A wedding dress e-tailer wants to eradicate child marriage by 2030 with a proposal that’s hard to turn down.

Founded by Chantal Khoueiry, Brides do Good is a pioneering social enterprise that offers brides-to-be the opportunity to purchase the world’s most beautiful pre-loved and sample designer wedding gowns from designers including: Alexander McQueen, Oscar De La Renta, Valentino, Marchesa, Rosa Clara, Lela Rose, Temperley London, Stewart Parvin and Phillipa Lepley amongst others, at an affordable price and with the unprecedented charitable proposition to address the global challenge of eradicating child marriage by 2030 (one of the United Nations sustainable goals) through partner charities Plan International and Too Young to Wed.

“When friends revealed they spent over thousands on a dress they’d only wear once and wouldn’t let go of it because of the emotional connection, I started thinking about the millions of wedding gowns sitting in boxes somewhere. And then my mind went to the millions of girls that are each year barbarically forced into early marriage and a life of violence – and then, inspiration struck!” – Chantal Khoueiry

Headquartered in London, Brides do Good’s unique business platform invites brides from all over the world to sell their designer wedding gowns and receive a third of the sale back, a third goes toward the operations of the site, and a third goes to Plan International and Too Young To Wed.

Brides do Good also offers bridal designers and retailers a solution to move excess inventory. Designers and retailers may sell their sample gowns and excess stock (non pre-owned) to Brides do Good, with a portion of the sale donated to Plan International and Too Young To Wed.

“We are absolutely delighted to be working with Brides Do Good and spreading the word of our fight against child marriage to past and future brides.” – Plan International

“We feel that while for most brides, weddings are the stuff dreams are made of, for many out there, less fortunate than ourselves, this is quite the opposite. We are in a position to help and support something that we feel strongly about.” – Caroline Burstein, Browns Bride

“If you decide to sell your gowns after the wedding, try to make sure it is going to a good home. Brides do Good sends a third of each sale to charities (such as Plan International, Too Young To Wed) to help protect the millions of girls who are at risk of early marriage” – Livia Firth

A symphony of social enterprise and forward-thinking retail, storytelling and love, Brides do Good is a movement: By Brides, for Girls.

 

I want to spend today doing things that prepare me to thrive tomorrow.

With my decision to leave management consulting and New York, I’m keeping to my 2016 commitments: chasing opportunities that challenge and seeking environments that stretch me furthest. It’s tough. And it should be. 

Eleven days into my stay in Colombia has meant a foreign land, a different culture and a new language. I’ve felt incredibly lonely, but also full to the brim with excitement. This is where exponential growth happens… and my intention was growth (be careful what you wish for!).

I want to write my story.  

I have an idea of who I want to be and the values I want to lead with. I fall short frequently and desperately want to fail less. A strong internal conviction will help me be who I grew up dreaming to be.

I’m human and humans fail, but process will win championships (Nick Saban).

Taking time away from the perpetual motion that consumes New York, NYCTech and management consulting allows me to slow down and create moments to consider process (internal practice) and cement the best parts together.

Back home, I made as much money as I was spending. If I didn’t work, I couldn’t survive. I needed to sit in a job that I didn’t love. That hamster wheel meant less time to discover things that excite me. It meant less opportunities for creation and creativity. The hamster wheel wasn’t helping me reach my goals.

By jumping off the hamster wheel, I created an opportunity to think, act, and grow.

Why a strong internal practice?

The distance between knowledge and success is action. Knowledge alone is useless.

I have tremendous potential, but my action has been sporadic. I’ve had interesting experiences and results, but I ask myself: what if I could deliver, contribute, engage and create consistently? If working at 20% has gotten me here, where can 80% get me? In less nerdy terms, what’s possible when I let my light shine?

How do strong internal practices happen?

Setting difficult goals with challenging timelines and achieving them. Falling in love with the process. Understanding that inches turn into feet, feet turn into yards and yards turn into miles. Every action is a move towards the distance.

What do I want in a strong internal practice?

Discipline: do what needs to be done. Everyday.
Patience: with people, ideas and myself.
Understanding: compassion/empathy/ a natural human centered design mindset.
Fortitude: mental toughness.
Mindfulness: strength in silence. power in observation.
Perseverance/Grit: to get hit, to hurt and decide to keep moving forward  

You couldn’t do that as a Management Consultant in New York?

