Chattanooga Pulse

He was the perfect president for the “Roaring Twenties,” a time when it appeared everyone believed the engine of American capitalism was a locomotive at full steam on an endless track. The business of America, Calvin Coolidge famously proclaimed, is business. Of course, as we all know, by the end of the decade the engine had screeched to a shuddering halt. Business was paralyzed for more than a decade.

Reagan, Clinton, and George W. Bush were Coolidge protégés. They too believed in the limitless potential of an unfettered economy—but the train has run off the tracks again, and we are all now trying to recover from the effects of that unbridled optimism.

Confidence in capitalism is at a 70-year low, and a growing number of people are looking for an alternative. For them, the business of America is still business, but they are advocating a different approach, one still profit-driven, but more inclusive in its practices, more democratic in its embrace. They call it social entrepreneurialism.

This isn’t a new idea. Florence Nightingale, modern nursing pioneer and founder of the first nursing school in the UK, was a 19th-century social entrepreneur.  Robert Owen, one of the founders of the cooperative movement, was an 18th-century social entrepreneur. He made his fortune in the cotton trade, but spent much of his life trying to improve the lot of people who worked in northern England cotton mills. He wanted to give the workers an opportunity to profit directly from their labor.  He wasn’t entirely successful, but others took his ideas and made them work. Today, they are the foundation of the cooperative institutions that run many of the banks and insurance companies in Europe, and a very successful retail food distribution network in the UK.

A number of people here in Chattanooga are attempting to do the same thing. Nathan Shirai and his wife run World Next Door on Market Street. Their focus is on fair trade items from Central and South America, India and Asia; their objective is to help impoverished Third World people pull themselves out of poverty, helping them set up village-wide cooperatives to make and sell their goods for a “fair price” in the first world.

Helen Johnson and Josh McManus are also working to promote social entrepreneurialism in Chattanooga. In the summer of 2007, they started Create Here, an umbrella organization using the resources of the Lyndhurst Foundation to fund a range of initiatives. In addition to helping young artists and entrepreneurs, they have a program called Springboard that helps would-be entrepreneurs develop a viable business plan.

One of the people interested in helping with Springboard is Frank May. May and his partners have established an organization called Community Alliance of Social Entrepreneurs (CASE), which is introducing the concept of social entrepreneurialism to established business owners, and developing a program to help nascent Springboard entrepreneurs.

CASE will evaluate the entrepreneurs’ prospective plans in terms of their long-term economic sustainability, as well as their social and environmental impact. One of the three core principles of CASE social entrepreneurship is economic sustainability. Clearly, to survive long-term, the business must be consistently profitable. But for May and his partners, it is equally important to evaluate its potential social and environmental impact.

May has run a successful business in Chattanooga for more than 10 years.  Trim and fit with boundless enthusiasm and apparently endless energy, he combines the pragmatism of a businessman with the idealism of a social activist—the essence of social entrepreneurialism. He has a preacher’s passion, but understands he needs to do more than just point out inequities inherent in some standard business practices; he must outline exactly how they can be changed for the better.

May is the president of the company that owns The Pool Place on Lee Highway.  He also owns stores in Knoxville and Maryville, as well as Huntsville, Alabama, and Dalton, Georgia. It’s largely a seasonal business, but he manages to keep his employees on the payroll year-round by turning The Pool Place into The Christmas Store during the slow winter months.

Like Nathan Shirai, May has seen the crippling impact of poverty in the Third World firsthand. His experience dealing with Vietnamese furniture manufacturers who keep their prices artificially low by using underage labor left him determined to practice his principles in his business.
“I visited a company in Vietnam that employs 8-year-old children to make outdoor wood furnishings. The underage employees make it possible for them to keep their prices low, and buying from them would make it possible for me to dominate the market economically,” he says.

But as a capitalist with a conscience, May couldn’t bring himself to make the deal. “I want to offer the Vietnamese workers a living wage,” he says. “The furniture will cost more. It should cost more.”

He may be an idealist, but May insists he is far from alone in his conviction. The number of social entrepreneurialism proponents is multiplying, here in Chattanooga and across the country, according to him. As he sees it, our experience in the past 10 years, born of ideas that stretch back to the beginning of the 20th century, may serve to convince many more Americans of the legitimacy of a kinder, gentler, more democratic capitalism that doesn’t exploit the majority for the benefit of the minority, but rather builds on Robert Owen’s 18th-century vision of an inclusive enterprise that causes all boats to rise.

Owen’s vision was rooted in localism. Embracing that ideal, CASE is launching an initiative called “Buy Local” for the month of November. The idea is to keep the profits generated in one of the heaviest sales months of the year right here in Chattanooga. More details on the initiative and a local shoppers guide are available from buychattanooga@gmail.com.