Oakland Represented Everything Fitness Can Do

The Oakland Running Festival wrapped up almost a week ago now, but that doesn’t make it old news by any means.

Much like your body needs to recover from such an output, and your mind needs some time to let the achievement sink in, the community and the masses have needed a week or so to let the Big Picture develop and assess just how impactful this event has become. 

That assessment began with a string of good vibes posted from one runner after another across Facebook and Twitter. Runners loved the event and…*blush*…had a ton of nice things to say about their race tees as well. 

But the real accounting of the race’s effect has just recently been released in the form of a commissioned report from the Regional Economic Studies Institute from Towson University in Maryland. 

A few line-items from the report: 7,300 runners dumped $3 million into the city; 19 percent were out-of-towners, averaging $445 spent per person on hotels, food, drink, shopping, entertainment, chicken and waffles; for each one, 1.8 non-running guests came along for support. 

But really, more valuable than the hard dollar figure is the enormous group hug that all this word-of-mouth generates. Let’s face it, by-and-large the majority of Oakland’s nationwide public relations is emitted from the worst stadium facility in TWO sports, coupled with an infamously criminal-esqe fanbase and the constant threat of being rejected by said teams because, no matter how bad those teams are, they’re still too good for Oakland.

Seriously…ask any long-range out-of-towner their impression of Oakland and you’ll hear it mentioned last among Bay Area destinations, coupled with groans about the Raiders or A’s. Not fair, to say the least. 

The truth about Oakland is that it’s gorgeous. On one side it offers sweeping views of San Francisco, on the other the rolling Oakland Hills. In between are blossoming neighborhoods that are becoming more eclectic every day. Rock Ridge? Jack London Square? Are you kidding me? Have you seen them lately? 

Well 10,000 plus ORF attendees did. They took a by-foot tour of every nook and cranny the city had to offer, then took to their keyboards to tell the world about it. It was easily the best PR Oakland has received this year, and a testament to the value of fitness events like ORF to create a positive mindshare among the masses. Corporate CMO’s pay attention! Perhaps in lieu of naming rights on the next stadium, you sponsor a series of multi-city fitness events. 

Kudos to the neighborhoods of Oakland who all came out to cheer on passing runners and support this celebration of their community. We at Greenlight are honored to have done our part, pumping money from the purchase of our race tees back into the Running for a Better Oakland organization, a non-profit that likes to say it “puts kids back on the streets” by teaching them the value of running and fitness on the wider scale of living an overall better life. 

Through the ORF partnership we also were able to donate to Mary’s Meals, an organization that creates a two-fold solution by delivering healthy meals to schools in areas where kids often don’t do either of those. By using the schools as a mess hall, they both create an incentive for the kids to GO to school, and they feed them a healthy meal. Our donation feeds 63 kids for a year.

AAAaaand…because we’re 100% recycled, the ORF shirts spared the equivalent of 60,000 plastic bottles from landfills. Let’s be clear too…all of this back-patting is not on us, but on Corrigan Sports Entertainment for choosing us to partner with on this race. They could use any race tee, but they chose to Wear It For Good. 

Here’s to Oakland and the ORF. We hope to be with you year in, year out…

Nestle sees no point in fighting child labor

For those of us little guys out there fighting gallantly to save the world, it’s just gut-wrenching to see a major player step forward and say, “Meh…it’s not our problem.”

So what do we do about Nestle? The packaged foods conglomerate whose last great idea was peddling litter-in-waiting and its accompanying junk food up the Amazon in a barge, is now suggesting that it has no reason to be concerned about child labor.

In a report yesterday, Nestle chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe stated that it is “nearly impossible” to eradicate child labor, arguing that in his (and Nestle’s) native Switzerland, “schools have one week holiday so students can help in the wine harvesting.”

Wait. He didn’t just say that.

Yes. Indeed. Nestle’s chairman likened the worldwide child labor crisis to the children of posh European wine estate owners who help their families with the annual grape haul.

