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NationSwell Announces New Partnership With JUST Capital

Posted on August 12, 2021September 8, 2022 by NationSwell Team

NationSwell is proud to announce a new partnership with JUST Capital, a non-profit organization whose data-driven tools, rankings, and indexes help companies improve how they serve not just their shareholders, but all their stakeholders — including workers, customers, communities, and the environment.

“JUST Capital’s impartial company rankings, open-sourced methodology, and collaborative initiatives have broken new ground in the movement toward stakeholder capitalism,” Katie Hunt-Morr, Managing Director of the NationSwell Council, said. “We are excited to add the force of NationSwell’s cross-sector community of impact-driven leaders to their work.”

“We know from having surveyed over 120,000 Americans since 2015 that people want companies to pay a fair and living wage, provide good benefits, and create equal opportunity for advancement,” said Michelle Mullineaux, JUST Capital’s Chief Marketing and Communications Officer. “We’re thrilled to work more closely with NationSwell’s community of change-makers to accelerate action around these critical issues.”

Members of the NationSwell Community can expect to see stories in support of JUST Capital’s human-centered impact across all of our channels, which include our member-exclusive newsletters for Council and Institutional Members, our public facing social channels, and journalist-led editorial stories of JUST Capital’s Impact on NationSwell’s storytelling platforms.

NationSwell will begin by supporting the Worker Financial Wellness Initiative, which was created by JUST Capital and PayPal with support from the Financial Health Network and Good Jobs Institute to encourage companies to make their workers’ financial security and health a C-suite and investor priority. The initiative elevates the necessity of worker financial well-being as business leaders consider solutions to shape an equitable and inclusive recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and take action to advance racial equity. The first cohort of companies to join the initiative includes industry leaders like Chipotle, Chobani, Even, Prudential Financial, and Verizon, a NationSwell Institutional Member.

To learn more about how you can be a part of supporting worker financial wellness, reach out.

NationSwell members can also expect to see expert leaders from JUST Capital around our table at events on stakeholder capitalism, equity, worker financial well-being, and other issues where JUST Capital’s leaders can provide valuable insights.

For more information on JUST Capital, and to learn more about some of their recent initiatives, visit their website.

For more information on NationSwell, visit our mission page.

Introducing Collaboratives, NationSwell’s New Cross-Sector Initiative to Tackle the World’s Biggest Problems

Posted on August 10, 2021September 8, 2022 by NationSwell Team

A series of overlapping crises hit — COVID-19, racial injustice, climate change, economic disruption — exposing the fragility and deficiencies in our current systems. For everyone, 2020 was a deeply challenging and jarring year. Leaders had a lot on their plate. They struggled to make sense of the cascading series of crises, and grapple with the implications for their organizations and stakeholders.

To problem-solvers, it has also represented a “portal moment” — a time of profound opportunity to re-imagine and re-build a more equitable, inclusive and high-functioning nation and planet.

To harness this moment of possibility, leaders from the C-Suite to the grassroots needed a place where they could come together to process, explore, engage and act with a diverse group of fellow leaders. They needed time and space — in a highly curated and supported environment — to process the moment, surface paradigm-shifting insights and solutions, and to explore how they might collaborate to drive progress.

In 2020, we launched #BuildItBackBetter, an initiative designed to empower cross-sector leaders and organizations to be their best when the world needed them most, offering them a highly curated space to explore and amplify the paradigm-changing solutions needed to foster a more equitable, inclusive and high-functioning nation and planet.

In 2021, we aim to go even deeper on these issues, and also tackle new issue areas with the same comprehensive, cross-sector approach. That’s why NationSwell is proud to announce the launch of Collaboratives, a new initiative to build cross-sector coalitions of leaders and experts to advance specific priorities, and enable ongoing collaboration, learning and cooperation that breaks down silos and puts equity at the heart of solution-building.

Collaboratives will bring together leaders from the tree tops and the grass roots to ensure each topic can be tackled from diverse and informed sets of perspectives. We’ll cover a range of topics including Building Public Trust in A.I., Adding Age to the Equity Equation, Centering Unheard Voices in the Climate Movement, Future of Work, and more. Each Collaborative will involve public events, working groups, and a unique multimedia content series — all working towards tangible progress on the issues of focus, such as cross-sector statements of commitment, aligned recommendations for leaders and public officials, and shared industry standards.

We are proud to work and partner with AARP, AARP Foundation, Autodesk Foundation, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, and Workday to make NationSwell Collaboratives a reality, to amplify our impact, to further our shared goals, and most importantly, to make good on our promise to the people of our nation and our world that we would build a better, stronger, and more resilient society than the one we had before COVID-19.

To learn more about Collaboratives, please reach out and follow us on social media.

Extreme Heat Is an Economic Inequality Issue. These Solutions Hold Some Promise.

Posted on July 20, 2021July 27, 2023 by NationSwell Team

Summer 2020 was the hottest summer on record for the North Hemisphere — and if the early numbers from this year’s summer are any indication, we’re currently on pace to break last year’s record.

While the rising global temperature has calamitous consequences for human life on our planet, in the short term, it creates long periods of extreme heat across the United States, with potentially deadly results; The Guardian reports that in Arizona alone, the number of annual heat-related deaths has doubled over the course of the decade, and that extreme heat has resulted in “at least 10,000 deaths between 1999 and 2016 — more than hurricanes, tornadoes or floods in most years.”

Deaths aren’t the only consequences: Long periods of extreme can affect our ability to get a good night’s sleep, potentially leading to poor performance in school or at work. It can affect our mood, making us crankier, more lethargic, or more aggressive. Some recent research even suggests spikes in violent crime tied directly to heat waves.

But though we all feel the heat, heat waves don’t affect us all equally. According to Global Citizen, the vast majority of heat-related deaths involved people who could not afford air conditioning. In the United States, over 800 outdoor workers died from extreme heat between 1992 and 2017, and over 70,000 more were injured. The New York Times reported that, amid record high heat in the Pacific Northwest this summer, many of the hundreds who died were people experiencing homelessness.

According to a report from UCLA, hot weather has deleterious consequences on students’ abilities to learn — and hits students experiencing economic hardship the hardest. “Without air conditioning, each 1 degree Fahrenheit increase in school year temperature reduces the amount learned that year by 1 percent,” the report said. “The decline in learning was detected when outdoor temperatures exceeded 75 degrees but becomes really problematic at 85, 90 and above.”

“I think it’s worth highlighting the fact that racial minorities and low-income students seem to be affected much more negatively,” Jisung Park, UCLA Professor of Public Policy, said in the report. “So with the same heat shock — in the same year with 10 more hot days — Black or Hispanic students on average would experience roughly three or four times the negative impact than a white student would. A lot of that seems to be because of different rates of air conditioning, both at school and at home.”

