BoP Impact Investment Opportunity for Qualified Social Investors

Strike a Spark and Save Lives!

After studying Bottom of Pyramid Consumers I have come up with a business plan to provide them for just one dollar with flint and steel to kindle a cooking fire from twigs they collect in vacant lots. We can manufacture the Product for 1 penny, my cut is 30 cents, 30 goes to distribution, and the remainder,  minus a wholesaler fee and commisison to registered reps, goes to the Impact Investors, as a Return on Investment. The Social Return is Priceless. Thousands of lives can be saved, as winter comes on. Many of those who will otherwise starve or freeze are children. I estimate the cash on cash return is higher than payday loans, title loans, or microfinance in the third world, where debt collection generally involves repossessing poultry, cows, or rudimentary tools, at considerable cost through unreliable intermediaries for an uncertain Total Return. Market failure? No! What we have in Poverty is the failure of Entrepreneurial Imagination. Where some see misery and a disgrace, I see opportunity. If our customers make it through the winter, we can upsell them to matches next spring.

This is not an offer. For a prospectus please contact your own qualified investment professional. Wealth Bondage makes no guarantee of investment performance or any particular social impact, positive or negative. The net effect of entropy is generally negative over time, and may ultimately swamp whatever positive emerges from the Steel and Flint Inititiative. As with any Impact Investment please consult a priest or life coach before committing your moral identity to the performance of this, or any, social gesture. Please recognize that Impact Investing, social impact, social return on investment, and other such words and phrases are terms of art in a rapidly evolving rhetorical context, and should be construed loosely, and to the advantage of those who use them. For the current meaning of these rapidly changing terms please consult Dr. Amrit Chadwallah, Professor of Applied Theater at Wealth Bondage School of Fine Arts. Be aware that Doctor Jeff Trexler is not associated with this post, nor is Jed Emerson, Lucy Bernholz, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Clinton Global Initiative, or any poet Laureate living or dead. It is not the intention of The Author Function, or his persona, "Phil," to provoke laughter with regard to serious matters. The reader is asked to maintain a solemn and respectful face, as if in the presence of wealth. We all have illusions that sustain us. Please be considerate of the illusions of others, as you would want yours to be respected in like circumstances.  

Comments

[Curator]

Holy fuck! This is funny.

[Christine Egger]

Hope you're comfortable, sitting as you are in my Headed to SoCap Suitcase...

[phil]

Extemely cramped in that suitcase, maybe like the ventriloquist's dummy.

[Christine Egger]

It was more like a Bag of Holding, always spacious.

I had a hard time finding the Voice of the Commons there :( but when I wasn't listening for that there was Paul Polak to be heartened by... I think...

[Phil Cubeta]

I wonder about the generations, too. How many ads, how many brands, how many moments shifting among the many corporate supported messages in facebook, etc until the psyche itself is commericialized, the voice of the commons deadeded by incessant messages pointed towards private profit. I can remember the first time I found a brand logo on an peice of clothing, a Countess Mara tie in 1965. I was so insulted to find the CM on it that I tried to pick the red threads out of the blue tie. I did not want to wear anyone's initials on my clothes, not even mine, why her's? Today, how different is the experience of those under 65. How quaint it must seem to have a sensibility formed when conversations were not gamed as user generated content to provide improved marketing. We have made heros out of those who have closed and privatized the commons, be it folklore, intellectual "property" or conversations, and quasi public goods. We treat their theft as a gift. "Steve Jobs, the creator of a walled garden ('ecosystem' of products and services privately owned) is the greatest to all philanthropists." This is moral insanity, but it is our current normal. Well, look who's talking! I am a second lobotomy short of a good attitude. And I can see Nurse Nancy taking notes for my file.

[Christine Egger]

I don't think we have to worry until someone has figured out a way to brand our exhale. It'll happen during northern winters first (or southern, Aussie-style). Messages floating on frosty breaths. And then they'll figure out a way to do it even when the breath is the same temperature as the external air.

Until then, we have our breathing -- and our heartbeat and the flutter of our eyelashes and the movement of our digestion system -- to remind us that we are miraculous creations first, billboards second.

[Phil Cubeta]

Your genes are soon to be owned. You might get a royalty, most likely not. The commons is what we had before intellectual property and copyright fights. For creativity, for life itself, this ends badly, but in the process, Steve Jobs (the worlds greatest philanthropist who gave nothing and enclosed the internet commons to enrich himself) did build Venus, the fine Yatch launched shortly after his death. May his ashes be stewn from the deck.