 to the Matrix of Peace show brought to you by Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Phyllis Blyse, and the CEO of Peedies Through Commerce. Our guest today is Don Larson. He's the founder of the Sunshine Nut Company, calling in from corporate headquarters in Moatsambique. We are discussing part two of the show called Business Co-Creating Peace in Africa. Using the Sunshine Business Model Developed by Don, Aloha Don. Buon Nite. Oh, I love hearing that. Yeah. Now, it's 12 o'clock at night. Well, it's actually in the morning. Use that, say, bondia, but that's for when the sun is shining. So, Buon Nite is also a greeting. Okay. That's from Moatsambique. I've met very few people who've ever heard the language of Moatsambique. So, thank you for bringing that to us and for bringing in this information about the model. I think what we'll do to start is we're going to pick up from where the first show ended on this topic and that show dropped on March 2nd, 2024. We will review the first part of the video about your work there and we'll show it right now. It's possible to create a premium food product and transform lives and communities at the same time. We're doing it every day with cashews here in Mozambique. I'm Don Larson, founder and CEO of the Sunshine Nut Company. And I'm Terry Larson, director of Social Impact. The cashew deteriorates from the moment that it's taken out of its shell. Most cashews, they sit around for three to six months unroasted getting stale. We roast within three weeks because we're right here in Africa where they're grown. I came to Africa in 2004 as the director of cocoa operations for the Hershey Company. I was one of the largest cocoa buyers in the world and was surprised at the extreme poverty of the African farming communities. So many international companies benefit from the resources of Africa while the people of Africa remain in poverty. In 2011, we sold everything and moved to Mozambique to create the Sunshine Nut Company. The Sunshine Approach is a sustainable business model that brings lasting transformation. Wow. And how many years ago has that been now, Don? 13 years ago that we moved here. Yeah, it's been 13 interesting years, challenging years, but also very rewarding. Well, we're going to frame that rewarding work within the context of the Matrix-of-Peace Whole Systems model, which is a model of society. It's a simple Venn diagram, but it, like all simple diagrams, it can reveal a lot of complex relationships, which is what this one does. And just as a bit of a refresher for the audience, the model, the outside three sectors of the model are the traditional three sectors of society, the public, private, and civil society sectors. So you can see them now when what we call they are in sector silo mode. And when you ended your introduction of the Sunshine Approach in the video, you said when you came to Africa or you came to Mozambique, there was a lot of poverty, which was what brought you there. And the model when we show those three sectors visually, not intersecting, but three separate circles, that's a paradigm view of a society not working with prosperity or justice or sustainability. It takes all three sectors working intersectionally to co-produce those outcome, which the Venn diagram, if we go back to the first, the second slide, we can see how when they come together intersectionally, the public sector, when it's supporting the private sector, you co-create prosperity. When the public sector is being watched dog by the civil society sector, it can create justice rather than just laws. And when the private sector is being watched dog by the civil society sector, it can co-create long-term sustainability. The model goes on to show that it takes all three of those outcomes, prosperity, justice, and sustainability to co-create what shows up as the supra intersection of those three, and that's peace or long-term societal peace. So what we want to do is sort of work from the non-intersectionality version of the model when all three sectors are working in what we call sector silo mode. And some of the conditions that keep a society in sector silo mode show up in our slide four. And those practices have to do with a private sector, dog eat dog, business cultures might makes right, paying bribes, you've got a public sector that rules by fiat, not law, and limited human rights and civil rights, corruption and bribery. And in the civil society sector, you have almost no operating civil institutions. Religions can be exclusive. There aren't really well-operated health or service benefit programs. And civil society's really in a survival mode. They're not coming together after their day job and supporting each other. They're just existing. Those are practices that we talk about in the matrix of peace and in the new book coming out on the model. In the next slide, we can see the consciousness conditions that drive those kinds of practices. Largely, this is the work of Richard Barrett in the main. And he has identified fear, fear, fear, fear of I am not enough, fear of I am not loved enough, fear to preserve. That's in the civil society sector. In the public sector, you have fear of not being able to preserve status, power or control. And in the private sector, you have the fears driving the group feeling it does not have enough, in which case it moves into control, domination, caution, greed. So we have these conditions of well articulated in the book on the society building model, the