By the numbers, extreme heat is undeniably an economic and housing inequality issue. And while there’s no easy solution, some ideas from across the United States hold some promise. Here are a few of them.

Sustainable Cooling Paper

Air conditioners may help us beat the heat, but they’re costly and unsustainable. The Hill reports that 75% of homes in the United States use air conditioning during hot months, and that we spend a combined $29 billion dollars a year on the electricity costs associated with the appliances. Our nation’s air conditioners also account for 117 billion tons of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere each year.

As it stands, air conditioning is a solution that creates more problems. But one Boston professor might have the answer we’re looking for.

In 2021, Yi Zheng, who teaches mechanical and industrial engineering at Northeastern University, announced that he’d invented a “cooling paper” that not only reflects sunlight from the roofs of buildings, but actually sucks heat from the apartments and other units within buildings fitted with his innovation.

“How could we simply transform [waste material like printer paper] into some functional energy material, composite materials?” Zheng asked himself.

While we’re likely many years out from widespread application, Zheng’s solution is a welcome one. And the best part? It’s 100% recyclable.

Shade Equity

“Shade is a civic resource, an index of inequality, and requirement for public health,” an article for Places, a journal for urban design and architecture, begins. “Shade should be a mandate for urban designers.”

It’s a mandate that some public officials are rushing to address. Curbed reports that of the approximately 7,900 bus stops in the city of Los Angeles, fewer than 1,900 are equipped with structures that create shade — and reprieve from the intense heat and sun — for commuters.

“Maybe you haven’t thought about it this way, but shade is an equity issue,” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said, according to the New York Times. “Think about an elderly Angeleno who relies on public transit to get around her neighborhood,” he continued. “Imagine her standing in the blistering sun in the middle of July waiting for the bus, with hot, dark asphalt. She deserves to be every bit as comfortable as her counterpart in another ZIP code in town.”

The Times reports that Los Angeles is “using data that overlays areas of intense heat with the busiest public transit routes… to deploy shade to nearly 750 bus stops, using trees, shade sails or umbrellas.”

It’s a meaningful first step in addressing how extreme heat disproportionately impacts working people and commuters. More cities and towns across America should follow suit.

Free Cooling Centers

According to the Centers for Disease Control, “studies indicate that spending even a few hours in a cool environment, or with a working air conditioner or cooling unit, reduces vulnerable populations’ risk to heat exposure. Those who adjust their behavior to include spending time in a cool place during a heat wave are less likely to sufer from heat wave mortality.”

Thats why the CDC has encouraged municipalities to open cooling centers during heat emergency in efforts to stem deaths that occur as a result of extreme temperatures. Because they’re free, they become one of the most reliable ways that people experiencing economic hardship can afford to keep cool. In Maricopa County, Arizona, the CDC reports that 84% of those surveyed at cooling centers were unemployed.

To find out more about cooling centers near you, visit your municipality’s website.

Diapers Stink. GDiapers Has a Circular, Sustainable Solution.

Posted on July 7, 2021September 8, 2022 by NationSwell Team

Though only a small fraction of the United States population wears diapers, a report from the Environmental Protection Agency found that our nation adds a whopping 20 billion disposable diapers to landfills each year, amounting to 3.5 million tons of waste. That waste, the report found, takes half a millennium to fully degrade; while degrading, it releases toxic chemicals into the air we breathe.

Kim and Jason Graham-Nye, the cofounders of GDiapers, think their product is a big part of the solution to this problem. In 2005, the founders launched their “hybrid diaper” — the world’s first “cradle to cradle” certified disposable diaper insert.

As part of our series amplifying solutions for a more Circular Economy, we spoke to the Graham-Nyes about their innovative product, why it’s so hard to bring circular solutions into a linear world, and the opportunities that circularity creates. This is what they had to say.

NationSwell: Tell me about how your company was founded.

Kim Graham-Nye, Co-Founder of GDiapers: 19 years ago, we were pregnant with our first child. While we were preparing, we read an article that said one disposable diaper takes 500 years to biodegrade. And in the same breath, it mentioned that 50 million diapers were going to landfills each day in the United States since 1970. And that’s just one country! Globally, the number is up to 300,000 a minute.

That’s the waste from just one type of product, used by 5% of the population for what’s usually 3 to 4 hours at a time. It’s a problem hidden in plain sight: one baby, five thousand diapers a year. People don’t really think about that! We talk about coffee cups when we talk about waste, but nothing really compares to diapers. It’s just not sustainable. Every parent needs them, so why isn’t anybody doing anything? Why are the only options cloth or disposable? How can you have a category that has only two choices within something that’s such a big industry?

So we got really excited about it, and we tried to research and find alternatives — but we couldn’t find anything at all, anywhere in the world. And so we initially left it there, thinking, it was possibly a really great business, but maybe not for us. We thought, we’re not chemical engineers, we’re not product engineers, we’re not designers, and we’re not into consumer manufacturing. None of that is our space, but this is a brilliant idea for somebody else — a hole in the market for somebody to create a better diaper. But then, after I was pregnant, I had to wear a diaper, which some parents who give birth do, even if we don’t really talk about it publicly. And the disposable diaper my husband brought home for me was plastic. It didn’t breathe. And it was becoming summer, so the heat of it was gross on so many levels.

And I thought to myself, “If every parent had to wear a disposable diaper, that would be the end of the category overnight.”

So suddenly, we became obsessed with the idea of making a better diaper. Eventually, at a trade show for baby products, we met an inventor, a woman who had made these compostable and actually flushable pads that went inside these really cute cotton washable pants. And we partnered with her. We ultimately launched in the US on November 29th, 2005 at Whole Foods.

Jason Graham-Nye, Co-Founder of GDiapers: My background is as a Japanese interpreter. I had worked in the stock market in Japan, out of university, and made a lot of money, but there was no meaning. And then I switched into teaching, and I found a lot of meaning in my work — but no money. Then I met Kim, and Kim had kind of a similar journey where she was working for the U.N. in Zanzibar doing HIV/AIDS research, the other pandemic. And then that made a lot of meaning, but not much money. And then she came to Australia and built a really successful business financially. It was very financially rewarding, but not much meaning. So our whole life has been about asking the question of how you find meaning and money from the same venture.

And we realized that we could do that with — of all things — diapers. But we didn’t have a consumer goods background. We didn’t spin out of Proctor and Gamble. We didn’t spin out of Kimberly-Clark. So the insanity of moving 10,000 miles to America with a baby, pregnant with another one, to fundraise. It’s been a trip.

NationSwell: What were some of the challenges to creating a product with circularity in mind, as opposed to a more linear model?

