The Fast Company 50
Even in these tough times, surprising and extraordinary efforts are under way in businesses across the globe. From politics to technology, energy, and transportation; from marketing to retail, health care, and design, each company on the following pages illustrates the power and potential of innovative ideas and creative execution. These are the kinds of enterprises that will redefine our future and point the way to a better tomorrow.
#16 NextEra Energy Resources
Juno Beach, FL
"Who is the largest renewables company in the country?" demands Mike O'Sullivan, senior vice president of development for NextEra Energy Resources. "Is it GE? Goldman Sachs? BP? If you read the ads on the back of The Wall Street Journal you would think these guys are the big gorillas. But in fact, nobody in the U.S. has invested as much in renewables as we have."
Since 2000, NextEra has quietly -expanded to become the nation's No. 1 producer of green energy from both wind and solar. It has invested $8 billion in wind alone. But what may be most interesting about NextEra, a national independent power producer, is how differently it behaves from its very own sister, Florida Power & Light Co., a more conventional regulated utility serving 10 million people across half the Sunshine State. Both are owned by FPL Group, a $20 billion public company, yet their respective performances illustrate how ground rules can drive an industry toward innovation -- or reinforce the status quo.
NextEra operates in 25 deregulated states and Canada, wherever it has the right to compete. Where the existing utilities have sunk large costs in fossil-fuel plants, NextEra can invest shareholder capital in renewables to help states meet increasingly stringent green-energy quotas. Its projects include the world's largest wind farm, the 735-megawatt Horse Hollow in Texas, and the world's largest solar-thermal plant, the 310-megawatt Solar Electric Generating System in California's Mojave Desert. It buys more wind turbines from both GE and Siemens than anybody else. Even after bowing to the economy by cutting costs and shelving some expansion plans, NextEra still grew earnings 18%, to $650 million, in the first three quarters of 2008, and plans to add 1,100 megawatts of wind power in 2009, compared to 1,000 added in 2007.
Jay Apt, director of the Carnegie Mellon Electricity Industry Center, calls the staff "alpha geeks" whose wind-control center in Juno Beach, Florida, is "state of the art," as good as anything he has seen in Europe. "It's the most data-driven utility I think I've seen, and I've seen some very good ones," he says. In 2006, NextEra bought one of the industry's leading consulting firms, WindLogics; there, a staff of PhDs uses the latest National Weather Service data to figure out the optimal placement for turbines and forecast their likely output. O'Sullivan calls them "our rocket scientists."
Florida Power & Light Co., meanwhile, looks a lot more like business as usual. The regulated utility has clashed with activists -several times in recent years over plans to build fossil-fuel power plants on environmentally sensitive land in and near the Everglades; its power mix includes 52% natural gas, 19% nuclear, and 6% coal; and it is proposing new coal and Nuclear plants. "Coal is a four-letter word to us," says O'Sullivan. Eric Silagy, an FPL Co. VP, counters, "For certain folks, coal is an important resource."
Why the split between the two subsidiaries? "Follow the money!" says Stephen Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, who watches the overall company closely. "These guys love to go into somebody else's service territory and compete with clean energy. But when they've got a monopoly, a captive customer base, they revert to the business-as-usual rate-base paradigm: large nukes and coal."
Lately, with Governor Charlie Crist pushing for a renewable portfolio standard in Florida, FPL Co. has been moved to follow its sister's lead. In December, the utility broke ground on the world's first hybrid solar plant, using solar thermal to boost natural gas, the first of 110 megawatts of planned solar plants that represent $729 million in new investments and, when completed around 2010, will make Florida the second-biggest sun-power state in the country after California.
If the nation's objective is to see more power companies behave as innovatively as NextEra does, the solution is clear: Introduce real competition across the country, create strong portfolio standards, and allow better price signals into the market through a carbon tax or a 100% auction-based cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases. Even Smith gives FPL Group credit for advocating the latter. "It is one of the most forward-looking utilities on climate and global-warming policy," he says. "One-hundred-percent auction is the position of the president, and it's the right position."
http://www.fastcompany.com/fast50_09/profile/list/nextera-energy-resources
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Friday, November 6, 2009
Green Energy Agenda Favors Rural Denmark
Green Energy Agenda Favors Rural Denmark
The Danes' shift to renewable, local energy sources have revitalized former textile towns and turned blacksmiths into wind-power entrepreneurs.
By Sam Adams
11/05/2009
Daily Yonder
The Danish port of Frederikshavn, pop. 25,000, is dedicated to becoming the first city ever powered entirely by renewable energy. Green energy is not only powering Denmark’s homes and appliances, it is powering Denmark’s rural economy.
On Samsø Island, a farming and tourist destination in the Kategat, wind turbines can churn out 13 times the electricity the 4,100 residents need, and farmers are selling their wheat straw to be burned in district heating plants.
On the Jutland Peninsula, manure produced by cattle and pig farms is turned into biogas and mixed into the natural gas in pipelines. And Vestas Wind Systems, the world’s largest wind turbine maker, was founded and maintains factories on Jutland.
Far from taking jobs, green energy is creating jobs in Denmark and, more and more, around the world. Vestas, for example, employs 20,000 people worldwide, many in small towns like Ringkøbing, Denmark, population about 9,300, and headquarters of Vestas Nacelles. (Nacelles are the streamlined housings that hold the inner workings of wind turbines).
“We have created thousands and thousands and thousands of jobs in this sector,” said Connie Hedegaard, Minister for Climate and Energy. Even amid the economic crises of 2008, the Danish export of energy efficient technologies grew by 19 percent last year. “It has tripled over the recent 10 years,” said Hedegaard, “and if you go and see where we have some of those strongholds … they will often be located in rural areas very far from here in Jutland.”
Denmark was forced into green energy production by the oil crisis of 1973. At that time, the nation was 100 percent dependent on foreign energy, with all of its oil coming from the Middle East. The situation became so bad that weekend driving was curtailed, and residents were only allowed to drive on alternating Sundays based on their car license numbers.
Since then, the country has discovered oil and gas reserves in the North Sea and invested heavily in renewable energy sources. Denmark now gets 17 percent of its energy through renewable sources. While it still produces about 60 percent of its electricity from imported coal, it is now a net exporter of energy.
Connie Hedegaard, Denamrk's Minister for Climate and Energy, sees environmentalism and economic growth as compatible. Perhaps surprisingly to Americans, Hedegaard is a member of the Conservative Party; conservative by Danish standards, it is still slightly to the left of most European conservative parties, and far to the left of the U.S. conservative movement. Hedegaard said that the “Greens” in Denmark had created an “anti-growth” agenda. She adheres to another brand of environmentalism, quite the opposite.
“I have been working with this for five years now,” said Hedegaarrd, “and I have tried to turn this into a growth agenda”
She said much of the growth in the green energy sector has been in areas where there had been tremendous job loss in the textile industry. With the help of green energy and conservation measures, Denmark’s current unemployment rate is less than two percent while per capita energy use has declined for the past three decades.
To those who would argue that green energy standards restrict economic growth, Hedegaard answered, “No. We can prove that we have had 30 years of high growth when we kept our energy use stable, and from that we gained money from not pouring it into the Middle East.”
The Danish government has invested in green infrastructure with a variety of programs. One, a contest, funded a community as a pilot for energy planning (Samsø Island won); others have offered tax breaks for using wind energy. The government has also matched money for communities to build biogas facilities and plans 50 new biogas plants by 2020.
But while government has worked to spur local investment in green energy, much of the reason the renewable energy industry has boomed in rural areas is the character those areas. Vestas wind systems, for example, grew out of a firm that company vice president Peter Wenzel Kruse described as “the Danish version of John Deere,” a tractor company based on the West coast of Denmark.
“It was in the windy part of Denmark, which happened to be rural area with a long history of blacksmiths. That was the cradle of entrepreneurism in Denmark, in the back of Jutland,” Kruse said.
