skylarwoodward

This week, Ambata launched their site aiming to connect communities of consumers here with global communties of producers. In one sense, it is an online store for the globally conscious consumer. However, the ideas behind it run deeper. Nathan and Tony are looking to create a social network of individuals interested in fair trade, sustainable, and enviornmentally responsible products which promote and sell these products through personal relationships and local communities. In fact, they care very little if products are bought through their site, and in fact have programs to sell products through other web front doors or even local community retailers, including church or school forums. They have no plans for marketing other than word of mouth and person-to-person networking, not only because they believe it to be very effective, but because it is also at the heart of how they want to live and commerce. It plays in concert with the tune of how intential communities are reshaping our world.

Ambata has a lot of similarities to Kiva, not the least of which are their names. Kiva is Swahili for unity, while ambata is a part of the same language meaning stick together. Sounds synonymic enough. Both organizations target helping people in developing nations, and to do so, both aim at connecting people in the US with people at the poverty level through their finances. But just as the words are more complimentary or co-dependent than similar, so are both institutions, and that’s the beauty of what is happening. Kiva finances new business growth which leads to new products to be sold, and Ambata stimulates that growth by giving those businesses new or healthy outlets to sell their products – thus creating revenue by which to repay the loan and thus allowing new opportunities. Though I haven’t seen many situations like this, new loan requests could pop up simply because global export channels like those promoted by Amabata are created.

One thing I’ve often noticed about Kiva is that it currently has no significant domestic impact on poverty; that’s not a bad thing, it is just the nature of the organizational model. Mostly, it would seem that Ambata is similar in this nature, but due to the need to actually warehouse and distribute hard goods that means there is work for Ambata to hire out locally. For this, they’ve chosen utilize CityTeam of San Jose to manage their warehouse operations – a huge win for a fantastic program that works to rebuild the lives of homeless throughout the country and has had an amazing impact here on San Francisco.

So since Ambata is all about the word of mouth, take this post as a prompt to both educate you and for you to share it with all of your friends. Congrats to Tony, Nathan, Chelsea and all on the launch. We look forward to seeing the catalogs fill up with tons of new choices over the coming year!