Shayna Harris, MBA ’11

A social entrepreneurs' quest to "be the change" and embrace the journey

This fall semester has been about exploring ways to serve the world with two Sloan colleagues, Adah Chan and Erica Dhawan. The three of us came together during the MIT Sloan AgInnovation study tour last spring, a 5-part course that we planned and taught, which culminated in a trip to Brazil and India to learn about agricultural innovations from small farmers and businesses.  

Emerging from that experience we recognized a very special working dynamic between the three of us, and a common quest to find impactful and meaningful careers which change the world in real ways.  Our backgrounds (finance, international development, and supply chain management), built upon a base of our common values of shared wealth + shared success, transparency, humility, and empathy, compelled me forward into that unknown territory of social entrepreneurship, the rollercoaster of start-ups, and an eye-opening personal development journey.

Embarking on the S+E+A (Shayna-Erica-Adah) journey has become the cornerstone of my MBA experience. In July we met in New York and pitched 15 ideas to each other of various social ventures that we could work on and explore during our last year at Sloan, to hopefully launch upon graduation. All of the ideas centered somehow around sustainable food, small-scale family farmers, and living healthy, green, chemical-free lives.  Those 15 ideas narrowed down to two, Supply Change and Mujer a Mujer, both of which we are currently actively working on with the guidance of professor (and mentor) Kara Blackburn.

Supply Change is about sustainable supply chains and the reduction of food waste.  The goal of the venture is to reduce the post-harvest loss of produce in developing countries, providing small-scale family farmers with additional income and increasing the availability of food.  We're building on the core of MIT, technology, to develop innovative ways to track & aggregate produce supply through a cell phone text message, and also develop a fruit processor that could work in rural areas to process fruit before it rots.  We're entering the MIT Yunus Challenge, which this year is focusing on agricultural processes, the Global Challenge, the 100K, and are taking the MIT Development Ventures course.  My Legatum Fellowship is supporting the initiative and team, and we're travelling to Paraguay in January with additional funds from the NCIIA, MIT Public Service Center, MIT Tech Dissemination Fellowship, and hopefully the MIT IDEAS competition!

Mujer a Mujer is a social venture that facilitates the access of green household products to low income communities whom currently don't buy them for a variety of reasons (access, $, awareness). We are working with five community health leaders in southern New Mexico -- which is one of the most polluted areas of the US-Mexico border -- to find ways that the community can invest in its own health by supporting local, green ventures.  

One of the activities that these incredible women have been undertaking is to teach others to make ecofriendly cleaning products with simple ingredients - baking soda, vinegar, water, essential oils - to get off the the dependency of harmful, conventional chemical products.  Based on this idea, together we launched a project and are selling green cleaning products door to door. This direct sales model provides a new avenue for income generation within the community.  We're also a series of Gleaning parties to teach our community here about how to make the products and raise funds for the pilot. We were recently featured on MIT's CoLab website, met with innovative designers and communicators from the IDEO design firm in Cambridge, and attended a Vida Verde green cleaner training (run by a Brazilian women's coop of house-cleaners) just yesterday.

I am so grateful to be on this journey, to have the support of friends and family, and the amazing amount of resources that MIT continues to offer.  Who knows what the future will bring. Increasingly I am seeing that it doesn't matter. Even when others are wrapped up in 'knowing', recruiting, and questioning my path. I know how to respond, and it's that I don't have the answers, but I know the values by which I live my life, and am getting incrementally closer (but will never quite reach) the 'what' ... as the SEA journey continues.

 

Propelled out of summer and into a very full fall!

