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[Work] is about a search, too, for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.
—LOUIS “STUDS” TERKEL, AUTHOR OF WORKING: PEOPLE TALK ABOUT WHAT THEY DO ALL DAY AND HOW THEY FEEL ABOUT WHAT THEY DO
In the spring of 2013, I found myself trekking down a narrow, poorly paved alley in the heart of bustling, chaotic Kolkata. I’d never been to India, but I thought I knew what to expect. I’d traveled pretty extensively, even to tough environments not set up for tourists, like Afghanistan. But I certainly didn’t expect to meet a scrappy, young American working outside the largest red light district in Asia, and to begin reformulating my life’s purpose in that place.
I went to India as part of my job with the McCain Institute for International Leadership, a new nonpartisan, nonprofit organization founded by Senator John McCain and his wife, Cindy McCain, a businesswoman and humanitarian. I’d just started at the institute and wanted to do well. It was just the two of us from our organization traveling together, Mrs. McCain and I.
We’d been invited by the International Justice Mission, a leading anti-trafficking nonprofit that works in India and around the world. We were scheduled to be in India for a week, traveling through red light districts and visiting aftercare facilities—safe houses where people get medical treatment, food, psychological support, and a place to sleep after exiting the sex trade. Many of them are girls—twelve-, thirteen-, or fourteen-year-olds who have been sold by their families into slavery, or kidnapped, or otherwise forced into prostitution. Aftercare facilities, often run with the support of an international or local nonprofit, are critical for helping survivors and also, ideally, protecting them against re-exploitation, such as from a trafficker who thinks he owns the girls working for him.
In many places, survivors of human trafficking are also at risk from their own families. In rare but heartbreaking occasions, a family member might resort to violence, throwing acid in the face of a girl who has been sexually exploited in an effort to reclaim the family’s “honor,” which they believe has been soiled by the girl’s lack of “purity.”
This book is about what I learned on that trip, which altered my life path and career. I saw in India not only survivors but also a real working model of something I’d long thought about—the private sector being harnessed to help address long-standing social problems. This book shares my story and the ways we all can help improve other people’s lives through our purchasing power (without even changing careers).
So many of us want to help change the world yet feel overwhelmed by the problems we see. Contemporary media and technology bring home the world’s struggles in a new and vivid way. We see images of Bangladeshi citizens walking through thigh-high water, and Syrian refugees washing up on the shores of Europe. Their plight is brought into our homes, yet we don’t know how to help. We can feel just as powerless reading about tragedy in our own country. We may post about a cause on social media, but ultimately feel that we’re not really making a difference.
It’s easy to get “analysis paralysis” and to default to inaction. I can sometimes hardly read the news (and instead cheer myself up by looking at animals on Instagram). But what I’ve found is that the best way to take action is to remind myself of the tools that are at my disposal right now to make change. As I’ve grown older and developed a better understanding of my own sphere of influence, I see one clear way I can make a difference: harnessing my purchasing power for good.
Most of us don’t realize how much purchasing power we have, and how much it matters. The average American family earns nearly $75,000 a year, and spends nearly $57,000. Half of that goes to housing, insurance, pensions, and health care, leaving nearly $30,000 for things like food, transportation, and non-necessities. That’s a lot of money spent, daily, on things like coffee and groceries.
Our purchasing potential is like an untapped superpower. We might buy a morning bagel at one shop rather than at another because it’s on our route to work, or drop thirty dollars on a gift card for a friend’s birthday. But we can slow down and reflect on these micro-decisions, and make more thoughtful choices. For mom-and-pop stores in our country and micro-entrepreneurs in the artisan and agriculture sectors around the world, every purchase really matters. These businesses stay afloat because a handful of people or businesses decide each day to buy from them.
The artisan industry is the second-largest industry in the developing world, after agriculture. International trade in artisan-made products, what the United Nations calls “art and crafts,” generates about $32 billion each year. Your birthday money, if spent on a bracelet made by a cooperative employing survivors of human trafficking, can have huge significance not just to the friend who receives it but also to the woman who rolled the beads for it. The money she earns selling bracelets could be what allows her to access clean drinking water or what pays school fees for her children. Our small purchases, when aggregated with those of others, can have a massive ripple effect. Our capacity to make change through purchasing is part of what makes me so excited about the conscious consumer movement, and what I want to share in this book.