That farming background has also helped bring wind energy and biogas production to rural areas. Biogas has flourished in farm country because farmers have to do something to get rid of manure, and sending it to biogas plants is cheaper than any other disposal method available to them.
On Samsø, Danish Energy Academy president Søren Hermansen said farmers were used to investing in expensive pieces of farm equipment and jumped at the chance to buy wind turbines.
For Peter Kruse, the wind power executive, selling communities on wind power is simple.
“What is wind power offering today? We call it an ‘investor’s high five.’ It’s competitive – it’s no more far more expensive than fossil fuels.” In places like Texas, natural gas may be free, “but it won’t last,” Kruse said. Alternatively, wind power “is competitive, it’s independent, it’s local power – it’s up there – and it’s local jobs.”
Journalist and author Sam Adams [5] lives in Letcher County, Kentcuky.
Rural Economies Must Change or Die
Danville Regional Foundation
Rural economies can be both old and new.
If we bail out New York City, what about New York Mill? Are we in this together, or are we on our own?
By Karl Stauber
Dear Mr. President:
Your presidency occurs at a critical time. Americans are afraid; we are having trouble seeing the future and our places in it. We can see that you are trying to create a new social contract and a renewed faith in the common good. The vast majority of Americans want prosperity for themselves and their families and are willing to work hard and play by the rules to achieve it. But people must believe, and that includes the 20 percent of America that is rural. Continue here.
The Danes' shift to renewable, local energy sources have revitalized former textile towns and turned blacksmiths into wind-power entrepreneurs.
By Sam Adams
11/05/2009
Daily Yonder
The Danish port of Frederikshavn, pop. 25,000, is dedicated to becoming the first city ever powered entirely by renewable energy. Green energy is not only powering Denmark’s homes and appliances, it is powering Denmark’s rural economy.
On Samsø Island, a farming and tourist destination in the Kategat, wind turbines can churn out 13 times the electricity the 4,100 residents need, and farmers are selling their wheat straw to be burned in district heating plants.
On the Jutland Peninsula, manure produced by cattle and pig farms is turned into biogas and mixed into the natural gas in pipelines. And Vestas Wind Systems, the world’s largest wind turbine maker, was founded and maintains factories on Jutland.
Far from taking jobs, green energy is creating jobs in Denmark and, more and more, around the world. Vestas, for example, employs 20,000 people worldwide, many in small towns like Ringkøbing, Denmark, population about 9,300, and headquarters of Vestas Nacelles. (Nacelles are the streamlined housings that hold the inner workings of wind turbines).
“We have created thousands and thousands and thousands of jobs in this sector,” said Connie Hedegaard, Minister for Climate and Energy. Even amid the economic crises of 2008, the Danish export of energy efficient technologies grew by 19 percent last year. “It has tripled over the recent 10 years,” said Hedegaard, “and if you go and see where we have some of those strongholds … they will often be located in rural areas very far from here in Jutland.”
Denmark was forced into green energy production by the oil crisis of 1973. At that time, the nation was 100 percent dependent on foreign energy, with all of its oil coming from the Middle East. The situation became so bad that weekend driving was curtailed, and residents were only allowed to drive on alternating Sundays based on their car license numbers.
Since then, the country has discovered oil and gas reserves in the North Sea and invested heavily in renewable energy sources. Denmark now gets 17 percent of its energy through renewable sources. While it still produces about 60 percent of its electricity from imported coal, it is now a net exporter of energy.
Connie Hedegaard, Denamrk's Minister for Climate and Energy, sees environmentalism and economic growth as compatible. Perhaps surprisingly to Americans, Hedegaard is a member of the Conservative Party; conservative by Danish standards, it is still slightly to the left of most European conservative parties, and far to the left of the U.S. conservative movement. Hedegaard said that the “Greens” in Denmark had created an “anti-growth” agenda. She adheres to another brand of environmentalism, quite the opposite.
“I have been working with this for five years now,” said Hedegaarrd, “and I have tried to turn this into a growth agenda”
She said much of the growth in the green energy sector has been in areas where there had been tremendous job loss in the textile industry. With the help of green energy and conservation measures, Denmark’s current unemployment rate is less than two percent while per capita energy use has declined for the past three decades.
To those who would argue that green energy standards restrict economic growth, Hedegaard answered, “No. We can prove that we have had 30 years of high growth when we kept our energy use stable, and from that we gained money from not pouring it into the Middle East.”
The Danish government has invested in green infrastructure with a variety of programs. One, a contest, funded a community as a pilot for energy planning (Samsø Island won); others have offered tax breaks for using wind energy. The government has also matched money for communities to build biogas facilities and plans 50 new biogas plants by 2020.
But while government has worked to spur local investment in green energy, much of the reason the renewable energy industry has boomed in rural areas is the character those areas. Vestas wind systems, for example, grew out of a firm that company vice president Peter Wenzel Kruse described as “the Danish version of John Deere,” a tractor company based on the West coast of Denmark.
“It was in the windy part of Denmark, which happened to be rural area with a long history of blacksmiths. That was the cradle of entrepreneurism in Denmark, in the back of Jutland,” Kruse said.
That farming background has also helped bring wind energy and biogas production to rural areas. Biogas has flourished in farm country because farmers have to do something to get rid of manure, and sending it to biogas plants is cheaper than any other disposal method available to them.
On Samsø, Danish Energy Academy president Søren Hermansen said farmers were used to investing in expensive pieces of farm equipment and jumped at the chance to buy wind turbines.
For Peter Kruse, the wind power executive, selling communities on wind power is simple.
“What is wind power offering today? We call it an ‘investor’s high five.’ It’s competitive – it’s no more far more expensive than fossil fuels.” In places like Texas, natural gas may be free, “but it won’t last,” Kruse said. Alternatively, wind power “is competitive, it’s independent, it’s local power – it’s up there – and it’s local jobs.”
Journalist and author Sam Adams [5] lives in Letcher County, Kentcuky.
Rural Economies Must Change or Die
Danville Regional Foundation
Rural economies can be both old and new.
If we bail out New York City, what about New York Mill? Are we in this together, or are we on our own?
By Karl Stauber
Dear Mr. President:
Your presidency occurs at a critical time. Americans are afraid; we are having trouble seeing the future and our places in it. We can see that you are trying to create a new social contract and a renewed faith in the common good. The vast majority of Americans want prosperity for themselves and their families and are willing to work hard and play by the rules to achieve it. But people must believe, and that includes the 20 percent of America that is rural. Continue here.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Future Wonders of Green Technology and Green Design
15 (More) Future Wonders of Green Technology: From Spinning Towers to Seawater Greenhouses
As the world increasingly focuses on sustainable initiatives, green architecture is a booming industry. Everything from single-family residences to giant 1.2-million-square-foot complexes complete with giant skyscrapers is getting the green treatment, and the innovation that iss going into these plans is more complex than ever. Some of these structures will debut as early as the fall of 2008 while others present a view of what 100 years from now may hold, but all represent amazing leaps in green technology that push the boundaries of what we’ve ever thought possible.
http://weburbanist.com/2008/07/08/15-more-future-wonders-of-green-technology/
24 Fantastic Future Wonders of Green Design
The ‘green movement’ has swept the world and architecture is at the forefront of the new industrial revolution – buildings being by far the biggest energy-sappers in the world. Many contemporary architects are limited by the confines of budgets, time tables and constricting clients. Some industrious innovators, however, are breaking convention and collaborating to launch our imaginations into the future of green design. A surprising number of the following projects are even slated to be built.