Now, we ourselves have noted what a daunting task this fight is, and it may very well be “nearly impossible.” But to cite the thousands of children worldwide who help family-run businesses and agribusinesses in a healthy way, and use it as an argument that fighting slavery and indentured servitude is futile, that’s just obscene. Especially from one of the largest players in the chocolate industry. I wonder if there’s any child labor in cocoa beans?

Brabeck-Letmathe goes further to say, “anybody who does philanthropy, should do it with his own money and not the money of the shareholders.” This man runs a major company. 

OMG. Oh. Emm. Gee. 

Greenlight Apparel: Change from Within a Triple Pundit Article

This article first appeared on Triple Pundit on March 19, 2011, was written by Ryan Chamberlain, and appears as part of a series on sustainability in the health and wellness industry, curated by Becky Eisen, Dana Ledyard, Izabel Loinaz. Follow along with the series here.

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em…then beat ‘em. That’s one way of defining the strategy of Greenlight Apparel: Join a traditionally wicked business specifically to effect change from within. The global garment industry has been fraught with ethical production problems for a long time: from the mass pollution of dyes, bleach, and solvents, to sweatshops, to providing the cotton plantation backdrop to our own history of slavery.

For the longest time it seems to have fallen on non-profit issue advocacy groups to fight the good fight. Yet entrepreneurial thinking shows that for every problem, there’s a profitable solution…and more and more of that thinking is being applied not to fabricated problems of consumer needs, but real problems of global ills. The for-profit approach to alleviating poverty doesn’t just work better, it’s also proving to be lucrative.

That’s the spirit behind Greenlight. Housed near Silicon Valley and led by a former Cisco Systems exec, the company was borne from a business plan written for entry into the Global Social Venture Business Competition while its founders were in the MBA program at UC Davis. The idea was to make high-quality technical athletic gear — the stuff of Nike or North Face – yet produce it with 100% organic or recycled fibers and package it with a mission to end child labor and human trafficking. There are those in the garment industry that tragically still turn a blind eye to the environmental and human rights issues that are rampant throughout the supply chain.

There are others that incorporate sustainable production and strive to be “sweatshop free.” Greenlight’s goal would be to reach another level, working hand-in-hand with suppliers and partner charities to produce economic and educational incentives to produce sustainable and fair trade products, and win by using more carrot, less stick.

This mission is proving both refreshingly simple and dauntingly insurmountable. From the environmental aspect, it’s enlightening to see the strides made in sustainable production. Securing organic or recycled material suppliers is nearly a plug-and-play task at this point. Organizations like SKAL and Organic Exchange provide painstaking certifications and labeling of clean agricultural products, while Unifi Manufacturing’s Repreve line of yarns offer a collection of polyester and nylon fibers that are equally lab tested and certified recycled. Greenlight purchases carbon offsets to account for shipping, and with that we meet our environmental goals rather easily and confidently.

The human rights challenges are a whole different monster, however.

In most discussions, efforts like Greenlight Apparel’s are described as choices…as “being responsible”…or “doing the right thing.” Our post-Inconvenient Truth green movement has advocated for better global decision-making. The reality – in many cases – is that those harming the planet aren’t making a “choice” to do so. They aren’t consciously destructive or even recklessly naive. Rather, their actions are simply their way of life.

Greenlight CEO Sonny Aulakh is a native of Amritsar, Punjab, India, an area greatly affected by both the environmental and child labor issues. As he notes, “The people there see right through it. It’s a part of their culture. It’s something they’ve grown up seeing and since no on else takes action, they end up accepting what is wrong as normal.”

This is the challenge Greenlight faces in its mission. It’s not about changing behavior, but taking a million steps backward into the origin of attitudes.

There’s a metaphor on decision-making about the frequency that most of us, several times every day, make the choice to not rob a bank. We all pass several banks daily. At any point we could walk in, approach a teller with a threatening note, and commence a robbery. But none of us do. What’s more, the idea is so far from our minds that it doesn’t even seem like we’re making a decision. It’s a second-nature, subconscious choice.