Jason: In the beginning we were asking moms to change their behavior. 95% of moms in America use disposable diapers, which have almost zero commitment. You just buy it, use it, throw it, that’s it. It’s classic: Take and make waste. There’s maybe no better example of the linear model than diapers. And so, to introduce a product that was a hybrid and outer pad, that you had to wash, and then there was this insert, and you had to get the fit right. That’s hard. I’m a third of the way through a Ph.D. in Circular Economics, looking at the barriers and enablers of a circular diaper solution in the developed and developing world.

So in my literature review, what we find is 114 definitions of circularity. And we go from three Rs — reduce, reuse, recycle — to 10 Rs: refuse, rethink, reduce, reuse, repair, refurbish, remanufacture, repurpose, recycle, recover.

And that row, the last two, recover, recycle, is the least circular. It’s mostly linear. And what we’re finding with big companies, and it’s understandable, is the focus is on recycling. They talk about this as the tailpipe end of the thing. Focus on the tailpipe.

Kim: And if you just focus on the tailpipe, nothing has to change.

Jason: Exactly. So they’ll just clean up the tailpipe and say that’s fine. Because with these big company, particularly in our category and others, the investment in their supply chain, everything they have optimized, the use of plastic to make their products — you can make 500 diapers a minute with the current state-of-the-art technology. If you say, “Well, if you use different materials, you could make 300 a minute,” that’s the end of the business. It’s a low-margin, high-volume business. So I think these bigger companies that say circularity is hard are right. Circularity is hard, but we see it’s the only way we’re going to get out of here alive.

We have to reimagine how we live. We’re the only species on earth that creates waste. That’s fairly profound. We’re the only species on earth that creates waste. And right now, it’s ending up in holes in the ground, or we’re burning it, or it’s going into the oceans. So I’m sympathetic to big companies because it’s such a huge shift.

The other piece is the citizen. And I say citizen, rather than consumer, because I think that’s a really important distinction. We’re called consumers. We’re told we’re consumers. What do consumers do? We consume. But as citizens, for a moment, we can think through how we show up in a circular economy.

NationSwell: But did operating in a circular way also create opportunities?

Kim: Absolutely. It propelled us forward.

What’s frustrating, and why you probably don’t see a lot of companies actually actively selling in the circular way is because it only really works for business if everyone is circular. But trying to be a circular player when your competitors are linear doesn’t make sense. It’s not a fair playing field. It’s rigged in their favor. Forget the fact that our materials are more expensive, so are our diaper is more expensive because that happens now in sustainability. The sustainable products, the organic broccoli is more than the regular broccoli. But now we’re adding a circular system where we’re the ones who collect and compost it, too. Well, guess what? That costs money. Anything I do, anything is more expensive than free. And yes, I can make compost, and we can sell the compost, but that’s not enough to subsidize the 100% of the cost of it.

So you have to then get creative on, wait, there’s this price differential, which is one of the biggest barriers to the market. Now, my product is more expensive. And now you have a service that right now I don’t pay. I don’t feel that I’m paying for my diapers to be collected in Sydney because they go in my rubbish bin. In America, I know you guys pay for your bins directly, but it’s not the same. If suddenly you needed a diaper service, it’s a new bill that you’re paying.

So the idea that in a linear world, consumers don’t have to pay for any of the damage they’re doing, and the companies don’t pay for any of the damage. So we’re not accounting for true costs. Where when you bring in a circular solution, I’m saying to the consumer, “Pay for the circular product,” it’s a premium, and most people will not pay that premium. But on top of that, why should they pay for a service for the end of life of it. Why should that be on them? It really should come back to governments.

Jason: If you tax a bad behavior and you subsidize a good behavior, lo and behold, everything changes.

Kim: This is where, when the companies say, “It’s hard,” whether it’s Pampers or Coke, or anyone because they’ll say, “Well, but it’ll cost $4 a diaper.” No shit. It’s supposed to cost $4. And then taxing and subsidizing would make us cheap or comparable. This is why it’s so hard to bring circular solutions into a linear world.

The Circular Economy and the Bipartisan Movement to Create a Legal #RightToRepair

Posted on June 23, 2021September 8, 2022 by NationSwell Team

the Federal Trade Commission began to explore the ways that manufacturers make it harder for consumers and independent repair shops to fix broken products. In May 2021, under the administration of President Joe Biden, the FTC released its findings to Congress. In its report, “Nixing the Fix,” the agency highlights the environmental and economic harm that has resulted from the ways that manufacturers discourage consumers from repairing broken products as a means of increasing revenue — calling on Congress to create federal regulations to prevent these manufacturers from doing so.

The FTC report comes amid a growing movement to that create a legal right to repair ensuring that manufacturers cannot interfere with — and, in fact, must facilitate — the ability for American consumers to pursue affordable repairs to the products they own, rather than discarding them and contributing to the 254 million tons of trash that the United States produces every year.

As part of our movement to surface solutions for a more Circular Economy, NationSwell spoke to Aaron Perzanowski, an intellectual property law professor at Case Western University. The author of a forthcoming book called The Right to Repair, Perzanowski is one of the nation’s leading legal expert on fair repair laws. Here’s what he had to say.

NationSwell: What is the right to repair, and why do consumers need that right?

Aaron Perzanowski, Right to Repair legal expert: So sometimes, you run into a problem where you need a particular piece of software or information in order to repair a device. For instance, if you have a busted optical drive on your PlayStation, you can’t just go buy a new optical drive and swap it out because the optical drive is paired with the motherboard on that device; you need special software in order to install a new one.

Right to repair laws would require manufacturers to provide repair shops, repair providers and consumers with all the parts, software, and information they need to actually fully repair the products that people own — in this instance, the special software you’d need to install a new one.

When people talk about the right to repair movement, they sometimes focus on these state legislative proposals that have been introduced in some 30 states across our country this legislative year. In some states, those legislative efforts are focused on consumer electronics, like video game consoles and smartphones; in other states they’re focused on agricultural equipment; in California, the bill is focused on medical equipment.

I think those are important laws; I support them. I’ve submitted testimony in various states to express support for those bills, but they’re just one piece of a much broader right to repair agenda. And that broader agenda is premised on the recognition that we as consumers, we as individuals, have an inherent legal and moral right to make use of the products that we buy — to exert control over the things that we own. And part of what it means to get the full use out of the products you buy is the ability to fix them if something goes wrong.

And historically, that has been the case. What we’ve seen over the last 20-plus years, is a set of increasingly aggressive restrictions on repair. Those include the way a product is built, what components are used, how they’re put together, the physical design, and then you layer on top of that software restrictions that lock people out of certain aspects of their devices and make it difficult, if not impossible, to repair them. And then you’ve got a number of market strategies, where companies charge very high prices for repair as a way to discourage people from repairing and encourage them to buy something new. You see companies that refuse to sell parts to third parties. You see authorized repair programs to control how many competitors are out there in the repair market. And the broader right to repair movement is focused on reestablishing this basic right of consumers to control the things that they own.

