Sunday – Blogtalk Radio – June 30, 2013

Welcome to another Java Hope Live Blogtalk radio program. This is your host Brenda Moore. I know it has been a busy week for all of my listeners. So I am pleased that you have taken 30 minutes out of your busy schedule to see what’s new at Java Hope.

I am happy to announce that Java Hope won First Place in the recent Pure Michigan Social Entrepreneurship Challenge. On June 18th, I was privilege to pitch the Java Hope program before a group of distinguished judges in Lansing MI. It was a wonderful event allowing social entrepreneurs to tell their story of why they were social entrepreneurs.

I have also been invited back for the Fall event and to participate in their Fellows program. This is truly an honor and I’m looking forward to the next event.

The challenge was to pitch a 5 minute investor speech without a prompt. So I had to remember my speech. The greater challenge was when my coach emailed me and said he had reviewed my speech and CHANGED A FEW THINGS! Of course he told me a day before the event.

I now had to remember a new speech in less than 24 hours. Thank goodness for cell phones. I recorded the revised speech on my phone and played it continuously.

When it was my turn to speak, I actually remembered it and pitched it flawlessly. Amazing. So I won first place and a monetary reward.

Now some of you may not be aware of what is a social entrepreneur. So let me tell you. This definition was coined by Ashoka the largest network of social entrepreneurs worldwide. They have nearly 3,000 Ashoka Fellows in 70 countries putting their system changing ideas into practice.

Social entrepreneurs are individuals with innovative solutions to society’s most pressing social problems. They are ambitious and persistent, tackling major social issues and offering new ideas for wide-scale change. Ashoka has a vision that everyone can be a Changemaker by responding quickly and effectively to

social challenges and where each individual has the freedom, confidence and societal support to address any problem and drive change.

Social Entrepreneurs in practice

Rather than leaving societal needs to the government or business sectors, social entrepreneurs find what is not working and solve the problem by changing the system, spreading the solution, and persuading entire societies to take new leaps.

Social entrepreneurs often seem to be possessed by their ideas, committing their lives to changing the direction of their field. They are both visionaries and ultimate realists, concerned with the practical implementation of their vision above all else.

Each social entrepreneur presents ideas that are user-friendly, understandable, ethical, and engage widespread support in order to maximize the number of local people that will stand up, seize their idea, and run with it. In other words, every leading social entrepreneur is a mass recruiter of local changemakers—a role model proving that citizens who channel their passion into action can do almost anything. Some of you listening to me are Changemakers. We want to help you become a Changemaker and impact and individual or an entire community for good.

Now for those of you who are not familiar with Java Hope and what it does, I want to acquaint you with our program and tell you why and how it got started. I am a coffee roaster. I had the privilege of traveling to coffee producing nations to purchase coffee for my customers.

While traveling in Ethiopia, our tour leader took our group to a home where we had made a financial contribution to help a child walk normally. He had a club foot. Our donation was to be used to pay for his surgery enabling him to walk and play normally. However the child approached us limping….indicating that he never received the surgery.

Our tour leader called for his Mother to come out of the thatch roof house. After a considerable time, she came out of the house and informed him that the Father of the child had intercepted the check, using it to buy liquor. Needless to say the tour leader was embarrassed and my team was livid.

Upon arriving back in the states and waiting for my connecting flight from LA to Detroit, I made a decision to help Americans who were marginalized. A lofty idea occurred to me to place single struggling Moms in the coffee cart business.

The next week I called my team together and shared my vision. It was unanimously received and we began working on empowering women to become business owners.

It was difficult to get the idea off the ground because most people had no concept of what being a social entrepreneur was or how two businesses could merge and achieve one social good. This made it difficult to quickly launch and achieve critical mass.

Then on Sept. 6, 2011, an amazing thing happened. Governor Snyder imposed 5 year term limits on welfare recipients. Once a woman reaches the five year limit, she was removed from the welfare system and could never be reinstated. It went to the Supreme Court in 2012 and the Appeals court on April 25th of this year. Both upheld the Governors decision to impose 5 year term limits on welfare recipients.

This legislation crystallized our target market and we officially began developing a curriculum, recruiting workers and board members. The challenge was getting women interested in the program. They were suspicious and doubtful of their own abilities.

We then found another silver bullet when we became workforce trainers under Michigan Works. Our partnership with Michigan Works allows young women 18-21 to receive pay while enrolled in our Java Hope program. Women of varying ages up to 50 years, can find evaluate our program through the agency if they are interested in business ownership.

The Pure Michigan Social Entrepreneurship Challenge is the 3rd milestone for Java Hope. This widely publicized event made people very aware of what Social entrepreneurship is and how offers a more efficient system of answering systemic societal problems that before seemed impossible to resolve.

Over the next few weeks we will be interviewing women in the program as well as potential candidates to get a first-hand understanding of how the program is helping or could help them become economically empowered. Our goal is to inform you the listener why social entrepreneurship is a more efficient system and how you can get involved.

If you are interested or know someone who may be interested in Java Hope, please send me an email to

Brenda@javahope.org. You may also use this email if you are interested in working for Java Hope or being a panelist on any of our upcoming shows. Again the email address is Brenda@javahope.org.

So please tune in next week on Sunday at 3PM to hear another engaging Java Hope live program .

Until next week, take care.

Brenda Moore