matrix of peace. Would you share with us some of those conditions that you walked into? We have a slide six and seven. Don, take us through some of the conditions that you walked into when you first got to Mozambique. Yeah, well, you know, I think that the key to this is really the commerce brings, I'll say that the engine is the country. Commerce and business brings the oil to make it run smooth. Without commerce and without incoming cash and the ability to make everything run, including the civil society, the public sector and the private sector, it's a country of chaos in many ways. And fear strikes, one of the things as a change management expert, one of the things that was striking as we entered into Mozambique is the realization that people have set ways to survive. And each area, these set ways are there. And when you try and change that, it strikes fear. And it also strikes the desire to keep things of the way they are, until you can demonstrate a better way and a better model. And that better way is through commerce. And so what we came up with, if you look at slide six, the typical things that we addressed were exploitation, heavy exploitation. They say that a corrupt government is usually funded because there's a corrupt businesses, you know? And so they've learned a way to survive by going along. So the exploitation, the corruption, when we go into the villages, it'd be malnutrition, where people are dying for lack of a $5 malaria pill, just inadequate healthcare. The education deficiencies, the curriculum's good. We do a lot of work with the teaching groups, but there's no money, there's no supplies, there's no resources, there's no real ability to pay the teachers well. There's lack of opportunities. The government said that 80% of the country is involved in agriculture. Yet 99.9%, they say, is subsistence farming of the agriculture activities. So that means pretty much the entire population is growing food to survive. Then you have the moral decay and the abandonment. We have, part of our business model is to take care of orphans. And it's a big passion of ours to, they've said that there are 2 million orphans in Mozambique, so it's like 8% of the population. So it's a major problem here. If I, I didn't mean to cut you off, but I wanna point out that you were the lead at Hershey Foods for buying the largest amount of cocoa in the world. Yeah. That's a business. Yeah. And what attracted you to Mozambique was this combination of using business as a force for good to change the conditions that alarmed you on the ground. So I just wanna point out the way John Mackey talks as well, he's the co-founder of our nonprofit Peace Through Commerce. He's the co-founder of Whole Foods Market. And it was his belief that unless you treat your stakeholders just as, which includes the shareholder, but other stakeholders are your customers, are your suppliers, are your team members, your employees, so that's three more stakeholders in addition to the shareholder. And then fifthly, there is the business, community, air, water, and environment. So if you were to put chairs around a boardroom table, you would have a chair there for the environment and a chair for the community, which are co-opted and providing you pretty much free, especially in Africa, the resources and sources that you draw upon just to be there. And you are articulating and seeing those invisible board members for many businesses. And then some are innocently not seeing those representations or those stakeholders in the businesses we all start around the world. You were seeing what John Mackie saw and other visionaries that there is a multi-stakeholder approach to doing business. And you began it right away. And unless they're doing well, you won't do well. Hershey is a good example of that if I can share. I was put on the cocoa desk. I was their turnaround guy, their change agent, the ones that went into the messes to straighten them out. Well, the Hershey brand was being accused of child slavery in the cocoa market and even slavery and all these things where we didn't have anyone on the ground. We bought off of houses that did the cocoa collection and did those types of things. So sitting at the table was not the farmers. And so what we've done here in Mozambique, now here's the thing, Hershey is owned by an orphanage. The Milton Hershey fund 100 years ago, they've taken care of probably hundreds of thousands of orphans. People don't know that, that they're owned by an orphanage, literally. The controlling interest is the Milton Hershey school. My father-in-law was a graduate of that school. And that's what really excited me about being part of a wonderful organization. Well, what we did and what I decided to do is take this concept of taking care of the employees, taking care of the farming communities and taking care of the orphan population and bring that to Africa. Milton Hershey used to take care of the farming communities with the farmers, the milk farmers and then the sugar farmers in Cuba. What we do is we've taken that and we have the model that takes care of all three of those. And it's very difficult to go down to this subsistence farmer level and do it effectively. It's just a rot with problems. So how did you accept- But that's where the real rewards come. Right, so you had to have some visits with them and gain their trust. I think you've got a slide for us showing you. Yeah, I think that's like seven. So did you say how many? There were like 100,000 