, It's embarrassing when men line up to dance with you and then run to avoid you in the expanse of 15 minutes! I was making progress on my own with my clear rotation of partners, however, I was beginning to run out of venues. I needed a private teacher to help me cut patterns on the floor just as well as any Latina chica.

I looked in magazines, newspapers, dance studios, bulletin boards and finally hired a cool woman who had studied classically in Cuba. Her lessons helped me go from wallflower to center stage in a few months--all for a price I could afford as a graduate student.

Have you ever wanted to just learn something fabulous from someone who truly knows how to teach? Sure you have. There's a linguist, a guitarist, a yogini in all of us just waiting to come out.

So, after this embarrassing evening in San Francisco Salsa land forgetting everything I ever learned in the "hood", I searched online to add the Lo to my first initial "J". I was super excited to learn of a new website that helps people find local teachers and classes to learn just about anything.  This Seattle-based website helps people learn all kinds of new things by connecting teachers to students, check it out Rumor has it they're coming to San Francisco.

Here's what they have to say about their motivation..."We started Teachstreet because we’re curious about the world. We like to learn new things and so do our friends. We want to get away from our computers and out into the real world. We want to build community, make ourselves a bit smarter and empower the great local teachers living in our hometowns."

This is a very similar concept to Laborfair.com so you can see why I love this site. Thank you Teachstreet team for making this possible..anyone for Mandarin?

Cheers,

Jota Lo

 

Video interview with Jenna Raby, founder & CEO of Laborfair.com

Watch this interview with Jenna Raby, founder and CEO of Laborfair.com. Jenna talks about Laborfair with Steven Tse of eBay during the 2008 San Francisco Home Show. Learn about what Laborfair.com is, its free service to consumers, the range of service providers Laborfair.com offers and how it differentiates from other online marketplaces like Craigslist.

Some socially conscious gifts for fair minded folks.

Listed below are some online sites to shop for socially-conscious gifts, including fair-trade chocolate, coffee, household items, and environmental furniture. I'm not just telling you the products here are fabulous. I know. I've bought and enjoyed items from every one of these socially conscious companies. Who doesn't love chocolate or having a gorgeous piece of hand-crafted furniture--all the while knowing you have put food on someone's table with your purchase? Buying fair trade products supports conscientious producers in developing nations all over the world so you can feel good about your purchases. Remember, more than 4 billion people make less than $2 a day. Wow. We can help change that this holiday season. Most or all of the items available on the websites below are certified fair trade. This means that the workers who produced them were paid a living wage in safe working conditions.

Global Exchange Online: http://store.gxonlinestore.org/index.html: Global Exchange, run by my friend Kevin Danaher, an iconoclast to be sure, is an excellent organization, truly committed to helping change the world through its Green Festival and the products it has on the website.

Grounds for Change (coffee and chocolate): www.groundsforchange.com: Yum, fair trade coffee. It's delicious and there's chocolate here too.

Ten Thousand Villages: www.tenthousandvillages.com/home.php: I love this company. They buy potholders, napkins, placemats, hair accessories and beautiful furniture--all made in sustainable ways in developing countries.

Tropical Salvage: www.tropicalsalvage.com: Run by another friend of mine, Tim O'Brian, this Portland, Oregan based sustainable furniture company goes above and beyond conventional environmental practices. Innovative, to be sure, Tropical Salvage actually reclaims and recycles beautiful tropical hardwood by mining them where for centuries caches of large, species-diverse trees have laid buried by volcanic eruptions. They salvage trees felled by floods and landslides caused by Indonesia's annual intense rainy season. Once mined, the beautiful wood, centuries old, is hand-crafted by indigenous craftsman into beautiful wine cabinets, book cases, stools, dining tables, armoires etc. You name it.

Go ahead shop till you drop and maximize generosity.

Jenna

Bottled Water and Going Green

I’m happy and grateful for the earth. In this season and age of plenty, the popular expression “reduce, reuse, recycle” has never made more sense. If we want a world where our grandchildren don’t have to live in a plastic bubble, filtering every environmental pollutant through a fire hose of sanitized oxygen, we better make “going green” a personal and a public necessity. I’m not a huge fan of California’s current governor, but I am supportive of his environmental policies—advocating for solar technologies, reducing fuel emissions, more widespread applications for bio-fuels and all around aggressive strategies to reduce our dependence on oil, domestic or foreign. As we think about easy steps to go green in our houses, what about going green with our personal choices? I’m not talking about organic food, more algae-based Omega 3 supplements instead of fish based ones, or the holy grail of health, drinking more water. No one’s against drinking more water and less Coca-cola except maybe kids. It’s our universal love of bottled water that concerns me. In 2005, Americans alone drank some 37 billion bottles of water, despite the well known fact that in most parts of the country, public tap water is not only perfectly drinkable but also more tightly regulated that its bottled counterpart. Our public water systems disclose the quality of their water while most bottlers refuse to do the same. Only 10% or so of these bottles are currently recycled—imagine 33.3 billion bottles in a landfill in the US alone.

