New hope for Guatemalans
A plan to unleash African entrepreneurship
Anabaptist business owners and climate action
Coping with discontinuous change, in the church and business
Opportunity building in Honduras
Faith guides Manitoba entrepreneurs
MEDA’s efforts to create business solutions to poverty are changing in order to build larger opportunities for more people.
Designing projects to deliver multi-country, regional initiatives is the latest evolution of the organization’s work.
MEDA is committed to growing agricultural systems to create jobs and transform lives, supporters were told at the annual convention in Atlanta in November.
MEDA has been more diversified in the past. It now recognizes that focusing on entrepreneurs in agricultural systems has proven to be one of the fastest and most effective pathways for individuals and communities to lift themselves out of poverty.
As it moves beyond countrybased work, MEDA has been rejigging its internal operations to be more efficient and effective. Implementing cloud-based technology allows the tracking of financial data in real time, streamlining financial reporting and decision-making.
These changes aim to enhance MEDA’s ability to drive change faster and smarter than ever before.
Another area of focus is doubling down on building strong relationships with partners on the ground.
In the fiscal year ending June 30, MEDA created 34,033 decent work opportunities. The organization has reached 46 percent of its strategic goal of creating decent work for 500,000 people by 2030.
Since that goal was set, MEDA has created 231,319 decent work
opportunities.
During its 2024 fiscal year, MEDA secured $23.5 million in institutional funding for two new projects.
A new project in Honduras (see story, page 6) will create 5,250 decent jobs and work opportunities for women and youth in the coffee and cacao industries in the country’s “Dry Corridor.”
The new $13 million Riz Afrique de l’Ouest (West Africa Rice) project is an example of a regional or multi-country initiative. The project, funded by the MasterCard Foundation, will work with 50 businesses and 250,000 small-scale farmers in Togo, Côte D’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) and Senegal. It aims to create more than 400,000 decent work opportunities for women and youth in the rice sector.
Similarly, the Harvesting Prosperity initiative aims to transform the rice industry across West Africa.
A decade ago, MEDA invested $1 million in Mountain Lion Agriculture through the MEDA Risk Capital Fund. It did this to support one of Sierra Leone’s only private rice processing enterprises.
Now MEDA is taking a holistic partnership approach to building an ecosystem around Mountain Lion Agriculture. This will enable the expansion of rice production across the region, creating jobs and long-term food security for millions.
These efforts are inspired by the work of MEDA’s founders in Paraguay, where an investment in the Sarona dairy in the 1950s laid the groundwork for a vibrant dairy industry there.
In Guinea, Sierra Leone, Cote D’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), and Liberia, rice is a staple, but these countries import 40 to 70 percent of their rice. At the same time, people live on less than $2 a day in some cases.
The Mano River Basin (Harvesting Prosperity) initiative will expand rice production and processing. Efforts in this direction have already begun. MEDA donors have provided $400,000 so rice growers can take advantage of the upcoming growing season.
Prospective institutional funders are the MacArthur Foundation, the MasterCard Foundation, and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The effort will begin with a $35 million pilot in Sierra Leone. The following project would be $100 million over 10 years, creating at least two million jobs and resulting in a 75 percent reduction in regional rice imports.
Seventy percent of the new jobs created would be for women and youth.
Domestically produced rice would be more nutritious, cheaper, and more readily accessible, said Gina Volynsky, MEDA’s vice president of partnerships and business development.
The $150 million MasterCard Foundation Africa Growth Fund, managed by MEDA, moved into an accelerated phase in FY24. It committed $66.53 million to eight new investment vehicles, two of which have invested in 13 highimpact businesses in Nigeria and Uganda.
Close to half of the 2,500 jobs that have been created by these investments are held by women. .
6
Growing resilience in a challenging region
Farmers in Honduras’ “dry corridor” struggle with extreme weather conditions. A new MEDA project aims to provide them with tools to increase their well-being.
17
A more prosperous path for Africa?
Loosening regulations and setting up special economic zones will allow African nations to become more developed and wealthy, Senegalese serial entrepreneur Magatte Wade says.
14
Opportunity and responsibility
Mennonite business leaders urged to steward creation through sustainable business practices.
20
Following Christ, creating cheeseboards
Steinbach’s Evan and Melissa Funk lean into their faith as they build Lynn and Liana Designs, an internationally successful charcuterie board firm.
Seminary president calls on pastors to work with entrepreneurs to find new solutions to today’s problems
Church leaders need closer relationships with business leaders to meet the challenges of relentless change in the modern era, David Boshart says.
“What the world needs today, is leaders in business and the church who bring their best entrepreneurial impulses to the countless opportunities of our time, and the complex challenges of our time,” he said.
Boshart, president of Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, commented in a Sunday morning meditation at MEDA’s annual convention in Atlanta, Georgia in November.
He said church leaders and entrepreneurial leaders are coping with a world of discontinuous change. “Discontinuous change is dramatic change that occurs in a relatively short period of time that disrupts the status quo.”
Boshart used a story of an
important bridge in Honduras as a metaphor for the effects of discontinuous change. Built in the 1930s, it was fortified by the US Army Corps of Engineers in 1998 “as a show of friendship between the US and Honduras.”
The US government told the Honduran government that the bridge was fortified to handle anything that Mother Nature could throw at it: hurricanes, earthquakes, or tornados.
When Hurricane Mitch swept across the country that same year, over 10,000 people died.
“But the bridge did precisely what it was built to do.”
However, while the storm didn’t damage the bridge, it moved the river, leaving both sides of the bridge on dry land some distance from the new riverbed.
Boshart saw a photograph of the landlocked bridge in 2004. It has
served as a metaphor for resilient leadership for him ever since, “during hurricanes of change.”
“It’s sobering for me to think about how the relevance of the metaphor has only increased for many leaders in many fields all around the world since 2000,” he said.
“Like the bridge, we engineer our churches, our businesses, our startups, our non-profit organizations to withstand threatening headwinds. We organize our churches and businesses to be strong and resilient.”
Over the past two decades, “leaders of all kinds have a sense that the river keeps moving.”
Churches, as old bridges, are no longer standing in the river, in many cases, he said.
“The challenge of repositioning the bridge across the river requires seeing opportunity in the challenge.”
He said the New Testament book of Acts, chapter 6, is a case study for leadership in a time of discontinuous change.
“Following Pentecost, the church’s growth was so rapid that it couldn’t be managed.”
Membership grew by the thousands every day, including a movement from a homogeneous racial and ethnic group to a multicultural global movement.
“Not surprisingly, conflicts began to develop. And yes, the needs of the community outstripped the available resources.”
One of the foundational values of the founders of the early church was to take care of the most vulnerable. A challenge arose in
the clash of cultures — the Hebrew widows were getting their share, but the Hellenistic (Greek) widows were going hungry.
In resolving that issue, early church leaders recognized that power is not a limited commodity and that there is always room for more leadership.
Church leaders asked the Hellenistic community to call upon leaders from within – people of good standing, full of the Spirit and wisdom. Those characteristics were values rooted in the community, culture, and spiritual wisdom, Boshart said.
Organizational guru Edgar Schein has said that the only important thing that leaders do is to create and manage a culture.