As the world increasingly focuses on sustainable initiatives, green architecture is a booming industry. Everything from single-family residences to giant 1.2-million-square-foot complexes complete with giant skyscrapers is getting the green treatment, and the innovation that iss going into these plans is more complex than ever. Some of these structures will debut as early as the fall of 2008 while others present a view of what 100 years from now may hold, but all represent amazing leaps in green technology that push the boundaries of what we’ve ever thought possible.
http://weburbanist.com/2008/07/08/15-more-future-wonders-of-green-technology/
24 Fantastic Future Wonders of Green Design
The ‘green movement’ has swept the world and architecture is at the forefront of the new industrial revolution – buildings being by far the biggest energy-sappers in the world. Many contemporary architects are limited by the confines of budgets, time tables and constricting clients. Some industrious innovators, however, are breaking convention and collaborating to launch our imaginations into the future of green design. A surprising number of the following projects are even slated to be built.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Why For-Profits Need Not-For-Profits
Jurassic Park Syndrome
Why corporations shouldn't take the cause out of cause marketing
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/133/do-something-jurassic-park-syndrome.html
Why For-Profits Need Not-For-Profits
BY: NANCY LUBLIN Tue Feb 3, 2009 at 12:29 PM
In Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs roam the island terrorizing the humans, who seek refuge in the main building -- a sanctuary with security that beasts surely aren't smart enough to breach, right? Wrong! The big moment of terror is when those dumb animals learn to turn the doorknobs. Uh-oh. Now the humans hiding in the kitchen are really screwed.
We're witnessing a Jurassic Park moment in the social-good space: Not-for-profits are screwed, and it's partly our own doing. For years, we -- the martyrs, the saints, the do-gooders -- have had the keys to that door to heaven. But then we shared them with corporate America, through a practice known as "cause marketing" since 1983, when American Express launched a campaign in partnership with the National Park Service for the Statue of Liberty restoration project.
You see these campaigns everywhere now. Companies buy goodwill by touting that "a percentage of the proceeds goes to ..." or slapping a charity's logo on packaging. Want to show moms that your company cares about children? Partner with the Make-A-Wish Foundation or St. Jude Children's Research Hospital -- moms love sick kids. Need marketing oomph with African-Americans? Call the United Negro College Fund or the National Urban League.
Both sides benefit: Not-for profits get brand recognition from being featured on that cereal box, and of course we ♥ the funds -- more than $1.5 billion per year -- which are usually "unrestricted," meaning we can spend the money on unsexy things like rent. Corporations improve their image and build internal pride. Cause marketing has been one big lovefest; we all reaped rewards -- and together did a lot of good.
But what if corporate America didn't need charitable America to show love? What would happen if they, the dinosaurs in our story, learned to turn that doorknob by themselves? In September, Macy's hosted "Shop for a Cause" in its stores. It bought full-page newspaper ads to promote the day "in support of nonprofit organizations." No mention of specific groups. The day's real draw? Simply the notion of shopping for a cause. Any cause. In fairness to Macy's, it did raise more than $9 million for deserving groups (whose names you can find on its Web site). But the cause-agnostic ads proved that organizations are easily written out of the cause-marketing story line.
Aleve has taken it even further. One TV ad for the painkiller shows a woman "on a three-day walk for charity." She is strong in her spandex, putting her body on the line for her cause -- and no specific cause is named. Another ad features a woman who volunteers at a homeless shelter. The medication helps her enjoy the physical work. Did Aleve give to a worthy group that helps the homeless? No idea, but it's the preferred pain medication of people who care!
Corporate America has realized it can bask in the glow of causiness without actually partnering with a cause. That could mean the end of a gravy train for not-for-profits and the beginning of competition with big, well-funded companies. (Read: We're all kinda annoyed and scared.)
But does that make good business? Charities lend more value than just their good names. Cause is our core competency. It's what we do. We might not know how to make lipstick or sell shoes, but what do those companies know about curing cancer? Plus, we're incentivized to make the campaign work, and have our own promotional armories -- which often include celebs!
Partnering with a dot-org is simply smart outsourcing. Because, besides eating humans, what else can dinosaurs really do in the kitchen?
Nancy Lublin founded Dress for Success and is CEO of the not-for-profit Do Something.
Why corporations shouldn't take the cause out of cause marketing
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/133/do-something-jurassic-park-syndrome.html
Why For-Profits Need Not-For-Profits
BY: NANCY LUBLIN Tue Feb 3, 2009 at 12:29 PM
In Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs roam the island terrorizing the humans, who seek refuge in the main building -- a sanctuary with security that beasts surely aren't smart enough to breach, right? Wrong! The big moment of terror is when those dumb animals learn to turn the doorknobs. Uh-oh. Now the humans hiding in the kitchen are really screwed.
We're witnessing a Jurassic Park moment in the social-good space: Not-for-profits are screwed, and it's partly our own doing. For years, we -- the martyrs, the saints, the do-gooders -- have had the keys to that door to heaven. But then we shared them with corporate America, through a practice known as "cause marketing" since 1983, when American Express launched a campaign in partnership with the National Park Service for the Statue of Liberty restoration project.
You see these campaigns everywhere now. Companies buy goodwill by touting that "a percentage of the proceeds goes to ..." or slapping a charity's logo on packaging. Want to show moms that your company cares about children? Partner with the Make-A-Wish Foundation or St. Jude Children's Research Hospital -- moms love sick kids. Need marketing oomph with African-Americans? Call the United Negro College Fund or the National Urban League.
Both sides benefit: Not-for profits get brand recognition from being featured on that cereal box, and of course we ♥ the funds -- more than $1.5 billion per year -- which are usually "unrestricted," meaning we can spend the money on unsexy things like rent. Corporations improve their image and build internal pride. Cause marketing has been one big lovefest; we all reaped rewards -- and together did a lot of good.
But what if corporate America didn't need charitable America to show love? What would happen if they, the dinosaurs in our story, learned to turn that doorknob by themselves? In September, Macy's hosted "Shop for a Cause" in its stores. It bought full-page newspaper ads to promote the day "in support of nonprofit organizations." No mention of specific groups. The day's real draw? Simply the notion of shopping for a cause. Any cause. In fairness to Macy's, it did raise more than $9 million for deserving groups (whose names you can find on its Web site). But the cause-agnostic ads proved that organizations are easily written out of the cause-marketing story line.
Aleve has taken it even further. One TV ad for the painkiller shows a woman "on a three-day walk for charity." She is strong in her spandex, putting her body on the line for her cause -- and no specific cause is named. Another ad features a woman who volunteers at a homeless shelter. The medication helps her enjoy the physical work. Did Aleve give to a worthy group that helps the homeless? No idea, but it's the preferred pain medication of people who care!
Corporate America has realized it can bask in the glow of causiness without actually partnering with a cause. That could mean the end of a gravy train for not-for-profits and the beginning of competition with big, well-funded companies. (Read: We're all kinda annoyed and scared.)
But does that make good business? Charities lend more value than just their good names. Cause is our core competency. It's what we do. We might not know how to make lipstick or sell shoes, but what do those companies know about curing cancer? Plus, we're incentivized to make the campaign work, and have our own promotional armories -- which often include celebs!
Partnering with a dot-org is simply smart outsourcing. Because, besides eating humans, what else can dinosaurs really do in the kitchen?
Nancy Lublin founded Dress for Success and is CEO of the not-for-profit Do Something.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Database of State Incentives for Renewables & Efficiency (DSIRE)
DSIRE is a comprehensive source of information on state, local, utility, and federal incentives and policies that promote renewable energy and energy efficiency. Established in 1995 and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, DSIRE is an ongoing project of the N.C. Solar Center and the Interstate Renewable Energy Council.
Established in 1995, the Database of State Incentives for Renewables & Efficiency (DSIRE) is an ongoing project of the North Carolina Solar Center and the Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC). It is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), primarily through the Office of Planning, Budget and Analysis (PBA). The site is administered by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), which is operated for DOE by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC.
