My conversation with Danny Sauter was interesting in that Danny is not your typical social entrepreneur.  In fact, Danny is a college student — a junior at Miami University in Ohio.  Yet his relative youth should not serve to diminish in anyone’s eyes the importance of his work.  If anything, the fact that he is leading a company while still in college should only serve to enhance that importance.  In my interview with Danny, we talked about his company’s efforts to both bring jobs and living wages to people in Africa and raise awareness at home about how our purchases affect people around the world.

There is also much to be learned for the social enterprise community at large.  College students are immensely valuable – they are passionate, talented, hard-working, and they work for free.  I am not surprised that they have been so successful with Danny’s organization Edun Live on Campus; I am only surprised that more social entrepreneurs haven’t followed suit to enter the campus social enterprise space.  There is much room, and it seems demand, for growth.

Edun Live on Campus is an organization selling 100% African-sourced t-shirts to college students.  They are your typical campus t-shirt company – except that they are entirely run by students, their shirts are entirely African from cotton field to production, and Africans earn a living wage and rise from poverty as a result.  An additional central component of the business is that it builds social consciousness regarding responsible consumer choices with the all-important college-age demographic.  For more information, please visit EdunLiveOnCampus.com.

My interview with Danny Sauter is below:

Danny, can you tell me a little about the problem that your social enterprise aims to solve?

The problem is that Africa has nearly 15% of the world’s population, but just 2% of the world’s trade.  And we kind of recognized – and I think there’s mounting support for this – that perhaps trade rather than aid is the key to ending the cycle of poverty and increasing development in the continent.  So our answer is to increase trade to Africa by sourcing 100% African-made t-shirts, and provide sustainable employment in the process.

Can you elaborate further on how Edun Live provides a solution to this problem?

Our solution comes through a simple vehicle.  Our answer to all this poverty is a t-shirt.  We realized that on a college campus, there are so many shirts made – when you go to a hockey game, or nearly every single social event.  We saw a really good opportunity to tap into something that everyone needs, wants, and uses.  If we can get them to think about what’s the message behind the shirt – where was this made, can I make an impact with my purchase, then we recognized that people can and will start to think about that.

So we get the blank t-shirts from Africa.  We pay a premium price for the shirts.  The communities and factories that the shirts were made in are managed by Edun, who makes sure that conditions are safe and comfortable.  They also enhance the sense of community, by teaching about organic farming and providing health education with HIV/AIDS programs.  So that’s where the impact is made, and then we bring the t-shirts to Miami, customize them, and use them as a vehicle for our message.

Tell me more about Edun – it seems like there is a bit of a hierarchical structure at work here.

Right.  The parent company is Edun, the ethical fashion brand that Bono’s wife Ali Hewson started in 2005.  The next year they started Edun Live, which simply sold blank t-shirts to consumers.  Then later in 2006 a group of students in Miami got together, wanted to start a company with a social mission, and they found out about Edun Live.  They were impressed by the potential of tapping into the college market – everyone orders t-shirts – and so they brought Ali Hewson in and pitched a business plan, with a goal of scaling to 40 colleges by 2012.  The company is run by students, and this is the first year that we have a designated non-student – the Assistant Director of Miami’s Center for Social Entrepreneurship – that has taken the lead in terms of expansion.  In the past, expanding to different colleges was more difficult when we were sending emails back and forth to students at the different campuses.

So now you’re seeing more growth for your company?

We’ve seen growth both in terms of sales on Miami’s campus and growth in terms of colleges.  We’re at nearly a dozen universities, including Gonzaga, Berkeley, Cincinnati, Wisconsin, and Ohio State, and our goal is to be at 40 college campuses by 2012, which I think is attainable if we have the right resources.  It’s exciting for students to get involved with and we’ve benefited from having the schools be really supportive of the program.

How have the students on your campus responded to Edun Live Miami?

It’s been really exciting.  We’ve had major music artists like Talib Kweli come in, and this year we’re bringing in Blake Mycoskie, the founder of Toms Shoes, at the end of February.  The more we can connect our name with events like this, we can raise greater awareness.  And we’ve been blown away by the response in terms of sales.  Each year sales have about doubled.  Starting out our first year, we sold 2,500 shirts on Miami’s campus, and then 5,000, and then last year 8,000.  This year the numbers are again pretty strong midway through our school year.  And that’s all on one campus.  But with the expansion of the program to nearly a dozen other schools, we can really scale up our impact.  The potential for growth is great.

It seems like you’re selling t-shirts to bring people out of poverty, but there’s a larger mission – to educate people about the impact of their consumer choices.  In the field of social entrepreneurship, it seems that enterprises break into one of these two camps – emphasis on sales and raising awareness, or emphasis on fighting poverty on the ground.  In which camp would you rather fit?

Good question.  We talked about Toms Shoes earlier, and people know about them.  I think that’s the side I want to be on.  Something that touches the end consumer, but does good in the process.  I think that – it is difficult, because something like Grameen Bank, Room to Read, they’re doing a lot of good but their message doesn’t really touch everyone.  Something like Toms shoes, maybe that message is a little easier to spread due to that direct impact with consumers.

So it’s about making people more conscious of their consumer choices?

Right.  Take certification for fair trade.  Somebody goes into a coffee aisle now, and while one side is regular, the other side is clearly labeled as certified.  Something like that is really important in terms of bringing transparency to the market, and informing consumers.  I saw a statistic with charity: water that all the money spent on Christmas gifts and decorations alone could end the water crisis.  The more we educate consumers, the more they’ll participate with their dollars.

How sustainable is the business, in terms of financial viability?

Our goal is to be fully self-sustainable.  We got a startup funding grant when we first launched, to cover the initial inventory of shirts.  We make a small margin on each shirt, and that is then put back into the company for printing out flyers, starting new lines, etc.  As we continue to grow, we expect to become self-sustaining.  The fact that we don’t pay students to participate is helpful for sustainability.

How much connection do you have with the mother organization of Edun Live?

We have a good amount of communication with them.  We share our marketing materials with them – things like posters, and flyers that we’ve created.  We have wide flexibility to see what fits the college market best.  We’re fortunate at Miami to have a group of about 40 students.  Other schools are more like 15.  We’ve had a couple of years to work out kinks, and bring on good people.

What kind of kinks were you able to work out?

A lot was internal – how do we structure ourselves best.  The first two years we had a smaller group, perhaps a bit too top heavy, but the past year we’ve really focused on empowering everyone.  Getting more people involved, and creating positions of responsibility.  We have VPs of Finance, Design, and Communication that are all students.

Is there anything you don’t know?

I think on one hand, we’re in this slightly awkward hybrid mode.  We operate within the entrepreneurship department of the university, and that’s good because it gives us stability, and access to resources with students and faculty.   But there’s always this question of how independent we want to be.  That’s one of the questions that we’ve been addressing.

Do you feel like participation in Edun Live Miami is impacting students once they leave college?

Yes.  Everyone has a genuine interest in this organization.  A lot of our team members aren’t actually business majors – we have business, history, political science majors as well.  And we’re not just selling t-shirts, we’re creating serious learning opportunities for students, and bringing in speakers to educate them as well.  Our students get very involved.  For instance, we have a design team that is entirely student-run that creates the graphics for all our shirts.  Participating gives them experience and a perspective change on what’s possible for a career after leaving college.

You can reach Danny on Twitter at @DannySauter and Edun Live on Campus at @EdunLiveMiami.  Click the links for more information about Edun Live on Campus as well as their partner organization, Edun Live.