Schein followed that comment by saying: “The hardest thing that leaders ever do is to change the culture of an organization. Most attempts fail.”
Boshart said that in times of disruption, organizations need strategies to deal with moving rivers.
He thinks leaders need to be ambidextrous during the hurricanes of change, able to manage breakthrough innovations with one hand while managing incremental changes with the other.
These processes need to be concurrent. That is a tall order for leaders, Boshart said. “But both are needed in a hurricane of discontinuous change.”
Following the pandemic, discontinuous change seems to have amplified. “We find ourselves living in a new world.”
Entrepreneurs are excited by the possibility of change, a whole new world,” he said.
However, he believes more church leaders need to become better at imagining the challenges and opportunities that accompany discontinuous change.
“As French philosopher
(Albert) Camus said, ‘In every wall, there is a door.’ ”
But solutions will not come without a vision that is rooted in values. “Character and values produce the vision that determines whether you can manage the culture of an organization or not,” he said. “MEDA — your values matter.”
When leading through discontinuous change, values become vulnerable to compromised expediency, he said.
“All our strategies of adaptation and internal alignment will not work if they are disembodied from our values. Faithful and effective leaders create and manage culture by maintaining their founding values as their north star.”
He recalled a conversation with a third-generation owner of a car dealership. The man told Boshart that when hiring, the firm looked more for character than experience or skills.
Asked why they took that approach, the man replied that they can usually teach skills, but not character.
Boshart’s own “personal conversion to seeing business and faith as essential partners” has led him to preach for almost 25 years that “business leadership is as much a spiritual vocation as church leadership.”
“When it feels like the river has moved, we need leaders who can create the new world that is waiting to be born, and the rivers that need to be spanned,” he said.
He thinks that the tendency of many church leaders to concede the church’s future to ongoing disintegration and decline is “a profound failure of leadership.”
“Business leaders, your church leaders need you to help us imagine a new world that is waiting to be born.”
“We need church leaders and business leaders who collaborate in
bringing the power of our theology together with the path of economic development. We need business leaders and church leaders who bring the foundational values of our faith to bear on economic solutions that raise up the poor, free the oppressed, heal the sick, feed the hungry and yes, generate wealth for all.”
“We need church leaders and business leaders who are not afraid or ashamed to meet the world in the character of Jesus, who came not to be served, but to serve.”
“The world needs church leaders, and business leaders, to be more entrepreneurial, not less, joining hands, working together.” .
Volume 55, Issue 1
January February 2025
The Marketplace (ISSN 0199-7130) is published bi-monthly by Mennonite Economic Development Associates, 100 S Queen St Ste 235, Lancaster, PA 176035368. Periodicals postage paid at Newton, KS 67114. Lithographed in U.S.A. Copyright 2024 by MEDA.
Editor: Mike Strathdee Design: Ray Dirks
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Published by Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA). MEDA’s economic development work in the Global South creates business solutions to poverty. MEDA also facilitates the connection of faith and work through discussions, publications and conventions for participants.
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The Marketplace is printed on Rolland Enviro® Satin and is made with 100% post-consumer sustainable fiber content, FSC® Certified to help meet client sustainability requirements, Acid Free, Elemental Chlorine Free Cover photo of Maria Pacheco by David Moustache
A new MEDA project aims to work with Honduran farmers to strengthen their resilience, improve their environmental impact, and earn more money.
The Opportunities for Circular and Inclusive Diversification in Agriculture (OCIDA) project will work with 7,000 small-scale farmers in Honduras’ “dry corridor.”
The five-year initiative is funded by Global Affairs Canada and donations from MEDA supporters. It runs until 2029.
Of the 10.6 million people living in Honduras, 52 percent live on about $6.85 US per day. One in seven people lives on $2.15 US per day, the current threshold for extreme poverty.
Honduras’ dry corridor endures high temperatures and long periods of drought. This alternates with periods of heavy rainfall, said Ricardo Gonzalez, MEDA’s country director for Honduras.
He said that 2.8 million people in this corridor find their livelihoods seriously affected by this extreme weather and suffer from food insecurity.
Photo by Jeffrey Moustache
business activity. Contributors to this approach include reducing, recycling, and reusing things that had previously been thrown away. It could involve giving waste a second life by developing byproducts.
producer organizations and related businesses. Of that group, 60 will improve their business performance, he predicted.
The project wants to support women and youth in rural areas for several reasons.
Honduras is one of the most gender-unequal countries in Latin America.
It is a male-dominated culture where women have historically had fewer economic opportunities, Gonzalez said. Women’s monthly income is 27 percent lower than men’s. However, studies show that women spend money better, investing 90 percent of what they earn back into their families.
Women and youth are considered “unbackable.” This perception makes it difficult for them to improve their economic situation.
OCIDA will work with smallscale coffee, cacao, and horticulture farmers, including many women and youth. The project takes three approaches: building increased climate and economic resilience in women and youth; improving the business performance of producer organizations and businesses; and focusing on an enabling environment for circular and inclusive growth in the dry corridor.
Circular economic growth includes reducing the negative environmental impact of a
Project participants have little or no formal education and cultivate two to 18 acres (one to 10 hectares) of land. They sell their crops and finance their needs through middlemen.
The OCIDA project has set goals of improving the sense of social and economic well-being of 5,200 participants and providing “smart incentives” to 3,000 people.
Smart incentives are mechanisms that stimulate or redirect market activities aimed at creating or facilitating access to new technologies or markets. This is usually accomplished through risk reduction and lowering barriers.
OCIDA also seeks to provide business advisory services to 80
Farmers could increase their yields by 25 to 40 percent over a three to four-year period by adopting most of the project’s recommended techniques and technologies, Gonzalez said. By selling to formal buyers instead of middlemen, farmers could increase their income by 19 to 22 percent per acre.
Meeting the quality standards required by formal buyers could add five to 10 percent to selling prices, he said.
Using organic fertilizers could reduce production costs by 10 to 25 percent and reduce CO2 emissions.
Informal financing costs farmers 72 to 96 percent interest per year or more, he said. Gaining access to formal financing would result in loan rates of between 18 and 42 percent. .
Special economic zones will allow the continent to prosper, serial entrepreneur says.
Freeing African businesses from government regulations is the best solution to poverty on the continent, Magatte Wade says.
“Africa is the hardest place to do business in the world because it is the most over-regulated region in the world,” she said in a plenary speech at MEDA’s annual convention in Atlanta.
Wade, a serial entrepreneur born in Senegal, serves as director of the Center for African Prosperity, Atlas Network. A bestselling author and globally known speaker, she is also the co-founder of Prosper Africa, which promotes “next-generation economic zones.”
The Atlas Network is a USbased non-profit that provides training, networking, and grants for libertarian, free market, and conservative groups around the world.
The Center for African Prosperity supports Atlas Network’s regional partner organizations as they work to “promote economic freedom and strong institutions, and to build the capacity for reforms that lead to broad-based prosperity across Africa.”
Poverty is grossly misdiagnosed in Africa, she said. People spend 80 percent of their time trying to diagnose solutions but focusing only on symptoms of poverty.
