The Sacramento Bee newspaper published an article on December 19th about “Peace Entrepreneurs”, written by Gilbert Chan. (Side note: I looked for the article online to link to and found the Sac Bee’s “fast and free” registration to be cumbersome and requesting too much information. If you’d like to attempt the process, go to Sacbee.com and search for “peace entrepreneur”.)

The article pointed to FLOW and an initiative called “Peace Through Commerce“. The general theme of the article can be summed up by the quote from Toni Maloney, co-founder of Business Council for Peace , “Our theory is more jobs, less violence.” Leaders of all the organizations mentioned in the article (and this post) are seeing the pattern that areas with more commerce are more stable. They are reaching out across borders to lend their entrepreneurial expertise to small businesses in other countries.

I’m thrilled by these efforts because I feel they helping create alternatives to global mono-culture and multi-national culture stripping. Would you rather learn how to run your own business or get a job at a sweatshop in China?

If you are in the Bay Area (San Francisco area in California), you might want to check out a FLOW gathering coming up on January 18, 2007 in San Francisco.