people unemployed when you were gathering people around to talk to you? Well, no, this is the northern area where there's an Islamic insurgency for the last seven years and over a million people have been displaced and over 4,000 people have been killed. And so we were perched by the government and some large companies to come up and implement our model to bring peace through prosperity, okay? And people just want a job and there are no jobs. So what we did is we specifically designed the model to have a branded product in the stores, the Sunshine Nut Company brand and for this case it's cashiers because Mozambique is known for their cashiers. They have a long history of being the king of cashiers but Civil War decimated their industry 30, 40 years ago. We are now in those conflict regions and we were meeting with the displaced people there. The people camps, there's 5,000 per camp over a million displaced. So there's a lot of camps but we were learning from them about their communities and would this model work and we presented the model. And so for the last two years we've been in these conflict regions working with five villages in total. In implementing this program where it's a community farm and it's a village concept in each community. So I'm imagining those conversations and I wanna do what in the law we call a practice note. So I wanna bring up slide eight. And to keep the narrative, we have two narratives. One is how you're implementing this on the ground and the other narrative in this show is how this model is diagramming what's going on on the ground so that we can like look through modeling, mimicking what's going on on the ground and then run with the model and then come back to the ground on the ground. So what the model is showing right now is when you're talking to the people about what's right about helping each other about getting gainfully employed where you care about their education. You just talked about it, their education, their welfare, their housing, their job security. Those, you're introducing values which in our model we say unite people. You have to talk too much yet about how you manage the beliefs that also can divide. But you obviously did. So in a modeling standpoint when you brought in shared, and let's go to the next slide, the kind of values that I'm talking about that bring people into the intersections are self-awareness, love, tolerance, honoring the group and I, we, those are the values that I've probably were being expressed in your conversations. So let me, I can see you wanna jump in. We can have you jump in now. How did this conversation go or maybe we can get into your engagement in slide 10? Yeah. So the interesting part is they didn't trust anyone. The government doesn't trust business. The people don't trust business because there's generations of, first there's no jobs, but those who do, there's a lot of exploitation and there's a lot of bullying. So then comes in people that wanna help and there's a lot of groups that wanna help. So what we had to do was overcome the trust issues, but also, there's a whole history of dependency of these people and entitlement, getting handouts. And so the key is you've got to transition them to the things that will be good for them, which is a stable job, dignity in their job, unity with the people that you're working for. The concept of hard work and for providing the feeling of earning a paycheck, all of these are new concepts that we are overcoming. And it's what people want. What I found with all of the people that we talked to, those who were like looking for the best deal, well, we exited. We were looking for people who motivated in villages that were motivated to do what was necessary to pull them out of abject poverty for good. And what business does, it provides the means for them to do it on their own. And it's very important for them to do it on their own. Let's look at yours. We were looking and we're gonna, I wish we had two hours here. We were looking at some of those conversations in the last slide. You could maybe talk about what manifested, what grew out of these conversations. You're showing the Sunshine family in slide seven and how that model looks. Yeah, so these conversations, this is the displaced camps. So those models were really trying to identify what communities were ready. And then we went to the community. So slide seven is the communities that we want to talk to. If you can bring up slide seven. So seven is where we're discussing with the communities. It just so happened that we had, I had to have soldier escorts and everything. There's soldiers on all four corners of the building watching for ambushes. You know, this is a hostile territory. But the look, we were initially going to do one community only. The look in the people's eyes, the desire to do something productive with their lives, to be given an opportunity, be given dignity, just a job, you know. We expanded the role, they expanded the number of communities. And so now we've got these community farms going into a lot of these different communities in the area. And we asked for 300 hectares, not to be put in our name, but for the community to allocate this land so that we can give two hectares to each family. And those two hectares, we supply about 500 cashew trees to each family for free. So one time that giving something for free is important, including the water wells and, you know, other things. But that really brings about the ability to produce