“When you take symptoms and treat them as root cause, you are
Photos by Jeffrey Moustache
Wade sees enormous potential for African businesses. wasting precious time.”
When she was two years old, Wade’s parents left Senegal as economic migrants to Europe, leaving her with her beloved grandmother.
Wade struggled after being reunited with her parents in Germany at age seven. She was unable to adapt to the plenty she saw around her compared with life in Senegal.
She couldn’t believe that she
could turn a knob and immediately get a hot water shower. In Senegal, fetching water and heating it meant a 45-to-60-minute wait.
“How come these people have this and we don’t? (in Senegal),” she recalls thinking.
That repeated question gave way to asking why many African nations are poor, and countries in other parts of the world are rich.
She was repeatedly told that African IQs are lower, and that they
are always fighting or lazy. She also heard that Africans’ lack of prosperity is due to malnutrition, or a lack of education.
The reference to education makes her furious, given the number of people with university degrees who sell goods in the street for lack of a better opportunity.
Half of graduates from African universities can’t find work, she said. “The more educated you are, the less likely you are to be able to find a job.”
None of the explanations she was given for African poverty made sense to her. Many Africans who leave the continent do well and “self-actualize” elsewhere. “The minute they go to another place, they can make it happen.”
After finishing business school in France, she moved to the US for greater opportunities. She took a job with a small family business. After only nine months, she realized she had outgrown her responsibilities.
Wade then moved to San Francisco and became a headhunter, recruiting bright candidates for positions in finance. Her clients included startups such as Google and Netflix.
She felt grateful for many people who had made a difference in her life, because “I do believe that God shows his grace through other people.”
But she was haunted by stories of Senegalese people getting into boats to come to Europe seeking a job. Many of those people ended up drowning. “Right now, you have thousands of young people, mostly young people, lying at the bottom of the ocean serving as fish food.”
That reality led her to surrender to God and vow to put her energy toward the betterment of her people, Senegal, “and my continent.” She returned to Senegal for a visit after an absence of four years.
Women hibiscus growers were losing their jobs because of the popularity of Western soft drinks. Wade decided to start a juice business and help the women return to work.
At one point those efforts created jobs for 9,000 women.
However, Wade had doubts. It took almost two years to legally register a firm in Senegal, compared to half a day in the US. “It just felt like swimming through molasses.”
The higher the level of freedom a country has, the wealthier it is, she said. Wade believes that regulation stands in the way of innovation.
That realization led her to join the Atlas Network think tank and start an initiative called Prosper Africa. She became serious about policy work and began promoting special economic zones. These regulation-free zones allow people to build businesses that can compete with Denmark and Singapore, she said.
She hopes that by next June, she will be able to announce her first special economic zone city. Of 10 African nations she has spoken with, “two are racing ahead.”
If a country gets a Singapore or Hong Kong-style economic zone, “the rest is going to be history,” she predicted.
“This is the reason why I am so bold in predicting that, in my lifetime, I will see the change that
I want. But before I die, (I want) to know that my continent has taken a major shift in direction and is racing toward prosperity. For Africans to become global co-creators in prosperity and innovation.”
“We know that when you allow businesses to be, you will have prosperity, and you will have innovation. This is the plan for us to leapfrog ahead. We have everything that we need, especially a super, super young population.
Africa has the youngest population in the world, with an average age of 19, she said.
“By 2050, one-quarter of the world’s population will be African. By 2100, it’s going to be one out of two people walking this earth will be African.”
Wade feels dizzy with the possibilities of what she believes Africans will accomplish in the coming decades.
Earlier in her life, she believed the best solution to Africans’ problems was to give them whatever they needed. “Eventually, with life … I came to learn that the greatest act of goodness and good is actually business. It is the greatest force for doing good — period.”
Wade was thrilled to learn about MEDA and its work. When asked to speak at MEDA’s convention in Atlanta, she concluded that “MEDA is me, and I am MEDA.”
She admits to being critical of the field of economic development, and “those who claim to want to change the status quo in Africa.”
“Thank you for doing (economic development) the right way, the way that still dignifies me as a human being.”
“Knowing that this is what you (MEDA supporters) do — business solutions to world problems — I wish I had known that earlier.” .
When Maria Pacheco was 12, her family moved to the US. Her father was a pediatrician who was invited to do a fellowship program at a Kansas City medical center.
“When I returned home (to Guatemala) after four years of living in the States, what seemed normal did not seem normal anymore,” she said.
Pacheco made the comments in a keynote speech at MEDA’s annual convention in Atlanta.
“Not just the poverty, but the war. It was the 1980s. A million people had to flee, (and) 200,000 were killed.”
She did not know what to do but was invited by her church to visit a refugee camp. Her work included taking moms, their children, and babies to a nearby hospital.
During the trip, one of the babies died. The mom wrapped up the baby and walked back to the refugee camp with a dead child.
The experience made Pacheco not want to be part of Guatemala. “I don’t want to be part of a society that allows this,” she recalled.
Guatemala has the largest economy in Central America. But the country struggles with high rates of poverty and inequality.
After a peace treaty was signed in Guatemala in 1996, more people started dying due to famine and poverty than were killed in the war.
Pacheco read about a malnourished 12-year-old girl named Juana in a Monday newspaper. By Wednesday, the girl was dead. “What country allows the most vulnerable, the most sacred to be unprotected?”
Photos by Jeffrey Moustache
Not knowing what to do, she walked down the road to a village in eastern Guatemala.
A woman invited Pacheco into her house. A small boy was lying on a mat on the floor, shaking. She told the woman that the boy would die unless she took him to the hospital.
“What she said changed me. She said, ‘Right now I have $5 in
my pocket. With those, I can try to save the child, or I could try to feed the other seven for the rest of the month.’ ”
When Pacheco asked women in the village what would change their situation, they told her they needed income sources and markets to sell their products. “If you can sell what we produce, the rest we can do,” they told her.
That led her to start Wakami. Wakami is a social enterprise that is a MEDA partner in the Women’s Empowerment for Central America (WE4CA) project.
WE4CA, MEDA’s first project in Guatemala, aims to support 5,000 women and young girls in Central America, including rural and indigenous populations. The project works in the regenerative agriculture (focused on coffee) and light manufacturing (focused on handmade products) sectors.
Pacheco decided to choose one product that women “could be really good at making, and then find markets for it.”
Making bracelets was the starting point for Wakami clients.
One of those women, Marla, started working with Wakami 18 years ago. She had no education and was living in a “machista” rural community where men questioned the value of sending women to school.
Marla told Pacheco that her dream “was that my (three) daughters don’t have to go through the same things I had to go through.”
In the hands of a woman with big dreams, a nail (used as the starting point for making bracelets) can help her products go to the world through Wakami’s value chains, Pacheco said.
Eighteen years later, the reality for Marla's family is much different than it was for her. One daughter came to visit Pacheco to show her college diploma. Another of Marla’s daughters is in her first year of law school. The third is in her senior year of college studying physiotherapy.
By the time the girls entered college, Marla’s husband had come around to her way of thinking. He agreed to help and even drive them to school. He suggested they learn English so they would have better
employment opportunities.