NationSwell: You mentioned increasingly aggressive restrictions. Who or what is restricting repair?

Perzanowski: Restrictions come in a number of ways. Sometimes it’s as simple as the way a product is constructed. So, take Apple’s AirPods, their wireless headphones. They’re designed in a way that makes them nearly impossible to repair. They’re fairly simple devices: It’s a headphone, and it’s a battery. And the thing that goes bad is the battery. You spend hundreds of dollars on AirPods, and for some people, six months, 12 months later, they can only hold a charge for 15 or 20 minutes. And because of the way they’re built, that battery is not user replaceable. The battery isn’t even replaceable by Apple. If you take it in for repair two weeks after you buy it and say, “Hey, the battery is busted on this thing,” they don’t fix it. They just give you a new one. And then they pay some recycler to shred those devices and recover whatever raw materials they can.

But Apple actually has to subsidize the recycling of those air pods, because it’s not cost-effective to actually go through that process — unlike a laptop, where it actually has some scrap value.

Software is also a big piece of this. So one of the biggest vendors here is John Deere. A John Deere tractor has dozens of computers in it. They’ve got all these electronic control units that control various aspects of this machinery. Let’s say you need a new turn signal for your John Deere tractor. You go out and buy a new turn signal assembly, and it’s authentic — it’s the real John Deere parts — and you replace it yourself, or you have your local mom and pop repair shop replace it.

Even though it’s authentic, even though it’s installed properly, it won’t work until a John Deere technician comes out with a laptop and blesses, authorizes, initializes, whatever language they want to use, that part. They need someone to do this little software ceremony in order to get that machine working. And you’ve got to pay them to do that.

So that puts John Deere dealers at a competitive advantage over the independent shops, because the independent shops can’t actually get your machine up and running, even though they’ve installed the part correctly.

Those are two obvious ways that this happens, but there’s a whole range of softer interventions, like the way that that companies price repair parts. Apple won’t sell repair parts essentially to anybody outside of their own authorized repair programs. And if you sign up to be an Apple authorized service provider, then you’re only allowed to do the repairs that Apple tells you you’re allowed to do. That means you can do things like replace batteries or screens on phones, but anything more complicated than that — and in fact, some things that aren’t terribly complicated, like replacing a broken camera in an iPhone — and Apple actually prohibits you from making those repairs. You’ve got to send those devices to Apple.

By denying people access to parts or conditioning access to parts on them agreeing, basically, not to repair repairable devices, companies like Apple get to control the repair market.

NationSwell: I imagine that the time-gating of sending something as vital as a smartphone away for weeks to be repaired might also disincentivize consumers from seeking repair from manufacturers.

Perzanowski: Absolutely, and it’s really problematic. There are cases where time really is of the essence. Let’s say you’re a farmer and your tractor breaks down, and you’ve got a two week period to harvest your crops, and you live hundreds of miles away from the nearest John Deere dealer. You’re facing a serious time crunch.

John Deere is not trying to get you to replace your million dollar tractor every time something goes wrong, but they know that once you’ve dropped a million dollars on the tractor, they can charge you pretty much whatever they want for repairs and you’re going to pay them when your livelihood depends on it. So they see service as a profit center. They see a real incentive there to crack down on these repair markets. And that, of course, has some spillover effects on other kinds of interests in terms of not just consumer welfare, but also environmental concerns and competitive concerns.

NationSwell: What are the environmental implications of right to repair, especially with respect to building a circular economy? And what are the implications of right to repair for local businesses?

Perzanowski: Circularity is certainly a significant improvement over the linear models that we saw throughout the bulk of the 20th century. And look, we should give companies credit. They are making investments in a more circular direction. Apple’s got these fancy robots that can extract rare earth metals from the engines of cell phones. And I think companies recognize that at this point, there’s actually an economic advantage to sourcing raw materials from discarded devices rather than mining them from the earth. And there’s a market for that, given that some of them have to deal with the horrible PR around a lot of the mining practices for some of the inputs to these devices.

What the right to repair does that I think makes the move towards a circular economy even more effective is that, in very simple terms, it lengthens the lifespan of these devices. Instead of keeping your phone for 18 months, and then the screen breaks and you ask yourself, “Hey, is it worth buying a new one, or is it worth repairing the old one?” the right to repair, by creating a more competitive market for repair services, by creating a more competitive market for replacement parts, changes people’s economic calculus in a way that makes them say, “You know what? I’m going to fix my phone and I’m going to keep it for another year or another two years.”

So instead of keeping it for 18 months, maybe you end up keeping it for three years. So if we’re talking about a circle, we’re stretching the circle out here by enabling repair. And I think that has the potential to have a really significant impact. One, because for the individual consumer, it gives them this option that they don’t really have today. And I think over time it has the potential to change people’s attitudes and the kind of norms and expectations around what’s reasonable in terms of the lifespan of a device — and that normalizes the idea that actually things should last longer, and it’s not normal to toss your phone out every 18 months. So I hope that that would have some impact on behavior.

The right to repair does not necessarily translate into the choice to repair, but it is a kind of a necessary precursor. Right now there are people who want to repair, but can’t. And in the future, it’s not to say everybody’s going to repair all their devices all the time, but I do think that we would see a significant increase. And there’s some pretty good empirical research out there, some that I’ve done, some that the European Commission has done that really supports the idea that if people are given the option, if people are given the right information, that they will choose to repair their devices and choose to buy devices that are more repairable.

NationSwell: Earlier in our conversation, you mentioned 30 states that have Fair Repair bills moving through their statehouses. I imagine that that number means that this isn’t just a blue state vs. red state issue, but that there is actually bipartisan movement around right to repair regulations.

Perzanowski: Absolutely. If you look at who’s introducing these bills across the states, you see these bills introduced and supported by Democrats and Republicans. This is not in any meaningful sense a partisan issue. And it’s because I think the goals and principles underlying these bills speak to values on both sides of the political divide. So Democrats might look at this and see it as an important environmental regulation. They might see it as a way of protecting the interests of less wealthy citizens — poor people generally rely more on repair. And some Republicans look at this, especially libertarian leaning Republicans, look at this as a question of individual autonomy, of the sanctity of personal property rights. And both Republicans and Democrats will look at this as a way of, especially in the current climate, a way of pushing back on what are largely big tech companies. They’re not the only companies that are in this space — I don’t know that we normally mention John Deere in the same breath as Google and Facebook — but I do think that there is an opportunity to craft a bipartisan, trans-partisan coalition here around these issues.

