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FLOW Vision News: SEPTEMBER 2007

Dear FLOW Members,

By the end of this communication, I would like every reader to go to our Donate Now web page and help us fulfill our Peace through Commerce challenge grant.  Since Jeff’s most recent FLOW Activation newsletter, we have received pledges for an additional $10,250, for a total of $110,250 in pledges.  But we still have less than two weeks to go to bring in a total of $150,000 by Sept. 20th.  We need to bring in $39,750 by the 20th.  If 2000 of you each gave $20 upon receiving this email, we would be over the top.  Is FLOW worth $20 to you?

I was once explaining FLOW to someone over lunch, and his response was “That all sounds great, but how are you going to do it all?  The Gates Foundation has more money than you’ll ever dream of having, and they are only focused on a handful of initiatives.”  In a sense, this is obviously true.  And yet to understand how FLOW can, with very modest resources, provide extraordinary leverage, it is important to understand how fractured our world is to understand how important the bridges that we are building are.

I’ll take two examples from our Peace through Commerce program to illustrate how our bridge-building adds concrete value to the world.  Last week I took time off from raising funds for our Peace through Commerce campaign to write a short article on property rights in Iraq.  It turns out that despite the fact that the U.S. spent $760 million to promote industry in Iraq last year, 90% of the Iraqi economy still flows through the government and unemployment remains around 40%.  While there are indeed deep cultural and religious sources of violence in Iraq, having a broken economy year after year fuels the fire of hatred. 

Through our focus on free zones as a means of poverty alleviation, in a conversation with one of the world’s leading experts on free zones I learned that he had been part of a team that studied free zone solutions in Iraq.  It turns out that one of his team’s discoveries was that banks won’t accept real estate as collateral for loans in Iraq because there are conflicting title claims to most of the real estate.  In most nations, equity in real estate is among the largest sources of investment capital by means of serving as collateral on loans.  The fact that this sector of the Iraqi economy is not functioning amounts to an enormous “software bug” that is preventing the revival of Iraq’s economy – and no one had realized it.

I can’t send you more details on the solution proposed by the expert right now because I just sent the article to a high level contact in the State Department, who was receptive, on Friday; if the plan goes forward, we want to coordinate communications respectfully to ensure an accurate and positive understanding of the plan by all relevant parties.  If, indeed, the State Department chooses to support this plan and if, indeed, it serves to launch a successful private sector economy in Iraq, in which unemployment gradually decreases from 40% down to 5%, then we might see a corresponding reduction in violence, just as we saw in Northern Ireland when unemployment decreased from nearly 18% in 1986 to below 5% today.  This is not to claim that unemployment causes violence – only that in a region overwhelmed with conflict, the conflict is unlikely to cease until and unless millions of people have positive life opportunities. 

Despite the millions of words printed in thousands of articles on Iraq by government, think tanks, universities, and other sources of expertise, you will find no one else who has focused specifically on the creation of a peaceful solution to Iraq based on an examination of the legal infrastructure there (though in a May 5, 2003, National Review interview Hernando de Soto points generally in the right direction).  We are a unique organization in that we are focused relentlessly on those elements of economies crucial to the creation of peace.  Moreover, we are action-oriented – it was due to the networks that we have created in this area that we were able to connect a solution in the private sector with a need in the State Department within a couple of days.

Think of it as solution arbitrage.  On Wall Street, arbitrageurs who are good at what they do become very wealthy by means of identifying otherwise unnoticed opportunities.  In the world of doing good, a century of hostility between those who aspire to do good, on the one hand, and those who understand markets and entrepreneurship, on the other, has resulted in a situation in which there are exceptionally large numbers of deep opportunities for doing good by means of arbitrating between the worlds of doing good, on the one hand, and markets and entrepreneurship, on the other.