“For me, to see the Marla story is what you see with women all around the world,” Pacheco said. “Women with income will transform realities.”
Last year (2024) marked Wakami’s 20th anniversary. The organization now has two systems with parallel missions.
Wakami Foundation works to create opportunities that allow its community to achieve its income generation dreams.
“Imagine a new generation, with no malnutrition, with high education, and no babies when they are 15 — they can do whatever they want.” Maria Pacheco, founder, Wakami Global
Wakami Social Business works to create brands, products, and value chains that elevate its community, regenerate the earth, and transform perspectives.
A partnership with MEDA has allowed Wakami to expand how it works with women to include regenerative agriculture and focus on a circular economy, Pacheco said.
New income generation streams include work with coffee, chickens, vegetable gardens, and banana fibers. Coffee plants need the shade that banana plants provide, and the banana fibers can be turned into textiles.
Wakami’s formula is that dreams plus opportunities equals change, she said.
The dreams of Wakami clients are to have income, and to have healthy and educated children who live in beautiful homes, she said.
In helping women to generate income through light manufacturing, Wakami assists with market research, product design, production and quality control, and sales. It has branched beyond bracelet making to include other products such as accessories, home décor, and clothing.
Wakami also makes “smart investments” in improving nutrition, education, and housing issues for the girls and women it works with.
Its nutrition program involves monitoring and weighing children. All of the young children of Wakami clients have recovered their weight to age-appropriate levels since they received chickens
and gardens.
A Wakami education program provides scholarships to the children of Wakami’s women entrepreneurs in 16 communities. More than 160 girls and boys receive scholarships each year.
Wakami also offers 13 girls’ clubs serving over 300 girls. The clubs empower girls and young women for life, aiming to prevent
school dropouts. It is now starting boys’ clubs as well.
Wakami operates five retail stores and eight kiosks, and sells its products through e-commerce, at https://wakamiglobal.com
Wakami is a Certified B Corp. B Corp. is an international certification recognizing companies that have voluntarily met the highest standards of
Solving poverty in Guatemala is an intergenerational issue that will only improve once families can increase their net worth, Ben Sywulka says.
“If you really want to solve the (poverty) problem, you have to solve the income, not just for this generation,” he said in a speech at MEDA’s annual convention in Atlanta.
“You have to solve it for the next generation as well.”
Sywulka, who was raised in Guatemala and now works in Indiana, has examined the problem closely from various perspectives. He has volunteered and done consulting for Guatemalan organizations, including Wakami, and the country’s government.
For him, solving poverty is a family project that requires a focus on improving families’ net worth, not just their income.
Most Guatemalans earn $340 a month, 30 percent less than the country’s minimum wage of $440.
Seventy percent of jobs in the country are informal, purely marketdriven, without minimum wages or security, he said.
The gap between urban and rural areas is worse. The urban average wage is $404 a month. Rural Guatemalans earn $252 a month.
Women earn less than men. Age and education levels also contribute to the poverty problem. “Most of us (in North America) earned less when we were younger than when we are older, but (in Guatemala) it can take up to 30 to 40 years before you start earning something close to the minimum wage, on average.”
“If you are one of the 2.7 million Guatemalans who never finished primary
Ben Sywulka
school… you are never going to get above half the minimum wage.”
People who finish high school earn closer to the minimum wage over time, he said. “The lucky few who go to college and beyond will get double, or triple, or four times the minimum wage.”
But 70 percent of Guatemalan children who enter preschool each year drop out along the way. Malnutrition, families lacking the money for their children to study and teen pregnancies all contribute to the problem.
Health concerns are also an issue. He estimates that 25 to 50 percent of Guatemalan households lack basic infrastructure needed for health.
In rural Guatemala, incomes have
increased by $400 over the past 10 years, but expenses have increased similarly.
Sywulka sees strengthening markets as key to helping fledgling Guatemalan businesses. Investments in sales and marketing are as important as training. Many people miss out on poverty reduction opportunities because they don’t have a marketing presence.
“This is one of the biggest constraints that Wakami has. They can help thousands of families … but they have to make the corresponding investments in sales and marketing to find buyers for everything that the women produce.
Hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans could earn several times the minimum wage working in call centers, but the country lacks enough fluent English speakers.
Many Guatemalans start at age 18 with nothing, reach age 65, and still have nothing, he said.
Only 18 percent of Guatemalans have the safety net they need to grow their net worth.
“We can reverse this spiral of poverty, through an upward spiral of prosperity. But it requires a holistic approach to poverty, and it requires strategic investments in leverage points.”
Only seven percent of the Guatemalan workforce is investing. “We have to solve the problem of lack of ownership.”
Creating millions of Guatemalan investors will require democratizing capital and making it possible for people to make small investments in infrastructure, contracts, business components, and business ventures, he said. .
We are the citizens of the world.
We believe that a better world is possible and that global change begins at home.
We dream of living in a world of unity, of equality; a world of connection.
We love the Earth and admire all of the volcanos, trees, and every single color of the flowers that exist(s) on it.
We believe in the power of dreams and we know that collective dreams are unstoppable.
We choose to live a life of purpose, and we know that our actions can build the world which we want to live in.
We know that working in collaboration with others makes everything possible. We believe in peace, gratitude, purpose, and in hope.
We are the citizens of the world.
social and environmental performance.
Wakami has shared best practices with trainers in Mexico and other Guatemalan organizations. It aims to provide the bridge to get women out of poverty and become businesspeople.
Wakami’s approach has been implemented in a national Guatemalan project that strengthened over 300 rural businesses, benefiting 20,000 people. “Even though we are small, we can get into having a bigger impact.”
More than 60 Guatemalan micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises have been incorporated into Wakami’s national and international value chains. Six coffee groups are working with Wakami’s regenerative agriculture project.
In villages where Wakami has clients, “the women have reduced malnutrition from 50 to five percent that’s huge.”
Average schooling for Guatemalan children is 4.8 years.
“The Wakami children have nine years (of schooling) on average.”
Between 16 and 20 percent of Guatemalan girls have teen pregnancies. “Wakami girls, coming from rural communities, have less than eight percent (teen pregnancies),” she said.
“Imagine a new generation, with no malnutrition, with high education, and no babies when they are 15 they can do whatever they want.”
“This is what they can do with
income. We are so proud of that. We have a social return on investment.”
Wakami will now work at developing value chains for coffee and banana fibers.
Other goals include assisting women in developing savings groups, and acceleration programs for girls. The acceleration program will introduce them to technology and help them develop portable skills, Pacheco said.
“A girl with English and technology can just leapfrog Guatemala’s economy and connect to the world.”
The Wakami Dream: Families with houses surrounded by gardens and bees.
A shared table with moms and dads that work and prosper and boys and girls who study and play. This is the new Wakami dream... prosperous and sustainable families... ...where we take care of the Earth because the Earth is already taking care of us .
Cleaner cooking in northern Ghana can have multiple health, environmental, and economic benefits, say the winners of MEDA’s annual pitch competition.
The Cooking Bag project won $10,000 US at the event, held at MEDA’s November convention in Atlanta, Georgia. The prize is known as the Allan Sauder Innovation Award in honor of former MEDA president Sauder.
air pollution, the World Health Organization estimates.