I went to work at the McCain Institute after more than five years at the U.S. Department of State, working first on counterterrorism and later on human security, a catchall term for work addressing human trafficking, domestic violence, and sexual assault. I’d known I wanted to work in public service since high school. My grandparents had been in public service, as had my parents. My mother’s father served in the U.S. Army, and my father’s father worked in national politics. My mother started a nonprofit to help children who were in Child Protective Services in Houston and was later appointed to serve as the chairperson of the board of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services. My father, in addition to his work in the private sector, also served in the government, focusing on national and international economic development and community well-being, throughout my childhood and to this day.
I grew up watching the dedication of my parents, and I felt passionate about carrying on a family tradition of public service. My parents definitely ingrained in me the belief that if I had an opportunity to serve others, I should take it—and they reminded me that opportunities to serve abound. My siblings and I each donated 10 percent of our allowance to nonprofits, but the real excitement in our house was about doing: going out as a family and serving a meal at a homeless shelter, or helping repair a house through Rebuilding Together, or ringing the bell for the Salvation Army at Christmas. (My dad still rings the bell every year.) In the United States, we have so much economic opportunity and freedom. I grew up with a strong awareness of this good fortune, and of the fact that we all have resources we can bring to assist others.
As an adult, I wanted to help improve the lives of those confronted by significant challenges. I was so grateful for the opportunity to work at the State Department. Yet during my time in government, I grew frustrated by the limitations of so many of our efforts to address humanitarian crises such as human trafficking, massive refugee migration, and real security concerns. Governments and nonprofits would step in with vital emergency assistance, but then be forced to walk away after the immediate crisis had passed due to funding constraints or a new catastrophe elsewhere.
The U.S. government donates millions of dollars overseas every year to help fund emergency housing, pro bono legal assistance, and medical and psychological services. These interventions are well-meaning and often critical. Yet again and again, as I saw, we come in with help during a crisis, then leave behind whole communities of people who have no real path toward reconstructing their lives. There are few jobs or chances of getting them. In most conflict and many post-conflict zones, the opportunity for dignified, stable employment simply doesn’t exist.
The efforts I witnessed to help women in particular were almost always social service based rather than employment focused. Nor were women usually included in our counterterrorism efforts, as I learned during my tenure working on that issue. Counterterrorism efforts predominantly involved military and law enforcement training, and as in the United States, the security sector abroad is composed mostly of men. We weren’t engaging half the world’s population in fighting terrorism, an act that had almost become a social norm in some countries.
Women are the primary conveyors of social norms within the family, communicating behavioral expectations around things like substance usage and appropriate dressing. Why weren’t we including them in the fight against terrorism?
While at the State Department, I helped craft a number of security programs focused on women’s participation in combating terrorism. I eventually wrote the State Department’s first Women and Counterterrorism Strategy, which laid out a variety of ways that the department could help bolster women’s ability to speak and write against terrorism in communities where it was developing. The strategy also supported programming designed to help mothers have conversations with their children about not resorting to violence against civilians as a way to achieve political aims. The ultimate goal of including women was to have a more effective national security program overall.
I had the opportunity to travel around the globe to meet program managers implementing this strategy, as well as local women participating in it. I encountered a pervasive sense of powerlessness among many of the women I met. I was having lunch in Kabul with some women employed by the Ministry of Interior in Afghanistan, for example. These were among the most empowered women in the country, working in the capital city. Yet they said they were seriously limited in their ability to share their opinions, even at home, including about non-controversial topics like what they wanted for dinner.
I tried to understand the dynamics underlying their lack of personal agency—was it religion, culture, tradition? What I consistently came back to was one thing: money. Women in so many countries have little or no access to money of their own, whether earned, shared, or inherited. Even some women with jobs, like those I met in my travels for the State Department, weren’t fully in control of their earnings once they got home.
Women’s lack of access to capital and/or power over income meant they didn’t fully make the decisions about their own lives in their own homes, let alone influence local and national affairs. They couldn’t be part of peace talks and conflict resolution because their opinions were habitually, consistently dismissed—even about trivial issues. They had seriously limited leverage, which translated into almost no personal or social power.