The problem so far though has been that the resources and lobbying efforts of trillion dollar companies have been pretty effective at scaring state legislators away from these bills. We’ve seen a bunch of these bills introduced this year, almost as many the year before, almost as many the year before that. And so far, none of them have been enacted, with the exception of an automotive bill in Massachusetts first in 2012, and then there was an update to it just last year to incorporate telematics information that cars are transmitting.

The hurdle here has been a real asymmetry of resources. Consumers don’t have paid lobbyists, so it’s hard to get your arguments in front of these state legislators. I got involved at the legislative level because part of what I was seeing was a lot of what I think are bogus and misleading worries about intellectual property rights that companies, and their lobbyists, and their trade associations were introducing at the state level — worries that state legislatures hear and think “Oh, this is going to be preempted by federal copyright law, or this is going to destroy trade secret protection.”

They’re state legislators, most of them don’t know anything about federal IP law, and that sounds scary, and there’s no one there that they trust to correct that record. So I put together a group of a dozen or so IP professors from around the country who signed onto a letter that we submitted in over a dozen states just trying to make sure that the record was clear around those issues.

They hear a lot of really scary stories about how it’s dangerous to replace the battery in your phone, and if you do it wrong, the phone’s going to blow up, and they’re concerned their constituents are going to be harmed as a result of right to repair laws, and then the company that made it is going to be sued for some massive tort liability.

NationSwell: In 2019, under the Trump administration, the Federal Trade Commission started to look into right to repair laws. It’s 2021, and under the current Democratic administration, they published their report, “Nixing the Fix,” which at least one publication characterizes as “blasting manufacturers for restricting the right to repair.” The FTC issues the report to Congress, they make it available to the public as well, and they basically call for a right to repair to be established at the federal level. Do you find that encouraging?

Perzanowski: I find it very encouraging. Less that this Congress will move to pass a bill immediately, and more that the FTC just issued direct and unequivocal support for the idea that these restrictions on repair are harming consumers, and it’s signaling its willingness to engage in some enforcement. The FTC is incredibly powerful when it wants to be. It can really shape the way the market works. It can really shape the behavior that companies engage in when they are clear that they’re willing to flex the muscles that they have. And up until this point, they haven’t really in the repair space.

And while the FTC has the power to target unfair trade practices, but so does the attorney general of every single state. If the FCC says it’s a problem, then I hope that that helps get the issue on the radar of the state level enforcement agencies, too, especially as a quick thing they can reference to combat the fear-mongering that lobbying might be doing to prevent them from regulating that space. One state is going to pass one of these bills legally giving consumers a right to repair. Eventually, there’s going to be a crack in this wall. And we’ll see what happens at that point.

To learn more about why we need more investment in creating a circular economy, read our introduction to this series.

“Waste Is Being Paid for by All of Us”: The Renewal Workshop, Apparel, and the Circular Economy

Posted on June 7, 2021September 8, 2022 by NationSwell Team

Nicole Bassett is on a mission to solve one of the retail industry’s most costly problems. In doing so, she’s not only helping those companies save money — she’s helping to save our planet, too.

The Renewal Workshop, an Oregon-based company she co-founded in 2016, seeks to “bridge gaps, connect systems, and mobilize leadership to make existing linear manufacturing practices circular.” They do so by “taking discarded apparel and textiles and turns them into renewed products, upcycled materials or recycling feedstock,” creating a “zero waste system that recovers the full value out of what has already been created as a way of serving customers, partners, and planet.”

I spoke to Bassett about her company’s bespoke system, her passion for operating within circularity, and what’s next for the Renewal Workshop. This is what she had to say.

NationSwell’s Anthony Smith: Tell me about how your professional journey led you to cofound the Renewal Workshop.

The Renewal Workshop’s Nicole Bassett: I used to work in sustainability and sourcing for apparel brands. When you’re working in that space, you’re always asking yourself, “How do I do it more sustainably? How do we do better?” You’re always trying to find the root cause, trying to find the levers that you can pull to start to make change. For so many of these big apparel companies, the only way they think they can grow their businesses is by making more stuff.

Our mission is to enable brands to think differently. The better the brands are at doing this, the more the brands become circular; and the more the brands become circular, the more our apparel industry can actually shift and change.

Circularity isn’t just about selling something again. Real circularity is about actually changing your entire business model from linear to circular. You can’t just have this side business that’s circular while the main business stays linear. You have to change everything.

NationSwell: How do you start to do that?

Bassett: When we get started with a brand, it’s typically because they’re paying us to renew their product. That’s how our business model works. Primarily, we enable them to resell their product because we have the technology and a storefront. The brand pays us for those services, and they get the revenue off the sales of their resold product. So it’s a whole new business channel for something they previously considered unsellable.

As we renew all their products, or as we’re cleaning and repairing things, we’re documenting everything, and we give our brand partners a report that says, “Here’s why your products are here.” Some of it could just be human use, like stains or dirt or something. And some of it’s construction issues, like if they used bad zippers, or buttons, or snaps, or something like that. So they get that feedback, and that feedback informs their design decisions.

We also work with designers and teach them how to do circular design. Not only does that benefit us as a company — because ultimately, we’ll have a better product that arrives at our door — but it also allows them to have a better sales channel down the road.

So in a nutshell, we get paid by brands, they become our client, and help our clients become more circular.

NationSwell: What’s the impact of your work so far?

Bassett: When we first started in 2015, we would knock on doors of brands and say, “Hey, we have this idea. You could recommerce your product, and we can give you the tools to do it.”

The brands would say, “That’s weird.” And they were very concerned that they would cannibalize their first price sales. They were very hesitant that their brand and their product would show up in the market in less than good condition.

And so we had to do a lot of convincing them that actually, this is really an additive thing. There is a consumer out there for these products.

And at the same time brands, third-party marketplaces started to just explode. All of a sudden, brands were like, “Oh my God, my product is getting sold somewhere else. And that’s a customer I don’t get. And they’re having an experience with my product that I don’t get to control.” So we use the example all the time of the car industry, where you have Joe’s Car Lot down the street, and you’re just buying a car and it’s whatever. Or you go to Toyota or Mazda or whoever, and say, “I like you as a brand, and I want to have a brand experience, and I want the confidence that I’m not buying a lemon.”

So the growth in interest has definitely changed. We started out with five brands; now we’ve got about 20 brands now that work with us. We have taken back over 400,000 pounds of textiles that otherwise would have gone into landfill. And we now are recirculating that into the economy for a brand.

The other thing that I think is really important is that we renew all this stuff in market. So we have a factory in the United States, and we have a factory in Amsterdam, and we’re renewing that product. So we’re not sending it overseas. We’re really focused on living wage jobs. We’ve got a very diverse employee team. There’s this opportunity to create new types of manufacturing jobs, and that’s what we’re doing here.

