Coca-Cola give $5million to the Clinton Initiative
September 30, 2009 by Simon Berry · Leave a Comment
Thanks to @stevebridger for alerting me to this. Coca-Cola are putting $5million into the Clinton Initiative over the next three years and it looks and feels like little more than a profile raising initiative. Watch the interview with Muhtar Kent, Coca-Cola’s CEO and Chairman, and make a judgement for yourself (don’t be put off by the intro advertisement!). I watched it and I am not at all inspired. In my humble opinion, Coca-Cola have to get out of the ’selling more Coca-Cola’ box if they are to sell more Coca-Cola AND aspire to helping pull Africa out of grinding poverty. Let me explain.
Growing Coca-Cola’s dominance of the fizzy drinks market in Africa will definitely create more jobs. And if they do it sensitively, which they have committed to do, this process will help alleviate poverty and increase equality. However, in my opinion, what is being sold as a huge development initiative is essentially ‘business as usual’. Not only that, my suspicion that there is a limit to the amount of fizzy drink people can consume and the growth of Coca-Cola will be at the expense of other soda producers. So while jobs are being gained in Coca-Cola they will be being lost elsewhere.
I don’t know what others think but ColaLife is what Coca-Cola needs to make it truly stand out as a leader. A commitment to ColaLife alongside the ‘business as usual’ approach would get Coca-Cola into markets of consumers with a social conscience that do not consume Coca-Cola at the moment on principle. ColaLife, implemented properly, would also completely transform Coca-Cola’s image and consumers’ attitude towards it.
I’m going to have a look and see what strings are attached (if any) to the $5million donation to the Clinton Initiative because ColaLife could make extremely productive use of some of this.
Google back off from original vision
September 24, 2009 by Simon Berry · 12 Comments
My Twitter search on Project 10 100 just started to yield results. With great excitement I rushed to my PC to see this:
Is ColaLife one of the 100 semi-finalists? No it isn’t. But hang on, there are not 100 semi-finalists! Google have changed the rules of the game!
There won’t be 100 concrete ideas to vote on, but 16 broad-brush themes. It now looks like a programme that a government or an aid agency would announce. Each theme is huge and it seems to me would need a lot more than a share of $10 million to make a significant impression. As an example, the first theme is ‘Help social entrepreneurs drive change‘ and within that is the idea to ‘Create a non-profit, venture capital-like revolving fund to invest in high-impact local entrepreneurs’. Nothing wrong with that idea, but it has been done. In the UK we have just such a scheme - UnLtd - which is wonderful. But UnLtd was set up with a £100 million endowment, not a $2 million investment.
Project 10 to the 100th has morphed. It’s not going to give 100 individual and amazing ideas the oxygen of publicity they need to become a reality. Perhaps that notion was just too innovative and too ambitious. It looks like we’re going to get a modest amount of additional funding with the traditional four or five key themes that existing organisations will bid for.
It turns out that Project 10^100 has been a bit of a distraction for ColaLife. We now need to move on and vigorously explore other options to make our idea a reality.
Onwards and upwards.
Let’s here it for the G20 bloggers
September 24, 2009 by Simon Berry · Leave a Comment
As you must be aware, the G20 Summit is underway in Pittsburgh. But you might not know is that there are a bunch of people passionate about social justice and the environment blogging from inside the summit under the banner of G20Voice. The idea of the G20Voice initiative is that it “Amplifies bloggers’ voices to hold the G20 accountable”. So if you want the people’s view of what’s going on you need to be following the G20Voice bloggers.
I had the honour to be nominated by ColaLife supporters for the first ever team of G20Voice bloggers at the London Summit in April 2009. You can read my posts here. A couple of the original team have made it to Pittsburgh. Can I recommend you take a look at the thoughts of Vikki Chowney and Todd Lucier - fellow team members from the London summit.
The highlight of the G20 London summit for ColaLife was the conversation with Bob Geldof captured by fellow bloggers Nick Booth and Lloyd Davies:
The tag being used for all this activity is G20Voice. G20Voice tweets are here.