After working on counterterrorism, I was detailed to the secretary of state’s Office of Global Women’s Issues to work on women’s security. Here, I focused on domestic violence, sexual assault, and/or sex trafficking, in addition to national security. The office was led by a woman I admire deeply, Ambassador Melanne Verveer, whom I refer to as the fairy godmother of global women’s empowerment. She could make things happen in a way that seemed almost magical. She was a true leader, and a true inspiration to me in terms of leadership. She also stood in stark contrast to the women I was meeting, who, once again, were vulnerable because of their economic insecurity. Poverty could lead to a woman being trafficked by her family. A woman’s lack of economic power was also an absolute impediment to leaving an abusive home and protecting her children within it.
If a woman did get out of an abusive situation, she had few places to go and little way to support herself. Even if a woman was rescued or found her own way to escape, she was then stuck in the unequal power dynamic of the donor-to-recipient relationship. So many of the women I met were smart, capable, and hungry—not just for food but also for opportunity. They wanted to learn to read, in many cases, and to make a better life for themselves and for their children. But their lives had essentially been taken from them. Without a way to earn a living, they could not wrest back control.
When I was growing up, I had a strong sense of my own agency. There was a lot of conversation in my house about the value of work and of striving for one’s personal best. In school, my brother, Peter, and sister, Meredith, both earned better grades than I did, and often with less effort. This became a major point of concern for me. I started to think I wasn’t the “smart one” in the family. My parents immediately fought back against this developing negative self-image. They insisted that I not compare myself to others but only to myself. They would say, “You have to do the best you can do. That’s all you can do.” This idea of pushing for my best really stuck with me. There was a lot of fun and laughter in my house, too, but I definitely grew up with a huge amount of support for seeing the value of my contribution and believing that we all have something to give.
The lack of opportunity available to so many women directly clashed with my experience, and with my beliefs and values. I couldn’t stand seeing their powerlessness, their lack of freedom. But what could they do to generate an income that would bring with it some autonomy? How could I help? I didn’t have any specific plan in mind, or know what role I might play. But I knew I had to do something.
I decided to learn as much as I could about the process of job creation. I went back to school to get an MBA at Columbia Business School with this aim. I commuted to New York City from DC for graduate school for two years while continuing to expand the women and security programming at the State Department.
After I finished business school, I left the State Department to take the job at the McCain Institute for International Leadership. As my boss and co-workers knew, I was still figuring out what role I would ultimately play to help create sustainable change, ideally one based on employment.
From my first day in India, I experienced sensory overload. I’d catch a whiff of an amazing scent of curry cooking, breathe in deeply, then suddenly realize I was also inhaling the scent of burning trash or fecal matter. We’d see an incredible red sunset and the deepest green hills, then step onto a street next to pigs rooting around in a sewage stream. It was loud day and night. We passed beggars who had babies on their laps and plenty of people I felt certain were not getting enough to eat. There were social expectations about behaving in a proper, reserved way, but there were also adults defecating in the streets and families living in shanties so flimsy you couldn’t fathom how they could offer real shelter.
Mrs. Cindy McCain and I were traveling with a small group from the International Justice Mission, driving around in a big, air-conditioned van with tinted windows, seeing the IJM’s offices, walking red light districts, and visiting aftercare facilities. The traffic was so bad that we would inch along for two miles, the driver hitting the gas, then the brakes, then the gas, then the brakes. Families on mopeds buzzed by us. Sometimes the streets were too narrow for our van and we had to back up and try a different route. The roads were very uneven, the slab under one building butting up against the slab under the next. We were all clutching bottles of water, trying not to get carsick from all the stopping and starting. It could have been a great time to get to know one another, but it was hard to turn around to talk when the van was lurching around so much.
I had complete trust in our driver but less confidence that we wouldn’t get stopped and harassed by thieves—or by officers of the law. Corrupt officials can be a part of the problem in places where human trafficking occurs. Some officials look the other way, take bribes that facilitate it, and, in rare cases, attack those who try to stop corruption. In 2016, a lawyer with the International Justice Mission was killed in Kenya while working on a case about police power. His client and driver were also murdered.
