The Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders at Stanford University, a series for aspiring students and founders at Stanford, interviewed Sharon Prince, CEO and Founder of Grace Farms on April 10, 2024. Ravi Belani, a lecturer in the Management Science and Engineering Department at Stanford, and the Director of Alchemist Accelerator for Enterprise Startups, kicked off the Spring quarter of the series with Prince – “a true catalyst for change.”
Since opening, Grace Farms has garnered numerous prestigious awards for contribution to architecture, environmental sustainability, and social good, including the AIA National 2017 Architecture Honor Award, and the Mies Crown Hall America’s Prize. Prince has also co-founded Grace Farms Teas & Coffee, which offers coffees and teas that demonstrate what the foundation advocates for, ethical, and sustainable supply chains. And 100% of the profits supports the Design for Freedom movement, to eliminate forced labor from the building materials supply chain, and the construction industry.
In recognition of Prince’s impactful work, Fast Company has named her to its list of the Most Creative People in Business 2022, for cleaning up construction, and the AIA New York & Center for Architecture recognized her for the New York City Visionary Award. The series is brought to the public by STVP, the Stanford Engineering Entrepreneurship Center, and BASIS, the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students.
Below are excerpts from the full interview that was released on April 17, 2024. The video clips have been slightly edited for clarity.
Being sustainable takes more effort and it actually cost more quite often. So, people ask me, “Is this going to cost more?” “Is this going to cost more now that I have to go through this process to be ethically sourced?” And in my head, I was thinking, “That is crazy,” because I’m not going to accept subsidizing our ROIs with slavery. So that’s why I was saying, “Oh look, we’re subsidizing our ROIs with slavery.” And the response was, “Okay.”
“I’m not going to accept subsidizing our ROIs with slavery.”
So, in terms of trying to tell you, or explain how to create a movement. In this case, it is also about creating a succinct language that can help to be adopted more broadly. So instead, I converted that thinking and instead of saying “It’s going to cost more, are we willing to accept the slavery discount? I’m not willing to do that. So, I want to show you the key factor here, when we say, “Challenging really fair market value.” Fair market value is not fair, it’s not the current price if it’s subsidized with forced labor.
Another way to think about it, is that if the fair market value with fair labor is here, and the market price is here without inspection, that delta is the slavery discount.
So, that’s a term that is starting to be adopted. I proposed that more broadly about a year ago, and now the good news of the movement it is starting to be adopted.
We’re taking on the entire construction sector, and creating this radical paradigm shift, to remove forced child labor from the building materials supply chain.
You know, it takes a whole industry to become a part of that, and that’s what we did. The built environment does have a relationship to nature and people, and the question that brought people around the table, is, “Is your building ethically sourced, forced-labor free, as well as sustainably designed?” That was a question I asked at the end of 2017, beginning of 2018, to get people onboard, and the answer is, “We don’t know.” If you look around here, you don’t know where these materials are made from. Unlike even clothing, you might not know who, but you know the origin on a piece of clothing. But you don’t know, and these materials are highly fraught. So, the one thing to note is, with construction, you think about labor, but it’s mainly on the job site.
“The whole sector has been given a labor-transparency pass, on the material procurement side, and half of the cost of a building is the material procurement.”
The whole sector has been given a labor-transparency pass, on the material procurement side, and half of the cost of a building is the material procurement. So, construction is the largest industrialized industry at risk of forced and child-labor. It’s also the most egregious violator of carbon emissions at 37%, and they do go together, and we can talk about that another time.
But the size of the industry, nearly $14 trillion in spending globally. There are new numbers that just came out of estimates of the illicit profits that are being earned by subsidizing with forced labor, $236 billion, of which, that’s on modern-slavery, of which $63 billion is derived from forced labor. At that time, there was no list of materials, and this is literally only five, six years ago. At the beginning, around 2018, we issued that [list].
The most important thing is people, not the numbers: there’s an estimated 28 million people in forced-labor conditions around the world, and likely more. And it’s been escalating. The last estimate that was revealed was 25 million five years ago. It’s not decreasing, even with more knowledge about supply chains and forced labor.
Here’s that list of [at-risk] materials. Some of them have longstanding histories of forced labor: rubber, glass, fiber, textiles, steel, electronics, bricks. Think about it. It’s crazy. Timber, copper, stone, iron, minerals, and polysilicon. And we’re not inspecting our supply chain. Now, solar panels, it’s fraught.
Solar panels are not sustainable, if they’re subsidized with forced labor, and made with that. So, I know you’re working on projects, this is a very important concept, because 35-45% of all the polysilicon in the world is being sourced from the [Uygur Autonomous Region] of China, but that’s not the only at-risk material. You have steel, copper, aluminum, glass. Glass, which I described before, there are no third-party audited certifications for glass that include fair labor. There are for many others that we put in our [Design for Freedom] Toolkit. So now, we also see some low-hanging fruit, right? I said first food is called to be accountable, then clothing, next is shelter. Clothing has already been accountable, and there are certain transparency certifications that’ve been put into play.
