Toms revealed their new One for One™ product yesterday: Sunglasses. We’ve always been big supporters of the Toms mission and the aesthetic of their simple shoes, so the idea of buying a pair of shades and helping a person with a vision disability sounds great to us. The models are as versatile and classic as the footwear line, and we really love the simple brand identifier on the arm of the glasses—painted lines, which almost bring to mind resin-dip paint jobs on surfboards. The design, according to company founder Blake Mycoskie, will remind the wearer that she has help a person in need to be able to see. Our favorite pair is the Classic 101, shown above.

Well done, Toms!

[This week, as part of Nau's pledge to donate 10% of sales on nau.com to our Partners For Change, The Thought Kitchen is pleased to share a collection of guest posts from our Partner organizations. Today's guest is Kate Heryford from Kiva.org, the world's first micro-lending website for the working poor, and one of Nau's original Partners For Change . -Ed.]

Last month, Kiva marked its 5^th birthday and celebrated five years in which it enabled 490,000 people to lend more than $165 million to 420,000 entrepreneurs in 53 countries. As exciting as the first five years have been, we thought we’d share a little bit of what we have in store for the next five years.

The success of the Kiva model presents an amazing opportunity for Kiva to work with our MFI partners to create and expand innovative loan products beyond the typical micro-business loans that made Kiva famous. The first step in this exciting new phase for Kiva is student microloans. For the first time ever, Kiva users can make loans to students to help them pay for the education that can help them break the inter-generational cycle of poverty.

A post-secondary education can increase income from 10-20% per year–if you can afford it. However, in most countries, government student loan programs simply don’t exist.  With no collateral, no credit history, and little or no job history, most aspiring college students can’t qualify for commercial loans to pay for school.  Ironically, a higher education is the very thing that could enable them to get the higher paying jobs that would enable them to build the track record that commercial lenders require.  As a result, generation after generation remains shut out of the education system, trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of poverty.

Kiva Student Microloans give recipients the opportunity to gain new knowledge and skills through higher education or vocational training. As a result, these individuals will be better positioned to find jobs, support their families and grow their communities — and ultimately make a real difference in the relief of global poverty.

To learn more about Kiva, visit the Partners For Change page on nau.com, or check out this short video:

Apropos of our earlier post about Mast Chocolate and “Sailing The Beans,” we recently spotted the new delivery vehicle belonging to our favorite provider of early morning wake-ups and late afternoon energy, Stumptown Coffee. Very cool.

The most common thing I hear from the American public is “what’s the best.” Coca-Cola and Pepsi would like you to believe that what they make is the best. But everybody’s taste is different. I can tell you what I like, or I can make suggestions. So try all these and then tell me what the best is for you.

You gotta listen to this guy talk about soda. From glass bottles to cane sugar, John Nese offers a common sense look at how small producers, making real drinks, with real ingredients, create something truly special.

(via Devour)

Rachel Botsman has an interesting guest post over on design blog SwissMiss on the social movement toward co-ownership, social-network enabled swapping and collaborative lifestyles. From Zipcars to CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture) to the exchange of books, DVDs and pretty much anything else on sites like Swaptree (now swap.com) and Freecycle, Botsman identifies a growing trend in consumption that’s less conspicuous and more collaborative.

Old market behaviors, including sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, and swapping, are being reinvented through social technologies and peer communities. The social networks, GPS and real-time technologies, peer payment systems and so on have created the efficiency and trust glue for us to mimic exchanges that used to take place face-to-face on a scale and in ways that have never been possible before. We have literally wired our world to share.

What do you think? Has the economy got you looking for ways to share ownership with others? Has peer-to-peer sharing expanded beyond your music collection to what you watch, what you wear? Does a bike share get you around? Hit up the comments, and let us know if you think sharing is making a dent in the cult of ownership.

(via SwissMiss)

I haven’t seen the movie, but the end credits for The Other Guys—that Will Ferrel, Marky Mark Mark Whalberg cop film—feature some great looking info graphics that, if you haven’t already brushed the popcorn off your lap and headed to the door, might make you stop and think.

The standouts for me:

• Average ratio of Executive Pay to Employee Pay, 1914: 7:1. Today: 319:1.
• Average Execute Salary 1998: 2.3 Million. In 2005: 11.8 Million.

I’m not trying to foment a revolution of the working class here. But have executives become that much more valuable? Or the rest of us that much less so? Did your salary quintuple in 7 years? Most of all: does this make sense?