Because of the danger that trafficking survivors continue to face, aftercare facilities are generally unmarked, nondescript buildings—sometimes right in a red light district, other times on the outskirts. We’d pull over on the main throughway, get out, and walk along the road past little markets and other cars. Then we’d cut across the street and into an alley, passing young women in cotton dresses and leggings sitting on dirty plastic chairs in front of shanties where they waited for customers. The shanties were basically three walls with a piece of metal for a roof, and a rope with a sheet hanging over the front as a door. Some of the girls played cards outside to pass the time, and men walked in and out of the curtained rooms, exiting carelessly, as though strolling out of a CVS.
We’d proceed to an aftercare facility. Inside, the leaders would give us a tour. They’d show us the kitchen and the sleeping room with its cots on a concrete floor, the curtains drawn. There would be generic posters featuring uplifting messages and drawings of rainbows, or maybe a stream, on the walls. Each shelter housed between one dozen and three dozen girls and women, and occasionally their children. The girls would often do a performance or show us artwork they’d made.
At one such facility we visited during the middle of our trip, we were sitting on the floor to watch a dance. There were ten or twelve survivors of human trafficking, in their teens and twenties, performing. Some looked like little girls, with dewy skin and silky pigtails. Others looked much older than their real age, trauma showing on their faces.
One of the young women had a son—an adorable, squirmy little boy who was three or maybe four. He was glomming on to me, squirreling around on my lap, trying to make my leggings snap against my shins. I zoned out for a moment, listening to the sounds of the traditional Indian guitar, holding this little boy. I found myself remembering the dance classes and performances of my own childhood. I’d always loved dancing and had grown up taking jazz, ballet, and tap. One time I’d dressed up as a raisin to dance to the song “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” by Marvin Gaye.
The little boy on my lap squirmed, jolting me back to the present, where I was sitting on the floor before a group of survivors of human trafficking. What happens next for these girls? I wondered. And this little boy? After the dance, after the time at the shelter, where do they go? What do they do? Once again, as at the State Department, I felt overwhelmed by the scale of the problem and frustrated by the limited options available. My mind was racing, trying to envision the next step for these girls.
And then, a few days later, we went to Sari Bari.
Our guide on the visit told us that we’d be seeing a social enterprise that was employing female survivors of human trafficking. I heard the words social enterprise and employing, but they didn’t really register. I didn’t fully recognize that we were now visiting a place altogether different.
We walked up two flights of concrete steps to a big open-air landing. There, we were greeted by an American woman named Sarah Lance, who introduced herself as the cofounder of Sari Bari. She didn’t look much older than I am (although it turns out she has a full decade on me). She was immediately warm, with a big smile and freckles across her nose. She had a bright, sunny disposition and a youthful, disarming voice. She seemed to radiate a calm confidence.
We were standing just steps above a cracked blacktop road in a maze of a neighborhood, with its one-room brothels, goats tied to poles, and big-eyed, barefoot kids wandering around, clutching dolls or poking at random puddles. Sarah held herself calmly in the midst of this, and projected a different reality. She came across as strong, peaceful, and powerful. She seemed to me to be a kind of warrior; she had the energy you get when you are doing the work you feel called to do.
At that point, she’d lived in Kolkata for a decade, she told us. She’d gone to India for the first time in her mid-twenties, after finishing her fine arts degree at California State Polytechnic and working a series of entry-level jobs. After that first visit to India, she wanted to return for a longer stay, and secured a position through a U.S.-based nonprofit to work at the Home for the Dying, started by Mother Teresa’s Catholic order, Missionaries of Charity.
Shortly after she began working at the Home for the Dying, a male co-worker went out for a haircut. When he returned, he told Sarah that a young salon worker had offered him sex. She was working as a prostitute, a legal occupation in India, as she told him, to earn enough money to take care of her daughter and family.
That haircut changed the course of Sarah’s life. She and her friend decided to learn more: Why were women like this driven to prostitution? Along with a handful of others, they began visiting the women in the largest red light district in India, buying them tea and listening to their stories. Sarah stayed on at the Home for the Dying for two years, while continuing to talk to the women in the red light district.
Many had been trafficked as teens, or even preteens, Sarah learned. They’d then been rejected by their families and had little or no exposure to life outside the red light district. As they aged into their mid-thirties, the only option for survival was to work as madams or traffickers themselves, exploiting other young women and taking part of their earnings. They were essentially trapped for life.