Which is what makes this a good hypothetical for defining the variances of social norms. The idea of bathing, defecating, washing your food, clothes and dishes, and dumping your garbage all in the same river is as inconceivable as bank robbery to the average Westerner. Yet that’s everyday life in the Mekong Delta. The idea of a crew of 9-year-old children waiting on you hand-and-foot throughout your weeklong resort vacation would raise red flags with you – Where are their parents? When do they go to school? When do they sleep?!? – yet you may find that to be a typical workforce in Mumbai.

What is unconscionable to us is as normal as breathing in some developing communities. It’s not enough to simply advocate for different choices or policies. There needs to be a complete paradigm shift. What we’re facing is a sort of mega version of Broken Windows Theory or Cialdini’s “injunctive norms,” where doing wrong is so massively widespread and indoctrinated into the culture that it ceases to be perceived as wrong and never faces disapproval.

While Greenlight’s approach certainly incorporates advocacy and awareness of the problem, we see the solution lying in alternatives. It doesn’t help to simply stop the sweatshop. You have to replace the sweatshop. That’s where partnerships with international organizations like Love146, Kiva, and Media Voices for Children integrate to create educational resources designed to lift children from the cycle of poverty, as well as economic opportunities that offer parents alternatives to selling their children into indentured servitude.

Greenlight staff personally make several trips a year to visit partners in Asia, Africa or South America, working with factories to help get their fair trade certification, scouting prospects for a magnet school we aim to open within the next year, perfecting production of our first consumer line of merchandise to be launched later this year, or even dropping off new cricket equipment to rescued boys at a partner ashram.

We put all this work into the back end so we can create a very easy choice on our entrepreneurial front end: If you can buy the same sweat-wicking tech fiber running tee from several brands, why wouldn’t you choose the one that let’s you save the world at the same time?

That’s our plan, and so far it’s working. Since our founding in 2008, Greenlight Apparel has donated more than $50,000 to these partner organizations from sales to large fitness and corporate events. We’ve accounted for saving more than 600 children from child labor, more than 100,000 sweatshop hours.

Greenlight Apparel’s mission in India and Vietnam

This past December, we decided to invite US Half Marathon Founder Ryan Dawkins and a good friend, Ryan Chamberlain to accompany us on our year end tour of our charity partners in Asia — the endpoint of Greenlight’s mission in India and Vietnam.

It’s a completely different experience to listen to a six year old boy tell you how he’s been trafficked five different times as opposed to just reading about it in the NY Times.

Here’s how this story and many others begin. A family of eight, living on the streets, gets an offer from a man for $20 dollars in exchange for a child. The man promises everything but the moon. Says the boy will be fed, go to school, and will get enough work to be able to send the family some of his earnings. The family, who probably haven’t eaten a decent meal in weeks or months, are too desperate to refuse.

What actually happens when the boy goes with the man is obviously far from the tale of prosperity he fed to the parents. The boy gets taken from this small rural village in India to New Delhi, where he receives work training. Once he’s received a fair amount of training, he’s off to be sold to a manufacturing plant or farm as a “skilled laborer.” The plant no longer needs people, they’ve fulfilled their quota, so the boy is sold to another owner, then another. During this time, the boy is earning about one-tenth of the minimum wage, and is not able to send one cent to his family.

When our charity partner, Bachpan Bachao Andolan, finds out about a factory forcing children to work from 8am to 2am every day, personnel from the Labor Department are informed, the factory managers are arrested, and the children are sent to the Mukti Ashram, Bal (Boys) Ashram, or Balika (Girls) Ashram — all immediate shelters for the children who are rescued from Delhi and its surroundings. They are immediately provided with medical help, food, clothing, recreational facilities, sports, theatre and counselling during their stay until the legal formalities are completed and they are reunited with their families.

This is where we had the opportunity to meet many children with similar stories and to see how our donations and the work of Bachpan Bachao Andolan has helped to change these children’s lives.

From rural Rajisthan to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, where we toured an orphanage where children are trained to market themselves for adoption. We didn’t want to donate too much money as we were told it would not be distributed fairly, so instead we opted to donate treats the kids would enjoy. We asked the kids what kind of milk they wanted and they chose chocolate milk and cakes.