I can hardly believe that the summer internship ended, two weeks of vaca, and voila! back to the books.  The summer rounded out really well.  I gained an invaluable insight into how a medium sized ($350m) company balances buying quality inputs (fruits and sugar) with an affordable price and sustainability targets in mind.   The Sourcing and Supplier Development Team (where I was based) did a good job exposing me to trainings and methodologies that leading companies use when they make purchasing decisions.  And in addition to the learning, I feel like in just 10 short weeks I was able to make a solid contribution to Stonyfield's ability to truly track the social and environmental impact of its food purchases.  I applied my background in social justice and fair trade to help develop sourcing values/principles, impact criteria, and make decisions on the management tools that will help them get there.  And got a whole lotta yummy, free yogurt!

Meanwhile, I've been able to organize my classes this semester around two start-up social enterprises that I'm working on.  Even though just one of my classes directly focused on sustainability, I am using class projects to further work in the arena.  For example, I spent the weekend interviewing two Mexican women about their cleaning habits and preferences for Listening to the Customer.  Otto Scharmer's Profound Innovation course has pushed me into a 'radical listening' zone which I hope will allow me to empathize more deeply with the communities where we are collaborating on these enterprises.  And Development Ventures is entirely focused on building a collaborative team of engineers, designers, and b-school students that can launch a social enterprise (in this case focused on fair food in Paraguay), taking advantage of MIT's many resources such as the 100K and the Yunus Challenge.

Lastly, MITFAC is rockin out!  We held a big kick off event last week where we hosted Santiago Paz, a very articulate and impactful coffee cooperative manager from Peru.  He talked to us about the difference that fair trade has made for his community as they've formed a niche for themselves in specialty markets, and the deep challenges that still remain.  We're holding our semester kick-off meeting this week, are launching a new advisory board of distinguished MIT professors, and will hold a semester long speakers series.

So life is busy as usual around Sloan, always inspiring and with so much to look forward to.

What's the carbon food-print of your yogurt?

One of the projects I’ve been working on this summer is to calculate the carbon ‘food-print’ of Stonyfield’s incoming (non-dairy) ingredients.  You know, the fruit, sugar, soy, and other ingredients that go into your yogurt.  To do so requires digging into a minute level of details from the company’s suppliers.  The idea is that, as a user, you would enter the volume purchased of each product into a dashboard.  You would paste the volume numbers into this dashboard year after year to get updated (and hopefully lower) CO2 numbers.  I’ve been working with a team to build the architecture and details behind that dashboard.

 

I started off with packaging, needing to know the weight in grams, material component parts, and total capacity of the containers, bags, and big metal totes in which these ingredients arrive to Stonyfield’s yogurt factory.  I’ve mainly used the industry tool “Compass” to get this CO2 output of packaging per item, but today I spent some time actually weighing the bag that the soy powder comes in, and then peeling apart unbleached paper bag and plastic lining to get individual weights and an accurate CO2 footprint. 

 

 

 
 

Additionally, I’ve been calculating the road distance from the warehouses of the various suppliers to the yogurt factory, collecting information on how many trips a year they make to the factory, and whether suppliers ship a full truck or “LTL” (less than truckload, or an un-full truck).  Also figured in is the temperature at which the products are shipped in the truck – be they room temperature, refrigerated, or frozen.

 

And it works!  All of this compiled data, organized neatly into a few spreadsheets, spits out the carbon footprint of these ingredients from the warehouse to Stonyfield, allowing Stonyfield to identify ‘hotspots’ in its supply chain for CO2 reductions.   This is huge, as ~ 12% of the carbon footprint from US households come from the whole process of food production, from the farm to the plate.  Next step for Stonyfield’s ingredient calculator will be to move further upstream in the supply chain, from the warehouse to the farmhouse, and eventually from the farmhouse to the field.  Eventually this, combined with the dairy and yogurt packaging footprint projects, will provide you yogurt-lovers with the whole picture on the carbon 'foodprint' of your yogurt!

Better World Design Competition - addressing Food Deserts

Just wanted to pass word of this awesome competition that Brown is sponsoring ... it's first ever Better World Design competition is focusing on funding solutions to Food Deserts.  What's a Food Desert?  It's a place where access to safe, healthy, and nutritious food simply isn't available or accessible, and particularly affects low-income communities in the US.  And this is a huge problem in the US! Anyways, click on the link above for info on the contest.  Submissions are due August 31st, 2010.  