Established in 1995, the Database of State Incentives for Renewables & Efficiency (DSIRE) is an ongoing project of the North Carolina Solar Center and the Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC). It is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), primarily through the Office of Planning, Budget and Analysis (PBA). The site is administered by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), which is operated for DOE by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Amazing Grace; finding Common Ground to Build a future together
'Amazing Grace' and the End of the Slave Trade
February 22, 2007
Two hundred years ago, the passion and oratory of a man named William Wilberforce drove the British Parliament to abolish slavery. Michael Apted, director of Amazing Grace, talks about the film adaptation of the life of Wilberforce.
Guests:
Michael Apted, director, most recently, of the film Amazing Grace, which opens nationwide on Friday, February 23
Eric Metaxas, most recent book is Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery; author of many children's books; humor pieces have appeared in Harper's magazine, and The New York Times
Excerpt: 'Amazing Grace'
We often hear about people who "need no introduction," but if ever someone did need one, at least in our day and age, it's William Wilberforce. The strange irony is that we are talking about a man who changed the world, so if ever someone should not need an introduction — whose name and accomplishments should be on the lips of all humanity — it's Wilberforce.
What happened is surprisingly simple: William Wilberforce was the happy victim of his own success. He was like someone who against all odds finds the cure for a horrible disease that's ravaging the world, and the cure is so overwhelmingly successful that it vanquishes the disease completely. No one suffers from it again — and within a generation or two no one remembers it ever existed.
The roots of the thing Wilberforce was trying to uproot had been growing since humans first walked on the planet, and if they had been real roots, they would have reached to the molten core of the earth itself. They ran so deep and so wide that most people thought that they held the planet together.
The opposition that he and his small band faced was incomparable to anything we can think of in modern affairs. It was certainly unprecedented that anyone should endeavor, as if by their own strength and a bit of leverage, to tip over something about as large and substantial and deeply rooted as a mountain range. From where we stand today — and because of Wilberforce — the end of slavery seems inevitable, and it's impossible for us not to take it largely for granted. But that's the wild miracle of his achievement, that what to the people of his day seemed impossible and unthinkable seems to us, in our day, inevitable.
There's hardly a soul alive today who isn't horrified and offended by the very idea of human slavery. We seethe with moral indignation at it, and we can't fathom how anyone or any culture ever countenanced it. But in the world into which Wilberforce was born, the opposite was true. Slavery was as accepted as birth and marriage and death, was so woven into the tapestry of human history that you could barely see its threads, much less pull them out. Everywhere on the globe, for five thousand years, the idea of human civilization without slavery was unimaginable.
The idea of ending slavery was so completely out of the question at that time that Wilberforce and the abolitionists couldn't even mention in publicly. They focused on the lesser idea of abolishing the slave trade — on the buying and selling of human beings — but never dared speak of emancipation, of ending slavery itself. Their secret and cherished hope was that once the slave trade had been abolished, it would then become possible to being to move toward emancipation. But first they must fight for the abolition of the slave trade; and that battle — brutal and heartbreaking — would take twenty years.
Of course, finally winning that battle in 1807 is the single towering accomplishment for which we should remember Wilberforce today, whose bicentennial we celebrate, and whose celebration occasions a movie, documentaries, and the book you now hold. If anything can stand as a single marker of Wilberforce's accomplishments, it is that 1807 victory. It paved the way for all that followed, inspiring the other nations of the world to follow suit and opening the door to emancipation, which, amazingly, was achieved three days before Wilberforce died in 1833. He received the glorious news of his life-long goal on his deathbed.
Wilberforce was one of the brightest, wittiest, best connected, and generally talented men of his day, someone who might well have become prime minister of Great Britain if he had, in the words of one historian, "preferred party to mankind." But his accomplishments far transcend any mere political victory. Wilberforce can be pictured as standing as a kind of hinge in the middle of history: he pulled the world around a corner, and we can't even look back to see where we've come from.
Wilberforce saw much of what the rest of the world could not, including the grotesque injustice of one man treating another as property. He seems to rise up out of nowhere and with the voice of unborn billions — with your voice and mine – shriek to his contemporaries that they are sleepwalking through hell, that they must wake up and must see what he saw and know what he knew — and what you and I know today — that the widespread and institutionalized and unthinkably cruel mistreatment of millions of human beings is evil and must be stopped as soon as conceivably possible — no matter the cost.
How is it possible that humanity for so long tolerated what to us is so obviously intolerable? And why did just one small group of people led by Wilberforce suddenly see this injustice for what it was? Why in a morally blind world did Wilberforce and a few others suddenly sprout eyes to see it? Abolitionists in the late eighteenth century were something like the characters in horror films who have seen "the monster" and are trying to tell everyone else about it — and no one believes them.
To fathom the magnitude of what Wilberforce did we have to see that the "disease" he vanquished forever was actually neither the slave trade nor slavery. Slavery still exists around the world today, in such measure as we can hardly fathom. What Wilberforce vanquished was something even worse than slavery, something that was much more fundamental and can hardly be seen from where we stand today: he vanquished the very mind-set that made slavery acceptable and allowed it to survive and thrive for millennia. He destroyed an entire way of seeing the world, one that had held sway from the beginning of history, and he replaced it with another way of seeing the world. Included in the old way of seeing things was the idea that the evil of slavery was good. Wilberforce murdered that old way of seeing things, and so the idea that slavery was good died along with it. Even though slavery continues to exist here and there, the idea that it is good is dead. The idea that it is inextricably intertwined with human civilization, and part of the way things are supposed to be, and economically necessary and morally defensible, is gone. Because the entire mind-set that supported it is gone.
Wilberforce overturned not just European civilization's view of slavery but its view of almost everything in the human sphere; and that is why it's nearly impossible to do justice to the enormity of his accomplishment; it was nothing less than a fundamental and important shift in human consciousness.
In typically humble fashion, Wilberforce would have been the first to insist that he had little to do with any of it. The facts are that in 1785, at age twenty-six and at the height of his political career, something profound and dramatic happened to him. He might say that, almost against his will, God opened his eyes and showed him another world. Somehow Wilberforce saw God's reality — what Jesus called the Kingdom of Heaven. He saw things he had never seen before, things that we quite take for granted today but that were as foreign to his world as slavery is to ours. He saw things that existed in God's reality but that, in human reality, were nowhere in evidence. He saw the idea that all men and women are created equal by God, in his image, and are therefore sacred. He saw the idea that all men are brothers and that we are all our brothers' keepers. He saw the idea that one must love one's neighbor as oneself and that we must do unto others as we would have them do unto us.
These ideas were at the heart of the Christian Gospel, and they had been around for at least eighteen centuries by the time Wilberforce encountered them. Monks and missionaries knew of these ideas and lived them out in their limited spheres. But no entire society had ever taken these ideas to heart as a society in the way that Britain would. That was what Wilberforce changed forever.
As a political figure, he was uniquely positioned to link these ideas to society itself, to the public sphere, and the public sphere, for the first time in history, was able to receive them. And so Wilberforce may perhaps be said to have performed the wedding ceremony between faith and culture. We had suddenly entered a world in which we would never again ask whether it was our responsibility as a society to help the poor and the suffering. We would only quibble about how, about the details — about whether to use public funds or private, for example. But we would never again question whether it was our responsibility as a society to help those less fortunate. That had been settled. Today we call this having a "social conscience," and we can't imagine any modern, civilized society without one.
Once this idea was loosed upon the world, the world changed. Slavery and the slave trade would soon be largely abolished, but many lesser social evils would be abolished too. For the first time in history, groups sprang up for every possible social cause. Wilberforce's first "great object" was the abolition of the slave trade, but his second "great object," one might say, was the abolition of every lesser social ill. The issues of child labor and factory conditions, the problems of orphans and widows, of prisoners and the sick — all suddenly had champions in people who wanted to help those less fortunate than themselves. At the center of most of these social ventures was the Clapham Circle, an informal but influential community of like-minded souls outside London who plotted good deeds together, and Wilberforce himself was at the center of Clapham. At one point he was officially linked with sixty-nine separate groups dedicated to social reform of one kind or another.