The Cooking Bag project is headed by Cornelius Pienaah and Sulemana Ansumah Saaka, two PhD students from Ghana. The project aims to reduce the use of biomass fuels like firewood and charcoal.
It will use the prize money to produce 1,500 cooking bags for distribution. The prize money will also support training women to manufacture the bags and conducting community engagement programs to demonstrate the bag’s benefits.
The Cooking Bag is an insulated device that can be put around a cooking pot after it is removed from a heat source. The bag allows food such as rice, beans, yams, or other dishes to continue cooking after being brought to a boil. The device reduces fuel consumption by 45 percent, lowering indoor air pollution and reducing the health impacts of smoke inhalation.
Cooking indoors with firewood or charcoal contributes to more than 28,000 premature deaths in Ghana each year due to indoor
In addition to reducing indoor smoke, the Cooking Bag will lessen the need for firewood and free women to spend more time on productive activities.
This was the second year that San Francisco-based D Prize has partnered with MEDA on the competition. All three finalists in the 2024 competition had previously won initial seed funds from D Prizes’ global competitions and carried out successful pilot projects.
This year’s other finalists are based in Uganda and Kenya.
• Ziimba targets mass deforestation in Uganda’s cattle corridor. It pays small-scale farmers to plant trees on degraded land and develop sustainable tree farms. It provides farmers with quality inputs such as certified seeds, pesticides and fertilizers, tree seedlings, technical support, and continuous training. This helps the farmers grow high-value cash crops to triple or quadruple their income each season. Farmers also receive long-term income from harvesting
fast-growing eucalyptus trees. Ziimba guarantees a market for the wood by purchasing it from the farmers and selling it directly to end users. The company has worked with more than 600 direct beneficiaries, and overseen the planting of more than 30,000 trees, with 80 acres of land under restoration.
• Kenya’s Miti Mitaani tackles several difficult urban challenges. These include the impacts of rapid urbanization, deforestation, and high youth unemployment. Deforestation has reduced tree cover in Nairobi, the nation’s capital, by 22 percent in the past three years. One-third of Kenya’s youth are under or unemployed. Miti Mitaani, which means “trees in our neighborhood,” engages young people and women as “tree stewards” who plant and care for trees along riverways and other public spaces. The company pays its tree stewards to ensure the survival of the trees they plant.
Convention attendees voted to give Ziimba the People’s Choice Award. Ziimba will receive a year’s coaching from Dawn Graber, a Florida-based leadership coach. Gruber acted as emcee for MEDA’s Atlanta convention in November.
Ziimba and Miti Mitaani were awarded $5,000 each by the Schlegel family, which has sponsored the competition for many years. Rob and Ron Schlegel, in announcing the winners, said all finalists were deserving of support. .
Mennonite business leaders have both opportunity and responsibility in stewarding creation through sustainable business practices, Douglas Day Kaufman says.
“What you are producing is part of creativity, part of God’s creativity, I think,” Kaufman said. He spoke at a panel discussion about climate action, linking faith and sustainability, during MEDA’s annual convention.
Kaufman is the executive director of the Anabaptist Climate Collaborative (ACC). ACC is a USbased nonprofit that brings together individuals and organizations to seek climate justice.
“It goes back to the creation … so you have a larger effect than someone who isn’t running a business, who isn’t working with God’s creation in that way,” he said. “I think it’s important to think about what that effect is.”
Three businessmen who took part in the panel — Brent Alderfer, Steve Brenneman, and Jim Miller — agreed with Kaufman’s point of view. Each shared measures their firms have taken to reduce carbon footprints.
Alderfer has been working on climate solutions for the past 20 years. “There are solutions,” he said. “(Changes to) the energy you use, the transportation, (and reversing) deforestation will get you 80 percent of the way there. … These are easy, and in most cases, economic.”
Alderfer is a Pennsylvania resident who has developed wind farms and large-scale solar energy systems. “I think what we’re looking at next is getting to zero carbon, which is probably the largest contributor to climate change.”
He thinks of the need to shrink our collective carbon footprints in terms of three things: “your customers, your church, and your children.”
“All three of those, if they’re not
holding you accountable now, they will be holding you accountable in history,” he predicted.
“I think, a generation ago, when the impacts of using resources in the world, or trees, or anything else, were really a small part of the global condition, I don’t think that was a moral issue,” he said. “But I think, in today’s circumstance, when you are thinking ahead to your children, to the next generation, I think it’s now a moral issue, what we’re doing now, on climate.”
Brenneman is the founder of Aluminum Insights, an Indiana aluminum extrusion company.
Aluminum is “infinitely recyclable,” he said. “You can recycle the product over and over, with no deterioration in quality.”
“Aluminum cans contain more than three times the amount of recycled content (of other materials).”
Recycling an aluminum can instead of making a new one saves 95 percent of the energy. A lot of electricity is used to make virgin aluminum, he said.
When a ton of glass is recycled, 42 kw hours of energy is saved. Recycling a ton of aluminum cans saves 14,000 kw hours. “What I do, when I’m walking by a trash can, and I see an aluminum can in it, I pick it up.”
Brenneman’s firm saw a two-year payback on installing a $650,000 solar system at its factory, which opened in 2022. The 600-kilowatt system takes up onethird of the plant’s roof. It supplies the factory’s electricity needs for
operations between 9 am and 4 pm.
Aluminum production creates three tons of carbon per ton of aluminum if it is done with renewable energy and modern technology. If produced in South Africa, where they use electricity generated from coal, it is about 18 tons of carbon per ton of aluminum, he said. “It makes a huge difference where you get it from.”
The company decided to plant prairie grass beside its factory, so they don’t have to mow. “There’s a lot of benefits in this. Reduced emissions, employee wellness, increased biodiversity, and acoustic screening. “Our operation does create a lot of noise. Our neighbors to the south don’t appreciate it.”
Aluminum Insights is trying to convince its customers to help them make the right choices in selecting the right aluminum, Brenneman said.
“It makes a difference. We are shipping two (semi) truckloads of aluminum every single day, six days a week.”
His plant’s scrap and customer scrap are all recycled. His customers get about a dollar a pound for their scrap.
Post-consumer scrap is
considered to have a carbon footprint of zero. If that scrap is reused by AI, the extrusion process generates only about 2.3 tons of carbon per ton of aluminum.
“We got really lucky. The only part that isn’t lucky is, it costs about five more cents a pound.”
Brenneman likes to understand his customers’ processes, show them his firm’s processes, and work to put them together, “and reduce our shared costs.”
One of his frustrations is the inability to reuse wood blocks used to stack aluminum. The company is working on replacing the blocks with reusable racks and eliminating cardboard.
Jim Miller’s DutchCrafters also thinks about limiting packaging waste. The Florida-based firm sells Amish-made hardwood furniture across the US, through its e-commerce platform and showrooms in Florida and Georgia.
“When we deliver throughout the states we don’t use any packaging, and our furniture is blanket-wrapped,” he said. “We don’t leave behind boxes, and Styrofoam and that sort of thing.”