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PS just an afterthought, but it's so ironic.  Almost every time that I have traveled abroad and visited small-scale and low-income farmers - in Brazil, Mexico, Ethiopia - I have eaten fresher and healthier food than I do on most days as a privileged grad student in Boston.  We've gotta figure this healthy food situation out for the urban and rural US populations that can no longer access this food, so instead are eating cheetos for breakfast and big macs for dinner.

Composting in Cambridge

There's a new composting program in Cambridge, not far from MIT, that the Dept of Public Works (DPW)is running.  You can drop your food scraps off three times a week, and they even provide discounted bins at $50 a pop to compost at home.  Whole Foods in Cambridge on Prospect also takes food scraps (every day during business hours).  And businesses can sign up to get their food waste and other compostable items picked up by the DPW.

Why compost?  The DPW says that "By recycling food, we reduce methane emissions at landfills that result from decaying organic matter. Methane is 72 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year timeframe! We are diverting at 1500 least pounds/week, avoiding at least 78,000 pounds of CO2 per year."

Staying cool and staying green

It's been HOT on the East Coast - around 100 degrees over the weekend.  I just moved into a new apartment, and as usual, have no AC.  Unless you're living in a brand new building, paying a pretty penny, or living in an on-campus dorm at MIT, it's pretty rare to have AC in Boston.

Sleeping on Saturday night brought me back to the muggy nights when I lived in tropical, coastal, northeastern Brazil.  Stagnant air, and the fan just seeming to push around the stuffiness to no relief.  I'd been debating about whether to get an AC unit for my room for these two months.  After all, I did survive the year in Brazil without it.  But getting up every morning at 7am to commute an hour to New Hampshire for work can be painful after a sleepless night due to heat and humidity.

So I did a little research on energy efficient AC units.  First of all, 'vampire drain' is a huge energy cost loss for Americans - in fact, we waste over $3 billion a year on appliances that are plugged in and sucking energy because they are plugged in and not being used.  So not only should I unplug an AC unit when not in use, but my fans, computer, TV, and floor lamps.  This would save me (on ave.) ~$270/year, energy efficient unit or not.

Second, if I really want to get an AC unit, the energy star certified units apparently save a lot on electricity usage (over 2x a year) and money over time, but they cost a bit more up front depending on the size.  The Energy Star website has a lot of resources to help choose the right unit for the area to be cooled, providing better temp & humidity control. 

As a 'green' consumer, I think that if this family living in steamy Dallas, Texas can live without AC year round, then I certainly could try harder.  And not only me, but the US Department of Energy could get it's act together by investing in some energy star appliances. According to this article, the dept. can start by taking Al Gore's advice and replacing it's light bulbs to become more energy efficient (and save $2.2million/year, enough to light up 3,200 houses!).  

BUT there are tradeoffs to walking the talk.  I'll likely be moving in a year after grad school, so it's not neccesarily worth investing in a brand new unit which will be used for just 2 months this year, only to be sold or recycled next year. Luckily my neighbor is moving out next week and offered to sell his unit to me for $30, and there are programs to recycle the old unit when I move out next year, if it's no longer working well. In the end, it looks like I'll spring for the used unit, which might use a bit more electricity, but costs less up front.    

And in the meantime, energy star AC unit or not, I'll do my best to ward off the 'vampires' by simply unplugging my unused appliances to save some cash and energy this year.

Sustainability in the strawberry field

At Pacific Ridge, a second generation family strawberry farm which I recently visited with Stonyfield, farm manager Kelly Wilmer likens strawberries to the "potato on the dinner plate."  I couldn’t agree more - they bring me back to 4^th of July’s in Michigan with my family, full of angel food cake, homemade whipped cream, and tons of fresh-picked strawberries.