income. And for each family, the average for a subsistence farmer in Mozambique, I've been told is about $33 per year of income. We're gonna bring them close to $5,000 a year in income, which is twice the monthly living wage for a Mozambican family. And that is going to have significant transformation. And in our model, we would call that creating stakeholders out of each one of them. So they're holding the raw resources in the trees and the cashews. And then you are their partner in getting them to market, which they could never do without you. Let's take a look. We've got about five minutes. Let's look at the sunshine families. Is there something in this slide you wanted to talk about? Yeah, well, so our company, our mission is really a combination of for-profit and non-profit because the for-profit does the actual interaction in the marketplace. You know, we've been in Whole Foods. They were our first customer. One of the owners came, and it wasn't John Mackie, but came to discover us about 12 years ago. Nice. 10 years ago, 2014, we entered Whole Foods. But that was the catalyst to us starting to take off and being able to sell the product. When we sell the product, we donate 90% of the distributed profits. Now, we take care of the company with the cash needs and everything. But that goes to do philanthropic work in the communities. And the villages project with the community farms and the village factories is under the Sunshine Villages Project. Our orphan care, where we have eight homes, over 30 children now that we've signed for. So hold your thought. I want to shift down to slide 13. We can start showing some of these outcomes. Yeah. Your homes, your employment. Yeah, so the Villages Project is where we do the community farms with each family. This woman that you see in the picture, she planted 500 trees on her own. She has about 50 trees a day, but she just took off with wanting to spend for herself and provide for herself. The employment project, we have a top-notch factor. I've managed a lot of different factories for different companies, including Hershey. And I've never had a better group of employees more dedicated than our group in the middle there. And then on the left is our Sunshine children living in the Sunshine homes, where we put Mozambican children that have been in desperate circumstances, orphans, and we pair up a woman that's also vulnerable with four to six orphans in a Mozambican house, in a Mozambican community, raised in a Mozambican culture, and we put them through private school and they're just blossoming and flourishing. And your wife, Terri, is involved in the education too, right? And then those services, I want to bring in Terri. Yeah, so Terri runs the foundation really. I do the community farms and the village factories. She runs the orphan care and brings in teams and does the community work. She's out in the villages every day, but yeah, it's been very exciting work for us. Very rewarding as well. Well, and what I want to do, let's just do a quick look to state, to go back to our other story, which is how we modeled this work using the matrix of peace. And this tool can be so valuable to people in education and in philanthropy and in business. So let's look at slide 14. So as I said at the opening, we need all three intersections, prosperity, sustainability, and justice. So talk a minute, just a little bit, if you want, about the prosperity intersection and what Sunshine Approach does to bring the private sector and the public sector together in co-creating those outcomes. The civil society does too, but the primary practices are happening in those two outside sectors, private and public. Yeah, well, obviously when you come in, there were a lot of people asking for a lot of things and there's corruption and all. What I found though at a higher level, they did not want that, but people through fear need to provide for themselves. And so they have an established way of taking care of their families. And so we were not part of that. And you have to go through, there's a lot of scars that you don't see on my body, from trying to go through this, but you have to go through and do things honestly, ethically, for all of the reasons of making the model work. And so what you do is you establish a new way. Someone's got to show a better way and it can be painful, but that's where when it breaks through, then many other companies can follow and you start getting an understanding of how there's a better way, there's a more fruitful way and then more, which ultimately lends itself to a much more peaceful way. Well, and I'm gonna have to leave it there for your contributions. Let's just show briefly slide 16. The audience can see that through the work of the sunshine net approach, we can have an intersectionality society in Mozambique versus a lot of developing Africa on the right side of the model, is still in what we call outside sector mode. And with that, I'll have to leave it there. Please go back, stop the film, take a harder look at each of those slides and turn into this show. You've been watching The Matrix of Peace at Think Tech, Hawaii. I'm your host, Phyllis Bleece, and the CEO of Peace Through Commerce. We've been discussing with Don Larson, the topic of business co-creating peace in Africa using the Sunshine Business Model. Mahalo Don for joining us, and Mahalo to our viewers for tuning in. Aloha. If you liked this show, why don't you give us a like or subscribe to our channel? Thanks so much.