Sustainability is one of DutchCrafters’ core values. The company has solar panels on the roofs of its showrooms. It is active in furniture industry organizations that promote eco-friendly options.
“We talk about this with a
“God loves the whole world, not just the human beings in it.” — Jim Miller, CEO, DutchCrafters
great sense of humility,” Miller said. “Like a lot of you who are business owners, you think of a lot of achievements that you are pretty proud of, and a whole bunch of stuff that you wish you were doing better at.”
“From my faith perspective, I’m inspired to care for all creation, and see that… God loves the whole world, not just the human beings in it.”
Black is the new green, he said. “We’re in the slow furniture business, so we’re producing furniture that takes a little while to produce, but it also is meant to last.”
“We feel that building products that last a lifetime is a great way to reduce (the amount of required) resources in the first place.”
Miller wants to make a difference, through the example his company provides and through “the challenges that we provide for our competitors, for the ways we can influence our customers, and then of course, with the leverage and relationships we have with our builder community.”
He wants to continue to change what he can within the business, while also being a catalyst for change at the systems level.
He also admits to some frustrations. Knowing how to talk about climate and stewardship with Amish builders who are more theologically and politically conservative is one of these.
“There’s resistance often … when we use certain language, like climate change, or when we use language like ecological sustainability even, or green, there’s some skepticism there,” he said.
“But if we can find ways of talking about creation care, and stewardship, there’s more resonance. How we bridge those gaps is an important frustration, and opportunity for us.” .
Spare a thought for American farmers. USA Today reports that every US state except Alaska suffered drought conditions this fall.
Experts say that even if affected areas receive lots of snow this winter, things may not improve until the spring.
Reduced crop yields, increased wildfires, and pleas for water conservation may become commonplace unless conditions improve.
The old saying about how history never repeats itself, but it rhymes comes to mind in US farmers’ pleas to their incoming president. Donald Trump’s musings about mass deportations early in his term have farmers singing the same tune as they were last time he occupied the White House.
It may surprise no one to read a “US farm groups want Trump to spare their workers from deportation” headline in Successful Farmer magazine. A similar story in Fast Company suggests those concerns go beyond the farm gate.
Close to half of the US’s two million farmworkers lack legal status.
That figure does not include the substantial contributions that undocumented farmworkers make to the dairy and meatpacking industries.
Higher grocery prices and the potential collapse of some small-town economies are predicted outcomes should government deportation actions target farm workers.
Two African entrepreneurs won the 2024 Earthshot Prize.
Earthshot was launched in 2020 by British Prince William “to search for and scale the most innovative solutions to the world’s
greatest environmental challenges.
Desmond Alugnoa of Ghana and Kenyan Francis Nderitu were among five people awarded $1.2 million to take their projects to scale. Alugnoa won in the “Clean Our Air” category for his initiative to drive behavioral change in waste management practices that reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Nderitu was recognized for Keep IT Cool, a company he founded that supplies sustainable refrigeration systems to small-scale farmers.
Food deserts is a term used to describe neighborhoods, and sometimes entire communities, that do not have affordable or nutritious food, especially fresh fruits and vegetables, accessible nearby due
to an absence of grocery stores.
The US Department of Agriculture defines a food desert as a place where at least 20 percent of residents live in poverty, and onethird of residents live at least a mile from a grocery store.
Several chains have found considerable profit and success in the dollar store market. The food in such stores tends to be processed and less healthy.
That situation may change if industry leader Dollar General‘s recent actions endure. Some reports suggest the fast-growing company now has more locations selling fresh produce than Walmart. Dollar General has over 5,000 locations offering fruits and vegetables, many in sparsely populated rural areas. .
Churches need to become comfortable with discussing ambiguities that can arise in entrepreneurship, the president of Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary says.
“How can we create spaces in the church, in your community, where you can have conversations about the ambiguous places you are finding yourself in,” David Boshart asked in a seminar at MEDA’s annual convention in Atlanta.
“To do discernment with others who can walk along with you, but not try to make it all come out right for you.”
Before joining AMBS in Indiana, Boshart served as a pastor and conference leader.
He spent much of the seminar in dialogue with serial entrepreneur Steve Brenneman. “We both have sort of entrepreneurial instincts, and we also live with some tension about that, in terms of our spirituality and our connection to the church,” Boshart said.
For many years, Boshart was interested in taking risks, “innovating, and thinking new thoughts, and having the big picture and the big idea.”
But a traditional local church “will do its best to squash that right out of you,” he said. “Don’t rock the boat, business as usual, don’t shake things up.”
“Living with that tension, of feeling that impulse inside me, and not being able to live that out
is a regret I have.”
Boshart first felt approval to be entrepreneurial when he was employed by an MC USA conference, and then at AMBS. “I came to AMBS with record low enrolment, a decade of deficit budgets, and it was either innovate or close.”
“It’s been a real life-giving thing for me to be able to embrace that entrepreneurial impulse in this place.”
Brenneman, who has enjoyed great success in some endeavors and crushing failure in one case, has also felt tensions in reconciling his gifts with church culture.
Starting businesses “takes an intensity, and it takes a tenacity,” he said.
He struggles to accept Christ’s teaching in the Beatitudes, about the meek inheriting the earth. “It’s tough to be an entrepreneur and be meek,” he said. “It’s not going to get you very far.”
Brenneman started a trailer company 25 years ago. Before that, he worked with a cargo trailer firm in Indiana’s Elkhart region.
“I didn’t want to just do a job. But I wasn’t part of the family that owned the business, and it was clear I wasn’t gonna get that opportunity because I wasn’t family.”
“A couple of my suppliers came to me, a father and son who were successful, and they said to me: ‘We see something in you, and if you want to do something on your own, we’d be interested in backing you financially.’ ”
He decided to build aluminum frame trailers. The company grew quickly, and Brenneman bought a door firm.
He needed a paycheque, and the trailer firm was not flush enough to give him one. “I got this opportunity to work for this Amish guy and buy his business over time. He was experiencing health challenges and needed the business off of his farm.”
Brenneman bought the door firm and had other people run the trailer firm.
“By 2006, the trailer company did about $25 million in sales.”
The door company grew from $2 million in sales to $40 million by 2007.
Brenneman thought he was “really, really smart” given his early successes.
But both companies were heavily leveraged. “We got it really rolling, just in time for the downturn of 2008. We were heavily dependent on the RV business for our customers. That business didn’t just slow down, it just stopped, for three months in the summer of 2008.”
The trailer firm survived. The door firm did not. His lender forced him to sell off those assets and bid farewell to 200 employees. It was an extremely difficult time.
“I prayed a lot,” he said. “My brother, who was involved with me in that business, asked me: ‘you have this other successful business that looks like it’s going to make it — you’re going to pay back all these vendors and suppliers and banks that lost money on us, right?’ ”
The losses from the bankruptcy totaled about $7 million.
Brenneman’s grandfather raised chickens to make extra money. A disease ravaged his flock in the 1940s, and he lost 10,000 chickens. “He spent 25 years paying back all his debts (about $25,000),” Brenneman said. “This is a story that got told to me, over and over and over.”