There were nonprofits working in the district that offered rescue services like the aftercare facilities we’d seen, but they focused largely on minors and rarely accepted older girls or women. Nor were there any groups offering real economic alternatives to the commercial sex trade. “What we heard was that they wanted an option out, and the route was through employment,” Sarah said.
Sarah and her friends tried to think of a solution. Another volunteer at Missionaries of Charity, a woman named Kristin Keen, had the idea of starting a business selling kantha blankets. These blankets are a traditional Bengali handicraft of the poor, made from about five layers of old sari fabric. The women could sew these blankets, Keen suggested, and someone back home in the United States could sell them. Everyone loved the idea, and they spent six months looking for a nonprofit to start it. When no one came forward, Keen encouraged Sarah to start it herself.
Sarah agreed to try. A nonprofit immediately offered her a space to work and introduced her to three women who wanted to leave the sex trade and could be the first trainees. Through another nonprofit, Sarah found two sewing trainers, her first two employees.
The first year, they trained and employed three women. Sarah tweaked the model and today runs a program that grew out of it, composed of three months of part-time training, followed by three months of full-time training—both paid—and then full-time employment. Many women work in the sex trade while gradually making the transition out. It takes time, and often a lot of support, to make that change. Once employed by Sari Bari, women earn fair trade wages, plus benefits. Sari Bari pursues markets for their handicrafts.
At Sari Bari, Sarah outlined for us the simple business model she’d created to employ these survivors-turned-artisans. I peered through a concrete doorway into a workroom just visible past the landing where we stood. I was trying to process what I was seeing. About eight women were sitting on the floor sewing. The energy in the room was profoundly different from the atmosphere in the aftercare facilities we’d seen. In the middle of this chaotic neighborhood, Sari Bari felt like a peaceful haven where incredible work was being done, by women who would have faced an absolute void without it. There was a collective focus among the women in the room, a feeling that what they were doing mattered. The feeling I got from these women was dignity. The women were making money by doing good work, and their income allowed them to begin to take charge of their lives.
It’s hard enough to start a business anywhere, but the idea that you could start a business in the middle of incredible suffering blew me away. It was a real working example of something I’d read about and dreamed about—the private sector being used to generate economic opportunity and economic development in communities that traditionally struggle. Here I was, seeing this happen in such an elegant way. I was totally taken by how straightforward the idea was: you serve a community by starting a business to employ the people in it.
Sarah invited our group to buy products on our way out. I was delighted to see how easy it was for people to spend money on these items. It wasn’t a hard sell. It wasn’t like trying to convince people to change their ways, like urging locals to purchase a cookstove that would eliminate the toxic particulates spewing from their traditional method of cooking over an open fire in the home. We were just buying beautiful bags and toiletry cases. I probably pick up three or four small bags in a year anyway. The items practically sold themselves.
What could be done with that? I asked myself. How could I help Sari Bari and places like it?
After that trip to India, I became obsessed with finding a way to link Sari Bari and similar co-ops to American consumers. I was on fire with the vision of making this happen. I thought about it all year, and then left the McCain Institute at the end of 2013 to work on it full-time.
When people hear the term market-driven solution, they often think that means relying on the free market instead of on government, or to the exclusion of regulations and nonprofits. I see government and nonprofits as crucial parts of economic and social development. But when it comes to long-term, sustainable, economic solutions to entrenched social problems, business is often a third, critical piece.
Retail is a massive force in the U.S. economy—a $2.6 trillion industry, two-thirds of our total gross domestic product (GDP). As such, retail purchases can be powerful tools for social change. Nonprofit giving and government aid are much smaller, about one-fifth the size of retail, in terms of dollars spent. Grants and government funding also can be fickle, and get cut too easily. Even the best aid efforts or interventions are vulnerable to what’s in vogue in terms of the foreign policy priorities of the country administering them, or even the shifts in priorities of a foundation or nonprofit.
The market is fickle, too, but revenue-generating businesses have layers of oversight that are lacking in government aid programs, at least at this point. And the profit motive can force creative solutions for continuing to do business. In business, if a product becomes unfashionable, the company must find a way to keep operating, to pivot. A for-profit can’t just walk away when interests change because it has too much money tied up in the equipment and staff, production facilities, and operations.