There’s more transparency in that sector. So, now we’re looking to take that sector, and that accountability, and convert that into interiors. So, curtains, chairs, carpet, right? Just in textiles alone, from the garment industry we can convert, and we’re doing that.
From the very get-go, the urgency of this situation really made me think about having the full ecosystem to come together. It’s not just one sector that’s responsible.
So, these you’ll see in blue: these are the pressure points. You do have agency, so whether it be owners and developers, there’s an owner’s project requirement. And the media’s important, in terms of awareness, government agencies on contracts, and extractives, and manufacturers obviously, documenting. As a university, being able to initialize research, which I’ll tell you about what is happening at Stanford right now. And then the public demand, right? That’s a very important part of the equation.
So, bringing people around the table, and the idea from the get-go, is that we need CEOs and industry leaders to be a part of the [Design for Freedom] Working Group, because we want them to make immediate decisions. How does that happen?
University Engagement
You ask them. It sounds like, oh, you have connections. I asked those who built Grace Farms, and then I asked them “Who else do you know? Let’s ask them.” We’re going to have gender parity on this, making sure that’s part of our concept of how we want to create that team. And we did so.
The next part that’s important is to have you as university students. This is a gift to be here because you as university students are able to imagine the future without being tethered.
We are now engaged at probably 25 universities, and I think it’s a very important part of being able to carry the baton.
“We are now engaged at probably 25 universities, and I think it’s a very important part of being able to carry the baton.”
So, our first industry report, we formally launched the movement in 2020. And those Working Group members, 30 of them, were part of that. And then people asked, “Okay, just tell me which one of those materials are made without forced labor?” Well, we’re at the beginning of the movement, we need the transparency, so we did start to say, “Okay, you have to use a toolkit.”
Design for Freedom Pilot Projects
There’s no certification out there. We have to create it. So, we developed a [Design for Freedom] Toolkit for the industry to start using. And then, our Creative Director, Chelsea Thatcher, one of the co-authors on the [Design for Freedom] report, along with former ambassador on modern slavery, said, “What are we going do next? We kept asking the question, “What’s next?” Now we need to have Pilot Projects.
They are in locations on three different continents. This is it in three years.
That means you have to get the whole team, like an owner, the architect, engineer, construction manager to agree to do this. So, we have 12 projects, and one really beautiful project that aligns is Shadow of a Face with Nina Cooke John, which is the Harriet Tubman Monument that replaced the Christopher Columbus Monument. See that Shadow of a Face? It’s extraordinary.
And Black Chapel, again, limited materials in London at the beginning.
And then we had a full-scale project in New Canaan Library. Turner Construction’s on this project, and you’ll see how now they have adopted, Design for Freedom, and are committed, as well as MillerKnoll, a top firm, too.
And then The Brij in India. This is now a bigger project, a million-square feet. And it’s with one of the key industrialists there, Sunil [Kant] Munja, in India, where there is the highest number of those enslaved conditions. That’s pretty bold to do that, too.
And then, we are starting to get RFPs for new projects. One of the five new ones that we just announced at our [Design for Freedom] Summit is the Karsh Institute of Democracy for the University of Virginia. You can imagine the capacity we’re going have to accelerate the movement.
What is so surprising, fascinating, and under-realized is the power, the enormous power of architecture, to drive new outcomes, and even humanitarian outcomes.
As a fellow entrepreneur, I think of architecture as a three-dimensional expression of a vision. The other thing about architecture is that space, and I do believe, does communicate. So, you start to wrestle with this idea, what does space communicate? Can you embed values into space? Can it be generative over 100 years? What can it do?
The concepts that I want you to really think about, again, is that architecture, space is a 3D expression of a vision.
Even if you’re unconsciously doing so, it still expresses a vision. And, we now have this opportunity to reimagine architecture as a driver of humanitarian outcomes, and even to be this entrepreneurial platform. All right, so here’s the first expression of Grace Farms.
It won an AIA New York Merit Award for Un-built Work. My role as the entrepreneur is to mark to market the vision, and how it’s being expressed. So, I had a 35-page program that was highly aspirational, with also utilitarian needs. So, after two years of development, I had to abandon the project, because it did not achieve the goal. It’s very tough to do. However, knowing that this is going to be a long-term project, I went on a whole search to find the right architect now, that we could get paired with. This is an image of [Kazuyo] Sejima and [Ryue] Nishizawa of SANAA. The reason why they were so perfect – and it was just another process in just selecting them – they were never tethered to existing models. We were creating a new kind of public place, there’s not a place like this, not only in terms of form, but in terms of concept.
And so, they could think in that abstract way. It was an iterative process: I am proposing concepts like, “We want to create an environment where you are experiencing nature, where nature is in the foreground, and the buildings recedes.” They took that further. You can see here that the building becomes part of the landscape.
“We also wanted to create a place to invoke curiosity, new perspectives, create an individual experience, and a collective experience.”
We also wanted to create a place to invoke curiosity, new perspectives, create an individual experience, and a collective experience. And it just goes on, a peaceful respite, in an active community, diametrically opposed. And there were many of those. So now, here we are, it’s a former equestrian site, and we start to develop it.