Could be good be cool? This is the question that the Switzerland-based brothers Nachson and Arieh Mimran decided to tackle in 2015. To answer this question, the brothers, descendants of French agricultural magnate Jean Claude, launched To .org, an organization blending investment, philanthropy and creativity to support businesses that focus on what Mimrans call “vital” issues.
These include areas whose critical impact is difficult to dispute: electric vehicles; sanitary; animal-free food and clothing; reforestation. “Previously, the view in traditional finance was that anyone who tried to pursue a goal beyond simple financial return would probably fail to achieve the market rate,” says Arieh, 27, a Princeton graduate.
“Today, it is clear that you can earn a lot of money while doing a lot of good. And this has led to a number of greenwashes, impact washing and purely profit-seeking investors using ESG language as window dressing.
This is why we are very careful in the language we use: we only support vital projects, those that are absolutely necessary.” Yet the Mimrans felt that supporting these kinds of businesses – or investing in related charitable projects – was not enough. The third pillar of To.org concerns creative communication.
“We realized that communication – making things aspirational, cool and desirable – was something that could allow us to function like a Trojan horse,” says Nachson, 34. “We can bring together multidisciplinary individuals and communities to discuss how we save the world. » This means teaming up with architects, materials scientists, technologists, musicians and stylists to highlight certain themes, initiatives and companies.
In one case, To.org sponsored the creation of a public toilet constructed from thousands of plastic bottles and more than a million plastic bags – the Bottle Brick Building – in a poor region of Uganda. This did three things at once: involved local informal economy workers in the project; create free and accessible toilets in an area suffering from poor sanitary conditions; and generate a lot of buzz.
“It’s a beautiful monument in a way. It doesn’t look like a toilet,” says Nachson. “We created something that could have digital reach through social media, but also physical reach: it brought well-off Ugandans into a slum where only a few of them had ever been to visit what they had seen online. » In some cases, creative input has been limited to a rebranding, such as when animal-free protein maker Clara Foods was renamed The EVERY Company.