Taken all together, it's difficult to escape the verdict that William Wilberforce was simply the greatest social reformer in the history of the world. The world he was born into in 1759 and the world he departed in 1833 were as different as lead and gold. Wilberforce presided over a social earthquake that rearranged the continents and whose magnitude we are only now beginning to fully appreciate.
Unforeseen to him, the fire he ignited in England would leap across the Atlantic and quickly sweep across America — and transform that nation profoundly and forever. Can we imagine an America without its limitless number of organizations dedicated to curing every social ill? Would such an America be America? We might not wish to credit Wilberforce with inventing America, but it can reasonably be said that the America we know wouldn't exist without Wilberforce.
As a result of the efforts of Wilberforce and Clapham, social "improvement" was so fashionable by the Victorian era that do-gooders and do-goodism had become targets of derision, and they have been so ever since. We have simply forgotten that in the eighteenth century, before Wilberforce and Clapham, the poor and suffering were almost entirely without champions in the public or private sphere. We who are sometimes obsessed with social conscience can no longer imagine a world without it, or a society that regards the suffering of the poor and others as the "will of God." Even where this view does exist, as in societies and cultures informed by an Eastern, karmic view of the world, we refuse to believe it. We arrogantly seem to insist that everyone on the planet think as we do about society's obligation to the unfortunate, but they don't.
No politician has ever used his faith to a greater result for all of humanity, and that is why, in his day, Wilberforce was a moral hero far more than a political one. Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Nelson Mandela in our own time come closest to representing what Wilberforce must have seemed like to the men and women of the nineteenth century, for whom the memory of what he had done was still bright and vivid.
Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln both hailed him as an inspiration and example. Lincoln said every schoolboy knew Wilberforce's name and what he had done. Frederick Douglass gushed that Wilberforce's "faith, persistence, and enduring enthusiasm" had "thawed the British heart into sympathy for the slave, and moved the strong arm of that government to in mercy put an end to his bondage." Poets and writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and George Eliot sang his praises, as did Henry David Thoreau and John Greenleaf Whittier. Byron called him "the moral Washington of Africa."
The American artist and inventor Samuel Morse said that Wilberforce's "whole soul is bent on doing good to his fellow men. Not a moment of his time is lost. He is always planning some benevolent scheme, or other, and not only planning but executing ... Oh, that such men as Mr. Wilberforce were more common in this world. So much human blood would not be shed to gratify the malice and revenge of a few wicked, interested men."
The American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison went further yet. "His voice had a silvery cadence," he said of Wilberforce, "his face a benevolently pleasing smile, and his eye a fine intellectual expression. In his conversation he was fluent, yet modest; remarkably exact and elegant in his diction; cautious in forming conclusions; searching in his interrogations; and skillful in weighing testimony. In his manner he combined dignity with simplicity, and childlike affability with becoming gracefulness. How perfectly do those great elements of character harmonize in the same person, to wit — dovelike gentleness and amazing energy — deep humility and adventurous daring! ... These were mingled in the soul of Wilberforce."
An Italian nobleman who saw Wilberforce in his later years wrote: "When Mr. Wilberforce passes through the crowd on the day of the opening of Parliament, every one contemplates this little old man, worn with age, and his head sunk upon his shoulders, as a sacred relic: as the Washington of humanity."
We blanch at such encomia today, for indeed, ours is an age deeply suspicious of greatness. Watergate seems to have come down upon us like a portcullis, cutting us off forever from anything approaching such hero worship, especially of political figures. With the certainty of a Captain Queeg, we are forever on the lookout for the worm in the apple, the steroid in the sprinter or slugger. And lurking behind every happy biographical detail we see the skulking figure of Parson Weems and his pious fibs about cherry trees and — of all things — telling the truth.
If ever someone could restore our ability to again see simple goodness, it should be Wilberforce. If we cannot cheer someone who literally brought "freedom to the captives" and bequeathed to the world that infinitely transformative engine we call a social conscience, for whom may we ever cheer? Especially knowing that he has been more forgotten than remembered, and that he himself would have been the first to denigrate his accomplishments — as we can see from his diaries and letters, which show us that he went to the grave sincerely and deeply regretted that he hadn't done much more.
In the thick of the battle for abolition, one of its many dedicated opponents, Lord Melbourne, was outraged that Wilberforce dared inflict his Christian values about slavery and human equality on British society. "Things have come to a pretty pass," he famously thundered, "when one should permit one's religion to invade public life." For this lapidary inanity, the jeers and catcalls and raspberries and howling laughter of history's judgment will echo forever — as they should.
But after all, it is a very pretty pass indeed. And how very glad we are that one man led us to that pretty pass, to that golden doorway, and then guided us through the mountains to a world we hadn't known could exist.
February 22, 2007
Two hundred years ago, the passion and oratory of a man named William Wilberforce drove the British Parliament to abolish slavery. Michael Apted, director of Amazing Grace, talks about the film adaptation of the life of Wilberforce.
Guests:
Michael Apted, director, most recently, of the film Amazing Grace, which opens nationwide on Friday, February 23
Eric Metaxas, most recent book is Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery; author of many children's books; humor pieces have appeared in Harper's magazine, and The New York Times
Excerpt: 'Amazing Grace'
We often hear about people who "need no introduction," but if ever someone did need one, at least in our day and age, it's William Wilberforce. The strange irony is that we are talking about a man who changed the world, so if ever someone should not need an introduction — whose name and accomplishments should be on the lips of all humanity — it's Wilberforce.
What happened is surprisingly simple: William Wilberforce was the happy victim of his own success. He was like someone who against all odds finds the cure for a horrible disease that's ravaging the world, and the cure is so overwhelmingly successful that it vanquishes the disease completely. No one suffers from it again — and within a generation or two no one remembers it ever existed.
The roots of the thing Wilberforce was trying to uproot had been growing since humans first walked on the planet, and if they had been real roots, they would have reached to the molten core of the earth itself. They ran so deep and so wide that most people thought that they held the planet together.
The opposition that he and his small band faced was incomparable to anything we can think of in modern affairs. It was certainly unprecedented that anyone should endeavor, as if by their own strength and a bit of leverage, to tip over something about as large and substantial and deeply rooted as a mountain range. From where we stand today — and because of Wilberforce — the end of slavery seems inevitable, and it's impossible for us not to take it largely for granted. But that's the wild miracle of his achievement, that what to the people of his day seemed impossible and unthinkable seems to us, in our day, inevitable.
There's hardly a soul alive today who isn't horrified and offended by the very idea of human slavery. We seethe with moral indignation at it, and we can't fathom how anyone or any culture ever countenanced it. But in the world into which Wilberforce was born, the opposite was true. Slavery was as accepted as birth and marriage and death, was so woven into the tapestry of human history that you could barely see its threads, much less pull them out. Everywhere on the globe, for five thousand years, the idea of human civilization without slavery was unimaginable.
The idea of ending slavery was so completely out of the question at that time that Wilberforce and the abolitionists couldn't even mention in publicly. They focused on the lesser idea of abolishing the slave trade — on the buying and selling of human beings — but never dared speak of emancipation, of ending slavery itself. Their secret and cherished hope was that once the slave trade had been abolished, it would then become possible to being to move toward emancipation. But first they must fight for the abolition of the slave trade; and that battle — brutal and heartbreaking — would take twenty years.
Of course, finally winning that battle in 1807 is the single towering accomplishment for which we should remember Wilberforce today, whose bicentennial we celebrate, and whose celebration occasions a movie, documentaries, and the book you now hold. If anything can stand as a single marker of Wilberforce's accomplishments, it is that 1807 victory. It paved the way for all that followed, inspiring the other nations of the world to follow suit and opening the door to emancipation, which, amazingly, was achieved three days before Wilberforce died in 1833. He received the glorious news of his life-long goal on his deathbed.