But a debt of $7 million is quite different from a $25,000 loss, Boshart said. People who invest in small businesses “have to know there is risk. By investing, they have to share in the responsibility of the potential loss.”
“I’m not saying there isn’t room for some kind of restitution, or however you want to resolve it. The relational piece is probably the most important.”
Forgiveness is a key part of the gospel, he said. “We pray that in the Lord’s Prayer, right?”
There is a precedent for forgiveness of debt in early US history. The colony of Georgia was established as a haven for people from debtors’ prison “as an act of mercy.”
“What happens when we in the church can’t get in touch with the mercy that is needed for those who have had a failed business and couldn’t possibly get a debt paid?”
“Entrepreneurship can be lonely because it is hard to find people to relate to who can understand and feel what you’re going through.” — Indiana businessman Steve Brenneman
A friend of Brenneman’s told him that in India “if you fail, you’re done. You won’t be able to be in business again.”
However, in the US, people idolize (people who have) failed and returned, he said. “It’s like you’re a hero if you’ve failed.”
Brenneman has given many talks on failure. “A lot more than on success, because people want to hear about the failures. Maybe it makes us — I don’t know, maybe it makes us aligned more because we all know our failures well.”
The church doesn’t handle some aspects of business failure well, Boshart said. “We can handle the legal stuff. We live in a guilt-based culture, where if you’re guilty, you pay a fine, and you’re off.”
“Our society lacks mechanisms for dealing with shame,” Boshart said. “We avoid going there…but we might want to hold something over somebody, and not announce that period of shame is over.”
Entrepreneurs are always looking forward. They are less likely to pause and look backward at things that happened, that they may have done wrong, Brenneman said.
He recently started another aluminum company. “Learned a lot from it, did it better the second time. That we can do. But dealing with some of that guilt, and shame — we don’t do very well with that.”
Meetings with a counselor helped him to understand that tendency in himself.
Successful entrepreneurs create an insulated barrier around themselves, making them impervious to criticism, he said. In 2018, Brenneman left the dayto-day operations of his trailer company. “I had some (personal) work to do, and I’m glad I did.”
He realizes now that he wasn’t humble enough and saw himself as infallible. He regretted letting people down, having debts that he
couldn’t pay off, “but I’m going to try to pay them off, over time, in new business ventures.”
Finding someone to share his experience with would have been difficult, he said. “The difficult part is deciding who that would be. Entrepreneurship can be lonely because it is hard to find people to relate to who can understand and feel what you’re going through.”
“Part of it is, it’s embarrassing to be in that vulnerable position with someone who’s successful.”
Brenneman’s trailer company has many large commercial projects, including simulators, training rooms, “about anything you could imagine.”
In 2011, the firm was approached by Northrop Grumman, a company that does a lot of contracts for the US military.
“If you’re a manufacturer in North America, at some point, you’re going to be supplying the military,” he said. “We have turned down a lot of projects that were obviously combative type products.”
But the project they were asked to do, a large, unmanned drone, was something the trailer firm knew it could do well. “They didn’t say exactly what it was that was going to go in it, but we could kind of tell what was going to happen.”
Northrop Grumman was so pleased with the results that it gave the trailer company an award.
When Brenneman brought one of his brothers to the factory for a tour, his brother was surprised to learn of the Northrop Grumman project.
A day later, the brother sent a text saying he had discussed what he saw with his wife. Both expressed surprise at the firm’s involvement with a defense contractor.
“I just said, yeah, you’re right,” Brenneman admitted. “I don’t know what I was thinking, you know, this
doesn’t align with my beliefs.”
His ancestor Melchior Brenneman was imprisoned in a tower in Berne, Switzerland for rebaptizing. “He rebaptized someone and spent four months in prison, and I’m making this product for the military … I have to end it.”
He called Northrop Grumman and explained that his beliefs would not allow the firm to continue with the project. “It’s things like that that we struggle with.”
Boshart sympathizes. He wishes congregations could provide listeners for these sorts of struggles.
If the church validated entrepreneurship as a spiritual vocation, more entrepreneurs who are later in their careers would turn around and find ways to support the next generation, he said.
“You (businesspeople in the audience) have an enormous spiritual resource to offer those who are coming after you. To encourage, to validate, to cheer them on, to coach them.”
Entrepreneurs could make a big difference by inviting pastors to this conversation, he said.
Brenneman asked listeners to engage in their area MEDA chapter and bring people to those conversations. “It can’t just be once a year at convention. It has to be more than that.”
Boshart agrees. “The economic conversation is something that we need to get better at. … It’s a bigger issue (than just money) in terms of how we think about what our witness is going to be in the world.” .
Evan and Melissa Funk don’t separate their Christian faith from their business practices.
The Funks have grown their Lynn & Liana Designs cheeseboard business from a garage in their Steinbach, Manitoba hometown into an internationally successful venture. They credit hard work and seeking God for their perseverance and business triumphs.
They also feel that responsibilities accompany their beliefs. The Funks told their business journey story since 2018 in a plenary talk at MEDA’s annual convention in Atlanta, Georgia.
“As a small family business who would consider ourselves faith-based, we are held to a higher standard,” Evan said. “We know that everywhere we go, we are representing our business and (Jesus) Christ as well.”
He thinks about Matthew 10:16, where Jesus urges his disciples to be “as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves.”
He wants to model servant leadership through example. But being as shrewd as a snake means not being a pushover or letting people walk all over him.
The Funks had to learn that lesson the hard way. As their staff grew, they were too small to create a human resources position or to contract for that service.
Initially, they hired friends, family members, and people from their church, Melissa said. Looking back, she sees how that can lead to problems.
“There were just a few challenges within our culture that started to arise in the company.”
The Funks realize they did not deal with the issues soon enough. They had to fire multiple staff, actions that led some other team members to resign.
“It was not pretty, and I say it was the lowest time in our business,” Melissa recalls.
“Never hire someone that you’re not willing to lose a relationship with, if the friendship is more important than the employment,” she said.
“If you’re not willing to give them constructive feedback, or to recognize whatever it may be because you’re scared to offend them… then that is not setting them up for success, it’s not setting your company up for success.”
There have been many stressful times along the way.
Evan left a day job to become Lynn and Liana’s first full-time employee. He had to take insurance off one of their vehicles and use a bicycle to get around for a few years. “This is what you do when you are bootstrapping a company,” he said.
Initial visits to retail trade shows did not bear fruit.
But Melissa was posting to the company’s social media accounts. One day, a message arrived from a New York retailer, asking if the Funks would consider selling their products wholesale.
“We just gave them some product and some random prices,
and to our surprise and joy, they just flew off the shelves.”
Other boutiques in the same neighborhood followed up with orders. Then, the Funks were asked by customers if they planned to attend the US’s largest retail trade show.
Melissa recalls a family discussion that tied the company’s future to a positive reception at that show. “If this show goes well, we will continue, but if it doesn’t, we will stop.”
“I don’t think we grasped quite the (financial) risk we were taking at the time,” Evan said.
The first person to visit the company’s booth placed a $5,000 order. After five days in the US, the Funks had “30 new customers and a lot of cheeseboards to make.”
Lynn & Liana was still a garage and basement-based operation. But the reception from retailers gave the Funks the encouragement needed to continue.
