Growers First Inc.
P.O. Box 4227
Laguna Beach, CA 92652
Phone: 949.551.1085
Email: info@growersfirst.org
Social Enterprise and Equity
The rights and voice of the indigenous living in developing countries are often overlooked, creating a sense of hopelessness and perpetuating the cycle of poverty.
The Growers First solution is to create a social enterprise in the form of a cooperative that closes the gap between growers and the consumer, thus returning more of the profit to the grower and creating empowerment through unification.
Cooperative Functions
Cooperatives are created as a social enterprise to give small growers access to resources and efficiencies that they could otherwise never achieve. Growers First either creates a cooperative that all growers in an area can join or restructures an existing one to achieve the greatest benefit to the growers. Key components of the cooperative include:
- Governance – Establishing the rules and regulations that govern a cooperative.
- Processing – Developing facilities that can process the raw crop to the point where it is ready for sale to the market.
- Nurseries – Creating seedlings for various crops.
By aggregating their crops and resources, the cooperatives gain efficiencies, buying and selling power, and bring a structure to achieving best practices in the enterprise in addition to providing other social benefits to the community. This contributes to a sustainable and growing income for the growers and an improved quality of life.
By participating in these aspects of the value stream, the farmers retain that portion of the margins and share the additional profits amongst themselves. The cooperative structure is also the foundation for social equity
Social equity benefits
- Empowerment - Giving growers a hand up, not a handout.
- Sustaining Family/Culture - Creating opportunities to sustain families and culture
- Gender Equity - Empowering women to be agents of economic change.
Cooperatives not only produce additional profits, they assure equality amongst members and produce local jobs. By working locally, growers aren’t forced to leave their families behind for months at a time to work as laborers in other areas.
Governance
For Growers First, the purpose of a co-op is to become an efficient point along the value chain with the ultimate goal of increased benefit to growers. Growers First governance practices have proven effective in achieving this goal in various co-op situations including
Creating a new cooperative from the ground up
Taking an existing cooperative and increasing its functionality and effectiveness
Helping to repair dysfunctional or ineffective cooperative
Optimally, a well functioning, effective cooperative not only provides added benefit to the grower but also provides complete transparency of the activities of the leadership and social equity to all members of the community.
Processing
Growers First helps communities build multi-function facilities and provides training on how to take the raw crop and process it to the point where it is ready for sale to the market. Greater involvement in the value chain adds significantly to the margins the growers retain for themselves in the sale of their crops.
Processing crops en masse is vastly more cost effective and efficient than the growers each doing their own individually. By aggregating the crops from all growers, the total labor requirement is reduced and other economies of scale come into play.
Nurseries
Growers First contributes start-up monies as well as seeds and seedlings for the development of agricultural nurseries that are run by the cooperatives. These nurseries, over time are the main contributor to the expansion of farms and revenue producing crops.
Nurseries can also be a type of laboratory where local agronomists can prepare custom blends of organic fertilizers and pesticides for cooperative members to help strengthen and increase their crops.
In addition to providing seedlings for the main revenue crops, nurseries also provide seedlings used in intercropping which creates additional revenue per hectare. Consumable crop seedlings are also produced which provide improved food staples for the growers and their families.
Empowerment
Indigenous growers are looking for and receive a hand up not a handout. Participation in the Growers First programs provides growers with a level of empowerment that they would not ordinarily be able to achieve. They learn new skills which allow them to create value in social enterprises. They attain a sense of identity as part of a larger collective and they achieve a real faith in a future that is an improvement for themselves and their families.
Sustaining Family/Culture
By participating in the Growers First programs, indigenous growers can achieve a level of income that can sustain them and their families within their local areas. Too often, families are forced to separate, sending a member to large cities in order to find jobs that will provide needed income. By creating opportunity and hope families remain intact. This also helps maintain their participation with their local community and insures that their unique cultures remain intact and can flourish.
Gender Equality
According to the United Nations, when a woman in the developing world earns an income, she reinvests 90% of it back into her family, as compared to only 40% for a man. Women can be the agents of economic change in rural agricultural communities and the programs implemented by Growers First assures that women receive equal compensation and equal representation through their work and participation in the cooperatives that are set up for growers.
