How You Can Help:

Please donate and/or get 3 friends to donate! Direct them to this blog post. Donate online or mail a check to ‘Ayllu Initiative’, PO Box 2403, Bala Cynwyd, PA 19004

Where Does Your Money Go?

100% of donations go to our pilot launch and are tax-deductible. In 2010, we will introduce 3 microfranchise models to Brazil, employing hundreds of the poor.  We are partnered with local nonprofits and microcredit banks.

• $10 buys supplies for 1 month
• $25 gets us an office for 1 month
• $60 covers the weekly cost of due diligence
• $150 supports 1 microfranchise for 1 month
• $500 backs our local partnerships for 6 months

Donate online or mail a check to ‘Ayllu Initiative’, PO Box 2403, Bala Cynwyd, PA 19004

About Artemisia

Artemisia International supports early-stage social enterprises in Brazil, France, and Senegal. In Brazil, they are the hub for information on social enterprise. As an incubator for entrepreneurs, they provide support in business plan development, management, and operations. Artemisia also works to make societies more accommodating of social enterprise by working with big business, governments, and universities.

The Story Behind Ayllu & Artemisia

When I moved to Brazil last summer, I knew a handful of people. Kelly, the Founder of Artemisia, was one of them. We’d met because Artemisia is partnered with Ashoka, and when I was employed as Ashoka’s Latin America Coordinator, I worked on the partnership.  3 days after I arrived, Artemisia hosted a groundbreaking event in Sao Paulo: an opportunity for social entrepreneurs to pitch new ideas, and get feedback from a panel of judges. Although this is relatively common in the USA, this is not the case in Brazil and the event was highly anticipated. I watched the presentations without understanding a word. Despite speaking Spanish, I was utterly lost in Portuguese for the first month. The event was nonetheless inspiring – even though I couldn’t understand the presentations I had a chance to speak with some of the entrepreneurs afterwards. The event confirmed that we had chosen the right place to launch Ayllu – I continue to be amazed by the vibrancy and enthusiasm of Brazilian social innovators.

The event took place at the Sao Paulo Hub. The Hub is a global network of group office spaces. In addition to providing gorgeous, affordable workspace, they also provide a powerful network for startups. It’s strange to look back on that night 6 months ago, because I sat in the Hub wondering if I would ever be part of the community and never expected it would happen only 2 weeks later! Ayllu is now a member of the Hub and Artemisia became an important factor in the success of our feasibility study. We look forward to continuing to work with Artemisia as we launch our pilot in 2010!

Social Business Plan Competitions are hosted by universities around the country. They are an excellent way for young startup teams to gain pro bono support and seed funding; the competitions we’re entering award between $15,000 – $100,000. Ayllu has a close working relationship with BYU, which is the leading academic institution for microfranchising.

Justin King

Justin (@justinallenking) is an MBA student at BYU’s Marriott School of Management. At BYU, he serves on the leadership committees of the Social Venture Competition and the Students for Social Entrepreneurship club. Prior to business school, Justin worked for a financial valuation consulting firm where he provided financial advisory services to public and private technology firms, including several Fortune 100 companies. Additionally, Justin has worked as a financial consultant for several start-up companies. Having lived in Chile for two years, he is fluent in Spanish and has a deep understanding of South American culture. He has experienced firsthand the extreme poverty that exists, and firmly believes market-based solutions are central to overcoming and ending world poverty.  Justin resides in Provo, Utah with his wife and daughter.

Ashley Anne Mitchell

Ashley Anne’s passion to create a more beautiful world for everyone drives her interest in social entrepreneurship. She studies International Relations, an interdisciplinary major incorporating economics, political science, and Spanish, which has stretched her mind around diverse avenues to improve the world, with market-based solutions offering the most compelling route. She has worked closely with BYU professors to create a foreign aid database called PLAID (Project-Level Aid database) and to co-author a paper exploring the effects of natural resources on third-party intervention in civil wars. She loves dancing, cooking, ceramics, and tennis. After graduating from Brigham Young University in April 2010, she plans to continue engaging in social enterprise and attend graduate school.

