Clearly you have not been walking enough because breast cancer is still with us. Maybe you should try walking on your hands and knees to appease the god of breasts.
Posted on 08/02/2013 1:03:16 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Vivienne Harr has already been garnering headlines for selling lemonade for 365 consecutive days – including on Day 173 at New York City’s Times Square – and raising exactly $101,320 that she donated to a nonprofit dedicated to ending child slavery.
But now, the 9-year-old girl from Marin County’s Fairfax, a 40-minute drive from San Francisco, is stepping up her game, again, if that’s even possible.
Last month, she began rolling out her mother’s recipe for organic, Fair Trade, “tunnel pasteurized” lemonade, bottled in Michigan and shipped to 70 mostly locally owned, organic shops in California and Oregon. On Friday, her commercially available lemonade debuted at Woodlands Market in Kentfield.
“I love telling people about my story,” Vivienne told NBC Bay Area on Friday. “I love selling lemonade.”
Among the many things that set Vivienne’s lemonade apart (notwithstanding that it was created after she sold lemonade for an entire year without taking a day off starting last June, that she donates the profits to charity, and that it is now a commercial product sold at stores) is that customers are now being ask to pay what they want for the bottles of pink juice.
“I ask people to give what’s in their hearts,” she said.
There have been sporadic “pay what you want” commercial enterprises throughout the country, including the now-defunct Panera Bread’s turkey chili venture to raise food insecurity awareness that has now fizzled out.
But Ayelet Gneezy, an expert in “pay what you want” studies at the University of California, San Diego said what Vivienne is doing is very unusual.
“I’ve never heard of this before,” Gneezy said. “It’s very impressive.
Gneezy, and Leif Nelson, her colleague at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, found that overall, the majority of people will choose not to buy something if it is a pay-what-you-want pricetag. But those who do choose to do so, will pay more than the asking price.
Since Tuesday, when Molsberry Market's in Sonoma began selling Vivienne’s lemonade, owner Joe Molsberry said that about 40 of 100 cases have sold. Some people paid $20 a case and others paid $50. The suggested donation is $2.99 a bottle. What's amazing though, he said, is that newcomers are visiting the story just because they've heard about Vivienne's story.
And this is a story that rises far above sales of lemonade and what customers will pay for it. It’s about the girl – and the family – behind the sweet-tasting liquid.
Vivienne, soon to be a fourth grader at Cascade Canyon Elementary School, and her family were visiting Sonoma last May when the young girl saw the book “Slavery” by Lisa Kristine, a journalist who photographs slaves across the world.
An image of two Nepalese boys with giant rocks strapped to their heads grabbed Vivienne’s attention, and she wanted to do something about ending their plight. “Maybe we could sell lemonade?” was the simple question Vivienne asked her parents, Alex, a stay-at-home mom, and her father, Eric, a triathlete, author and founder of Resonate Social, a successful digital marketing.
They didn't say no.
“We’re sort of this out-of-the-box family,” Harr said. “We didn’t discount it. We went all in.”
Which meant that for 365 days starting in June 2012, the family – including now-3-year-old Turner – took to the streets – once, even flying to New York after an invitation from Mayor Michael Bloomberg – to sell lemonade. It was Vivienne’s idea to have people pay “what was in their hearts” because, she says, “it’s a giveness, not a business.”
Vivienne gave the first $101,320 to Not for Sale, a Half Moon Bay nonprofit that tries to eradicate child slavery, and other smaller donations to the Nepal Youth Foundation, Free the Slaves, LeTot Center in Dallas, United Way, and the Mayor’s Fund in NYC for the victims of Hurricane Sandy.
The family’s promise is that when they start to make a profit from the bottled lemonade, half will go to five charities, and the other half will go toward salaries and production costs. Harr said he was able to secure about $800,000 in investor funding to launch the company this summer.
Harr since sold his company and has become the CEO of Make a Stand Lemon-aid, and the full-time business partner of his daughter – a “fiercely compassionate” girl who cried when bees drowned when she was little. He said the family isn’t particularly devout or religious, though they do occasionally attend church, but that they do now feel that their lemonade business is sort of divinely inspired, or at least, that this was their fate.
As for now, Vivienne is having a typical summer, playing with her brother, Barbie’s, and of course, drinking lots of lemonade.
“It’s low in sugar, it tastes so good,” she said. “I drink it all the time.”
IF YOU'RE INTERESTED: Half of all profits from your purchase go to five carefully-vetted, hand-selected organizations that lead the way in eradicating child slavery: Free the Slaves, UNICEF, Nepal Youth Foundation, the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labor–and an organization that focuses on this issue here in the United States: GEMS: Girls Educational & Mentoring Services. To learn more, click on makeastand.com.
‘cried when bees drowned’
She should be around when a bee hive gets dumped on the ground and the bees come out pis*** off.
A few drowning after that will be no big deal.
Use guys is too cynical. Do you know that you can end breast cancer by paying $25-50 to participate in a “Walk to End Breast Cancer” in your area?
I’m waiting for Ferrari to make the same offer.......
Unfortunately since the money is going through organizations like UNICEF (part of the United Nations) it will be ineffective and could even be used to PAY for child prostitutes. Missionaries are more likely to actually accomplish something in rescuing children from slavery whether sexual or otherwise.
Also, the left (which for the most part controls the U.N.) may classify reasonable child labor practices as child slavery. In some poor countries children must work in order for families to survive.
Clearly you have not been walking enough because breast cancer is still with us. Maybe you should try walking on your hands and knees to appease the god of breasts.
Those walks are less attended since Komen decided to fund Planned Parenthood
So she's selling lemonade to stamp out Islam?
They ain't got time for that. There's no money to be made off of ending slavery elsewhere in the world today. Reparations mean a settlement check in "your" pocket.
Even the newspapers don’t know how to make a noun plural -
playing with her Barbies (dolls) not Barbie’s.
And by buying anything in breast cancer pink.
honestly stories like this warms your heart.. and maybe iv become to cynical.. but how many actual slaves have been freed by her 100k ?
“Her cute little smile will disappear as soon as she figures out about the real world :( “
Aint that the truth...
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