In this trip, we felt we made a small difference, but much is left to be done around the world for children’s rights. Our mission for each year is to show our customers and supporters, first hand, the impact they are making when they choose to partner with Greenlight Apparel.

25,000 Long Beach Marathon Runners to Fight Child Labor with Greenlight Apparel

Simple choice of activist outfitter produces funds to end human trafficking and slavery.

When the 25,000 participants of the Long Beach International City Bank Marathon and Half Marathon begin to perspire their way through this weekend’s events, they’ll be doing more than striving for personal best times – their sweat will be stopping sweatshops.

By partnering with clothing vendor Greenlight Apparel, race producers RUN Racing are funneling $3000 into charities fighting child labor, human trafficking and sex slavery. “RUN Racing is proud to work with Greenlight Apparel and know that we’re not just buying race gear, we’re helping people too,” said John Parks, EVP of RUN Racing. “We always want to provide the very best quality to our race participants, but it’s also great that we can help in this way.” “As a marathon runner I always love going to the expos and buying myself a memorable t-shirt or hat for all the hard training I’ve done,” said Marathon entrant Morgan Gerhart of Progressive Fitness Training Run group, running in her fifth marathon. “I am 100% more likely to buy a t-shirt that supports fighting child labor. It’s so great to know the money is going towards a great cause.”

Greenlight Apparel — Wear it for Good

While many clothing companies are feeling the pressure to go “sweatshop free,” Greenlight Apparel has built its business model specifically around the child labor fight. The company dedicates 10% of every sale to the cause, and actively partners and works with humanitarian charities focused on the Worldwide Child Labor Crisis. Thanks to the sheer numbers behind the Long Beach Marathon, this partnership allows Greenlight to channel $2000 into the microlender Kiva – helping developing communities to produce more sustainable and humane economic opportunities – and another $1000 to the non-profit Love146, which fights for the abolition of child sex slavery and exploitation.

“RUN Racing is easily our largest account, and their level of participation really validates our mission,” said Greenlight Apparel Executive Director Monika Gill. “They could certainly choose any number of clothing vendors, but that they use the opportunity to do something extra, something good with that choice – that really makes a statement.”

Social and eco-entrepreneurism is clearly the Next Big Thing, almost on the verge of creating its own economy a la the Internet. In the athletic apparel industry, Greenlight Apparel, is nearly a veteran in eco-friendly practices and social activism. Launched in 2007, the company has helped rescue 637 children and prevent more than 37,000 child labor hours. In addition to the company’s activism on that front, they also adhere to using 100% organic or recycled fibers. “People make common decisions everyday,” noted Greenlight Apparel co-founder Sonny Aulakh, “and more and more companies like ours are taking common actions that people are going to take anyway, and adding a beneficial byproduct to them. It’s a great trend to be experiencing.”

About Greenlight Apparel: Greenlight Apparel is an activist outfitter of active people, producing high-quality casual and technical apparel for large sporting, entertainment and corporate events. Not just “sweatshop free,” our mission is to aggressively work to eradicate child labor practices and human trafficking. Our company dedicates 10% of each sale to humanitarian partner charities working to eliminate illegal manufacturing sites, build schools and create economic opportunities in developing countries. All Greenlight Apparel merchandise is made with 100% recycled or organic fibers.

About RUN Racing: Led by Olympic Gold Medalist Bob Seagren, RUN Racing specializes exclusively in the development, management and implementation of endurance, health, fitness and special events. RUN Racing events include the OC Marathon held in May; the Pacific Open Water Festivals held in June and August; the Long Beach International City Bank Marathon held in October; the Dana Point Turkey Trot 10K & 5K held on Thanksgiving Day and the LA County Half Marathon held in December. “Follow RUN Racing on Twitter for event information (@RUNRacing) and find The Long Beach International City Bank Marathon on Facebook for interactive event information (Long Beach International City Bank Marathon)”