Working for a 'World of Good'

By Jessica Guynn
CONTRA COSTA TIMES (view full article)

Priya Haji pauses inside Whole Foods Market in Berkeley, where her startup, World of Good is on display. (Joanna Jhanda/Contra Costa Times)

BERKELEY - August 15, 2004 - In her early 20s, she was thinking locally. A senior at Stanford University, Priya Haji joined with a recovered addict she met on hardened East Palo Alto streets to start a drug-treatment and prevention program that gained national recognition for helping thousands each year.

Now in her 30s, this enterprising business school graduate is acting globally. Through an online catalog and in colorful displays in spas and salons, yoga studios and independent bookstores, her new startup World of Good sells fair-trade goods from funky floral embroidered wool pouches made in a women's cooperative in Nepal to beaded handbags made out of recycled saris from a cooperative in India.

Haji, whose pugnacious spirit hides behind gentle eyes and a warm, engaging smile, is an American-born entrepreneur of Indian descent with a strong family heritage of social activism passed down through the generations.

Her maternal grandparents were jailed in India's independence movement from Britain; later in life, her grandmother started a nursing school for women. Her paternal grandfather struggled against European colonialism in East Africa and sent all seven kids -- including four girls in a traditionalist society -- to college.

Her parents -- a Muslim and a Hindu -- met and fell in love in medical school in India, settling in a small Texas town -- her father a surgeon, her mother a family practitioner. Her parents raised six of Haji's cousins in addition to their own two children. "We joke that we are like the Indian Brady Bunch," Haji said.

While still in high school, Haji helped her father start a free health clinic that today has several dozen volunteer physicians -- including her mother -- and sees thousands of patients a year.

Now Haji and fellow Haas Business School graduate Siddharth Sanghvi hope that blending compassion and capitalism will forge greater economic opportunity for artisans in developing countries by reaching more American consumers.

Haji and Sanghvi aim to create a brand that guarantees artisans make a fair profit. World of Good works through established nonprofits, cooperatives and other organizations or cuts out the middleman to buy directly from the artisans.

"This is the right idea with the right conscience at the right time," Haji said.

The goal of the World of Good merchandising strategy is to first appeal to consumers with the quality and price of a wool shawl or glass-beaded necklace, then with the story behind the product. For example, buy a $9 "Spring Into Change" coin purse, and 20 percent of that purchase will support Maya weavers and their children in Guatemalan highland villages.

World of Good kiosks already can be found in Cody's Books on Fourth Street and Whole Foods Market on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, luring consumers who like to shop the world but may not frequent fair-trade-only outlets like nonprofit Global Exchange and the Mennonite-run Ten Thousand Villages.

"We want it to be an easy, fun choice that you can feel good about, not preachy," said Haji. "We think that most of the time, given an equally priced product with equal quality, consumers will go for the socially conscious choice."

Haji believes that World of Good can keep the prices of fair-trade goods competitive because companies tend to mark up the prices of such goods. World of Good and retailers have agreed to curtail their margins to make sure artisans get a fair wage, Haji said.

"We believe it is possible," she said. "Right now, it's too early to tell."

Haji belongs to a new breed of entrepreneurs determined to use their business savvy to bring about social change, says William Rosenzweig, a Haas professor of social entrepreneurship. "Priya has a very charismatic kind of passion for creating equity in the world," Rosenzweig said.

A sense of social justice formed at an early age. In the fifth grade, Haji stepped in the middle of a school-yard fight and wound up in the principal's office for hitting a bully picking on a smaller girl. "Everyone was shocked, including me," Haji said.

In high school and college, she spent almost as much time volunteering as studying. "I think we all have it, a voice inside of us that tells us when things are right and when things are wrong," Haji said.

In the winter of 1992 when Haji was volunteering for an AIDS outreach program, handing out condoms and bleach in Whiskey Gulch, a down-and-out neighborhood just miles from the manicured Stanford campus, she met David Lewis, an ex-convict, addict and gang member turned social activist who inspired her to take more forceful action.

Lewis says he sized up Haji's resolve to help others when she accompanied him to San Quentin, where he counseled inmates on drug addiction. Haji didn't shrink from an experience that would have intimidated many young college students. "I thought she would never speak to me again, but instead she called me and said, 'Are we going tomorrow or what?' The more tests I put her through, the more she was able to say, 'Yeah, this is what I want to do.'"

Haji drew on rising anger over a war on drugs that she saw as a war on poor people and people of color. At the time East Palo Alto was dubbed the nation's murder capital as drug and alcohol addiction, unemployment and HIV infection rates soared along with the crime rate. Like Lewis, she believed that addicts needed treatment, not jail terms.

