This Center is Called the MO Center. It contains resources for fighting hunger of the whole person in earth-friendly ways. It is designed to enable you to develop your own Modus Operandi, your own Mode of Operation, or to put it in our Hunger Fighters' context, your own Marching Orders for joining in this cause.

A little history on Hunger Fighters will help explain the selection of resources. When we were creating Hunger Fighters the thinking initially was that we wanted to do a successful dotcom -that could meet a social need and make money.to be a for profit social enterprise.achieving a social good and making money. (These are not necessarily mutually exclusive, it just means you measure additional factors in addition to making profit and creating jobs and providing quality products and service) The model called for providing an egrocer locator which would find who delivers groceries in your area. This was summer of 99. Peapod was surviving. Home Grocer was about to do an IPO and WebVan seemed to have no trouble raising capital. Albertsons was piloting grocery delivery as was Safeway. It looked like the egrocer industry was about to flourish. The model was to charge the egrocers for us helping them grow their industry by driving customers to them and we would get a percentage of the sale. We would then donate a percentage to America's Second Harvest. At that point we were GroceriesEtcDelivered.com working out our own pilot. While the egrocer industry was falling apart by early 2001, we were hearing about "sustainability", triple bottom line, and environmental issues. There were pleas to save the rainforest and stop global warming. The more we learned about the issues the more we realized we wanted to be a Triple Bottom Line dot com. That is we wanted to do business with the long term in mind and being mindful of all the stakeholders.

Triple bottom line refers to being concerned about people, the planet and profits/revenue. It means looking at a broader definition of shareholder and stakeholder than organizations have tended to use. It means consciously being responsible to future generations by leaving the planet and environment in as good or better shape as a result of your enterprise doing what it does. It means being concerned about the people and community internal and external to the organization. It means increasing some revenue or profit earning activities if you are a not for profit or governmental unit (e.g., the US Post Office) and increasing your measurement of the people and social good activities if you are a for profit entity. For all it means including environmental/planet enhancement measures as indicators of success. ( For a quick primer on the Triple Bottom Line, http://www.rolltronics.com/ppl/tbl/html and http://www.rolltronics.com/ppl/rtc.sustain.html. Also, the MO Section's Triple Bottom Line has many resources.)

To really operationalize that would mean that in the process of making money we wanted to help to cure hunger and make the earth and its people better off as a result of our having been in business. When we looked at whether this should be a for profit or not for profit form of organization, we chose the for-profit since we wanted to champion triple bottom line organizations. We choose to pay taxes (and hope to have toJ) for the replenishment of the social capital we draw on in the process of using the infra structure to do business. It would be a bit more difficult encouraging a for-profit to "go Triple" if we ourselves could not do it successfully.

We subsequently changed to an advertising model to support the mission of helping cure hunger. Some revenue could come from recommending related services but most would come from sponsors and advertisers who are in tune with the mission and who want to reach like-minded people with the promotion messages. We realized three aspects about helping cure hunger. It was a broader concept than just physical hunger thus the "hunger of the whole person". Helping cure hunger is a long run concept. There will be some actions that can be taken today to alleviate immediate physical hunger. Thus the Donation Center for clicking daily to donate free food. For helping cure hunger of the whole person in the long run, it became clear that promoting triple bottom line entities would have the greatest results. And, if we were going to be promoting triple bottom line organization, we would enjoy the challenge of figuring out how to operationalize it for ourselves. As more organizations of all types operate with the triple bottom line, globally, the greater the chance to cure hunger in the long run.for ourselves and for future generations.

You will notice on the Directory for the MO Center that Triple Bottom Line and Social Enterprise are in the same section. We believe that some for-profit and not-for profit social enterprises could be encouraged to also take a look at the third bottom line. They are probably operating with three now but do not officially measure the third.

We hope you will find the MO Center useful to yourself for ideas on fighting your own hunger and for helping your own organization become more of a triple bottom line organization. If you have not already joined the free membership, please do. The site is able to recognize you by name and keep track of how many cups of free food you are responsible for donating. That will be displayed on your site.

For more information on triple bottom line organizations and potential benefits, check out the Model Organization Section in the MO Center. Also the Nominate an Organization information gives examples of activities that might indicate a triple bottom line organization. And, if you know about such a governmental, educational, for-profit or not-for-profit organization that should be nominated, please do so.