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.
?What If!, the innovation company, support ColaLife (again)
August 28, 2009 by Simon Berry · 2 Comments
Through my day job (Head of Third Sector Team at Defra), I had the good fortune to meet Dave Allan and James Baderman of ?What If!, the innovation company. ?What If! is an international company whose clients include Coca-Cola, Unilever, Cadbury Schweppes and many other big names. On this particular evening ?What If! had been charged with arranging a Ministerial Dinner in Admiralty House to bring social enterprise ambassadors and government officials together. I was there as a government official.
Dave and James were very interested in the possibility of supporting ColaLife through the ?What If! Foundation. I met with James and his colleagues a couple of times but formal support was not possible with an unincorporated body so the potential partnership was put on the back burner.
Fast Forward a few months and we decide we are ready to incorporate ColaLife and need a registered address. I went back to ?What If! to ask if they would provide us with our first ‘legal home’. They said ‘Yes’. So ColaLife’s registered address will shortly be:
The Glassworks,
3-4 Ashland Place,
London, W1U 4AH
Thanks ?What If!. I don’t think ColaLife could have a more appropriate first home.
ColaLife brokers partnership with global NGO for Tanzanian field work
August 4, 2009 by Simon Berry · 13 Comments
Our first major achievement was to get Coca-Cola’s agreement to look at trialling our ideas on the ground in Africa. Now we can reveal our second major achievement: we have successfully found them the partner they needed. Three weeks ago, on 20th July 2009, after months of partnership development talks, AED (The Academy for Educational Development) started work on the ground in Tanzania with Coca-Cola and local bottler SABCO. Together, they will be looking at the viability of early field trials to develop the work of their MDCs: a ‘learning laboratory’. And we hope that the concepts and ideas Colalife has put forward will form a successful part of those trials.
Over a year ago, in June 2008, when I travelled to Brussels to meet with Salvatore Gabola, Coca-Cola’s Global Head of Stakeholder Relations, he set me a challenge. He liked the idea. He said that the time could be right. BUT:
“Coca-Cola couldn’t do this [colalife] by itself even it wanted to. Distribution of medicines is not our business, not our area of expertise. We would need to partner with an international NGO.”
Not one to turn down a challenge, I started approaching all the big names in the UK. It’s a great idea - surely some big organisation with the expertise we needed would take it forward? What’s to lose? People could only say ‘No’…. Yep, they said No. Six months and a great many polite put-downs later: still no luck. Then I got a message from a member of the Facebook Group, Magdelena Serpa. She works for AED in the States and was really excited by the Colalife idea. She arranged a telephone conference with her colleague, Peter Johnson, a member of AED’s Senior Management Group. We followed this initial call with another involving all the relevant AED experts in Washington and New York and I was able to persuade them that the idea had potential. I undertook to try and set up a telephone conference call with Euan Wilmshurst and Adrian Ristow of Coca-Cola. That was in early December 2008.
The Coca-Cola/AED telephone conference took a while to arrange but finally we all got around the virtual meeting table on 20 January. After a couple more telephone conferences it was clear that this partnership was going to be fruitful. But there was still a lot of work to do to build the relationship; it would not have helped to reveal that negotiations were underway at that time, so I put my blogpost on the back burner and waited.
This week, my contacts at Coca-Cola told me that the work is underway, though any major announcements will have to wait until the findings start to emerge. This exploratory phase will assess the viability of social product distribution and social messaging, for trials in the last quarter of this year.
This is a big day for ColaLife: a truly significant milestone for the ColaLife campaign and the culmination of months of work behind the scenes. Thank goodness I don’t have to keep this to myself any longer!
Onwards and upwards.
Why we still need Google’s support
April 23, 2009 by Simon Berry · 1 Comment
Animation produced by Facebook members to support our Project 10^100 entry
There is a danger, now that Coca-Cola have said yes (probably) to trials of our idea in Tanzania, the people at Google will think ‘job done’ and decide we don’t need their help. However, the truth is that we need their help now more than ever. Up until the Coca-Cola statement on Tuesday (21/4/09) all we had was an idea, a pretty amazing idea, but just an idea. Now we have a job to do. It’s not a case of ‘job done’, more the case of a huge ‘job to do’.
Although we are right to expect Coca-Cola to invest in the ColaLife idea, we shouldn’t expect them to ‘own’ it - and indeed they have no aspiration to. Coca-Cola will be one of a number of crucial partners that will be required to make ColaLife a successful, replicable reality. If ColaLife aidpods are going to be part of the trials this year we are going to need several thousand of them. We are going to need talented designers to build and test prototypes. Then we’ll need them made - preferably in Africa. Everything so far has been voluntary - but to do this properly we’re going to need funding. While the trials are underway in Tanzania we’ll need to be learning and understanding the key success factors. We’ll need to be working with local people in other developing countries to understand local conditions and the enablers and barriers to replication of the idea. And so the list goes on.
