Fully Alive by Tyler Gage

Author:Tyler Gage
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

Refining the Mission and Getting Certified

While Francisco took the reins of the for-profit side, we needed someone who could run Runa Foundation and make it into its own organization. Up to that point Runa Foundation existed as a nascent vision and not much more than a set of incorporation papers.

Through a long chain of conversations and introductions we were introduced to Eliot Logan-Hines, a native of Austin, Texas, who was finishing his master’s degree from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. Eliot had spent the prior decade working on agroforestry and conservation initiatives in Latin America.

On a fundraising trip through the Bay Area, Dan and I met Eliot at a coffee shop in East Oakland where we talked for a few hours about financing mechanisms for carbon sequestration programs, squatters on his farm in Costa Rica, and challenges with Fair Trade coffee supply chains. Eliot was clearly brilliant, opinionated, and just a strange breed of human being. He had this nutty professor–spritely wizard nature to him that was unlike anyone I’d ever met, and his life sounded straight out of a Gabriel García Márquez novel, full of odd circumstances, bizarre characters, and weird twists. It was immediately clear that his breadth of experience enabled him to view difficult issues at odd angles and come up with creative solutions.

Eliot later told us that after that first meeting he was blown away by the potential for guayusa and the Runa business—so blown away that his immediate thought was How I can steal this idea and do it better than these schmucks? Unaware of his characteristically mischievous intentions, we wanted to test the waters and build a relationship with Eliot, so we offered him a consulting contract to assess the viability of our agroforestry model and carbon credit programs.

His work was stellar and, beyond the confines of the specific project, he challenged us to think about long-term impact, our hybrid organizational structure, and the potential conservation impacts of guayusa production in entirely new ways. As our relationship developed, he helped us create an eight-word mission statement to frame the future impact of Runa’s work.

We’d learned about eight-word mission statements from the Mulago Foundation, which is dedicated to assisting social enterprises that address the needs of the very poor. Kevin Starr, the managing director, and Laura Hattendorf, the head of investments, had stressed to us that mushy words such as “empowerment,” “capacity building,” and “sustainability” mean nothing. A mission statement should say exactly what you’re trying to accomplish with a verb, a target population, and an outcome that implies something to measure—in eight words or less. “Save kids’ lives in Uganda” or “Rehabilitate coral reefs in the Western Pacific” were two examples they gave.

We wanted our work to prove the value of the Amazon in concrete, tangible ways and to help shift the broader conversation away from moralistic concepts of “needing to save the native peoples” or more distant goals about maintaining global oxygen production and carbon sequestration. With economics as our

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