On Wednesday, May 23, 18:30 we are co-organizing A 3D academic view on social entrepreneurship in The Hub Vienna. 

Learn about the latest insights and research on social entrepreneurship from four Hub Members that are not only serial social entrepreneurs, but also contributed to the academic discussion through their respective research. From the support needs of social entrepreneurs, to the relations of social entrepreneurs and business angels and the role of social entrepreneurship in poverty reduction, Evelina Lundqvist, Michael Bauer-Leeb, Katharina Norden and Hinnerk Hansen take the chance to share with you their academic perspective on Social Entrepreneurship with a space for Q&As.

Evelina Lundqvist and Michael Bauer-Leeb: ”Facilitating a business relationship between social entrepreneurs and business angels.”

Kathrina Norden (ThreeCoins): “Social entrepreneurship and the World Bank’s poverty reduction strategies: how to apply solutions that work.”

Hinnerk Hansen: “The support needs of social entrepreneurs”.

Sign up here!

See you there! 
Michael & Evelina

Thanks to everyone who participated this evening at Zero Waste Design-Denken im Business in Mangolds in Graz!

Thanks to our main partner Saubermacher, partner Die Grünen and supporter Grüne Akademie! We love youuuuuu!

And Mangolds also – Julia Pengg and Natalie Pötscha – you rule!!

Here you can download the presentation in German. (PDF, 6,2 MB)

If you have questions and ideas, please let us know!

Thanks for working for a Zero Waste world!

Alexandra, Michael and Evelina

PS. Check out ZeroWasteSommerWochen for kids in Steiermark! Sign up now! 

Tomorrow, Saturday at 18:00 we start with the first workshop in Mangolds Café and Restaurant in Graz. See the rest of the program here. Bring your cooking apron and come!

Thanks also to our Goodiebag partners! 

Also thank you to: 

The people in the pictures are (left to right): Pernilla Alexandersson, Mikael Sundström, Evelina Lundqvist, Olle Svahn, Madeline Opira, Kowsar Aden, Henrik Peel

… Jenny Claesson, Josefin Uhnbom, Rebecka Hagman, Ebba Åkerman, Vanja Höglund, and Christoffer Hansen

… and Pinky, of course!

Thanks Ernesto for the invitation!

You may have noticed that The Good Tribe’s logo is an elephant, and that we like pink. People are often very curious about the elephant, our name, and our choice of colour, and ask us: Why an elephant? Why a tribe? Why pink? We love these three questions, because in answering those we get to talk about the story behind The Good Tribe and our values.

On February 22, 2009, what we now recognize as the day The Good Tribe was born, Gayathri and Evelina visited a temple together outside of Madurai, southern India. All of the sudden something big standing in a corner of the sparely lit temple caught Evelina’s attention. A huge elephant, inside the crowded temple! Gayathri met Evelina’s astonished looks with laughter and said, “It’s normal! You want to get blessed!?” Said and done. We gave the elephant (and its master) a coin, bowed humbly, and the elephant took turns to bless us by resting its trunk on our heads for a short second. Breathtaking! We felt pretty small in that moment. The elephant encounter was just one detail of the amazing trip we did together through Tamil Nadu and Kerala, during which the idea of The Good Tribe was born.

So when it later was time to choose a symbol for our logo, what else could art director Magnus Gillberg do than get us an elephant! More than being just a powerful symbol for the both of us, elephants represent values that are highly important to us: integrity, long-term thinking, knowledge, intelligent and value based leadership, and the importance of the tribe.

So why a tribe?
One of the people who have influenced our business and marketing thinking most is the author Seth Godin. His message is that in order to find our place on the market we need to build a tribe of people who share and support our goal. For us this means to create a Zero Waste society, in which we empower people to take care of the amazing resources we have, both in terms of material resources and human capacity – and it starts by gathering these people who share and support our goal. For us a tribe also implies that we should do business with tribe spirit: we show solidarity, act with compassion and love, our leadership is value based, we are courageous, and we are way more powerful and make much more noise when we stand and act together.

And what about the colour pink?
Pink is different. Especially in the field of sustainability and environmental issues most things tend to be greener than green. Don’t get us wrong, we love green! But it certainly has its advantages to be the pink flower in a field of green. But back to different. In order to rethink and challenge today’s economic structure and values, the destructive consumer behaviour, and the focus on infinite economic growth we have to think pink, meaning out of the ordinary, unconventional, pioneering, and joyful. We have to show that there are accessible alternatives (like Zero Waste and Social Entrepreneurship) to established ideas, norms, and values, which lead to a healthy and happy planet. This change is going to be anything but easy. But a powerful method accomplishing change is addressing emotions – especially passion, fun, and creativity – and what better colour to communicate that is there than sparkling pink!?

Enter: Pinky Ele
Now let’s take a step further and combine the three parts – think of a pink elephant tribe! Hello The Good Tribe! And our muse, the pink elephant: Pinky Ele! We’ve noticed that having a pink elephant in the room, even a small one made out of porcelain, makes people look twice, smile, and ask intrigued questions. An excellent way of engaging conversations, which lead to inspiration, rethinking, creativity, exchange of knowledge, and perhaps even actions which contribute to a happy planet!

In the spirit of The Good Tribe we wish you lots of pink elephant love!

Gayathri Rathinavelu & Evelina Lundqvist 
Founders of The Good Tribe

Photo: Rupert Pessl, The Good Tribe

Last night, Gayathri, Sandra and Evelina were interviewed at Tekniska museet’s (museum of technology) Nerd Café in Stockholm. Watch the Bambuser live stream to learn everything about The Good Tribe and Zero Waste! (In Swedish)

Enjoy!

