News

More aid = More trade

Development assistance may boost Canadian exports to aid recipient countries, a study by the Canadian International Development Platform suggests.

The study, described as a first attempt to “measure the elasticity of Canadian exports to aid,” studied countries that received Canadian official development assistance between 1989 and 2015.

The average return over that period on a dollar of gross official development assistance was between $1.10 and $1.19 in exports, the report says. “In addition to the core moral and humanitarian purpose of aid, an added benefit over time may be that the same investment has the effect of boosting Canadian exports to aid recipient countries.”

While the researchers state that the main purpose of foreign aid should continue to be poverty reduction, this aid leads to “an effect that is additional and complementary to the core moral and humanitarian imperative that is and should continue to be the main driver behind Canada’s foreign aid.” About 98.5 per cent of Canadian aid is not tied. Aid is considered “tied” when a condition for its disbursement to a partner country is that the proceeds can only be used to buy goods and services from the donor country providing the assistance.

The study authors argue that Canada has opportunities to improve the linkage between trade and development strategies. This is true both in areas where Canada currently is strong, such as agriculture and agrifood, as well as “high tech, high-value-added and ‘sunrise’ sectors” such as clean technologies. ◆

Cash, or skin chip?

Microchips have become a common way for vets to help animal shelters identify Fido or Fluffie’s owners should the furry friends go missing.

How about a microchip for employees so they don’t need to bring cash for the vending machine, carry a pass to enter a building or remember log in codes for computers?

Three Square Market, a Wisconsin technology company, put microchips under the skin of 40 workers who volunteered to have the procedure, USA Today reports. The chips do not have GPS-like abilities to track employees, but is an effort to increase convenience and move to cashless payments, the company says.

Religion professors interviewed by the newspaper said getting a microchip in the arm does not fulfil the Book of Revelations’ warnings about “the mark of the beast” prophecy.

But concerns over that very question led to a $500,000 court award to a West Virginia coal miner who quit his job when his employer wouldn’t honor his religious objection to using the firm’s biometric hand scanner. That device tracked hours worked by linking a number to an image of a worker’s hand. ◆

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Maximizing purpose to grow profits

Businesses that take wholistic view are thriving

Businesses that want to grow lasting profits will embrace “triple bottom line” thinking that seeks to maximize purpose as well as dollars, a Pennsylvania business professor says.

“At the end of the day, because of how God has created and designed business to work, you are actually going to maximize profit if you pay attention to your customers, to your suppliers, to your employees,” JoAnn Flett said in a workshop address at MEDA’s annual convention in Vancouver.

Flett directs the Master’s of Business Administration program at Eastern University, a Christian university near Philadelphia, Pa. that is affiliated with the American Baptist Churches USA. She is board chair of Capital for Good USA, a philanthropic organization that works to help vulnerable and marginalized people in the USA and around the world.

Flett and Tina Campbell, who is interim co-executive director of the ASSETS program in Lancaster, Pa., outlined the case for using Christian business as a force for good.

There is a theological basis for businesses creating economic and social value, Flett said.

One of the challenges JoAnn Flett in making this more widely understood is overcoming the “sacredsecular divide,” the misinformed feeling in the church that business is deeply secular.

When Flett suggested that the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce should host a seminar on doing well by doing good, she was told “no one will come to that.” She persisted, and the session attracted 153 small business owners, spawning a five-year series.

Business is about money and meaning simultaneously, she said. In her Faith and Fortune business ethics course, she reminds students that the purpose of business is not just to generate profits, but to better the lives of people it touches and to serve the common good. While profits are essential, they are merely fuel to sustain the business.

JC Penney, writing in 1919, understood that his retail firm owed a profit to the public, to provide goodpaying jobs and to restore the community. Similarly, Henry Ford paid a living wage, giving his workers enough money that they could buy the cars his firm produced. Business has an intrinsic role in Christian identity, by providing meaningful work, she said. Given that business is inherently relational, “you have to care about your community, your employees, your suppliers, your customers. Any of those fall down and you are in trouble.” The original meaning of the term economics includes care of others, purpose and service, she noted. ASSETS is working to harness the power of the private sector to reclaim that broader purpose.

MEDA started the ASSETS (ASSETS stands for A Service for Self-Employment Training and Support) program in 1993. At one point, it grew to 25 cities across North America. Most were in the US, as well as a chapter in Mexico City and Canadian projects in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ont. and Vancouver, B.C.

MEDA spun out the program to local partners a few years later after the board decided that domestic community economic development, for which institutional funding was difficult to find, was not a core priority. Today, two ASSETS projects remain, in Lancaster, Pa. and Toledo, Ohio. Tina Campbell urged the audience to consider practical ways of carrying out “business as unusual.”

“Business as usual isn’t working in our society right now,” she said.

While North Americans live in the wealthiest society in the world, that wealth isn’t for everyone, she noted.

ASSETS has struggled to determine how to respond to the fact that poverty has doubled in Lancaster since ASSETS was established, largely due to a loss of manufacturing jobs. That is a challenge for an organization whose mission is poverty reduction. Campbell urged people to think about how they use restaurant spending, including whether servers are being paid a living wage. “How many of us are thinking intentionally about where we go, when we spend money in restaurants?”

She cited a 2014 study that estimated restaurant spending totals $800 billion, double the $400 billion donated to charitable causes.

One Lancaster restaurant, John J. Jeffries, chose to employ Burmese refugees and help them buy homes.

Tina Campbell, co-director of ASSETS Lancaster

Since starting that initiative, they have had zero employee turnover in their kitchen over the past four years. Another firm, Lancaster Food Company, has intentionally built its business around creating jobs for people with barriers to employment. The firm, which bakes organic bread, offers a living wage to its employees, most of who come out of the prison system. For the past four years, ASSETS has sponsored the Great Social Enterprise Pitch, a five-month competition that helps participants create busi-

“How many of us are thinking intentionally about where we go, when we spend money in restaurants?”

ness plans that incorporate social and economic values. This year’s winner was a Somali refugee who created Bridge, an online portal that Campbell described as “a cultural Airbnb.” Bridge offers services such as cooking lessons, dance classes or drumming lessons. Buyers pay for services and provide an income for newcomers. ASSETS produces a business directory to help companies find suppliers that fit specific criteria, such as women-led social enterprises. Consumer decisions matter as well, Campbell said, urging people to buy their food from locally owned grocery stores and to use a similar lens when purchasing gifts. Lancaster County, Pa. is a 600,000-person market. If 10 per cent of consumer spending shifted to local businesses from national chains, the resulting $130 million in purchases would create 1,600 new jobs in the area, with $52 million in new local wages, Campbell said.

Given that the creation of 3,000 good-paying jobs would cut the poverty rate in Lancaster County by half, even a 10 per cent shift in consumer spending to local firms could have a dramatic impact, she said.

That prescription didn’t sit well with everyone in attendance. One participant noted this spending would just be pulled from somewhere else, warning about the dangers of protectionism.

Places that pull everything back home will ultimately lose more than those that are trading, he said.

Flett, agreeing that the issues are complex, urged the audience to challenge their church leaders to think more strategically about business. ◆