Wilberforce was one of the brightest, wittiest, best connected, and generally talented men of his day, someone who might well have become prime minister of Great Britain if he had, in the words of one historian, "preferred party to mankind." But his accomplishments far transcend any mere political victory. Wilberforce can be pictured as standing as a kind of hinge in the middle of history: he pulled the world around a corner, and we can't even look back to see where we've come from.
Wilberforce saw much of what the rest of the world could not, including the grotesque injustice of one man treating another as property. He seems to rise up out of nowhere and with the voice of unborn billions — with your voice and mine – shriek to his contemporaries that they are sleepwalking through hell, that they must wake up and must see what he saw and know what he knew — and what you and I know today — that the widespread and institutionalized and unthinkably cruel mistreatment of millions of human beings is evil and must be stopped as soon as conceivably possible — no matter the cost.
How is it possible that humanity for so long tolerated what to us is so obviously intolerable? And why did just one small group of people led by Wilberforce suddenly see this injustice for what it was? Why in a morally blind world did Wilberforce and a few others suddenly sprout eyes to see it? Abolitionists in the late eighteenth century were something like the characters in horror films who have seen "the monster" and are trying to tell everyone else about it — and no one believes them.
To fathom the magnitude of what Wilberforce did we have to see that the "disease" he vanquished forever was actually neither the slave trade nor slavery. Slavery still exists around the world today, in such measure as we can hardly fathom. What Wilberforce vanquished was something even worse than slavery, something that was much more fundamental and can hardly be seen from where we stand today: he vanquished the very mind-set that made slavery acceptable and allowed it to survive and thrive for millennia. He destroyed an entire way of seeing the world, one that had held sway from the beginning of history, and he replaced it with another way of seeing the world. Included in the old way of seeing things was the idea that the evil of slavery was good. Wilberforce murdered that old way of seeing things, and so the idea that slavery was good died along with it. Even though slavery continues to exist here and there, the idea that it is good is dead. The idea that it is inextricably intertwined with human civilization, and part of the way things are supposed to be, and economically necessary and morally defensible, is gone. Because the entire mind-set that supported it is gone.
Wilberforce overturned not just European civilization's view of slavery but its view of almost everything in the human sphere; and that is why it's nearly impossible to do justice to the enormity of his accomplishment; it was nothing less than a fundamental and important shift in human consciousness.
In typically humble fashion, Wilberforce would have been the first to insist that he had little to do with any of it. The facts are that in 1785, at age twenty-six and at the height of his political career, something profound and dramatic happened to him. He might say that, almost against his will, God opened his eyes and showed him another world. Somehow Wilberforce saw God's reality — what Jesus called the Kingdom of Heaven. He saw things he had never seen before, things that we quite take for granted today but that were as foreign to his world as slavery is to ours. He saw things that existed in God's reality but that, in human reality, were nowhere in evidence. He saw the idea that all men and women are created equal by God, in his image, and are therefore sacred. He saw the idea that all men are brothers and that we are all our brothers' keepers. He saw the idea that one must love one's neighbor as oneself and that we must do unto others as we would have them do unto us.
These ideas were at the heart of the Christian Gospel, and they had been around for at least eighteen centuries by the time Wilberforce encountered them. Monks and missionaries knew of these ideas and lived them out in their limited spheres. But no entire society had ever taken these ideas to heart as a society in the way that Britain would. That was what Wilberforce changed forever.
As a political figure, he was uniquely positioned to link these ideas to society itself, to the public sphere, and the public sphere, for the first time in history, was able to receive them. And so Wilberforce may perhaps be said to have performed the wedding ceremony between faith and culture. We had suddenly entered a world in which we would never again ask whether it was our responsibility as a society to help the poor and the suffering. We would only quibble about how, about the details — about whether to use public funds or private, for example. But we would never again question whether it was our responsibility as a society to help those less fortunate. That had been settled. Today we call this having a "social conscience," and we can't imagine any modern, civilized society without one.
Once this idea was loosed upon the world, the world changed. Slavery and the slave trade would soon be largely abolished, but many lesser social evils would be abolished too. For the first time in history, groups sprang up for every possible social cause. Wilberforce's first "great object" was the abolition of the slave trade, but his second "great object," one might say, was the abolition of every lesser social ill. The issues of child labor and factory conditions, the problems of orphans and widows, of prisoners and the sick — all suddenly had champions in people who wanted to help those less fortunate than themselves. At the center of most of these social ventures was the Clapham Circle, an informal but influential community of like-minded souls outside London who plotted good deeds together, and Wilberforce himself was at the center of Clapham. At one point he was officially linked with sixty-nine separate groups dedicated to social reform of one kind or another.
Taken all together, it's difficult to escape the verdict that William Wilberforce was simply the greatest social reformer in the history of the world. The world he was born into in 1759 and the world he departed in 1833 were as different as lead and gold. Wilberforce presided over a social earthquake that rearranged the continents and whose magnitude we are only now beginning to fully appreciate.
Unforeseen to him, the fire he ignited in England would leap across the Atlantic and quickly sweep across America — and transform that nation profoundly and forever. Can we imagine an America without its limitless number of organizations dedicated to curing every social ill? Would such an America be America? We might not wish to credit Wilberforce with inventing America, but it can reasonably be said that the America we know wouldn't exist without Wilberforce.
As a result of the efforts of Wilberforce and Clapham, social "improvement" was so fashionable by the Victorian era that do-gooders and do-goodism had become targets of derision, and they have been so ever since. We have simply forgotten that in the eighteenth century, before Wilberforce and Clapham, the poor and suffering were almost entirely without champions in the public or private sphere. We who are sometimes obsessed with social conscience can no longer imagine a world without it, or a society that regards the suffering of the poor and others as the "will of God." Even where this view does exist, as in societies and cultures informed by an Eastern, karmic view of the world, we refuse to believe it. We arrogantly seem to insist that everyone on the planet think as we do about society's obligation to the unfortunate, but they don't.
No politician has ever used his faith to a greater result for all of humanity, and that is why, in his day, Wilberforce was a moral hero far more than a political one. Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Nelson Mandela in our own time come closest to representing what Wilberforce must have seemed like to the men and women of the nineteenth century, for whom the memory of what he had done was still bright and vivid.
Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln both hailed him as an inspiration and example. Lincoln said every schoolboy knew Wilberforce's name and what he had done. Frederick Douglass gushed that Wilberforce's "faith, persistence, and enduring enthusiasm" had "thawed the British heart into sympathy for the slave, and moved the strong arm of that government to in mercy put an end to his bondage." Poets and writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and George Eliot sang his praises, as did Henry David Thoreau and John Greenleaf Whittier. Byron called him "the moral Washington of Africa."
The American artist and inventor Samuel Morse said that Wilberforce's "whole soul is bent on doing good to his fellow men. Not a moment of his time is lost. He is always planning some benevolent scheme, or other, and not only planning but executing ... Oh, that such men as Mr. Wilberforce were more common in this world. So much human blood would not be shed to gratify the malice and revenge of a few wicked, interested men."
The American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison went further yet. "His voice had a silvery cadence," he said of Wilberforce, "his face a benevolently pleasing smile, and his eye a fine intellectual expression. In his conversation he was fluent, yet modest; remarkably exact and elegant in his diction; cautious in forming conclusions; searching in his interrogations; and skillful in weighing testimony. In his manner he combined dignity with simplicity, and childlike affability with becoming gracefulness. How perfectly do those great elements of character harmonize in the same person, to wit — dovelike gentleness and amazing energy — deep humility and adventurous daring! ... These were mingled in the soul of Wilberforce."
