Hungry? Grab a Burrito Babe!

Don’t you hate it when you bite into a freshly made Chipotle burrito and get a mouthful of just rice or just beans? Wouldn’t you love to find a hassle free way to donate to charity? Are you wondering how these questions are related and where the hell am I going with this? Okay, okay, I’ll stop with the not so rhetorical questions.

If you answered yes to the above questions (and live in the Los Angeles area), then you are in luck. I was driving home last night, flipping radio channels until I landed on program called the Community Council on KIIS FM. I’ve listened to this program a few times before whenever I happen to be driving late on a Sunday night; it features unsung heroes,  nonprofits  around the area, etc. This time, I tune in just in time to hear something about 2 burrito connoisseurs studying for their masters at the USC School of Social Work who wanted to combine their love for burritos with social entrepreneurship - something they're learning about in school. Unfortunately I missed much of the explanation of their actual concept and but was able to catch their opinions about where the best burritos can be found. (C’mon, guys. The answer is Chipotle.) Anyway, my interest piqued, I looked up the Burrito Babes to learn more about who they are and what they're about.

Photo From iloveburritobabes.org

 
Burrito Babes is very new social enterprise concept still in its developing stages. In fact, Sarah and Taleen only publicly pitched their idea as a final project last semester in December 2011. From their website aptly named www.iloveburritobabes.org, the Burrito Babe mission is to

“build stronger communities by providing local, sustainable, Mixican Style gourmet world burritos that bring social awareness and the opportunity to make a large-scale change with each burrito purchase.”

Note: Mixican is not a typo. I fell for that too. Think back to the first question! The only way to get the perfect bite of a burrito is to mix the ingredients first before putting it together. Clever huh?


Here’s how their giving model works. When a customer makes a burrito purchase, they receive a small, heartshaped token. With that token the customer can decide which of the three charities of the month (one from each category of food/hunger, local, international) they want a portion of the Burrito Babes profit to go to. And instead of a winner take all strategy, at the end of the month Burrito Babes divides the profit according to what percentage of the vote each charity got. There are a few things that I love about this particular giving model. First, it makes giving back so easy and intuitive. Second, the decision of which charity to choose requires a little bit of learning about each one. This empowerment to choose also give the customer the sense that they are more invested in the cause. Lastly, Burrito Babes supports multiple nonprofits on a rolling basis. This allows repeat customers to learn about different nonprofit causes each time they come in.

Photo From iloveburritobabes.org

So what’s next for these Burrito Babes? Sarah and Taleen are both finishing up their degrees in May and just began marketing Burrito Babes this month on their Twitter, Facebook, radio stations etc. A couple of fundraising events are also in the works. Both are gearing up to run in the Hollywood Half Marathon and 5K to raise money for additional startup funds. Finally, next month Burrito Babes will be hosting a Burrito Eating Contest on April 21 in Santa Monica where half of the proceeds will go to the Westwide Food Bank.

Links:
Sarah and Taleen's video campaign for Burrito Babes
Donate to their Half Marathon Efforts
Burrito Babe's Feeding America Virtual Food Drive Donation Page

Feature Blog - Audaemus

Let me just say – there are not a whole lot of small-time bloggers writing about social entrepreneurship out there. Most of the blogs or sites I’ve found are written either by a team of writers or by companies who specialize in working with social entrepreneurs. I did find a few one-“man” blogs, though the authors are usually mysterious and reveal little about themselves. Case in point is a blog titled Audaemus, which in Latin means “Let us dare” or “Let us be bold.” Audaemus’s mission is to explore social entrepreneurs around the world while also touching on related topics such as microfinance, international development, global philanthropy etc.

When I first began poking around this blog, I had no clue when this blog was started or who was the person behind it. There is no revealing “About Me” section and the dates of the blog posts show only the month and date. It took a lot of clicking and reading through comments to find these out. Upon starting this blog, the mystery author, who I later figured out to be Michael, was writing for a social entrepreneurship – focused private family foundation. Through this connection, the Michael brings an insider look to different social entrepreneurs and social ventures.

While clicking through “Older Posts” to find the very first blog posts (April 2006 fyi), I came across a variety of posts that touched on completely new ideas to me and also several posts that were very relatable to my own experiences. For example, I recently went on a volunteer service trip to Ghana where my group’s purpose was to aid in the sustainable development of a community fund. The people we worked with were very capable of helping themselves but since foreigners are always donating money and goods, it seemed like they were more concerned with and even expected us to give them free stuff. Audaemus captured my sentiment exactly in a blog post from more than 5 years ago entitled “Is charity harmful to development?”

The posts are relatively short, making it an easy read. The writer also provides links to related blog posts so I can “flip” through interesting posts rather quickly. Most of the blog posts are just long enough to pique interest and sometimes leave me so curious that I end up clicking through provided links and/or Googling to learn more.

It seems that Audaemus has lost its steam over the past few years. Alexa’s traffic rank for this blog is 3,585,029. Posts are sparser now at about once or twice a month than years ago when there were regular posts (at times even daily posts!). Even comments on recent posts are far in few between. The majority of the posts are informational in a let-me-tell-you-about-this kind of way. There were a few segments of posts that went against Audaemus’s traditional one-sided posts theme and those were the Audeamus Awards. These in particular were more involved because Michael asked his readers to vote for different social entrepreneurs. If I were him, I would definitely bring Audeamus Awards back so that the blog is less one-sided and more conversational.

Nonetheless, the content on this blog is a great start for my own research. There’s so much content on here that it would take a LONG time for a new reader like myself to lose interest. There are plenty of posts on Audaemus that profile companies and social entrepreneurs that I could refer to as I am researching social entrepreneurs/enterprises to blog about. My site will differ in the sense that I’m focusing on these profile posts while Audaemus has a variety of related topics that are also featured. I’m definitely keeping Audaemus on my blog list for inspiration and I can’t wait to get started!