JOSHUA CAPLAN
Founder and Chief Activist Officer, Tea of the People
From the New York hedge fund titan to the single mother of three in Accra, Ghana, the diffusion of technology has forever changed the way our world operates. Arthur C. Clarke once equated advanced technology to magic, alluding to its ability to revolutionize whole industries in a short period of time.
When we started Tea of the People, we ran through endless apps, Snapchat selfies and online paleo recipes. We found something so powerful linking these phenomena that we built our company’s social mission around it. Outside of human imagination, technology is the greatest tool at our disposal to make substantive inroads with the world’s most pressing challenges.
With a lineup of innovative teas, Tea of the People aims to bring positive and sustainable change to people and our planet. We are dangerously passionate about helping people become healthier, and supporting game-changing entrepreneurs and non-profits.
When building out our corporate social responsibility strategy, we placed more emphasis on the “how” than the “who”. This is not because who we support is of little importance, but because the right methodology can apply to all kinds of issues. We believe that leveraging technology as a tool for good can bring positive change across a wide range of communities.
Tea of the People is currently donating a portion of its profits to Medic Mobile, a non-profit organization that advances healthcare in the developing world. They had a tremendously successful pilot program – in just six months their SMS platform saved a Malawi hospital 1,200 staff hours of follow-up time when 1,400 patient updates were processed via SMS.
The same technology can boost local economies, says Jan Chipchase, formerly Nokia’s principal scientist. Nokia stands behind a mobile phone’s ability to “increase people’s productivity and well-being, mostly because of the simple fact that they can be reached”.
The causes we support are important, but if the tools used to get the job done are ineffective or underdeveloped, one can argue that supporting a cause that is less aligned with company or customer values, but more impactful, will yield a considerably higher social return. A highly effective technology deployed to tackle one problem can be leveraged and adapted elsewhere to yield even greater benefits.
By supporting technology-driven companies, Tea of the People aids innovation in everything from infectious disease eradication to microfinance risk models. For us it’s a win-win. A recent poll illustrates the benefits to having a corporate social strategy. According to Nielsen’s 2014 Global Survey on Corporate Social Responsibility, 55 percent of global online consumers are keen on paying higher prices for products and services from companies with a socially conscious mission.
Long before Tea of the People began handcrafting Dragon Well green tea, loaded with real super fruit or barrel-aging organic rooibos with Madagascar Cocoa beans, we wanted to use business as a tool for good. If social entrepreneurship is to be a force for good, we believe a larger focus must be given to developing innovative technologies that can be applied to a broad range of problems.
