Presentation given May 16th, 2020

II—Business models and social entrepreneurship

Two Key Concepts:

Green entrepreneurship / Win Win

• Birders paying entrance fees, avitourism and the change of values around Mindo over time ha pasture/ha forest
  • Twenty years ago a hectare of pasture cost perhaps three time more than one of forest. Today the opposite is true.
• Donations cultivation from individuals, as personal hand-shake type transactions, web form on our site, short donation letters written to private foundations.
• Provision of native species trees from nurseries in our reserves, stocked with seeds and seedlings from our forests.
• CO2 emissions compensation relationships to fund forest restoration, for example with Tiny Footprint Coffee of Minnesota, USA.
• Grant writing for international NGO support. This is something we´ve been dedicating more time to and having more success at over the last handful of years, and we see this model growing in coming years.

Don´t let anyone confuse you, while our structure is non-profit and we don´t pay income tax this is not “just charity” like I debated with an older friend from Germany for hours one night long ago. What we do shares all the elements of a business. We have costs, income, margins, taxes, permits and the defining feature is that it´s highly competitive. Not just any project or initiative finds a niche and hangs around for 19 years.

So, as we continue to compete and to really think of creating positive impacts, we continue to grow our networks, our concepts, and we´ve been thinking in terms of landscapes. How does what we do fit into the social and ecosystemic fabric of our region? To this end we recently applied to become a pilot project for the LandScale approach under development by Verra.org, Rainforest Alliance and others, a certification system that helps document, measure and communicate different types of contributions to landscape sustainability. In this case we´re seeking to continue working with a consortium of local NGOs and communities to better protect and improve the main watershed where our bird sanctuaries are found, the Pachijal River watershed. The idea is that it´s a win for our donors, a win for us, a win for the river and its communities, a win for LandScale, a win for a long list of IUCN Red List endangered species, a whole lot of winning going on. So much winning, we´ll get tired of winning.

Now, if we look back over the last few minutes, over these various business models, these examples of social entrepreneurship, they all have one thing in common, the express desire and framing of a Win-Win approach. That´s cool, I like it, we´re nice people in the NGO world, we want to see everyone come out ahead, all boats rise with the tide and all those other clichés.

Really, think about it, I´m sure if we were to go through the entire 16 hours of todays event, we´d be liable to hear comments about win-win, triple bottom line valuations, quadruple, quintuple bottom line valuations, and maybe before long we´d even come across yet more bottom lines including more and more dimensions we haven’t heard about yet. “My sustainable business´s positive effects on the moon, perhaps?” Sorry, got a little carried away, I´m not trying to be facetious, really.

Here we´re going to shift gears