New York is full of people that identify goals and knock them out of the park. I chose to change my life because I’m in pursuit of exponential growth, and management consulting was only showing me incremental growth. 

I’ve been in Medellin, Colombia for a 11 days and it’s already stretching me. I’ve also got the bandwidth to make decisions that help me in my pursuit of exponential growth and for building the mechanism for delivering action when opportunities arrive.

Why I’m in Latin America

Being in Colombia helps make my immediate goals more attainable. It’s cheaper than New York, sits in a time-zone between the East and West coast of America (my ideal clients and family), and provides a culturally-rich environment for language learning & cultural mindset broadening.

Tangibly, what I hope to achieve while in Colombia

• Learn and interact effectively in Spanish
• Be fight-ready in Jiu Jitsu
• Build deep relationships with people interested in bettering their city. Particularly key players in tech/startups, innovation, policy and people. 

How long am I gone?

I booked a one-way flight to Colombia. I’ll be in Medellín for at least six months. After that, we’ll see. 

But Money! 

To make money, I incorporated a digital agency/marketing company. I support companies I believe in and work with people I admire. While here I’m doing really challenging work with clients in product, marketing, and writing. I will continue to do challenging work that grows me professionally and pays me. In my life I want to do really cool (professional) things.

Crazy, crazy cool things that grow me but also allow me to make a dent on the organizations I’m working with. In this moment, I feel this style of working and lifestyle will help me do those things more than management consulting did.

And Career!?

I believe this journey will help me be a more capable and professional person. I will learn lessons that make me uniquely effective to organizations in an ever globalizing, ambiguous and interdisciplinary world. I want to ensure that I’m doing things to inspire confidence in other people, to let me help build their companies, join their boards and lead their communities, families and futures.

I recognize that unplugged from traditional mechanisms and ladders, I lose institutional sponsors, coaches, and mentors. I enlist my community for support as I identify tough questions, challenge areas and the right people who can help me as I understand how to prepare myself for leading teams, building organizations and making things happen.

Why?

I love traveling. I love understanding new people and places. I love learning and being challenged. I want to do more than climb the ladder and run in the hamster wheel. I want to write my story. I want to be in charge of my life. Many people hate being a corporate slave; being stuck in a job they don’t like. I want to love what I do. I want to grow as a human, as a partner and as a creator. I have a lot to learn. This helps me do it.

It’s a scary thing to let your light shine. I frequently dim my own in fear. I no longer want to. And I don’t want my communities to either. Look around. The world decays without our light. It needs us to shine. 

This experience challenges me to be the best version of me. It puts me in the best position to unlock my potential.

 

How many times have you heard this before after missing a deadline at work: “You need to show more leadership.”  And if you get angry with a colleague: “You didn’t show any leadership spirit.”

When a team doesn’t perform well, someone will say the supervisor doesn’t have leadership abilities. I have experienced this scenario for much of my career. At some point, I even started questioning the idea of leadership and asked myself: “Is leadership just an artificial incentive, invented by organizations to make their employees accountable and make them do more work?

In all the above mentioned situations there may be other dynamics at play, but because we’ve coined the term called ‘leadership,’ we throw it around conveniently. Imagine if there was no word called ‘leadership’ in the dictionary. How would we deal with many situations? If work didn’t get done, people would talk about it without finding someone to blame. If a team doesn’t perform, people will talk about the lack of performance and the reasons, and not the leadership abilities of a supervisor.

If there was a power cut, people would not blame the prime minister, but instead work together to solve the problem, or accept the reality and live in darkness. The leadership label is affecting our ability to go deeper on issues. There are hundreds of definitions of leadership and most of them focus on the ‘leader’ and their personal characteristics.

There’s a belief that by adjusting, fixing or changing this one person, we will get the outcome that we want. Leadership is not about an individual. If it’s not about an individual, then what is it about? Leadership is a space in which people come together to realize their individual and collective potential.

httpss://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwSb0RI9inQ

At all the peace talks Joji Felicitas Pantoja attended in the conflict-troubled Philippines island of Mindanao, coffee was served to put people at ease. But Pantoja soon realised talking about peace wasn’t enough in communities unable to address basic needs like food and health, sparking an idea to use coffee as a vehicle for change.