Add that manufacturing plastic bottles for bottled water creates an astounding amount of pollution in the packaging, transport, and refrigeration-- an annual equivalent of 1.5 billion barrels of oil, according to Food & Water Watch. In an effort to cut costs (have you seen the price of gas these days?) and live my beliefs, I changed my approach to consuming water. Here’s what I did. I bought a Brita Water filter so I was on the absolute safe side around lead and mercury content. I poured the filtered tap water into a funky grey Nalprene bottle I purchased at Walgreens for $5.99. These nifty, lightweight and dishwasher safe bottles are not just for hitchhikers and athletes anymore. I carry it around with me at work and monitor both my daily water intake and the cash I’m saving. My goal is to buy a gorgeous personalized metal water container, like the Boy Scouts used to use with all the money I save. Hippie chic—yep, that’s right. Pull that one out at a meeting with the big boys in the pressed suits. So here’s my rant--just don’t buy bottled water, stick to drinking filtered tap and wine in glass, recyclable bottles, of course. Interested in how corporations are bottling tap water and selling it as from "the source", check out www.thinkoutsidethebottle.org.

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Originally uploaded by jenna_raby

Laborfair sister site in India, different worlds, same message

Today, I was thrilled to see a feature article appear in the Technology section of the New York Times about a former Microsoft employee and internet entrepreneur that is using the power of social networks to bring more jobs to India's masses making less than $3 a day. The title of the article is: "In India, Poverty inspires Technology Workers to Altruism." Check it out at:

Check it out here:

New York Times article about Babajob

He's beginning in Bangalore where there is an endless flood of expatriates with a need for local services and the money to purchase them. It's a great idea--one that I’m proud to say we had first in the US ;-) and have worked on for the better part of two years. I feel well-qualified to comment then on this subject.

The people Babajob aims to help are those service sector personnel, e.g. painters, cooks, childcare workers, handymen and chauffeurs (yes, you definitely do not want to drive yourself in India), who lack a viable social network and the ability to connect with potential employers. The company has identified low (if any) computer literacy and limited access to a computer as the primary roadblocks to that connection. Oddly enough, the problem in India and its growing economy, is the same one here: how to connect independent, qualified service providers with those looking to hire them in order to increase their opportunities and simultaneously redistribute a bit of wealth back into the economy. Laborfair tackles that head-on here in the US by making the hiring process for those same types of services far more efficient – resulting in cost savings for consumers, more consistent job opportunities, and a resulting higher wage for independent service providers.

In India, without social networks and the connections they foster, these service providers are relegated to a life of poverty. In America, there is less overall poverty, but our challenges are of a strikingly similar nature--access to living wage employment, health care, affordable childcare, etc. Laborfair and Babajob share the same ideological genetics. We both believe in using business to create social change, and in supporting the entrepreneurial drive of the world's people to have better paying and more consistent work opportunities. We're proud that Laborfair began by helping non-profit worker centers throughout the Bay Area find more employment opportunities for their in-need clients (and continues to do so).

But there are also differences in our approaches necessitated by the unique cultural differences. Where Babajob charges the employer to contact providers and pays intermediaries to interview computer illiterate workers and post their profiles on the web, Laborfair sells a highly efficient and affordable marketing and communication platform to the provider in order to keep the service free for the consumer. We believe that in order to help service providers build their businesses, they must make the barriers to entry as low as possible for potential employers. There is also much greater computer access in the US, meaning that we do not have to carry the overhead of intermediaries to interview and post worker profiles. And like Babajob, we’ve made it much easier than previously possible for consumers who need quality, trustworthy personal help to find it at a fair price. With Laborfair, you can forget the hassle and expense of contacting an overpriced housecleaning service or mining the yellow pages for service professionals without a review or ratings. Instead, there's a great independent local service provider waiting to do your job.

I find this article incredibly encouraging. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a giant corporation or a small startup approaching the issues of poverty alleviation and the growing income divide, whether they’re focused globally or domestically, or even if they treat it as a business opportunity or a philanthropic effort. The point is that there's room for everyone to be the catalyst for change. Your consumer choices and the conscious capitalism you display in your daily hiring decisions are the real and genuine power here. Businesses like Laborfair and Babajob demonstrate how innovative businesses concepts, both in the US and abroad, can create social change --the main ideology behind our mission here at Laborfair.com. Kudos to them. Perhaps there's a partnership in the making.

Green inspiration - the kind you eat

I read an article on poverty in America today, how Walmart and 7-11 are increasing inventory around cheaper food items as Americans get poorer--as a result there's more malnutrition and people eat far less fruits and vegetables. It really got me thinking--I'm happy I finally have time to write a blog. Absent of moral posturing, when I started Laborfair, I entered heart first, business pragmatism second. Ben Picard, my partner, and I designed Laborfair to be a profitable business that delivers positive social change. We looked around and noticed that the household service sector was inefficient--agencies charged an outlandish fee for their services while individual service providers made only a portion of the proceeds from their hard work. We conceived of Laborfair as a trusted and valuable communication service that delivers concrete social and economic value to our entire community of users: consumers, service providers, and the wonderful organizations throughout the Bay Area, that dedicate themselves to helping qualified people find gainful employment. I have a big list of why I love this company (after two years straight of singing praises, fighting for viability on a shoestring, and being passionate about our success). The takeaway? Fair prices for homeowners while individuals get far closer to living wage employment and some greens in the fridge. I'm proud of that.