Bloomington

So your interested.  Good to hear.  This is a little about what we believe in and how we want to see it work.

Lets just jump into it then – How do you change businesses to become more sustainable?  How to get them to place corporate social responsibility as a priority?  Well for a long time now people have been lobbying the government as The solution to this issue.  Well lets reflect on how far that has got us.  I think we can all say it causes stress and a little bit of spite for everyone involved.  The businesses feel attacked, the consumers have to fight hard for this change, and the politicians have conflicts of interest that impair judgment.  So what else can we do?

Well there is this idea that was started by Brent out in San Fransisco.  It is called Carrotmob, and has really caught my attention.  Brent refers to it as a reverse boycott pretty much.  We are buying stuff to create change not the other way around.  We are using the carrot not the stick.  Everyone leaves happy

So how it works is we hold a competition between local coffee shops to see which business pledges to use the most of our money that day to become more sustainable.  This company then wins our business.  We then reward that business by rolling… deep!  We who up in the hundreds and Carrotmob it!  Instead of buying coffee at another shop that day we concentrate our buying power on the winning company, because we know that this money will be used for change.

Well its a start a small start.  This campaign will change one Bloomington coffee shop for the better, but does it stop there?  Neither Brent or I think so.  I think the best part of this method is that it really empowers consumers to demand more from their choice businesses.  It completely opens up a new way of thinking.  This type of reverse boycott could even happen on a major scale across the country.  What if we approached another homogeneous market, like the personal printer companies, and asked them to do this.  We could rally the organized buying power of thousands across the country.  Who cares which brand of printer you buy?  They are all essentially the same.  But do you care if that printer was produced in a wind powered factory, or used lots of recycled parts to make it, or used less ink/power to run?  Of course you would.  This is what joining Carrotmob can do for you!

Get excited – Change is coming! Obama isn’t the only one!