An Italian nobleman who saw Wilberforce in his later years wrote: "When Mr. Wilberforce passes through the crowd on the day of the opening of Parliament, every one contemplates this little old man, worn with age, and his head sunk upon his shoulders, as a sacred relic: as the Washington of humanity."
We blanch at such encomia today, for indeed, ours is an age deeply suspicious of greatness. Watergate seems to have come down upon us like a portcullis, cutting us off forever from anything approaching such hero worship, especially of political figures. With the certainty of a Captain Queeg, we are forever on the lookout for the worm in the apple, the steroid in the sprinter or slugger. And lurking behind every happy biographical detail we see the skulking figure of Parson Weems and his pious fibs about cherry trees and — of all things — telling the truth.
If ever someone could restore our ability to again see simple goodness, it should be Wilberforce. If we cannot cheer someone who literally brought "freedom to the captives" and bequeathed to the world that infinitely transformative engine we call a social conscience, for whom may we ever cheer? Especially knowing that he has been more forgotten than remembered, and that he himself would have been the first to denigrate his accomplishments — as we can see from his diaries and letters, which show us that he went to the grave sincerely and deeply regretted that he hadn't done much more.
In the thick of the battle for abolition, one of its many dedicated opponents, Lord Melbourne, was outraged that Wilberforce dared inflict his Christian values about slavery and human equality on British society. "Things have come to a pretty pass," he famously thundered, "when one should permit one's religion to invade public life." For this lapidary inanity, the jeers and catcalls and raspberries and howling laughter of history's judgment will echo forever — as they should.
But after all, it is a very pretty pass indeed. And how very glad we are that one man led us to that pretty pass, to that golden doorway, and then guided us through the mountains to a world we hadn't known could exist.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Creative Capitalism; L3C, Low-profit Limited Liability Company
L3C
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A low-profit limited liability company (L3C) is a legal form of business entity in the United States that was created to bridge the gap between non-profit and for-profit investing by providing a structure that facilitates investments in socially beneficial, for-profit ventures while simplifying compliance with Internal Revenue Service rules for "Program Related Investments".
Legislation
Vermont. The pioneer legislation approving the L3C as a legally-recognized form of business entity (House Bill 0775) was approved by the full Vermont House of Representatives on February 27, 2008 and by the Vermont Senate on April 11, 2008. It was signed into law by Governor of Vermont James H. Douglas on April 30, 2008. As of August 10, 2009 Vermont lists about 60 L3Cs in the state database, including a chess camp, theater, alternative energy companies, publishers, food companies and numerous consulting firms. [9]
Michigan. Introduced by Traverse City Republican State Senator Jason Allen on July 24, 2008, Senate Bill 1445 was signed into law on January 16, 2009[10] as an amendment to the Michigan Limited Liability Company Act[11] by Governor of Michigan Jennifer Granholm. The bill was supported by the Council of Michigan Foundations[12], and the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Growth[13].
Utah. February 2009 - State Senator Lyle Hillyard (Utah politician) from District 25 introduced the Low-profit Limited Liability Company Act S.B. 148 on February 2, 2009. The Act is sponsored in the House by State Representative Kraig Powell of District 54.On March 23, 2009, Utah Governor Jon M. Huntsman Jr. signed the Low-Profit Limited Liability Company Act S.B. 148 into law. [14]
Wyoming. January 2009 - Wyoming State Representative, Dan Zwonitzer, introduced the L3C bill HB0182. On February 26, 2009 Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal signed the L3C Legislation into law.
Illinois. August 2009 - Gov. Pat Quinn signed Illinois' L3C bill on August 4, 2009. The law will take effect on January 1, 2010. [2] The law aims to make it easier for social enterprises to attract capital, said Sen. Heather Steans (D-Chicago), who sponsored the bill. "Foundations have a growing interest to not only make grants that achieve a social purpose but also use investments to do that," Steans said. Chicago attorney and financial adviser Marc Lane of Marc J. Lane Wealth Group, who helped spearhead the Illinois legislation, said the L3C law could create new jobs by supporting social enterprises that otherwise couldn't exist. It's particularly timely given the credit crunch, he said.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L3C
The L3C: A More Creative Capitalism
By Jim Witkin | January 15th, 2009
During his 2007 Harvard commencement address, Bill Gates, now the world’s best funded philanthropist, called on the graduates to invent “a more creative capitalism” where “we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities.”
It doesn’t take a Harvard grad (or Harvard dropout like Gates) to understand that traditional market forces mostly work against the notion of a socially beneficial enterprise (one that seeks social returns first and financial second). Existing for-profit corporate structures demand a higher financial return than a social enterprise can usually deliver; while non-profit organizations have limited access to capital and a tax-exempt format that limits a strong profit orientation. If the social enterprise field is to evolve and grow, what’s needed is a hybrid of the two forms, a structure that supports a “low profit corporation.”
Enter the L3C (low-profit, limited liability company), a new corporate structure designed to attract a wide range of investment sources thereby improving the viability of social ventures. In April 2008, Vermont became the first state to recognize the L3C as a legal corporate structure. Similar legislation is pending in Georgia, Michigan, Montana and North Carolina. But if the L3C seems like the right choice for your social enterprise, you don’t have to wait! L3Cs formed in Vermont can be used in any state.
Flexible Ownership Attracts a Range of Investors
The goal of the L3C form is to bring together a mix of investment money from a variety of sources. This process starts with investments from Foundations known as Program Related Investments (PRIs). Foundations are required to spend at least five percent of their assets in a given fiscal year in order to maintain their tax-exempt status. They have two basic options for spending their money: they can make grants, where there is no financial return on the money, or they can make program-related investments (PRIs) investing in for-profit ventures and potentially earn a return.
But to qualify as a PRI, the investment must relate to the Foundation’s mission and the risk/reward ratio must exceed that of a standard market-driven investment (ie, the risk must be higher, and the return lower). Surprisingly, the use of PRIs by Foundations is limited even with the potential to earn a small return. Because of burdensome and costly IRS requirements to verify PRIs, many foundations shy away from investing in for-profit ventures due to the uncertainty of whether they would qualify as PRIs.
Unlike the Limited Liability Corporation (LLC), the L3C is explicitly formed to further a socially beneficial mission. The L3C’s operating agreement specifically outlines its PRI-qualified purpose. This should make it much easier for Foundations to make program related investments in social ventures while ensuring their tax-exempt status remains secure.
Like the LLC, the L3C is able to form flexible partnerships where ownership rights can be tailored to meet the requirements of each partner. This flexibility permits a tranched or layered investment and ownership structure. The Foundation’s L3C membership stake provides for a very low rate of return and can be subordinate to the other investors. Because the Foundation can invest through PRIs at less than the market rate while embracing higher risk levels, this lowers the risk to other investors and increases their potential rate of return. So the remaining L3C memberships can then be marketed at risk/return profiles necessary to attract market driven investors.
The end result: the L3C is able to leverage Foundation PRIs to access a wide range of investment dollars through a flexible partnership structure. Additionally, profit and loss flow through the L3C to its members and are taxed according to each investor’s particular tax situation, making it easier for non-profits and for-profits to partner together.
Some examples of L3C entities that have been created or are in the process: carbon trading, alternative energy, food bank processing, social services, social benefit consulting and media, arts funding, job creation programs, economic development, housing for low income and aging populations, medical facilities, environmental remediation, and medical research.
L3C Advocacy
The L3C concept was formed by Robert Lang, CEO of the Mary Elizabeth & Gordon B. Mannweiler Foundation, Inc. Marcus Owens, a tax attorney with Caplin & Drysdale in Washington, DC, wrote the basic law. The Mary Elizabeth & Gordon B. Mannweiler Foundation has funded the Americans for Community Development whose purpose is to promote the L3C and the adoption of this new corporate form in all fifty states. Mr. Lang and others formed the first L3C, L3C Advisors, for the purpose of helping social ventures structure, organize & finance L3C’s.