Setting up “Coffee for Peace”, Pantoja worked with Mindanao farmers to revitalise an industry long abandoned for cash crops like rubber and bananas – and her farmers’ earnings tripled.

“Peace is not just the absence of war … if we don’t address the economic aspect, it’s not complete,” Pantoja, 56, a self-described peacebuilder, said by Skype from Mindanao.

Across Asia women like Pantoja are re-examining society’s problems through a business lens, playing a more leading role than women in other regions in harnessing the power of markets to tackle poverty and social ills, according to the first experts’ poll on the best countries for social entrepreneurs.

The Thomson Reuters Foundation survey of the world’s 45 biggest economies found the Philippines was the country where women fared best when taking into account representation in leadership roles in social enterprises and the gender pay gap.

In fact five other spots among the top 10 ranking in the poll of nearly 900 experts in social enterprise were in Asia – Malaysia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia and Thailand.

Russia, Norway, and Canada rounded out the top 10, while Brazil came last and the United States fared badly in the perception poll due to concerns women are paid less than men.

Women interviewed across Asia described a fairer playing field and higher drive to put compassion over valuation as the reason women are doing so well as social entrepreneurs.

COMMUNITY FOCUS

Overall the online poll, conducted between June 9 and July 15 in partnership with Deutsche Bank, the Global Social Entrepreneurship Network (GSEN) and UnLtd, foundations for social entrepreneurs, found 68 percent of experts said women are well represented in leadership in social enterprises.

A study by Deloitte in 2015 showed that women hold only 12 percent of the world’s board seats while data from the Inter-Parliamentary Union shows women account for about 23 percent of all national parliamentarians.

However only 48 percent of experts said women in social enterprises were paid the same as men, with the United States particularly concerned on this issue.

“Whereas men want to be like Mark Zuckerberg, women want to do well for the community,” said Peetachai “Neil” Dejkraisak, who founded a rice social enterprise called Siam Organic with a female business school classmate.

“They are more compassionate and want a meaningful life … Social entrepreneurs are inherently driven by improving people’s lives, lifting people out of poverty. Women social entrepreneurs are better at doing this than their male counterparts.”

Neil and Pornthida “Palmmy” Wongphatharakul began work on Siam Organic as business school students, not setting out with the aim of building a business seeking to improve society.

“The social impact was tied into the business model – the better the business, the more impact for the farmer,” said Palmmy.

With Thai rice farmers earning about $12 per month per acre, they decided to home in on the U.S. market and innovations – mainly the organic purple “Jasberry” rice, high in antioxidants – to boost farmers’ earnings and win health-conscious customers.

The company now works with 1,000 farmers and sold about 100 tonnes of its specialty rice in 2015 to Thai and U.S. buyers – and its farmers earn an average of $180 per month per acre.

“My objective has always been whatever you do, you always have to help the farmers you promised to help. When a decision comes along, you put the farmers first,” said Palmmy, 31.

DUPED MAID TAKES LEADERSHIP ROLE

Indonesian former domestic worker Heni Sri Sundani never imagined she would become a social entrepreneur, using education to empower children and families in Indonesian villages.

From an impoverished farming family, in 2005 she went to Hong Kong as a maid to support her family but discovered her recruiter kept half her salary, inspiring her to use any spare time to study for a degree in entrepreneurial management.

She returned home six years later with a degree and started offering free classes to children through her Smart Farmer Kids in Action movement, teaching science and also modern farming.

As the movement grew to include over 1,000 students in eight villages, she began charging a small fee to help cover running costs but most parents, who are farmers, could not afford it.

So she created another community programme to help the farmers sell their products online and introduced eco-tourism, boosting their incomes so they could pay for schooling.

“We hope these children stay and empower others in the villages to become educated farmers. We don’t want them to go to big cities to become exploited labourers or end up becoming human trafficking victims,” said 29-year-old Sundani.

“People I met were amazed what a woman like me can do. More women started to join me because a woman is not just a housewife,” she said, adding she raised money via crowdfunding.

Malaysian Mastura Rashid realised it was not enough to give free food to the poor when she was a volunteer handing out meals to homeless people in Kuala Lumpur as this was not sustainable.

