Thursday, May 22, 2008

Creative Social Change - Carrotmob

I'm a long-time activist who believes that social change and activism has to be fun and creative. I can't do marches and door-to-door campaigning. That's why this project called Carrotmob excited me. "Carrotmob organizes consumers to make purchases that give financial rewards to those companies who agree to make environmentally friendly choices." For their first campaign, they focused on liquor stores in San Francisco. Check out this entertaining video to learn what happened.

3 comments:

Margie Puerta Edson, CFRE said...

This was great - another great post and thought provoking. Action provoking. I love the idea of using the carrot and not the stick. Very scalable and sustainable ideas at work here. Lack of sustainability and scalability is part of the problem with Tucson's Downtown. Must read "Forces for Good" by Leslie R. Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant (McLeod Grant is at Stanford University - so no surprise Carrotmob) There is a whole chapter on making markets work for social change and how the Environmental Defense organization in the late 1980s was able to get fast food giant McDonalds to change their packaging to more environmentally friendly materials and in doing so, all other fast food chains changed as well. No more happy meals in styrofoam in landfills. Amazing.

Anonymous said...

This is awesome! Thank you so much for posting it. I'm sending the link to everyone I know.

Eva said...

The Tuesday Night Ride Crowd would be a good place to start organizing something like this. Maybe we could choose businesses in the Main Gate Square Area since that's where the ride starts...