Artemisia’s Social Business Network

Entrepreneurs from Artemisia’s social network range from 18 to 35 years of age, and have in common their vision, action-oriented profile, courage and determination to build businesses that contribute to solving social problems. They have leadership skills, creativity, strong ethics and a profound commitment to improving the quality of life of and creating opportunities to low-income people.

Adriana Barbosa

Feira Preta www.feirapreta.com.br

Fostering ethnic entrepreneurship
While agribusiness accounts for approximately 30% of Brazilian GDP, it has yet to acquire acceptable socioenvironmental standards and sustainability levels. Alexander established Ecossistemas Design Ecológico to provide consulting and certification services for farms, companies and organizations. Alexandre helps his clients implement regenerative models, which improve their financial results, the quality of the environment and people’s lives. Headquartered at Sítio Gralha Azul, in Santo Antonio do Pinhal – SP, the company is also a model for the sustainability concepts it provides to clients.

Alessandra França

Banco Pérola www.bancoperola.org.br

Microcredit for youth
Once Alessandra realized the greatest challenge of young entrepreneurs was their lack of funds, she decided to create Banco Pérola, an institution that provides microcredit to 18-29 year olds from C-D-E classes in the area of Sorocaba, in the state of São Paulo. Banco Pérola offers three types of microcredit: working capital, investment and mixed funding. The institution pioneered working with this public in the region, and betting on the potential of young, first-time entrepreneurs.

Alexander Van Parys Piergilli

Ecossistemas Design Ecológico www.ecossistemas.net

Ecologic production systems to companies
While agribusiness accounts for approximately 30% of Brazilian GDP, it has yet to acquire acceptable socioenvironmental standards and sustainability levels. Alexander established Ecossistemas Design Ecológico to provide consulting and certification services for farms, companies and organizations. Alexandre helps his clients implement regenerative models, which improve their financial results, the quality of the environment and people’s lives. Headquartered at Sítio Gralha Azul, in Santo Antonio do Pinhal – SP, the company is also a model for the sustainability concepts it provides to clients.

Auire

Technologies for people with disabilities

Fernando Gil and Nathan Sautchuk are engineering graduates and master's students from the Polytechnic School of São Paulo. In 2010, they founded the Auire. An enterprise that creates and distributes low cost technologies for people with disabilities. Its business model is based on design and product development in collaboration with future users. The main product is a portable color and bank notes identifier at a price far below market. This device reads the color of the object or the value of the note and says its name / value aloud. This is the first device capable of reading Reais (Brazilian currency) and the first player of color projected into the country. The social impacts of this business include: [1] Price reduction of assistive technology products, and [2] increase of the employability of people with disabilities.

Carla Tennenbaum

EVAMARIA www.evamaria.org.br

From E.V.A. scrap to home decor
Seeing scrap as an artistic opportunity and an environmental issue that must be dealt with has led designers Carla Tennenbaum, Adriana Yazbek and Paula Dib to build Trans.forma, a consulting design company. They created EVAMARIA to handle scrap form Ethylene Vinyl Acetate Copolymer (known as EVA), a synthetic material that is still not efficiently recycled, and accounts for 140 tons/month of scrap in the state of São Paulo alone. Carla has set up a group of socially vulnerable artists to work with the material, so that they may potentially become manufacturers, designers, replicators and promoters of practices to add new value to scrap.

Cristiana Reis

Mamãe Natureza

Eco-friendly products to mothers and babies
The domestic demand for eco-friendly products has been growing, and a significant share of consumers already base their purchasing decisions on environmental criteria. This has led Cristiana to create Mamãe Natureza. With the mission to build the awareness of mothers and women in general to the critical importance of caring for the body and the planet, the company provides them with access to a line of eco-friendly, reusable and biodegradable products. Realizing the Brazilian market lacked such a product line, Cristiana moved to establish her company: her line of products includes cloth diapers and sanitary pads in fashionable design, and is manufactured by women living in secluded communities in Ubatuba, in the state of São Paulo.

Daniel Contrucci

Aoka www.aoka.com.br

Sustainable travel to secluded areas in Brazil
Daniel and his team set up Aoka, a sustainable tourist operator, to design and organize trips in partnership with local communities and organizations that have a proven record of socioenvironmental performance. Such partnerships allow for social inclusion, income generation and incentive to entrepreneurial small businesses focusing on responsible tourism, while highlighting local culture and the exchange of knowledge between communities and visitors.

David Hertz

Gastromotiva www.gastromotiva.org

Catering school: hands-on training and income generation for youth
In 2004, David Hertz – chef and culinary teacher – decided to use his ability to train low-income youth. With this initiative, David combined youth need of professional skills with the increasing demand restaurants of São Paulo, a gastronomic hub, have for skilled labor. Gastromotiva, his home catering service, provides students with an opportunity to both be trained and generate income. The company also keeps an incubator to support young apprentices in the development of gastronomy ventures in their own communities, which typically are unaware of haute cuisine products and services.

