By Diana Brement, Jewish Sound Columnist
Steve Schwartz initially emailed me to say he’s “a Member of the Tribe who has found himself living and working with plenty of different tribes.” He might be referring to moving around a lot in the Midwest as a child before his family settled in Syracuse, N.Y., but he might also mean his work as co-founder and director of external relations for the nonprofit Upaya Social Ventures.
“Not all your neighbors are going to be just like you, and that’s a good thing,” is the message he got from his dad, who is from Ohio, and his mom, who spent the majority of her childhood in northern Mississippi. “That advice has had a lot to do with the course my life took.”
Steve and his wife Jaren met as graduate students at Boston University, where they were getting master’s degrees in international relations. They wound up working in New York, Steve in public relations for private equity and hedge funds and Jaren at UNICEF headquarters. When Jaren was advised to get some international experience, she signed up for the Peace Corps. Unbeknownst to her, though, Steve had just bought an engagement ring. And so the newly engaged couple was off to West Africa.
“It was a great opportunity to expand horizons,” says Steve of working in a small town in Benin, where he served as a business adviser to local farmers and tradesmen. Having trained when Benin was a Communist country under Soviet influence, they didn’t “have a sense of how to turn [their work] into a true business.”
He also got his first microfinance experience there with a group of women who started a savings and loan association. “It started as a hobby…a fun thing that happened every Tuesday morning,” he says, and turned into a viable operation.
Steve then went to do public affairs work for the non-profit Unitus (which has since folded), where he met Sachi Shenoy and Sriram Gutta. “They were working on something called the Ultra Poor Initiative, a program that truly understood the nuance of poverty,” notes Steve.
India has 400 million “ultra-poor” citizens, people too poor to be eligible for microfinance. Mostly unskilled, they work primarily as day laborers in construction or agriculture.
When Unitus closed its doors, Sachi approached Steve about starting a new organization with Sriram that would focus on helping the ultra-poor. With teams in Seattle and India, Upaya has built “six businesses that are collectively employing 1,200 people in northern India…one of the poorest areas in the world,” through its LiftUP Project, says Steve.
One of their most successful ventures is Tamul Plates, which employs over 500 people in the Northeast state of Assam. A network of affiliated groups in this tribal region makes disposable plates and bowls from palm leaves (see more at www.upayasv.org). Caterers at Benaroya or McCaw Halls often use plates like these, which are compostable and chemical free, yet hold hot liquid for hours.
When he’s not working — and Steve has long days necessitated by the time difference between here and India — he and Jaren are “pretty avid sailors” who keep a boat at Portage Bay. They try to get out on Lake Washington as much as possible and hope to train their seven-month-old Newfoundland puppy to go out on the boat, too. (If you’re wondering, the dog already weighs 100 pounds — on his way to about 175 — and the owners drive a small sedan.)
• • •
“People continually struggle with their energy their brains and their sleep,” says Sondra Kornblatt.
We last spoke when she published her “Restful Insomnia” book (March 12, 2010). Now she’s left her day job in corporate communications at Group Health to pursue this passion full time. “I wanted to work on work I liked,” she says, and with her two kids in college she had more time and flexibility.
From her office in a co-working space, which provides companionship and structure, she’s creating webinars and seminars at www.restfulinsomnia.com, and offering individual coaching.
“There are five obstacles to restful nights,” that are the focus of her instruction, she says. Even when you can’t sleep, there are ways to rest and feel refreshed in the morning. While she generally sleeps well now, Sondra says her interest developed about 10 years ago when she had “intense insomnia for about a year” and conventional solutions didn’t help.
Sondra recently decided to take up ukulele. Making music, she says, uses “a different part of my brain.” She’s also a yoga enthusiast and she and Stacy Lawson will present a two-hour workshop on yoga and insomnia on Nov. 16 at Red Square Yoga in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood.
• • •
Short Takes: Cameron Levin, former JTNews ad sales rep, designer for Butch Blum, and one of last year’s Five Women to Watch, has joined the advisory board for the University of Washington’s new Fashion Development program.