So, Google, if you’re listening. We need you now more than ever.
The text of our Project 10^100 entry are here.
Please register to vote for ColaLife here.
If you work for Google . . . when are you going to announce the top 100 ideas? (well, if you don’t ask?).
No more organisations needed?
February 18, 2009 by Simon Berry · Leave a Comment
It would be very attempting to set up ColaLife as an NGO but I strongly believe that the organisations needed to implement the ColaLife already exist and that we should focus on joining things up and facilitating relationships to make things happen. Now and again I receive a message that reassures me that this is correct and that this is the right approach. This arrived yesterday from Cami Allen who is the Program Manager at an organisation called ‘Vitamin Angels’. Check them out here. Cami has now joined the ColaLife Google Group.
It is a pleasure to find Colalife. In the past year we have approached Danone and Nestle regarding the potential for piggybacking vitamin A supplementation onto their existing distribution systems in markets with deep penetration down to the household level. Obviously these markets are more limited in global scope than is CocaCola.
Vitamin A may be an ideal “social product” to add to the pod. I am not sure to what extent you have been involved specifically in health care interventions in developing countries, so I will give a short overview of vitamin A if you will bear with me:
Vitamin A supplementation in over 60 priority countries is a key health intervention recommended by WHO/UNICEF. Vitamin A is known as the anti-infective vitamin, guarding against external infection. It is essential to the immune system, especially in children under five who are most susceptible to infectious diseases. Deficiency of vitamin A (VAD) is a major contributor to the mortality of children under five. Leading causes of death, including measles, malaria, acute respiratory infections, and diarrhea are reduced substantially by vitamin A supplementation alone.
% reduction of U5MR due to vitamin A supplementation:
- Measles (50%)
- Diarrhea (33%) an
- Overall mortality (23%).
Operational research also shows evidence that vitamin A supplementation of neonates (in the first 2-3 days of life) can reduce mortality by a further 23-60%.
Vitamin A supplements are practical:
- Need to be taken just once each six months. The body is able to store vitamin A in the liver, making it possible to get adequate vitamin A status with one high-dose capsule each 4-6 months.
- No special storage or transport conditions (usually) required. Vitamin A very stable; relatively cool, dry environments are all that is needed
- Some basic training is required to distribute, but no specialist medical personnel required.
- Not controversial, and as a policy is already supported by virtually all national governments (as well as WHO and UNICEF).
In addition, it is considered to be one of the best investments possible from an cost-efficiency and efficacy standpoint:
Vitamin A supplementation is also aligned with the Colalife goals to address MDGs 4 and 6 – and when given to deficient mothers, MDG 5 as well. It’s also aligned with Aims 1, 2, 4 and 5.
Anyway, we are pleased to have found your group and look forward to contributing to this discussion whenever possible. Down the road, if vitamin A supplements were to be selected as an appropriate “social product” for the Aidpods, we would be more than willing to supply this product for the trial and beyond. In addition, Vitamin Angels is deeply committed to exploring new distribution systems via public-private partnership, and there is some possibility that we may be able to commit other resources as well in order to make this happen.
If you’re interested in reviewing us further, our website is at www.vitaminangels.org. I have to warn you that the site is quite dated and not reflective of the strategic focus that we have adopted over the past 18 months. (A new site geared toward both our professional associations and cultivating our supporter base online will launch in May.)
Breakfast with James Alexander
August 20, 2008 by Simon Berry · 1 Comment
I set off for London at the crack of dawn this morning to have a breakfast meeting with my old friend James Alexander. We were brought together again by one of Kate’s press releases. James has been holding the interim CEO post at We Are What We Do. I first came across We Are What We Do when I met Eugenie Harvey when she was promoting her amazing book ‘Change the World for a Fiver‘. If you haven’t got this book - buy it - it’s an inspiration. Here’s an interview with Eugenie from the delicious ambitious site:
Anyway, We Are What We Do are about getting lots of people to do small things to bring about big change. That’s what this campaign feels like. Lot’s of people have taken a moment to show their support by joining the ColaLife Facebook Group and we are making great progress as a result. However, We Are What We Do are experts getting people to do another small thing, and then another small thing . . . . which woud be good expertise to have access to. We will be looking at how we can work together on the ColaLife Campaign.
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