SUSTAINABLE ECONOMY
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Once again, she found in Amsterdam – just as she had when she started War Child in 1994 – a perfect breeding ground for ideas that aren’t yet mainstream. ‘This city has a liberal, creative spirit that gives social entrepreneurs much needed community support and space for experimentation.’ It didn’t take Verloop and Hillen, a former Managing Partner of Accenture and an expert in crowdfunding, long to build a base for Social Enterprise NL, thanks to a large number of socially minded businesses already operating Ctaste in the city. ‘I discovered that Amsterdam has a history of Dining in complete darkness is a relatively new culinary entrepreneurship and private initiative focused on people’s development. The first such restaurant, Blindekuh (‘Blind Man’s Bluff’) opened in Zurich in 1999, and the concept soon talents instead of their perceived disabilities,’ Verloop explains. made its way to Amsterdam. Partially inspired by a Parisian Among Social Enterprise NL’s members are many early dinner in the dark, Sandra Ballij and Bas de Ruiter left their examples of enterprises that operate as inclusive employers. bank jobs in 2007 to start one of the first commercially Ctaste, a ‘dine in the dark’ restaurant founded in 2007, successful social enterprises in the Netherlands. prides itself on hiring blind or partially sighted waiters, The Ctaste restaurant helps to tackle the staggering 70% rate of unemployment for people with sensory disabilities by who are able to guide guests through meals in a pitch-black recognising the unique abilities of blind or visually impaired room. And Swink, a web-services company created in 2008, staff. Using skills such as excellent attention to detail and offers people with conditions such as Asperger’s the chance spatial awareness, partially sighted waiters guide guests to to use their unique analytical skills to help clients improve their tables in a pitch-black room and answer any questions their website’s SEO or social-media presence. that arise as patrons try to decipher the flavour combinations Verloop also found in Amsterdam an existing fertile network of their surprise meals. of organisations, ranging from the aforementioned Impact Emboldened by the restaurant’s success – it attracts nearly Hub Amsterdam and Pakhuis de Zwijger to traditionally 20,000 visitors a year – Ballij and de Ruiter started CtheCity commercial accelerators such as Startupbootcamp and and Ctalents. The former is a multisensory tour of Amsterdam Rockstart, which are becoming more active in the social in the dark, which is given by blind guides and held in a space. 300m2 room that simulates scenes of the city. The latter ‘When impact is your drive and you have to swim upstream, is a diversity-management agency, which trains sensoryit helps to have stubborn, like-minded people around. In talented young professionals and matches them to inclusive our building alone, you can find shareNL, a knowledge and employers. networking platform for the collaborative economy, and THNK, an academy for creative leadership with a strong TTC Mobile social-innovation focus,’ she adds. This unique service-oriented social enterprise dates back to 2007, when, inspired by a documentary on the massive growth of mobile phones in Africa, Amsterdam-based entrepreneur Hajo van Beijma and marketing expert Bas Hoefman decided to harness this growth by using mobile technology to connect organisations to previously hard-toreach audiences. Since then, TTC Mobile has worked with everyone from international organisations such as the United Nations to governmental authorities like the US Department of Foreign Affairs and big NGOs, including the Gates Foundation. The company’s mission is to reach as many people as possible in developing countries with free text-message info that enables positive behavioural change in areas of their lives such as health, finance, agriculture and education. TTC Mobile’s most recent effort, the PRIORRI Financial Literacy Training project, launched in February 2016 in cooperation with the World Bank and the Ministry of Agriculture of Mozambique, will see the company helping farmers save money through its interactive SMS platform Vusion that, every two months, sends farmers text messages summarising the amount of money saved up to that point.
CONNECTING THE DOTS WITH SOCIAL INNOVATION Hajo van Beijma, Co-founder and Director of TTC Mobile, is no stranger to the collaborative power of Amsterdam’s many co-working spaces, which he believes play a huge role in scaling up existing enterprises. ‘When TTC Mobile started out in 2007 as a non-profit called Text to Change, we decided to share an office with two like-minded organisations,’ says van Beijma, referring to the 1% Club, a crowdfunding platform that connects people in developing countries with smart ideas to those who can help them effect change, and Akvo, which builds open-source software used to make cooperation in international development more effective and transparent. ‘At that time, we didn’t call ourselves “social enterprises” yet, but we were among the first organisations in the city working on using technology in emerging markets to do good.’