ColaLife has introduced me to some great people
September 23, 2009 by Simon Berry · Leave a Comment
Today I met two more people face to face that I’d hooked up with online through ColaLife. At lunchtime I met Maria Diaz. Maria is part of the team at CTT. CTT is led by William Hoyle who has been a great ColaLife supporter and evangelist from the very start and he has infected the whole of the CTT team with his enthusiasm. Many months ago William introduced me to the people at Trovus who donate their website monitoring service - Trovus Revelations - to ColaLife. CTT also support ColaLife with their CTTm@il service. I met with Maria today to start planning an email campaign that would kick in if we get through to the semi-finals of Google’s Project 10 to the 100th ideas. Watch this space on this one.
This evening I met with Jane Young. The theme was the same - campaigning - but this time it was video campaigning. Jane is the founder of Scrmblr (pronounced scrambler) which brings together creative types, who mostly work in the private sector, to do good things for good causes. I’m hoping that members of the Scrmblr network will rise to the challenge of creating an animation to support the voting campaign. Again, watch this space on this one.
ColaLife Limited - ColaLife incorporates
September 10, 2009 by Simon Berry · 1 Comment
It’s official. Today ColaLife’s Certificate of Incorporation arrived from Bells, Wells & Braithwaite. ColaLife Limited is a company limited by guarantee (non-profit). Our Memorandum and Articles of Association are here. Many thanks to Bells, Wells & Braithwaite for their pro-bono help with the incorporation. The first draft of a business plan is also on its way. Once this in place I hope it will provide enough information to enable people to sign up for board membership to take ColaLife to the next phase.
There are several reasons for incorporation including:
- To provide supporters, particularly potential funders, a mechanism to engage (please get in touch!)
- To enable ColaLife to inject further pace into the campaign which has been totally dependent on Coca-Cola until now
- To enable ColaLife to engage in design and prototyping of the aidpod concept
- To enable ColaLife to bid to implement the ColaLife idea if we make it to the finals of Google’s Project 10 to the 100th
The not-for-profit legal structure we have chosen will enable us to adopt charitable status or CIC status at sometime in the future if this would be beneficial. Either of these decisions would be one-way.
Onwards and upwards.
ColaLife Project 10 the the 100th animation hits 9,000 views
September 7, 2009 by Simon Berry · Leave a Comment
While we wait for Google to announce the 100 semi-finalists of the Project 10 to the 100th initiative, the ColaLife animation, which formed part of our entry, has passed 9,000 views. Here it is again:
ColaLife moves on the rest of Europe - Part 2
September 1, 2009 by Simon Berry · 1 Comment
I have been invited to give a ColaLife presentation at the 8th Annual World Food Technology & Innovation convention in Rotterdam at 15:35 on 27 October. It looks like it’s a plenary session. The programme is here. This is the pitch I will be going in on:
Distributing commercial products in developing countries fulfils one purpose: a commercial one. Will this be acceptable in the future against a back drop of high child mortality and grinding poverty? Sustainable distribution businesses will need to maximise social and environmental returns as well financial ones.
ColaLife is encouraging Coca-Cola to engage in ’sustainable distribution’ and use the unused space in Coca-Coca crates to carry ’social products’ such as oral rehydration salts, vitamin A tablets, water purification tablets or whatever else is required in a particular location to improved public health, particularly children’s health.
You can get a Coca-Cola virtually anywhere you go in developing countries but in these places 1 in 5 children die before their 5th birthday. as well as being a blight on humanity it doesn’t make commercial sense that 1 in 5 of your potential customers die before they are 5.
ColaLife is a mature proposition that has been honed by exposing the idea to thousands of people in social networks. Coca-Cola have engaged at international level; ColaLife has brokered a partnership between Coca-Cola and an international NGO (AED) and local trials will start in Tanzania this year.
Four children die every minute in Africa alone from simple preventable diseases and this has been the case for many decades - ColaLife aims to be part of the solution to this problem. This presentation will be delivered by ColaLife’s founder and former development worker, Simon Berry.
http://colalife.org - the website
http://colalife.org/blog - the blog
Other speakers include:
Tim Carey
Director, Sustainability and Technology
PepsiCo
Steven Moorhouse
General Manager European Supply Chain
Coca-Cola
Dr. Graham Cross
Director Innovation Acceleration & Supplier Alliances
Unilever
Andrew Trevis
Plant Director
Kraft Foods
Chris McCann
ES Country Head
Wal-Mart Global Procurement
Onwards and upwards!
What others are saying about ColaLife- ColaLife on Flickr
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