Kanyi Maqubela describes Vergence, which runs Carrot Mob to reward sustainable businesses and One Block Off the Grid, a solar buying club that negotiates bulk discounts. Early San Francisco campaigns got 180 sign-ups and 42 solar installations; later Bay Area efforts hit 1,200 sign-ups, expanding to Los Angeles, San Diego, and New Orleans.
Chapters
Thank you, Casey. Thank you, folks from Influx Insights. This is really exciting. My name is Kanyi. I'm the field director at Vergence. And Vergence is quite simply described as a platform for social activism. And when I first started, I didn't know what the heck that meant. And I was told to think about mobs. Now, when you think about mobs, my first reaction was angry townspeople carrying tree trunks into castle doors trying to break them down, screaming bloody murder. But that's not the mobs that we're talking about. We're talking about mobs that involve creativity through entrepreneurship and influencing business through positive market-based solutions to influence positive social change. And there are a couple of examples that I want to just quickly describe to you. And before I start, the people who have the postcards, if they can just start— take one and pass it on. Just take one and pass it on. And the reason that I asked to do take one and pass it on instead of putting them on all the chairs is because There's something about something so simple as looking at somebody in the eye and giving them a flyer that evokes a sense of collaboration and evokes a sense of community that is pretty central to what we do at Virgin's. So one of our first projects is called Carrot Mob. The way that Carrot Mob works is that we go into an area, let's just take the Mission, and we look at 5 liquor stores in the Mission and we say to them, "Whichever one of you can make the biggest commitment to go sustainable, instead of doing a sit-in, instead of throwing rocks, we're going to buy from your liquor store." In droves. And droves. And so they compete, they compete, and we organize, and we go around and we text our friends, and we call our mom, and we call our dad, and we post on Facebook, and we post on Twitter, and we build momentum until there is this energy that's just sizzling, and then we all go to the liquor store and have a big party, and everybody wins. There's another program called One Block Off the Grid. The way that One Block Off the Grid works is Again, we organize. And so we go into a community and we canvass, we knock on doors, we host house parties, we do info sessions, we do webinars, we do it online, we do it offline, we create social networks. And then what we do is we form something akin to a Costco buying club, but instead of for wholesale goods like peanut butter and Nutella, it is for renewable energy products., and then we take that big group and we go to a bunch of competing solar installers, and we say to those solar installers, "We've got a whole bunch of people here who we organized and who we've spoken to one by one individually. Who can give us the biggest discount?" And we use these market-based solutions to try and negotiate positive activity where we're encouraging positive businesses to do better through their market-based solutions. And this is stuff that when I first started engaging in it, I was— I was naturally skeptical because I had never really thought of this notion of a mob being a force for an incredibly powerful good. It makes sense, but I had just never thought of it before. And since I've been with One Block Off the Grid and with the Vrgins, I've been pretty blown away by what's happened. Our first campaign was last fall in San Francisco. 180 people signed up. And the way that it was done was we posted flyers on neighborhood walls and bulletin boards in Potrero Hill. And we went to real estate meetings in La Castro and just spoke about our program. And it was very scrappy, but people were interested. There's a market for this stuff. And when they know that it's happening with their neighbors, when they're engaging with their friends, when they're engaging in the collective, and with the influence on the collective, they're realizing that they have an opportunity to be really powerful. And of those 180 people, 42 ended up buying solar and putting it on their homes. Which we were astounded by, which doesn't sound like a lot, but it is. The second campaign we ran in the Bay Area, 1,200 people signed up. And, you know, the momentum is palpable, and it's growing, and it's building on itself, and it's kind of overwhelming, you know, but it's great. And we then went down to Los Angeles and launched out of a good magazine, and now there are about 550 people signed up in Los Angeles. There are about 300 people signed up in San Diego. There are 250 people signed up in New Orleans. In a state where there are 60 solar systems total in history. And this stuff is real. This stuff is real. If you just look at each other and band together and think, "Wow, there's a notion of common good." But instead of us all thinking about it, but siloing ourselves and moving forward, let's join hands and look at each other and then move forward. And then let's see what happens. That happens. And with the advent of social networks and with this democratization process where everything's sort of going like this, we all need to move forward this way, right? We all need to move forward at once in incremental steps. And we found that that's been— it's been, again, overwhelming, you know, overwhelming. And I'm young, and what I'm seeing in this generation is that the 19th century and the 20th century were about what we can build And it was remarkable what we were able to build. But the 21st century is not only going to be about what we can build, but how we can sustain. And so that's what we're trying to do.