Last Monday, April 23 The Good Tribe was invited by Othmar Lehner – one of the supervisors of Evelina’s and Michael’s master’s thesis, and head of ACRN – to present their research findings, as well as The Good Tribe at ACRN’s Spring School on Social Entrepreneurship. ACRN is an academic research and collaboration network dedicated to enhance and broaden the knowledge of social entrepreneurship.

Michael had a great two-hour discussion with doctoral students and social entrepreneurship experts from around the globe. Evelina was also scheduled to participate, but she unfortunately got sick the day before.

Michael reports: “We talked about our findings of the master’s thesis, as well as about The Good Tribe’s mojo, vision and goals. It was a fantastic event thriving with energy and lots of Q&A!”

Thanks to Othmar Lehner and Karin Stichlberger for organizing and hosting a great event – we’re happy to come again :)

Photo: Karin Stichlberger, edit The Good Tribe

Zero Waste may sound visionary, almost utopian – but we believe it can become reality – again. Yes, that’s right – there was a time in the history of mankind were there was literally no waste at all. Following Ulrich Grober, author of “Die Entdeckung der Nachhaltigkeit” (roughly translates to “The Discovery of Sustainability”), almost everything was used up entirely, almost nothing was left over or discarded as something that has no value.

Up until the beginning of the fossil period and the age of industrialization the flow of materials was – if you will – a closed loop. All materials taken from nature went back to nature. In case you say that’s romanticizing, as the old ages displayed environmental problems as well – of course, but keep in mind that those were problems on a significantly lower scale and that we’re talking about the flow of material here.

Then humanity discovered the great power of fossil fuels and industrialization set in. Don’t get me wrong, industrialization has got some merits. The steep technological development, the provision of goods and services to many people at affordable prices, and a huge increase of wealth to the benefit of a large number of people is a nice outcome. Most of us live longer and are healthier than our ancestors would have ever imagined. Many of us have an abundance of possibilities at our command – almost instantly and 24 hours a day.

But – and you could have guessed there’s a “but”, couldn’t you – at some point we lost control. This repetitive, expanding pattern of take-make-waste to fuel economic growth and ensure our quality of life kept many of us busy and quite a few of us apparently happy for quite a while. However, today we seem to have reached a dead end. Despite our ongoing and unchanged consumption patterns happiness is not increasing. Despite having access to everything all the time quality of life is not increasing. Despite incinerators and recycling all those mountains of waste are not shrinking. They’re growing and growing. Something is going awry here.

In The Good Tribe we see that the concept of Zero Waste offers a solution to some of these problems. Not only is it a “future-focused concept [...] that demands a commitment to ‘design out’ all present and future waste from the life cycle of every product, building, or system”, as Steffen Lehmann and Robert Crocker put it in their most recent book “Designing for Zero Waste”. Zero Waste is also a philosophy, a certain mindset that lets us look beyond our unsustainable consumption patterns. It urges us to reconsider if we really need this next and next and next piece of whatever it is we believe we must have so urgently by confronting us directly with the “true material realities of our present crisis and its growing list of devastating consequences” (Lehmann, Crocker).

If you want to learn more about Zero Waste, check out our first research paper titled “What is Zero Waste?”, which we will present May 14 at our ZeroWasteFest! discussion and networking event “Zero Waste Design Thinking in Business”. The paper will also be made available for download. The photo above is from our preparation for ZeroWasteFest!.

If you want to start digging deeper and learn more about sustainability, zero waste, and what you as an individual can do to become more sustainable, here’s some literature we can recommend to start with:
• Steffen Lehmann and Robert Crocker, “Designing for Zero Waste”, Routledge (in English only)
• Ulrich Grober “Die Entdeckung der Nachhaltigkeit”, Verlag Antje Kunstmann (in German only)
• Leo Hickman “A Life Stripped Bare: My Year Trying to Life Ethically”, Eden Project Books (in English, also available in German under the title “Fast Nackt: Mein abenteuerlicher Versuch ethisch korrekt zu leben” via your local/online bookstore)

Michael Bauer-Leeb

Photo: Rupert Pessl

Michael Bauer-Leeb and Evelina Lundqvist interviewed by Nina Trebien and David Trebien at Austrian Social Business Day, March 15 about ZeroWasteFest! May 12 to 14 in Graz. (In German.)

Happy Monday!

Together with our Swedish collaboration partners Pål Mårtensson from Kretsloppsparken and Elin Lutke, our Brazilian-English-Swedish translator and former waste management tour coordinator for Cirque de Soleil, we went through the next steps of the Scandinavian field trip.

In a update meeting with Elin Lutke, our Brazilian-English-Swedish translator and former waste management tour coordinator for Cirque de Soleil and Pål Mårtensson, Kretsloppsparken, Gothenburg city.

The trip is for Brazilian politicians that are interested in looking at the latest innovations and thoughts around sustainable development within waste management. The trip will take place in the end of May. We will be visiting cities, enterprises, centers and organizations concerning waste and energy. It will be an intensive trip filled with a lot of energy, creativity and entrepreneurship! The purpose of the trip is to trigger ideas, exchange knowledge, experiences, receiving concrete methods and tools for working with waste management in a creative and efficient way.

More detailed information about the program is on it’s way, stay tuned!

Love!
Gayathri