Heidi Buehner

Heidi is currently a student of the Marriott School of Management at BYU and will graduate with a degree in business management in April 2010. Heidi developed a passion for social entrepreneurship during three summers of research and humanitarian work in Madagascar, where she worked on projects involving healthcare, hygiene education, business development, and business skills training programs. She also has experience in the fields of global health systems, business leadership, economic development, and social impact investing.

Adam Norton

Adam is a junior at BYU’s Marriott School of Management and is pursuing a degree in business management with an emphasis in entrepreneurship. He lived with his family in Curitiba, Brazil for 4 years, working first as a missionary and later establishing a small English school. He also worked with municipal governments as a volunteer, visiting high school English classes as well as holding workshops for teachers. While living in Brazil he experienced the reality of poverty, witnessed the effects of entrepreneurship on low-income families, and became convinced of the potential of social entrepreneurship to solve social problems. Later, he worked in management and training for several utility locating companies in the U.S., developing his own curricula for and training hundreds of new hires. As a certified facilitator, he also worked with in-house management teams. He has three children and believes social entrepreneurship can build a better world.

1. Network – It’s cross-sector and engaged
2. Friends – Founders need all the peer support they can get
3. Knowledge – diverse perspectives, thorough conversations

Economists talk a lot about “utility.”  It’s the generic term they use to refer to the joy, satisfaction, stress relief, etc. we get from the goods and services we consume. My road bike, for example, is a huge source of utility for me. A Chipotle burrito is, likewise, loaded with Mike-variety utility.

In a world where economies of scale are easy to come by, utility is cheap. And in a world where competition and economies of scale exist, utility only gets cheaper as time goes on.

A week ago, I went to Best Buy and paid about $350 for a netbook computer.  That’s insanely inexpensive considering the same amount of computing power would have cost millions of dollars and required a warehouse-size space only a few decades ago. When I got home with my new netbook, I connected to the internet and spent the next several hours entertaining myself online, all without spending a penny.

The amount of utility I got out of those transactions was, and continues to be enormous, despite the small price tag. That’s because, in a world like mine, where competition and scale economies abound, meeting my needs and satisfying my “utility requirements” get cheaper with the passing of time.

I can, of course, do without my internet and netbook. But the idea that costs decrease as scale economies and competition increase holds true for our most basic purchases as well, and the implications are hugely important.

In the developed world, we can spend a smaller and smaller percentage of our income on things like food and clothing than can our friends in the developing world. This means that 1) our wealth increases even as wages stay the same; and 2) additional discretionary income is continually freed up for purchases that may be non-essential for survival but critical to getting ahead.

The Next Four Billion, published by WRI, shows, for example, that as people move up from the base of the income pyramid, they spend about the same amount on essentials like food but spend increasing amounts on services like telecommunications and healthcare. This ability to spend more freely on telecommunications and healthcare, in turn, allows them to work more efficiently and productively and supports their journey out of poverty.

The point here is that the economic development problem is not just about increasing people’s incomes. It’s just as much about increasing relative wealth by making access to goods and services more affordable.

And that brings us to the real problem of having markets that are exclusive.  Exclusive markets not only support relative poverty and the uneven distribution of wealth but exacerbate it.

Because of their relative lack of access to companies who are able to leverage scale economies, and because many of the markets in which the poor participate are not highly competitive, they pay more for the same goods and services than we do. And the gap is only going to get wider as time passes, unless we can start to build competitive markets in these communities and find far more efficient ways to serve their populations.

For Ayllu, then, helping social enterprises scale is not simply about bringing great ideas to more and more communities.  It’s about helping to create competitive, efficient, and INCLUSIVE markets that will both help lift families out of poverty and also narrow the wealth gap.  That’s a cause worth fighting for.