The L3C is still in “proof of concept” form, but will be put to the test this year. Because the first L3Cs were formed in 2008, this means 2009 will be the first year that the concept will be tested with the IRS. Hopefully, the IRS will readily accept Foundation investments in L3Cs as valid PRIs. Steve Gunderson, CEO of the Council on Foundations, which supports the L3C approach says “we’re optimistic” that the IRS will also support this approach to PRI investing.
The economic realities of connecting social needs with capital markets is leading to innovations like the L3C form. As the problems that social ventures try to solve get bigger and more widespread, hopefully these types of innovations will keep pace.
Nonprofit Law Blog
L3C - Developments & Resources
http://www.nonprofitlawblog.com/home/2009/03/l3c-developments-resources.html
http://www.triplepundit.com/2009/01/the-l3c-a-more-creative-capitalism/
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A low-profit limited liability company (L3C) is a legal form of business entity in the United States that was created to bridge the gap between non-profit and for-profit investing by providing a structure that facilitates investments in socially beneficial, for-profit ventures while simplifying compliance with Internal Revenue Service rules for "Program Related Investments".
Legislation
Vermont. The pioneer legislation approving the L3C as a legally-recognized form of business entity (House Bill 0775) was approved by the full Vermont House of Representatives on February 27, 2008 and by the Vermont Senate on April 11, 2008. It was signed into law by Governor of Vermont James H. Douglas on April 30, 2008. As of August 10, 2009 Vermont lists about 60 L3Cs in the state database, including a chess camp, theater, alternative energy companies, publishers, food companies and numerous consulting firms. [9]
Michigan. Introduced by Traverse City Republican State Senator Jason Allen on July 24, 2008, Senate Bill 1445 was signed into law on January 16, 2009[10] as an amendment to the Michigan Limited Liability Company Act[11] by Governor of Michigan Jennifer Granholm. The bill was supported by the Council of Michigan Foundations[12], and the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Growth[13].
Utah. February 2009 - State Senator Lyle Hillyard (Utah politician) from District 25 introduced the Low-profit Limited Liability Company Act S.B. 148 on February 2, 2009. The Act is sponsored in the House by State Representative Kraig Powell of District 54.On March 23, 2009, Utah Governor Jon M. Huntsman Jr. signed the Low-Profit Limited Liability Company Act S.B. 148 into law. [14]
Wyoming. January 2009 - Wyoming State Representative, Dan Zwonitzer, introduced the L3C bill HB0182. On February 26, 2009 Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal signed the L3C Legislation into law.
Illinois. August 2009 - Gov. Pat Quinn signed Illinois' L3C bill on August 4, 2009. The law will take effect on January 1, 2010. [2] The law aims to make it easier for social enterprises to attract capital, said Sen. Heather Steans (D-Chicago), who sponsored the bill. "Foundations have a growing interest to not only make grants that achieve a social purpose but also use investments to do that," Steans said. Chicago attorney and financial adviser Marc Lane of Marc J. Lane Wealth Group, who helped spearhead the Illinois legislation, said the L3C law could create new jobs by supporting social enterprises that otherwise couldn't exist. It's particularly timely given the credit crunch, he said.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L3C
The L3C: A More Creative Capitalism
By Jim Witkin | January 15th, 2009
During his 2007 Harvard commencement address, Bill Gates, now the world’s best funded philanthropist, called on the graduates to invent “a more creative capitalism” where “we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities.”
It doesn’t take a Harvard grad (or Harvard dropout like Gates) to understand that traditional market forces mostly work against the notion of a socially beneficial enterprise (one that seeks social returns first and financial second). Existing for-profit corporate structures demand a higher financial return than a social enterprise can usually deliver; while non-profit organizations have limited access to capital and a tax-exempt format that limits a strong profit orientation. If the social enterprise field is to evolve and grow, what’s needed is a hybrid of the two forms, a structure that supports a “low profit corporation.”
Enter the L3C (low-profit, limited liability company), a new corporate structure designed to attract a wide range of investment sources thereby improving the viability of social ventures. In April 2008, Vermont became the first state to recognize the L3C as a legal corporate structure. Similar legislation is pending in Georgia, Michigan, Montana and North Carolina. But if the L3C seems like the right choice for your social enterprise, you don’t have to wait! L3Cs formed in Vermont can be used in any state.
Flexible Ownership Attracts a Range of Investors
The goal of the L3C form is to bring together a mix of investment money from a variety of sources. This process starts with investments from Foundations known as Program Related Investments (PRIs). Foundations are required to spend at least five percent of their assets in a given fiscal year in order to maintain their tax-exempt status. They have two basic options for spending their money: they can make grants, where there is no financial return on the money, or they can make program-related investments (PRIs) investing in for-profit ventures and potentially earn a return.
But to qualify as a PRI, the investment must relate to the Foundation’s mission and the risk/reward ratio must exceed that of a standard market-driven investment (ie, the risk must be higher, and the return lower). Surprisingly, the use of PRIs by Foundations is limited even with the potential to earn a small return. Because of burdensome and costly IRS requirements to verify PRIs, many foundations shy away from investing in for-profit ventures due to the uncertainty of whether they would qualify as PRIs.
Unlike the Limited Liability Corporation (LLC), the L3C is explicitly formed to further a socially beneficial mission. The L3C’s operating agreement specifically outlines its PRI-qualified purpose. This should make it much easier for Foundations to make program related investments in social ventures while ensuring their tax-exempt status remains secure.
Like the LLC, the L3C is able to form flexible partnerships where ownership rights can be tailored to meet the requirements of each partner. This flexibility permits a tranched or layered investment and ownership structure. The Foundation’s L3C membership stake provides for a very low rate of return and can be subordinate to the other investors. Because the Foundation can invest through PRIs at less than the market rate while embracing higher risk levels, this lowers the risk to other investors and increases their potential rate of return. So the remaining L3C memberships can then be marketed at risk/return profiles necessary to attract market driven investors.
The end result: the L3C is able to leverage Foundation PRIs to access a wide range of investment dollars through a flexible partnership structure. Additionally, profit and loss flow through the L3C to its members and are taxed according to each investor’s particular tax situation, making it easier for non-profits and for-profits to partner together.
Some examples of L3C entities that have been created or are in the process: carbon trading, alternative energy, food bank processing, social services, social benefit consulting and media, arts funding, job creation programs, economic development, housing for low income and aging populations, medical facilities, environmental remediation, and medical research.
L3C Advocacy
The L3C concept was formed by Robert Lang, CEO of the Mary Elizabeth & Gordon B. Mannweiler Foundation, Inc. Marcus Owens, a tax attorney with Caplin & Drysdale in Washington, DC, wrote the basic law. The Mary Elizabeth & Gordon B. Mannweiler Foundation has funded the Americans for Community Development whose purpose is to promote the L3C and the adoption of this new corporate form in all fifty states. Mr. Lang and others formed the first L3C, L3C Advisors, for the purpose of helping social ventures structure, organize & finance L3C’s.
The L3C is still in “proof of concept” form, but will be put to the test this year. Because the first L3Cs were formed in 2008, this means 2009 will be the first year that the concept will be tested with the IRS. Hopefully, the IRS will readily accept Foundation investments in L3Cs as valid PRIs. Steve Gunderson, CEO of the Council on Foundations, which supports the L3C approach says “we’re optimistic” that the IRS will also support this approach to PRI investing.
The economic realities of connecting social needs with capital markets is leading to innovations like the L3C form. As the problems that social ventures try to solve get bigger and more widespread, hopefully these types of innovations will keep pace.
Nonprofit Law Blog
L3C - Developments & Resources
http://www.nonprofitlawblog.com/home/2009/03/l3c-developments-resources.html
http://www.triplepundit.com/2009/01/the-l3c-a-more-creative-capitalism/
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