To take another example, Rina Ahsan, a Bangladeshi-American single mother who wants to create a business importing artisanal products made by Grameen micro entrepreneurs into the U.S, recently approached us.  We have a yahoo group devoted to this project and a growing network of individuals and organizations that are working along similar lines.   While we can’t guarantee that Rina’s particular project will succeed, part of our job is to help people who have vision’s like Rina’s develop the understanding and contacts needed to become successful.  Again, sometimes we act as an arbitrageur, recommending an organization such as Bootstrap that already has the entrepreneurial training expertise while staying in touch with such people and connecting them to potential business partners and mentors in their area of interest.  We expect that our forthcoming wiki-based website will support such people in connecting with each other in a scaleable manner.

So while working on the public policy front to create a positive legal infrastructure that will support positive entrepreneurial endeavors around the world, we are simultaneously seeding and feeding tiny entrepreneurial projects everywhere.  We don’t know which will grow and which not, but we believe that the overall project of, on the one hand, working towards positive legal infrastructures and, on the other hand, supporting a growing movement of purpose-based entrepreneurship, is a crucial niche in solving world problems, a niche that is largely neglected without our work within it.

Much of our time to date has been identifying and building relationships with key individuals and organizations.  This is a time-consuming business, with much travel involved, and because we are unorthodox people do want to understand what we are doing – sometimes those on the left are wary of our commitment to entrepreneurs and markets, and sometimes those on the right are wary of our commitment to doing good.  And yet the more work we do, and the more time we spend building bridges across this divide, the more deeply convinced we are that this is a very important vein to be mining.

FLOW is the only organization that is systematically focused on entrepreneurial solutions to problems.  There are many thousands of organizations that provide pieces of the puzzle, and we are very appreciative of and grateful to those organizations.  But we add value by taking pieces of the puzzle and putting them in place.  A research study that could reduce violence in Iraq saves no lives by sitting in a file somewhere.  An immigrant single woman with a passion for social entrepreneurship shouldn’t have to create her own entrepreneurial training, network of contacts, and mentoring system.

Our Peace through Commerce program is designed to scale up these systems dramatically.  At present most of our work is handcrafted, so to speak.  But it is designed to be scalable.  As we educate more people on the importance of legal infrastructure that supports entrepreneurship, millions will be able to support the creation of those infrastructures that will allow our most pressing social and environmental problems to be solved.  As we create on-line systems and communities for mentoring and networking for positive entrepreneurial projects, millions will be able to experience creative flow in their lives, working for good while loving life.  On a small scale we have demonstrated that we can have dramatic impacts in lives and on policy.  Our Peace through Commerce challenge grant is the first opportunity we have had to break into a larger scale of operations.

Please go to the this link, and give what you can. Give what you can.  If you donate before Sept. 20th, your $20 donation will bring us more than $75 in revenue to FLOW by means of activating the Challenge grant.  For a focused way of saving lives in Iraq, bringing women out of poverty in Bangladesh, and creating a scaleable system through which all of you can be more effective at creating sustainable peace, prosperity, happiness, and well being for all it is a remarkable bargain.

Peace,

Michael Strong
CEO & Chief Visionary Officer
FLOW, Inc.

P.S.:  Our Member’s Platform this month is Rina’s Story, a moving tale of how one woman came to making a commitment to making a difference in the lives of women in Bangladesh.  Our organization this month is The Amber Chand Collection:  Global Gifts for Peace and Understanding, another very concrete path to helping to create peace through commerce.

P.P.S.:  We need pledges by Sept. 20th, not necessarily gifts in hand.  Especially for larger gifts, you may wish to contact us to notify us of your pledge and fulfill it at the end of the tax year.  Donors of $10,000 or more will be invited to our Peace through Commerce retreat.  Contact Jeff Klein at jeff@flowidealism.org for details.

P.P.P.S. Here is a link to The Creation of Conscious Culture through Educational Innovation, a piece I wrote which was just published as a change this manifesto at changethis.com.

Please contact us at contact@flowidealism.org with ideas, insights, and inspiration. And remember that FLOW is a non-profit organization that promotes economic freedom and broadly distributed prosperity. You can support FLOW through your financial contributions among other means.