I love and have built a business around the idea that we can change the world for the better with our wallets. The purchasing power of individuals and of major companies can be harnessed for good and lead to concrete improvements in people’s lives. The company I started, To the Market, economically empowers vulnerable communities around the world by hiring them to make the kinds of products you and I buy every day.
Since starting my business, I’ve seen both individuals and major corporations make real efforts to source from producers like Sari Bari, and to ensure that the groups they order products from are paying fair wages, employing at-risk communities, and/or using manufacturing processes that respect the environment. All of us buy so many items for personal use, and the companies and agencies we work for and run procure huge numbers of office materials, promotional products, and recruiting swag. We all can improve people’s lives simply by changing where we buy our cup of morning coffee, our host or hostess gift, our team T-shirts, the centerpieces on the tables at our company’s annual gala or dinner or award ceremony. We can pay attention to where our products come from, who made them, and how.
Another exciting truth about this moment in time is the scale of global production capacity, and the scope of the supply chain that it can feed into. Small groups offering fair trade and ethically sourced products are proliferating, and they are increasingly able to connect with huge numbers of buyers and multinational companies.
Still, even with all these good intentions and the great work being done, it’s easy to dismiss conscious consumerism as trivial—how much good can one bracelet do?
A great deal, it turns out.
Purchasing ethically made goods helps generate sustainable income for real people, and that—combined with social support—can turn around lives. “I have seen profound transformations,” says Sarah Lance of the women who work at Sari Bari. “There is no logical explanation for it, other than that human beings are resilient. If you give them an opportunity to rise above their circumstances, they will. These women are not beggars. They’re not children. They’re not the elderly. They are adult women who want to take care of their families.”
It takes time, for sure. At Sari Bari, it takes about two years for most women who work there to move from survival mode to a more forward-looking mind-set. But Sari Bari gives them that time. “I have profound hope that they can have a whole life, be economically selfsufficient and relatively emotionally healthy,” says Lance.
Our purchasing power can also provide real opportunity for future generations. Most women at Sari Bari have children, and through the group’s social service arm, these kids get support to go to school and graduate high school. In 2018 alone, nearly sixty children participated in the school support program. Some of the women’s children have gone through the program and enrolled in college—these are kids whose mothers had received, for the most part, little or no education. They couldn’t read or even sign their own names when they arrived at Sari Bari. This is the power of economic opportunity, and we can help provide it.
As Lance puts it, “A business, if it works, can sustain itself. It’s not that I think the world needs more purses necessarily. But it does need more economic opportunities for women. I believe in employment, in providing jobs and a way for people to take care of themselves.”
Work—and the income earned from it—gives people the freedom to use their voice, to speak up for the changes they want and need to see made. Without earning power, others can silence you. Employment is not the immediate intervention needed in the moment of crisis, but it is the only way I have seen that allows individuals to move from recovery to real independence. Employment is a long-term, sustainable approach to empowering those in need. I want every person struggling for dignified work to find it, to have that spark in their eyes that I witnessed in Kolkata and to know that they are valued contributors to this world. Economic independence empowers.
In this book, we visit people who have lived through experiences that are hard to imagine. It’s important to acknowledge the real suffering of others to help address their ongoing challenges. My intention in sharing these struggles is to inspire action through a means many of us have not fully grasped—the power of the purse to do good.
The book highlights cooperatives and businesses that offer ethical employment. It shares not only how the dignity of work affects real people but also how each of us has the power to make change through the supply chain. I recommend practical actions we all can take—as individual consumers, retailers, employees, or entrepreneurs—basically anyone empowered to make a purchasing decision.
The following six chapters look at some major categories of consumer and corporate spending—gift giving, customized goods, factory-made shoes and apparel, coffee, and chocolate—as well as recycling and the role of reuse in today’s world. The chapters focus on products we wear and consume—the items that connect us viscerally and physically to the people who made them. I don’t provide a list of “no-go” companies or materials; instead I highlight solutions that are working and companies striving to do good.
This book shares what I’ve learned from partnering with talented and capable artisans, farmers, and other skilled workers who have overcome incredibly difficult circumstances, and from working with businesses that prioritize social good. It’s been an inspiring journey. I hope it inspires you, too.