NationSwell: What would you say to people who might not understand why this is important?

Bassett: People are just at the precipice of understanding what the linear economy has done to our world. I just don’t think it’s a word people understand. People just think, “I go to the store, and I buy a toaster oven, and I take it home, and I throw it away.”

And so I think what’s really, really important is how much this is a system, which makes it harder. And that’s where I think that there’s a lot going on in this space, but I would say we’re still not at the place where systems change is happening. But a company who makes something has to decide they’re going to take accountability of that thing for its entire life cycle. And ultimately, if they’ve planned for that, they’ve planned the pricing of that, they’ve planned the disposal of that, they know where it’s going to go. If it needs to be repaired, it knows where it goes to get recycled. And they would never design anything that would be waste because then they are responsible for that waste.

Apparel is not designed for a system that exists. There are no recycling options for any blended material of textile. So if I create a shirt that’s acrylic nylon spandex, I am creating garbage. There’s no way around it. But if I created a cotton t-shirt, cotton can actually get shredded down and respun into new yarns — and there is a path for that.

Also: waste is being paid for by all of us. So we, as the consumer are now bearing the cost of dealing with waste, and then we as a society are bearing the cost because our municipalities have to deal with this waste. So our taxes go towards dealing with garbage pickup and having to do that. So the brands have offloaded all of the responsibility and all of the costs downstream.

NationSwell: What’s your call to action here?

Bassett: If you are a business or a designer, think about where your products come from, and where it will go next. Are you designing it with an end in mind? And does that end actually exist? So is this something that can get even recycled? Or if not, how do you enable its use again multiple times?

Brands will invest in circular if consumers reward it. I think individuals should look at companies and say, “Are you just doing this because it’s a trend? Or are you doing this because it’s a part of a bigger strategy where you’re trying to truly change your business?” And there are some companies who truly are trying to figure this out. And then there’s some where they’re just like, “Oh, I can sell more of my stuff.” So it does require a little bit of homework on the consumer side — but consumers are going to drive this change.

To learn more about why we need more investment in the circular economy, read our introduction to this series.

Opinion: It’s Time to Tackle the Deluge of Disinformation

Posted on June 2, 2021September 8, 2022 by NationSwell Team

We used to say that a lie travels around the world before the truth can even get out of bed. But now, in the digital age, we’ve seen that a lie can travel around the world while the truth is still falling asleep the night before.

Such is the speed with which the internet and social media can amplify misinformation. And to give the truth a fighting chance, we urgently need to make important changes to our digital life.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has created a unique moment of crisis that left all of us more engaged than ever with digital platforms, the pitfalls of our government’s inability to adequately regulate the tech sector have left the whole world imperiled by the speed with which a lie can travel.

The perils of disinformation are all around us. It was present long before the Trump administration, but exacerbated by a president who lied over 30,000 times in office, and who became surrounded by a political machine and media ecosystem that amplified those lies. This eventually resulted in the “Big Lie” of a stolen election, and a violent insurrection in our nation’s capital on January 6th that attacked the very pillars of American democracy.

If that wasn’t bad enough, misinformation is hindering vaccination efforts by spreading false rumors about vaccines that could lead to more deaths and the development of new variants that could resist vaccines. These are just two of the most glaring examples of the many societal ills that arise from vast systems of disinformation brainwashing people with lies.

Both the fault and solution largely lie with the big tech companies that have come to dominate our lives. Never in the history of the world have there been companies as powerful as the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter. Facebook, for instance, has more information on U.S. citizens than the U.S. government. With billions of people using the products of big tech every day, these platforms have an unprecedented ability to influence our world.

These are publicly-traced behemoths who might spout clever marketing slogans like “Don’t be Evil” but in reality they are driven solely by the bottom-line. We are mistaken in thinking that companies like Facebook are social media platforms that help people connect. Their true functions are as advertising companies. Facebook might hide behind the fig-leaf of saying they don’t sell your personal information, but in reality they sell access to you through the vast amount of data points they’ve collected about you. They are “walled garden” that offer companies the chance to micro-target people to sell their products. Your activity on these platforms – and the way they follow you around the internet on your phone or PC – enables these platforms to understand you at a shockingly granular level. So granular in fact, that they can predict your behavior, needs and wants with incredible precision.

Some might be unbothered by this. A new mother might benefit from Facebook seeing her pictures of her baby and targeting her with diapers advertisements. A young artist may feel that all of the content on their feed is supportive of their work, or even inspiring. But of course the algorithms behind such targeting are far more nefarious than just these benign examples.

Guillaume Chaslot was a Google engineer who helped develop the Youtube algorithm that keeps viewers glued to its platform to the tune of one billion hours per day. Initially as a whistleblower, and now researching these platforms, he has documented how the algorithms behind these platforms can send users down a rabbit hole of disinformation trying to keep them hooked: In other words, someone who is a 2nd Amendment supporter viewing related videos on Youtube might find themselves slowly sucked into the world of dangerous, but popular and influential, lies that are Qanon.

We are not powerless against the dangerous speed with which these lies travel, but the road to reducing the amount of disinformation plaguing our society is a challenging one. We have to tackle these issues from all sides: we require increased digital literacy education, regulatory and legislative reform, and the design of innovative new technologies to solve these systemic problems.

We must start with greater regulation of the tech platforms that are radicalizing our societies around the world. A first step should be requiring and enforcing identity checks. It is speculated that more than half of the users on Facebook and Twitter are bots, and these are often the worst offenders in spreading lies, whether they are Russian agents pushing a divisive agenda to undermine American democracy, such as anti-vaxxer propaganda undermining vaccination efforts.There is no reason these anonymous bots should be able to wreak havoc as they do, and getting rid of anonymized accounts will go a long way to clearing them from platforms and amplifying disinformation.

Revisiting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is also essential. This is, however, a highly nuanced undertaking that should try to find a middle-ground that allows these platforms to continue to thrive as forums for free speech but doesn’t allow tech companies to simply hide behind the law and permit disinformation to thrive. Hiring more moderators and investing in technological solutions to police malicious content is a good place to start.

Another important step is to require these big tech companies to pay for the journalism that is featured on their platforms, as has been done recently in Australia. The Australian law is far from perfect, but government regulation there has provided a much-needed lifeline to publications who have seen their model upended by these tech platforms, who rely heavily on the sharing of news stories but don’t compensate publications for it. The disinformation problem is exacerbated when credible publications that can debunk lies are being increasingly marginalized and put out of business.

Civil society and foundations have an important role to play too. The challenge of misinformation is not going to be fully solved anytime soon, even with strong regulation, so we need to be teaching people, especially children, how to identify it and become more conscious consumers of digital content.