So she started working with urban families who earn under $250 a month last year, selling their home-cooked traditional coconut rice and spicy shrimp paste dish “nasi lemak” to office towers and petrol kiosks under “The Nasi Lemak Project”.

“We want to help the poor by giving them direct access to the market. Malaysians love to eat, there is no other better product than nasi lemak,” Mastura, 26, said.

Mastura said Malaysia’s emerging social entrepreneur scene is competitive but a level playing field for women like her, unlike traditional businesses where women face discrimination.

Her project has received grants from two government-linked agencies set up to encourage innovation and startups.

“I don’t see gender bias in social entrepreneurship – in politics or marriages, perhaps yes. There is no discrimination towards me as a woman social entrepreneur,” Mastura added.

(For the full results of the 2016 poll on the best countries for social entrepreneurs go to poll2016.trust.org)

By Alisa Tang @alisatang in Bangkok, and Beh Lih Yi @behlihyi in Jakarta. Editing by Belinda Goldsmith. c Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women’s rights, corruption and climate change. 

 

Porn has been proven to release more dopamine in our brains than heroin. While billions are spent on winning the war on terror and drugs, who is fighting for the mental wellbeing of our children?

Technology-enabled porn is also teaching violence against women and girls. Dr. Gail Dines explores the online business that gets more hits each month than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined.

Rather than looking at how corporate-owned media affect the way in which girls and women construct gender and sexual identities that produce and reproduce hegemonic gender relations, some scholars are arguing that we need to take a more positive approach to media targeted at women. Starting from the premise that media texts are polysemic (open to multiple meanings), feminist media scholars – often sounding more like fans than researchers – have begun to argue, often without any research to back up their claims, that women and girls may actually be empowered by hypersexualized images that objectify women because they offer a kind of pleasure that comes with being noticed and desired by men.

88% of scenes in top-rented and selling porn have been found to contain physical aggression.

35% of all internet downloads are pornographic. 93% of boys between 12 and 17 go online. A third of them have unmonitored computer access. 88% of scenes in top-rented and selling porn have been found to contain physical aggression. Females are far more likely than males to be sexualized in the media. Pornography has become a primary source of information about sex among children and adolescents.

Why do so many scholars ignore the socio-economic dynamic within which porn is produced, distributed, and consumed that shapes the very products that circulate within the mainstream market? My major concern is how the “wider political and economic conditions” shape the way in which porn is produced and distributed. This involves taking a critical look at  how porn as an industry works within the global economic system.

In 2011, at a plenary session of a conference in London called “Pornified? Complicating Debates about the Sexualization of Culture,” pro-porn scholars Feona Attwood, Clarissa Smith, and Martin Barker argued that there is no such thing as “it.” The “it” they were referring to was the porn industry, and their reasoning was that because there are so many sub-genres of porn circulating on the Internet, there couldn’t possibly be a cohesive industry. While this is a rather strange argument given the way management scholars analyze industries – nobody would argue, for example, that there is no such thing as a car industry because there are lots of different types of cars on the road – it also speaks to the ways in which much of what passes for scholarship today in the world of pro-porn studies is little more than simplistic musings rather than rigorous research.

Ironically, the porn industry would be the first group to disagree with the argument that a porn industry does not exist. In a 2000 interview, Andrew Edmond, president and CEO of Flying Crocodile, a USD20-million pornography Internet business, discussed how surprising it is that so few people understand the scale and scope of the industry. Edmond’s explanation for this was that “a lot of people (outside adult entertainment) get distracted from the business model by (the sex). It is just as sophisticated and multilayered as any other market place. We operate just like any Fortune 500 company.”

In the absence of thorough and robust sex education programs in schools, porn fills the knowledge gap for children and youth and thus becomes an important player in the development of adolescent sexual templates. This is especially worrisome given the findings of a comprehensive content analysis of contemporary porn that found that the majority of scenes from 50 of the top-rented porn movies contained both physical and verbal abuse targeted at the female performers. An industry of this magnitude and reach that so blatantly produces images of violence against women is a worthy area of investigation because it plays a role in constructing notions of gender and gender relations.

An obvious starting point in developing a map of the porn industry is an analysis of how porn is a key driver of technological innovations and pioneers new business models that subsequently permeate the wider economy. A key factor driving the growth of the porn market has been the development of technologies that allow users to buy and consume porn in private on almost any device with a screen, without embarrassing trips to seedy stores or video rental shops. Porn does not just benefit from these technologies, however; it has helped create the technologies that expand its own market.