Henrique Bussacos

Tekoha www.redetekoha.com.br

Market intelligence to manufacturing communities and sustainable corporate gifts
E-commerce represents R$ 6.4 billion in sales in Brazil, which led Henrique to create Tekoha, a large ethical network to connect consumers to manufacturers of handcrafted products. Tekoha provides market intelligence to manufacturing communities and sells a wide range of products via a virtual shop at www.tekoha.org, also ensuring that economic and human values are perfectly balanced in this new trading system.

Joice Gomes

Arquitetas da Comunidade http://arquitetasdacomunidade.blogspot.com/

Architectural services for the low-income population
In the past decades, large Brazilian cities have received an influx of millions. These new inhabitants migrated from rural areas, aggravating even further the already substantial housing deficit. To help solve this issue, Joice and Daniela, two young architects, established Arquitetas da Comunidade, an organization to provide architectural services to families and community associations in the low-income areas of Campinas – SP. The organization offers a wide range of services – from blueprints and follow-up of the building work, plans to reduce material and energy waste, and improvements in home safety and health conditions, to training to construction workers.

Kátia Sartorelli

Conviva

Home and community center interventions in needy areas
Conviva combines the provision of planning and building services with other social actions focusing on improving the quality of life of low-income people. With a distinctive and well structured work at affordable prices that involves the community throughout the process, Katia intervenes to improve community centers and homes in poor neighborhoods of Campinas, in the state of São Paulo.

Luiz Flávio Alves de Lima

Revista Menisqüência! www.menisquencia.com.br

Culture, income and training for youth in peripheral urban areas
In Brazil, unemployment for youths of 15 to 24 years of age is 3.5 times higher than that for adults, affecting 45% of the youth population. To overcome this situation, Luiz Flávio has started the youth magazine Revista Menisqüência!. The young themselves produce and sell the magazine, which includes cartoons, photographs and poems to discuss behaviors, employability, entertainment and other youth-related themes. With a fun but critical approach, the magazine innovates by informing readers that 50% of the cover price goes to the salesperson, while the remaining 50% is used as funding to train and include new youngsters in the business.

Marcelo Rocha (DJ Bola)

A Banca www.abancaaudaciajovemcomacao.blogspot.com

Sociocultural events and space for micro entrepreneurs in peripheral urban areas
DJ Bola is head of A Banca since 2000. This sociocultural producing company is headquartered in Jardim Ângela, an area in the southern part of São Paulo that presents one of the highest violence rates in the world. A Banca aims at creating new entertainment and leisure areas for the young population, highlighting local cultural groups and boosting the economy by promoting mostly free-of-charge events with local bands, DJs and dance groups. Such events also open up opportunities for micro entrepreneurs to sell a wide range of products. Over 25 such venues have already been held in different spots of the region, with an average attendance of 4,000 people each. Additionally, Bola conducts workshops for DJs and MCs, as well as provides guitar classes to the community.

Mark Van Loo

Bombelêla Dance Company http://bombelela.ning.com/

Inclusion through dance
Mark Van Loo is a choreographer who founded Bombelêla, a dance company working along two fronts: the dance company itself, which offers dance presentations for different events and generates income to young artists; and Incubadança, an initiative that gathers eight dance groups and promotes social inclusion for different socially-vulnerable groups – i.e., children, youth, disabled people and the elder. Bombelêla intends to shift paradigms by showing everyone can dance and become a professional dancer. The company also makes presentations in corporate events, and was featured on several TV shows.

Omar Haddad

Sementes de Paz

Cooperative for food and eco-friendly product distribution and logistics services
While at college, Omar and his team had the idea of inverting the conventional commercial rationale: instead of producing first to sell later, they decided to create demand first to then market their products. Next, they moved to create Sementes de Paz, a cooperative for food and eco-friendly product distribution and logistics services based on the principles of solidarity economy, fair trade and sustainable agriculture. Sementes de Paz focuses on building a collective consumption network that gathers, on the one hand, small producers and associations of organic and/or agro-ecologic producers and, on the other, people interested in redirecting their financial resources towards sustainable agricultural practices, free of chemical inputs.

Tiago Dalvi

Solidarium www.solidarium.com.br

Fair-trade home and fashion design company
In 2006, Tiago and his college peers established Solidarium in Curitiba, in the state of Paraná. The social business in is line with principles and values of fair and ethical trade, focusing on establishing partnerships between small manufacturers and large retailers to create and develop a network for trading products. Solidarium currently fosters the selling of products manufactured by low-income entrepreneurs from the states of Paraná, Pernambuco and São Paulo, granting them access to different sales channels and large-scale distribution of their goods, with a substantial increase in revenues.

Viviane Sarraf

Museus Acessíveis www.museuacessivel.incubadora.fapesp.br

Museum accessibility and inclusion
Viviane’s challenge is to grant access to culture and the arts to everyone. To achieve that, Museus Acessíveis offers a range of services that includes theoretical and practical training of professionals, implementation of regional networks and availability of information on the subject through the web. Going forward, Viviane plans to create an organization – Núcleo de Produção de Materiais Multissensoriais – that will gather a multidisciplinary team to work on accessibility materials that should help visitors to interact with cultural institutions.