Although they are a much-loved American summer staple, conventional strawberry production in the US can be anything but sweet.  Conventional strawberries are often cited as among the most pesticide intense, and as in much of US agriculture, many strawberry farmworkers to do not enjoy the labor protections of other US industries.  

Because of this, Stonyfield has developed labor and greenhouse gas toolkits to engage their US fruit farmer suppliers in a conversation about sustainability, to benchmark practices at the farm level, and to collectively improve practices for the future. There is a real need for innovation in US agriculture, practices which are mutually beneficial practices for farmers, workers, consumers, and the earth. Pacific Ridge is doing its part with organic production and thoughtful hired farm labor projects.  And each toolkit subject area conjured interesting stories and reflections from Kelly.

The Stonyfield greenhouse gas emission toolkit asks farmers about crop rotation in addition to cover crops, weeding, pest management, and practices that will be unique depending on the farm’s location and conditions.  During my visit, I learned that Pacific Ridge operates eight parcels of organic farmland, adjusting practices parcel by parcel to the fickle demands of southern California weather – fog, heat, and the Santa Ana winds.  Strawberries demand a lot of the soil when they grow, and since Pacific Ridge owns multiple plots of land, they are able to rotate broccoli, kale, and other vegetables with the strawberry crops on off-seasons to return important nutrients to the soil.  

Kelly and I also talked about the situation of hired farmworkers in the strawberry fields, and her attempts to provide year-round labor.  Steady work is a very common problem in US agriculture, as the work moves with the seasons.  California farmworkers follow a migratory route that can take them from Mexico to Oxnard to Watsonville and back in a year.  It’s a chicken and egg problem – without year round work in one place, farmworkers will migrate.  Without farmworkers in one place all year round, there is little incentive for farmers to invest in housing for workers.  And so on.

Kelly is collaborating with local companies to see if there are joint synergies to ‘pool’ work between fruit harvests and between job functions to create this steady labor.  For example, Pacific Ridge has strawberry fields as well as facilities to freeze the berries.  The company could freeze more berries from other farmers, creating jobs for the same workers to pick and freeze strawberries.  Seems simple, but the industry is so fragmented that these initiatives are fewer than you might expect.

All in all, I learned a lot during my visit to Pacific Ridge about the precarious balance between labor rights, environmental sustainability, business practices, the US legal system, and the harsh US agriculture scene.  The types of companies that Stonyfield strives to source from are those – like Pacific Ridge - that can be innovative, flexible, are transparent, and willing to go the extra steps to improve their practices year by year.  Sustainability is a dynamic process, and not a checklist of practices.  That’s what’s making my summer internship so challenging, and yet so much fun.

Next up – from the fruit farm to the yogurt factory … my journey continues!

Yogurt on a Mission: Summer MBA internship

I started my summer MBA internship at Stonyfield Farm two weeks ago.  Stonyfield is an organic yogurt company – but not just any organic yogurt company.  It’s ‘Yogurt on Mission,’ a mission for “healthy food, healthy people, a healthy planet, and healthy business.”  I’ve worked with for-profit companies in a collaborative capacity while working at Oxfam America, and in an individual consulting capacity (Divine Chocolate, Unilever, and Macondo) on short-term sustainability, sales, and supply chain projects.  This summer will be different because I’ll be working with fruit and sugar farmers to benchmark and measure the social, environmental, and climate impact of their work.  Why?  In order to improve practices and rebuild a healthier and more sustainable farming system.

I sought out this summer position at Stonyfield after watching a film about the company during the Professional Seminar in Sustainability last semester, a course which is part of MIT’s new Sustainability Certificate.  In the film Saida Benhayoune (who works in Sourcing and Supplier Development at Stonyfield) explained how the company was working hand-in-hand with farmers to become aware of their hiring and work practices on farmworkers.  At Oxfam I saw time and again that it seemed easier for companies to talk about and work on environmental issues, a lower hanging fruit if you will, than it was for them to tackle the complex and political situation of farmworkers.  After watching how Stonyfield was embracing the challenge as an opportunity for social justice at the farm, I knew I’d jump at the chance to work with Saida and Stonyfield. 

