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.