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California's tent city

posted on Saturday, April 18, 2009 02:04 PM

What does a city of homeless people in tents in Sacramento have to do with social business in the UK, you may well ask.

In December 2003 Terry Hallman was fasting in a tent in Chapel Hill North Carolina while using the library to blog for economic rights. We'd talked in the past about his work in Russia sourcing a microfinance bank in Tomsk.

I tried to help. Recalling the theme of a Capra movie 'Meet John Doe' where a reporter played by Barbara Stanwyck who in an effort to save her job, invents a 'John Doe' who [/font][/font]protests against an injust political and social system and threatens to jump off city hall. Gary Cooper shows up to step into the part.

I pitched a pastiche at an ABC News reporter, inverting the roles, but she dropped me like a hot brick when I described what it was about.

]"Nice try" wrote Terry, "But the powerful sponsors of ABC won't want to hear any critiscism of capitalism, she'd probably lose her job".

Ironically, he'd just returned from Ukraine where he'd recent put forward a proposal for a business driven approach to poverty eradication, aimed at an Islamic community, the repatriated Tatars of Crimea.

It's the point at which I decide to enter the world of social business, launching P-CED as a UK based social enterprise and in an interview with a diaspora leader, he describes the aims of our work

The strategy paper, on which this was based introduces a new concept of "economic smart bombs", which are weighed in terms of social and economic return with equivalent spending on real weapons in the form of Tomahawk cruise missiles.

The following year, Senator John Edwards, who like John Doe had been making a call for social justice in his One America campaign opened the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity in that same North Carolina town where Grameen Bank now aims to open up for microcredit

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