The porn industry has also been a pioneer of new business models that help to make commercial video profitable, opening the way for the commercial viability of video-sharing websites such as YouTube and television series downloads to cellphones and iPods. The porn industry has been able to exploit the unregulated, freewheeling nature of business on the web, which has made it very easy for small companies to enter new markets with very little capital. It has also allowed them to pursue international strategies, since the jurisdictional ambiguity of Internet geography facilitates the avoidance of taxation and regulation.

“Porn is becoming a mainstream, everyday business.”

Porn has led the way in obtaining free content from users, repackaging and then reselling it. The porn industry has also developed marketing devices that have been adopted by other Internet sectors, such as free “supersites” that build traffic and cross-link to numerous providers, generating advertising and pay-per-click revenues. There is even an investment firm that deals specifically with the porn industry.

While these activities are in themselves unremarkable business operations, they signal that porn is becoming a mainstream, everyday business – a legitimate enterprise being taken more seriously by Wall Street, the media, and the political establishment.

According to an article on the website therichest.com, MindGeek is the number one distributor of porn in the world that ranks among the top three bandwidth consumption companies on earth.

The porn industry, despite its efforts to portray itself as progressive and sexually liberating, is especially aggressive in organizing against regulation so that it can continue to grow in market size and mainstream acceptability. The industry seeks to operate in an almost regulation-free zone and has attempted to shred existing and proposed protections for porn performers against injury, the transmission of STDs, and the exploitation of minors.

Pornography operates as an industry , and this means that we need to examine how it uses its corporate dollars to establish legitimacy and lobby for political and legal change. Lobbying is a central part of the porn industry’s business plan, because any legal restrictions on content, production, and distribution could reduce profits. Ultimately, pornographers don’t tell the truth about men, but I know as the mother of a son, he is worth better than this. Our children are worth more, our culture is worth more, our boys are worth more and our girls are worth more.

This is an abridged version from Dines’ academic paper: “There is no such thing as IT”:  Toward a Critical Understanding of the Porn Industry.”

Gail Dines – Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at Wheelock College in Boston, Massachusetts.

Kidbox has announced the launch of their Kids Board of Directors. The company is the first online shopping style box that deliver cool brands to kids, and is also on a mission to clothe children in need. They want to empower children to give back and start the conversation between parents and kids about social good.

Kidbox launched in spring 2016 with a social mission at its core. Through a partnership with K.I.D.S./Fashion Delivers, Kidbox outfits a child in need for every Kidbox purchased. The partnership supports their mission to donate clothing to one million children and enables parents and kids to start a conversation about giving back. They are enlisting young leaders across the country to further realize their goal.

Once selected, the Kids Board members will attend an annual all expense paid 2-day conference and workshop with the Kidbox team in New York City. They will have the opportunity to meet and work alongside various members of the team including Buyers, Marketers, Designers and Web Engineers and will be given the opportunity to collaborate on business projects such as designing an original item of clothing, developing a new social media activation campaign and supporting programming at a major charitable event. The Kids Board will take part in video conferences, while continuing to represent Kidbox as local ambassadors for social good in their respective regions of the United States.

“By involving talented kids in the KIDBOX mission, the team is gaining invaluable insights into the meaningful causes that matter to the youth of today,” said Kidbox CEO Miki Racine Berardelli. “We hope that these young leaders will aid in fostering an even greater spirit of generosity worldwide.”

Kidbox  is committed to outfitting more than 1 million children in need, and will be inviting the board to support the brand in achieving this goal. They will work hand-and-hand with the Kids Board Members to figure out the right way to make a meaningful impact—from scholarships to social engagement campaigns, video series to bus tours. The company also expects to learn a great deal from the kids on the board, inviting them to help develop ideas that will improve the business.

To apply to join the board, prospective candidates are encouraged to fill out a questionnaire online and submit a 30 sec – 2 minute video by December 15, 2016 answering the question “How can young people change the world and what am I doing to help?”. Videos must be uploaded to YouTube and a link to the video along with application materials can be emailed to Kidbox at kidsboard@kidbox.com. Children must be between the ages of 6 and 15 on January 1, 2017.