The tech companies are feeling the pressure on this issue and are trying to do things to reduce the heat on them. Twitter put caveats on tweets around the election by partisans spreading misinformation, and Facebook and others have invested in both human and technical solutions to weed out bad offenders. But despite seemingly endless financial resources to throw at the problem, that won’t be enough. A recent study showed that disinformation on Facebook is 68% higher in Italy than Ireland because Facebook is better equipped to handle this challenge in English than in other languages. Think about Facebook’s global reach and how many languages there are and the scope of this global issue is even more apparent.

As we get closer to another pivotal election – the 2022 midterm elections – the time is now to reduce the speed by which a lie can travel and give the truth a chance to set the record straight. It is not an exaggeration to say that democracy, science, health and the ties that bind our society are on the line unless we rise to the challenge of this dangerous trend.

Brittany Kaiser was the whistleblower in the Cambridge Analytica scandal and is the founder of the Own Your Own Data Foundation. Ann Ravel is the Director of the Digital Deception project Maplight and the former Chair of the Federal Election Commission. Jeremy Hurewitz is Curation Director at NationSwell.

Solving the World’s Dumbest Problem: How Copia Helps Restaurants Waste Less, and People in Need Find Food

Posted on May 20, 2021September 8, 2022 by NationSwell Team

Komal Ahmad, the founder of Copia, thinks hunger is the world’s dumbest problem — and not without reason.

Every single day, Americans waste the equivalent of one pound of food per person, or 365 million pounds a day. That’s enough waste to fill a 90,000 seat football stadium to the brim. By the end of 2017, according to estimates from the United States Department of Agriculture, our nation had wasted 81.4 billion pounds of food,

Amid all this waste, 42 million people in America, including 13 million children, experience food insecurity, meaning they do not know where they’re going to get their next meal, if they even get to meet at all.

And in the wake of COVID-19 and its disruption of our economy, and our supply and delivery chains — really, our entire way of life — that number is expected to increase: One early estimate from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says the percentage of adults “who sometimes or often didn’t have enough food to eat in the last seven days” rose from 3.4 percent in 2019 to 11 percent in 2020.

But as it stands, the numbers behind our waste and our hunger net out to what Ahmad calls a baffling disparity: Americans end up wasting about three times as much food as there are hungry mouths to feed.

“Hunger isn’t a scarcity problem — it’s a logistics problem,” Copia says on its site. “There isn’t a lack of food, but an ineffective redistribution of excess food.”

Copia’s technology allows donors from businesses that serve food — think restaurants, hotels and Silicon Valley’s corporate cafeteria’s — to use its app to connect them with nonprofits that work with people experiencing hunger. Those nonprofits set up profiles on Copia, answering questions like what food they might need, when they need them, how they need to be packaged and what facilities they have to store them. From there, Copia’s algorithmically pairs nonprofits with donors, then donors use the app to quickly schedule a pickup of their excess food, and Copia dispatches its drivers for pickup and delivery.

On top of this service, Copia’s technology allows its donors businesses track trends in their surplus food, and reporting patterns in their excess back to them in order to help them make better buying decisions.

“With Copia, donors with excess food benefit in three real ways: real time sustainability and environmental metrics, itemized surplus analytics to help reduce waste at the source and fully automated tax receipts and reporting,” the site says. “We help the donors we partner with track trends in their surplus food, and we report back to them in order to make better buying decisions.”

In other words, if Copia’s drivers are constantly picking up celery from their donors’ restaurants, the restaurant owners will get a notification to buy less celery, creating less food waste and saving the restaurant money.

One big client Copia has helped? The Cheesecake Factory. In partnership with Copia, the national restaurant chain created the Nourish Program, an exclusive deal that moved the entirety of the chain’s food waste management and recovery system to Copia’s system. As a result, in 2020, Cheesecake Factory restaurants across the country were able to donate 400,000 pounds of food to nonprofits that feed people experiencing food insecurity.

Ahmad never expected to be the founder of a food startup in the circular economy. But while she was a student at Berkeley with a clear track towards medical school, she had an encounter that changed her life forever.

“One day, I was walking down Telegraph Avenue and I encountered a homeless man who was begging for food,” she said to ELLE Magazine. “Something about him compelled me to stop and ask him to lunch.”

Over conversation at that lunch, she learned the man was a veteran.

“He had just returned from a tour in Iraq, was waiting for his benefits to kick in. He hadn’t eaten in three days. So this was a veteran, someone who made a selfless sacrifice for our country, only to come home to face yet another battle. To add insult to injury, right across the street, Berkeley’s dining hall was throwing away thousands of pounds of perfectly edible food.”

But while researching and coordinating ways to rescue that food from Berkeley’s dining hall, she learned that food donation to nonprofits was something of a logistical nightmare: the kind of nightmare that keeps people experiencing hunger from the food we waste every day.

“I know it sounds unrealistic to say that one lunch transformed my life — but it’s true. It was in that moment that the idea of Copia was born,” Ahmad said.

At present, Copia has recovered 3.4 million pounds of food, and they’ve helped deliver 3.2 million meals.

“[As a nation], we waste over 365 million pounds of perfectly edible food every day,” Ahmad said in Naturalizer. “We simply can’t tolerate a world where we waste three times more food than there are mouths to feed. We have the technology. We have the resources. We have the wherewithal to solve this problem.”

To learn more about why we need more investment in creating a circular economy, read our introduction to this series.

From Our Experts: How to Center Mental Health All Year Long

Posted on May 18, 2021September 8, 2022 by NationSwell Team

only month of the year we think about our mental wellness. We asked mental health experts in the NationSwell Council how we can center our mental health all year long. Here’s what they’ve shared so far.

Give yourself permission to feel: Many people are socially conditioned to suppress their emotions, especially those considered negative, to such a degree they become disconnected from their inner selves. Here is an exercise I created to help people honor all their emotions and access the wisdom transmitted by their emotions. Visualize yourself sitting in a circle with your emotions and feelings as honored guests. It might help to draw a large circle on a piece of paper and write down along this circle the emotions and feelings arising within you. Next, identify the three to five strongest emotions you are feeling (circle them on the paper) and welcome a conversation with them. One by one, say to each: “I honor you and give myself permission to feel you and to listen to what message you want to tell me. Is there anything you want to tell me?” Then sit in a moment of silence with each one to give it space to talk to you. (For more tips, please read this article: “Tender, Loving Self-Care for Asian Americans: A guide for tending to the traumas of anti-Asian violence and racism.”)

Submitted by Due Quach, CEO + Founder, Calm Clarity

Eat lunch: Instead of working yourself to exhaustion hoping that you’ll have time to rest later, carve out time to do the things that recharge you NOW. A small and powerful way to start creating space in your day is to take a lunch break. Start taking a consistent, hour-long lunch break and do something you enjoy – read a book, meditate, watch your favorite show, or enjoy the outdoors. When you prioritize taking time on a daily basis to do the things you enjoy, you’ll have more energy and you’ll be able to show up in all the parts of your life — for your job, your family, and yourself.