Can’t find an embeddable version, but check out the credit sequence here.

How on earth has no one told me about The Scout before now? The Brooklyn-based web mag recently launched the third in a series of films about craftsmanship—something that those who know me will recognize as close to my heart, and work. This profile of the Mast Brothers, Rick and Michael, offers a beautiful, and occasionally humorous look inside their Brooklyn chocolate shop.

In their quest to imbue their bars with as much of the adventure and curiosity of their craft as possible, they’re planning on sailing their beans back from Dominican Republic personally. “Any idea that makes us nervous, or scared that it won’t happen—we know that we’re definitely on to something. And sailing the beans is definitely the biggest thing…we know we’re onto something.” For making the connection between food and farm—or, in this case, cocoa plantation—you can’t do much better than that.

“If we start treating people like people, and stop assuming that they’re slower, smaller, better smelling horses; if we get past this ideology of carrots and sticks and look at the science, we can build organizations and work lives that make us better off, and that have the promise to make our world a little bit better.”

An awesome inquiry into why we do what we do, adapted from a lecture by Dan Pink at RSA (the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.) Check it:

(via 18th & Hoyt)

You know composting is good. Perhaps you’re doing it yourself on a small scale, collecting the organic waste from your kitchen and turning it into rich soil for your garden. But what happens to that larger scale organic matter that sometimes passes through your life? Where does yard debris go after you put it on the curb?

The surprising answers to those questions led two young entrepreneurs—Tyler Miller, and Nau alum Pierce Louis—to start Dirt Hugger, a local composting company that creates sustainable economies by collecting, processing, and utilizing valuable organic nutrients locally. It turns out that without access to composting services, organic materials are mostly processed in unsustainable ways: they are dumped in landfills where they produce 40% of the nation’s methane gas emissions, burned in open air piles, or trucked long distances to urban processing centers.

Tyler and Pierce are in the running for the Myoo Create Beat Waste Startup Challenge: as one of ten finalists, they’re up for a $15,000 grant from Adventure Ecology, the folks behind the Plastiki expedition. For nurturing the idea that organic waste has real nutrient value and that communities are strengthened when they retain that value locally rather than trucking it out of town, they’ve got our vote. Whether in compost or clothing, we need more of this kind of closed-loop thinking.

Back in March, we gave bottled water a pretty hard time—enough to even catch the ire of the International Bottled Water Association, who accused us of ‘mis-reporting’ their greenwashed pro-bottled water film. They said their piece, but the facts remain: billions of plastic bottles are thrown away each year while less than 30% are recycled; shipping water needlessly wastes energy and contributes to climate change; bottled water is no safer than tap water in the United States; tap water actually outperforms bottled water in taste tests; and—perhaps most galling of all, almost a quarter of bottled water is just tap water repackaged by Coke and Pepsi—it’s just thousands of times more expensive.

So I was interested when a link to a new product floated across my desk: boxed water, labeled simply enough “Boxed Water Is Better.” No plastic, easily recyclable, made from materials largely produced from a ‘renewable’ resource. They’ve even pledged to donate 20% of their profits to water and reforestation organizations. Sounds pretty good, right?

Well, maybe. The question is: better than what, exactly? Despite their optimistic rhetoric, many of the fundamental flaws of bottled water really have less to do with the bottle, and more to do with the idea of packaging, shipping, and selling something we can get for free in our homes. While paperboard isn’t made from petroleum, it still takes energy (usually from coal and oil) to package, ship, and dispose of the box—thousands of times more than just turning on the tap. And only about 50% of states in the U.S. have access to carton recycling, meaning many (if not most) of those boxes will end up in landfills. Based on that, boxed water only looks better than one thing: bottled water. Which isn’t a high bar to clear.

While I admire their pluck and positive intentions—20% of profits is an admirable benchmark, even for a company not yet turning a profit—I have to wonder if this really is, as they claim, ‘a step in the right direction.’ Boxed Water Is Better describe themselves as an “ever growing and adapting project…committed to constantly exploring new technology to lessen the impact of the portable water market.” So maybe down the road they’ll invent a solution that’s better than just ‘less bad’. But as Nau’s Grant For Change gets underway, it’s interesting to ponder the limits of innovation and design in solving problems of manufactured demand. Perhaps sometimes, the best solution isn’t to change the package, but to change ourselves.

So what do you think about Boxed Water? Step in the right direction? Or, as the Seven Sins of Greenwashing would put it, just a ‘lesser evil?’