In the fall of 2019, they moved the business into an unfinished, smelly 2,700-square-foot shop. “This new space is what helped us scale beyond our wildest dreams,” Melissa said.
During the six months before the 2020 pandemic, “we were sailing with the wind.”
They had 100 retailers across North America selling their boards. They attended trade shows in Las Vegas and New York, “and saw major success, right up until March of 2020, that is,” Melissa said.
Dozens of pending orders from
retailers were canceled, postponed, or returned within a few days. Some of their customers closed temporarily, others permanently.
“We had no new orders to work on, and six staff relying on us for full-time income,” Evan said. “I believe the next part of the story is where God has moved most miraculously in our business.”
That fall, representatives of a US TV program asked if they wanted to sell their product on Good Morning America’s ‘Deals & Steals’ show.
A six-second TV spot on the show, offering a 15 percent discount for the following 24 hours, was key to keeping the company afloat.
The TV show team predicted
that the segment would move 4,000 cheese boards, something the Funks found difficult to believe.
They hired more staff and invested in more inventory. While they had a six-month lead time to prepare, they thought they would lose their business if the promotion was unsuccessful.
In April 2020, the segment aired. They sold all their stock. “It was the craziest moment of the business,” Melissa said.
They shipped 30 pallets of product in three days. That allowed them to get through the pandemic without laying off staff.
“We strongly believe the Lord gives us bits of wisdom as we ask for it,” Evan said.
They opened an online store, listing their products in the summer of 2020. “It worked pretty well. By the end of 2021, we were doing millions in direct-toconsumer business.”
Then, the company’s products reached 100 Hollywood celebrities through gift bags distributed at the Grammy Awards. That project led to a new customer, an important influencer. But growth brought new challenges.
Evan says the company grew by 1,000 percent in 2020 and 300 percent in 2021. “This significant growth can put a massive strain on your cash flow. You need more money to buy inventory, you need to hire more staff… If you’re lucky, you can get paid in 30 days.”
The company came within $5,000 of exhausting its line of credit. That led to some sleepless nights.
“Trusting God and his wisdom is key, because, like the Lord says, if he clothes the lilies and takes care of the sparrow, why wouldn’t he do so for us,” Evan said.
They secured working capital from AMEX small business loans. “I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to secure funding for a four-yearold company, where two years of the financials don’t matter because the amounts are so small. It’s not easy when all the banks could take from you is cheeseboards.”
They hired a part-time controller to help the company get its finances in order, with financial statements that they could trust.
Evan said that in a small Mennonite town, sometimes money and success can be taboo. Some people will think such things come by cutting corners or stealing, a suggestion he rejects.
“I think if you are ethical, and you are a profitable business, I think God loves that, and I think God enjoys that.” .
Healthy Calling. From Toxic Burnout to Sustainable Work by
(IVP, 2025 192 pages, $18 US)
A sense of calling has paradoxical outcomes.
People who view their work as a calling are passionate, committed, and valuable to have around. However, they can also be prone to toxic burnout, exhaustion, and disillusionment.
Ariana Molloy’s fascinating book includes the positive and negative realities of calling in the workplace. It provides a helpful analysis of the causes of toxic burnout and suggestions for improving the situation.
Work can result in a job, a career, or a calling. In contemporary Western society, the average person changes jobs 10 times between age 18 and 42, the book suggests.
Malloy recognizes that experiencing work as a calling is a gift and a privilege.
Calling involves an overwhelming sense of purpose in our work, a caller (God), integration of our skillset and passion, and positively contributing to society.
She describes calling as a dynamic process, a journey that contains all the requirements of falling in love and the maintenance required while being in love.
But calling has a shadow side. People who feel called are more likely to work overtime or agree to take on extra responsibilities without any extra pay or acknowledgment.
Burnout is rooted in chronic stress. There is a difference between general burnout and calling burnout, Molloy argues.
In the former situation, a person might respond: “I don’t
Ariana Molloy
know what I’m doing anymore.”
In the latter, they may say: “I don’t know who I am anymore.”
The fallout from calling burnout damages more than the individuals who suffer this, she writes. “It doesn’t happen only to us; it affects everyone else in our lives.”
While burnout is not a fixable problem, it is a manageable problem, she suggests.
Workaholism and job idolization are a deadly duo that can lead to burnout. People prone to either of these temptations must learn to distinguish between perseverance and denial.
Self-protection requires confronting inconvenient truths and being wary of workplace demands. Malloy reminds readers that despite what a manager may say, work is not your family.
She warns people to recognize the duplicity of two (conflicting
messages) that may be given in a workplace: “Take care of yourself but do more with less.”
The book provides a helpful explanation of the impact of shame in calling burnout and the connection between burnout and boundaries.
Establishing clear work boundaries can be challenging, as they are a process, and subjective. They require maintenance, flexibility, and (re)clarification.
The author provides useful reflections on how to maintain boundary resilience when others try to “boundary shame” you into working beyond your capacity.
The book explores humility and its application as a “central virtue from which all other virtues rise.”
Molloy views humility as a “social oil” that helps balance work as a calling and the larger purpose of our lives.
Healthy humility has three components: knowing your strengths and weaknesses, being teachable, and consistently taking time to rest and reflect.
Humility means thinking about yourself less, not thinking about yourself poorly, she writes. The book also explains why people have difficulty fully embracing the importance of the Sabbath. She explores the ideas of sabbath sadness and sabbath survival, offering sabbath surrender as an antidote.
Malloy makes no false promises, admitting there are no easy recipes or quick fixes. “Practice makes progress, not practice makes perfect.”
“A healthy calling is sustainable when we stay more concerned with our Caller than our calling.” — MS
Coming to grips with the historical significance of Jesus’ cousin John
Christmaker. A Life of John the Baptist. by James F. McGrath. (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2024 172 pages, $24.99 US)
Much of what we think we know about John the Baptist is wrong. So James McGrath argues in this fascinating biography, one of two books he released in 2024 on John.
“John was less recluse and wild man than an articulate intellectual of profound moral and spiritual vision,” he writes.
McGrath draws many provocative conclusions from available texts and visits to Middle Eastern sites associated with John’s ministry.
People who skip over
scriptural references to John in their rush to get to Jesus and miss the influence the former had on the latter risk misunderstanding Jesus, he says.
And John was better known than Jesus when both men were teaching.
John decided not to follow in his father’s footsteps as a temple priest, ignoring the hereditary nature of that role. He chose instead to become a prophet, a critic of the temple practice of requiring animal sacrifices for the forgiveness of sin.
He was an itinerant speaker whose way with words drew admiring crowds and worried temple and secular leaders alike.
John was a rebel and martyr revered in Christian and Muslim circles. He baptized Jesus and had a major influence on some of Jesus’ teachings.
In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus’s disciples ask him to teach them how to pray in the same way that John taught his disciples to pray. Or consider Jesus’ words in Luke 7: “I tell you, among those born of women there is no one greater than John.”
This book is well-argued and well worth buying. — MS
Would you like to comment on anything in this magazine, or on any other matters relating to business and faith? Send your thoughts to mstrathdee@meda.org