And it worked out!  My position this summer will focus on supply chain sustainability and carbon footprint calculating in non-dairy sourcing (fruits & sugar) and in marketing.  As the summer goes on I’ll write more about how the metrics & measurements are going at the farm level.  In the meantime, here’s a link to some films from Stonyfield’s farmers. 

Oh, and I wanted to mention that this internship was made possible by the support of Stonyfield and the Sloan Social Impact Fellowship.  The latter (SSIF) is an important resource for Sloan students who are interested in social impact to pursue summer internships in this burgeoning but non-traditional area of interest for MBAs.

I also prefer butter to margarine - snapshots from Slow Money

1. I'm spending two days at the Slow Money Alliance Conference in beautiful Shelburne Farms, Vermont.  Although a more detailed blogpost will come about what Slow Money is to me, I thought I'd share my twitter feed today which highlights the quotes of the conference.  My favorite quote of the conference so far was one posted above the speakers:  "I prefer butter to margarine, because I trust cows more than I trust chemists" Joan Gussow, Slow Money founder
   Stonyfield CEO on why scale organics: "organic can not remain food for the elite." #aginnovation#food-ag about 5 hours ago via Echofon

2. @JoelSalatin, on the privelage of sust ag: the lunatic fringe is always percieved as elitist (abolitionists, etc) as it begins #food-ag about 7 hours ago via Echofon

3. @JoelSalatin: what we need is to rediscover kitchens; no culture can be food secure when imprisons 2x ppl in jail than ppl making food.about 8 hours ago via Echofon

4. Joel Salatin, strive beyond sales in biz: "when I strive to be good, growth takes care of itself" (he makes no sales goals in biz planning)about 8 hours ago via Echofon

5. Joel Salatin, on his farm: a symbiotic, multispecial, synergistic farm...aeromatically and aestetially romantic" #aginnovation #food-agabout 8 hours ago via Echofon

6. Making a killing OR making a living? The way we spend our $$$ is totally out of sync with life. Woody Tasch @ Slow Money conferenceabout 10 hours ago via Echofon

7. Robert Zevin: diversification badly misunderstood-more meaningful to invest in 1 company you know, than 40-50 co's you know nothing aboutabout 11 hours ago via Echofon

8. SRI investor RobertZevin: if we bought quality co's, why buy&sell all the time?Let's make statement against fast$ by holding slow portfoliosabout 11 hours ago via Echofon

9. Slow Money: investing as if food, farms, and fertility mattered. @slowmoney conference today in beautiful Burlington#aginnovation #food-agabout 11 hours ago via Echofon

10. "the midwest has become a place where you use soil to hold plants upright & pour oil over them" (to grow). Bill Mckibben 350.org#food-agabout 12 hours ago via Echofon

11. "farmers markets have been the fastest growing segment of our food economy for over a decade"bill mckibben @slowmoney#aginnovationabout 13 hours ago via Echofon

12. "is investing 1% of our $ in the local economy revolutionary? Some ppl think so." - woody tasch, slow money founder #food-ag#aginnovationabout 13 hours ago via Echofon

13.   

    "I prefer butter to margarine, because I trust cows more than I trust chemists" Joan Gussow, slow money founder #food-ag#aginnovationabout 13 hours ago via Echofon

Video: farming as a family affair

Really good, 4 minute video on on working towards organic on a 6th generation family fruit farm in Northern California.  Demonstrates differences from using an organic pesticide on pear and apple plants.  Also points out challenges of price for organic growers.

Farming as a Family Affair from Stonyfield on Vimeo.