Social Entrepreneurship Consulting Fairbanks AK

Two childhood friends, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, turned a $5 correspondence course on ice cream making into a successful business that shares its rewards with its employees and with the community, and has fun doing it!

Building their startup in Burlington, Vermont, they turned Ben & Jerry’s Homemade into an American cultural institution and made it such a successful company that it was acquired a few years ago by the global consumer-goods powerhouse, Unilever.

Part of Ben and Jerry’s deal with Unilever was to make sure the company stayed true to its roots in social entrepreneurship, which have boosted causes from global warming to small-scale family farms.

“Business has a responsibility to the environment and should uphold a set of aspirational principles,” the company’s mission statement still reads. “Whether it's in sourcing ingredients, supporting non-profit organizations, or using our ice cream to help better the environment, we think it's important to lead with our values.”

Social entrepreneurship manifesto

Cohen and Mal Warwick, another social entrepreneur with an impressive track record, help others follow in their footsteps in their new book, Values-Driven Business: How to Change the World, Make Money and Have Fun. They start out by asking some of the big questions that might dog any social entrepreneur.

“If you run your business in accord with your personal values, will you make money?” they write, “Or will you simply drive yourself into bankruptcy.

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