"We weren't solving anything. There were no after-school programs, no substance-abuse treatment program, no alternative-sentencing programs. We didn't want to deal with this as a mental health or medical problem, so we criminalized it. It's so not an answer," Haji said. "To me it was a question of: How do we build a system to address this? How do we create the programs that are needed?"

Soon she was spending more time in East Palo Alto than at Stanford. Haji, Lewis and others drafted a 15-year business plan for a community center to treat addiction and submitted it to the Echoing Green Foundation. The $15,000 fellowship helped swing open the doors of Free At Last in Haji's senior year at Stanford.

Instead of writing her thesis on liberation theology, she lived it, "that idea that there is a higher power or spiritual force that each of us can harness to change ourselves and the world around us.

"It was hard for me to sit still and write a thesis when I could use those same tools to write a grant application for the center," she said.

The Free At Last motto is "in the community, for the community, by the community." Grants, county funds and private donations underwrote a plethora of programs: mobile health clinics, street outreach workers, AIDS counseling, outpatient and residential treatment programs, affordable and transitional housing, job training. Dozens of people each day dropped into the center, which served as an "emotional emergency room."

"The break-through philosophy of the program was that people don't have to leave the community to recover," Haji said of Free at Last, where many of the staffers are recovered addicts from East Palo Alto. "When you give people the space to recover their lives in the community, you recover the community as a whole."

Haji took over as executive director, rolling up her sleeves to do everything from painting walls to designing marketing materials and setting up accounting systems. She was so young for such a big job that she was sometimes mistaken for a secretary.

Lewis and other mentors helped her transform from the college student with the untamed curly hair and big earrings to a power-suited community activist. Soon Haji was navigating local politics and testifying before state commissions with confidence, winning over people who at first were put off by her age and Stanford pedigree.

Haji's headstrong, youthful vigor served her well in a high-burnout job, said Lewis, president of Free at Last. "She learned very quickly the disproportionate amount of minority people in prison, and she also realized very quickly the lack of services for those people once they got out," Lewis said.

"We said we would build an organization that filled the gaps. It was (Haji's) commitment and her anger. She was able to channel that anger into something positive. She was so young, she had never heard the word no. She didn't know what no meant."

Haji still carved out time every weekend to run a group for women in the residential treatment program and their family members. "Being connected to the clients really kept me grounded," she said.

By the time Haji left the agency that started with "two employees and a pay phone," it was serving 3,000 people a year in 10 facilities with an annual budget of $2.5 million and a staff of 60.

"Here's a community that was at that point in time experiencing just a devastating impact from the effects of substance abuse. In comes this little dynamo who says we can create treatment programs, we can work with people to help them find a better way," said San Mateo County Supervisor Rich Gordon.

"David Lewis brought the street smarts and the know-how of having been there, and Priya brought the organizational and business skills. The net result was a program desperately needed in the community that has continued to make a huge difference to this day. From my perspective, what Priya did in starting Free at Last was like miracle work."

Haji's achievements at Free at Last garnered attention. Before business school, she consulted with the Soros foundation on Proposition 36, which in 2000 required treatment instead of prison for nonviolent drug offenders.

Haji enrolled at Haas to see whether a business degree could help her merge purpose and profit. "In the nonprofit sector, you are pushed in two different directions: a social mission and raising money," she said. "I went to business school to figure out how to create sustainable models, opportunities to use market forces and business itself ... to generate the same social good without this bifurcation of effort."

Her mission at World of Good is to support thousands of artisans from Asia, Africa and Latin America by selling their handicrafts in more than 100 retail outlets by year's end. "The thing that I love about World of Good is that there is an infinite capacity for the number of communities we can help and work with, the number of stores in which we can put the products and the number of ways we can build these opportunities," she said.

But the capricious nature of privilege still tantalizes her -- why some people are born with it and others are not. Haji, a church-goer most of her life who was baptized in the Presbyterian church, says she sees God in many forms but struggles when she witnesses injustice and poverty in the world.

After finishing her MBA at Haas, Haji traveled for six months in Mexico, Latin America and Asia to cultivate contacts in artisan communities and brainstorm a business that could bridge widening social and economic gaps. On her travels, she peered into the eyes of women in India and Mexico and saw herself. She felt humbled when a woman from a Chiappas cooperative told Haji that if weavers could sell twice the number of hand-embroidered pouches, they could afford clean, running water for their children and lighting that wouldn't strain their eyes as they sew.

"I thought, 'They could be me.' It's an accident of birth. Why was I born in America? Why was I born to educated parents? Why was I raised with the opportunity to go to Stanford? I can't answer those questions," Haji said. "The thing I do know is that if I use my privilege the right way, I can make life a lot better for them."