I have been legally blind since the third grade.
I remember a fateful day in Spanish class when the teacher pointed out with her commanding, thick accent that I couldn’t see the board. I went home and broke down in tears, disgusted at myself, for bad vision was something I was too young to understand. It was like having the bubonic plague.
All of you out there with glasses and contacts remember the day when you could actually see. You didn’t even know what you’d been missing. One day the trees were giant green blobs and the next day there were leaves! There were delicate, detailed, beautiful masses of individual leaves that once made up a prehistoric pile of mush. I could read every white board and I was never afraid to raise my hand in Spanish class again.
Via: tumblr
Discovering your blindness isn’t the end of the struggle. There are glasses to buy, doctors to visit, prescriptions to update and contacts to order. You’ll never wake up in the morning and see the world for what it really is, unless you’ve passed out in your contacts. And there’s nothing worse in this world than dry, slept-in contacts.
Before Warby Parker, a glasses company open since 2010, it was impossible to find a quality, cheap, nice lookin’ pair of specs. Prescription lenses alone were worth a couple hundred dollars, and like most small, important objects, glasses are easy to lose and even easier to break. With one click, you can have five pairs of glasses shipped to your house for free, and after the almost impossible choice of deciding your favorite, a new pair is yours for only $95. Warby Parker brought style, comfort, ease and affordable prices to the blind market. But its business ventures go beyond providing just a pleasant experience for their customers (blind or not blind). Warby Parker is just one example of the for-profit, socially conscious businesses working to change the economic world as we know it.
Similar to Tom’s shoes, glasses are donated to the developing world for every pair purchased through a partnership with a nonprofit called VisionSpring. Their charity, however, isn’t just a project that they include on the side; it defines their entire business. This phenomenon is called a benefit corporation. A regular corporation can abandon its social practices when the economic side is suffering. A benefit corporation suffers the consequences of lawsuits for not sticking to its social mission, just as it bears the weight of lawsuit for monetary wrongdoing by its directors. In a traditional corporation, the board of directors must solely make money to satisfy its shareholders. A benefit corporation provides the lawful agreement that the business has two motives, which takes the pressure off companies to succeed, succeed, succeed.
Neil Blumenthal, a co-founder of Warby Parker, told the New Yorker: “We wanted to build a business that could make profits. But we also wanted a business that did good in the world.” B corps are attractive to the young workforce — they offer the societal mission of nonprofits, but they exist in our self-motivateded, invisible hand economy. They are attractive to investors, as we see with Warby Parker’s booming popularity and expansion, along with other large companies such as Patagonia and Etsy.
We are finally figuring out how to incorporate societal missions in a cutthroat, moneymaking world. As young adults, it’s up to us to encourage these practices by working for B corporations, or, even better, founding our own.