Submitted by Whitney A. White, Founder of Agra Global, Creator of Take Back Your Time

Hold space in the workplace to discuss: Any credible conversation about belonging at work or within any community requires addressing mental health (among other critical topics). Sharehold’s research on belonging at work during a time of uncertainty found that mental health was the top reported factor that impacted employees during a prolonged crisis. Now, as we emerge from the crisis, we must take the lessons forward with us by holding space to discuss mental health and burnout at work – and take action on what we’re hearing. This could mean a period of reduced work loads or a company-wide, pre-scheduled break during which everyone is offline, and investing in trauma-informed internal communications. It’s critical for managers and executive leads to lead by example here.

Submitted by Sarah Judd Welch, Principal & CEO, Sharehold

Forget the hype: Remember, mental health is a journey — not a to-do list. Last fall, during a wave of depression, I wrote this blog post about how I needed to let go of the “wellness hype” to keep going in my healing journey. You might not feel better after a week of meditating. You might feel better and then something small triggers you, and you’re down in the dumps for a week. Taking care of your mental health isn’t about succeeding. It’s about taking time to acknowledge and honor your feelings, needs, and desires day to day, moment to moment. Journaling is a powerful way to get in tune with what you need for your mental health day to day – because everyday is different.

Alina Liao, Founder + CEO, Zenit

Learn more about the NationSwell Council here.

“Get It Dirty Once in a While”: How ‘Swords to Plowshares’ Is Helping to Heal by Recycling Guns

Posted on May 18, 2021September 8, 2022 by NationSwell Team

This article is Part Two in our series on the most innovative solutions within the Circular Economy.

In the United States, there are limited options to dispose of unwanted firearms. Some police departments host gun buybacks, where people can bring weapons in exchange for cash. Other police departments will always accept people’s guns, no questions asked. As a direct consequence of this dearth of options, there are more weapons in people’s homes and on the streets, and therefore more potential for them to inflict needless — and in some cases deadly — harm.

One faith-based nonprofit in Colorado has found a unique solution to this problem: recycling these unwanted firearms by forging them into garden tools at live events, and then gifting the newly recycled weapons back to families that have experienced harm in the hopes that the families will use them to tend garden and create life.

RAWTools, the organization leading this charge, has seen AR-15s become spades, AK-47s morph into plows and gun barrels experience new life as mattocks, hoes and trowels.

As part of our series on solutions in the Circular Economy, NationSwell spoke to Mike Martin, the co-founder and Executive Director of RAWTools, the organization that’s making it all happen. This is what he had to say.

Thank you for taking the time today, Mike. Please tell me about yourself and your organization.

RAWTools is mostly faith based, but we function in a lot of space that isn’t specifically faith related. I come from a Mennonite, Anabaptist background, and that tradition has a focus on non-violence. This program, Swords to Plowshares, draws its name from an Old Testament verse about sitting under a fig tree — a reference people are becoming more aware of because of the musical Hamilton — where everyone has what they need, no longer living in fear of one another.

It’s not that we think we can eliminate fear, but we can build and encourage spaces where fear doesn’t dictate our decision making.

We’re rooted in restorative justice and transformative justice. So a lot of what we do is victim-centered and focused and really informed by stories of victims and survivors of gun violence. Through Swords to Plowshares, we create and encourage those spaces by going around the country doing events where we turn guns that have brought harm into garden tools, and at these events, we invite folks impacted by gun violence to share their stories. After they share their story at these events, they come over to the anvil, and they take a turn with the hammer, and help make the gun into a garden tool. And the community that’s there at the event gets to see that, and that moment where they see it, where they experience each other, that’s why we do what we do.

We do our work to expose the injustices that bring about gun violence, but also to help under resourced communities see the devastation and trauma that gun violence can cause, and that these victims and survivors will have to deal with that trauma for the rest of their lives — that it’s not something they can escape from, that they’re continually healing from it. And it’s hard to understand that unless you hear someone else’s story.

But once you hear it, you’re motivated to take action in your lives, your families and in your neighborhoods, whether it’s with us or not.

What do you hear from people at the end of your events, once they have the garden tool?

I think that folks who have been affected by gun violence, it’s hard for them to imagine a way out. And when we turn, their gun into a garden tool, they see that there’s a way out, a path towards healing.

For other people at the events, we also make sure we partner with other organizations — so if someone may not be keen on helping us blacksmith turning guns in the garden tools, they might be really motivated to help the local advocacy group with whatever their passions are. So we try to have multiple organizations represented. Plus, we’re usually in and out of town in a day or two, so we want to help build relationships with other organizations wherever we visit. So a lot of people are grateful for the connections that were made at these events.

Do you ever hear from people that they’re actually gardening with the tools, or does it become more of a keepsake?

Absolutely. I say at every event, “It’s fine if you treat this like an art piece on a shelf, but please, get it dirty once in a while. Put it to work.” Because the idea is that we take something that was made to bring death into something that is made to cultivate life. We recycle them into tools that help bring life into the world, that build a better world, that they can grow, and eat and even sell — and that’s why you have to get it dirty and put it to use.

Since we’re talking about the circular economy, one of the things we’ve found, and that we hear from our participants, is that everything that gets made from a donated gun always sells for more than what that gun would have sold for by itself.

That’s how we make the economics of this work, and the economics of this are really important to me. We think about peace and doing the right thing as separate from increasing your bottom line. And we’re showing that this works, that you can sustain a happy and prosperous life by working to dismantle violence. The earned income from our tools is what’s keeping us afloat right now. As we get bigger, we’re hoping to employ full time blacksmiths, to help more people find their careers in this space that recycles tools for killing.

We hear from people with political careers, or who are directors of other nonprofits, that they have the tools made from repurposed guns on their desks as a way of initiating conversation, a way of opening people up to this. And that’s one way to put the tool to work: If you’re a leader, you can help to break the ice in a in a conversation about transformative justice or restorative justice in your community.

How did COVID-19 affect your work?

We haven’t held any of our live events since the pandemic started, and we made the active choice not to hold digital events. Of course, we’ve taken a financial hit. But more than, it’s just something we’ve deeply missed over this last year — but we feel strongly about this choice.

This doesn’t work over Zoom. When people talk about their experience with gun violence, sometimes they just need — sometimes you just need someone to hug you, you know? You need that physical. You need to see — actually see — their facial expressions as you’re talking to them.

Sometimes you just know you can’t have six feet between you and somebody else.

To learn more about why we need more investment in the circular economy, read our introduction to this series.