The Samaritan Counseling Center, whose mission is to promote psychological health and wholeness, is convinced that a society that honors integrity and ethical behavior will foster healthy individuals, families, and communities.

For-profit businesses, not-for-profit organizations, and individuals that demonstrate business excellence and the highest standards of ethical conduct, integrity and civic and social responsibility may be the recipients of the 2007 Oregon Ethics in Business Awards.

Finalists include:
Businesses
•Boly:Welch Recruiting
•First Tech Credit Union
•gDiapers – Recipient
•Duckwall-Pooley Fruit – Recipient
•Healthnotes
•Legend Homes
•Les Schwab
•Gerding Edlen Development – Recipient
•LightSpeed Aviation
•Oregon Vineyard Supply
•Speak Shop
•Starker Forest
•Thyme Garden Herb Seed Company

Not-For-Profit Organizations
•Dove Lewis
•Hands on Greater Portland
•Friends of the Children – Recipient
•Medical Teams International

Individuals
•Al Jubitz
•Peggy Fowler – Recipient
•Mario Pastega
•John Bates

THIRD WORLD POVERTY IS AN OVERWHELMING THING.

Those who have seen it with their own eyes return home chastened by the experience but can think of no earthly way to make a dent in the misery.

After all, what can one person, one family, one couple do by themselves against such a monstrous enemy?

BrainstormNW, April 2008

The obvious answer is to write a check. Maybe it’s not a Bill Gates-sized check, but giving something – anything at all – seems right.

Even so, while gifts of money salve our conscience, they seem to disappear, without having the substantive impact envisioned.

Folks grow weary of feeling ineffectual, reasoning that a check, even many checks, will never replace what is truly lacking: a viable economic system that allows people to advance themselves. A marketplace.

In time, many givers shrug it off and get on with their lives.

Cindy and Clay Cooper are non-shruggers.

Not content to take the checkbook route, Cindy Cooper and her husband have decided to give the real thing: the gift of capitalism.

Yes, it’s the fish story again – the gift of a fish versus the gift of a fishing lesson that results in a lifetime of support – but with a 2008 twist: Give someone a fish and they eat for a day, give someone access to a virtual global marketplace of fish buyers and they eat for a lifetime.

The Coopers’ Speak shop, a nearly 2-year-old venture based in Portland, is a picture of perfect timing, marrying the growing need in a global marketplace to speak other languages with Internet technology that allows a virtual immersion experience.

Speak Shop’s one-on-one Spanish lessons are taught from Guatemala via live videoconference to Americans who have found their professions – especially in legal and medical circles – increasingly international.

The coopers provide the technology platform and act as the bridge between a growing crowd of students and their Guatemalan tutors. For this serviced, the Coopers receive a $9.95 membership fee from each student and then pass on full lesson fees to the tutors themselves, who for the first time, have clients year-round and businesses they can run and manage themselves.

Fascinating Oregonians - Cindy Cooper

It all began when Clay Cooper, a web tech guru who never traveled went on a trip to Guatemala to follow his career goal to “do something international.” He met up with a college-educated Spanish tutor living a surprisingly impoverished life.

It occurred to him that a man with such a bilingual skills lacked only one thing: a market in which to offer his commodity. The wheels began turning.

Cindy completed the vision, supplying her international experience growing up in Brazil and her unwavering belief in capitalism as a tool to bring about social good.

The result: A marriage, a business and a third-world venture incubator all in one.

Cindy, who says her time in corporate marketing for Nike gave her practical ideas for businesses to aid in developing countries, believes the power of business for social good “is still largely untapped.”

To date, Speak Shop has taught some 5,000 lessons online and seeks soon to recruit tutors in other countries and offer other languages.

The effect on tutor families has been nearly instantaneous, she says. Instead of struggling for necessities, Speak Shop tutors are able to stow away cash for their children’s education and to complete their own.

Even more, Cindy says, the tutors have become entrepreneurs rather than just survivors. “They’ve started developing marketing and business skills. Over time, something has shifted in how they think of their role,” she says. “Now that they’re out of survival mode, they think, ‘What else can I dream about?’”

BY KRISTIAN FODEN-VENCIL
Portland, OR  October 29, 2007 3:35 p.m.

Listen to radio broadcast.

Starting a new business is difficult at the best of times. But if you’re also trying to make that business altruistic, the job can be doubly difficult.

One Oregon couple is using their computer — and friends in Guatemala — to help people learn a second language.

As Kristian Foden-Vencil reports, the couple is revolutionizing the way Americans learn a second language and hoping to help Guatemalan teachers earn a better wage.

Clay and Cindy Cooper live in a small Northeast Portland home. It’s also where they run their small business – Speak Shop.

Cindy Cooper: “Hi Sylvia.”

Sylvia: “Hello,”

Cindy Cooper: “Welcome.”

“You want a coffee or anything?”

This morning, Sylvia Tesh is dropping round to take a Spanish lesson.

For a $10 a month fee, she has joined Speak Shop and been given access to Aracey Rogel, a Spanish teacher based in the small town of Antigua, Guatemala.

Now that Tesh belongs to Speak Shop, she pays $8 an hour for  Spanish lessons with Rogel.

Cindy Cooper helps her log on.

Cindy Cooper: “Okay, so we’ll go ahead and get started. I’m just going to log in.  So you can see how this works, I’m just putting an e-mail address into the homepage Speak-Shop-dot-com. And then we just click log-in and we click this button that takes us to the video conferencing area inside….And then you see Aracey, who is in Guatemala.

“Ola,”

Aracey Rogel “Ola Cindy.”

With that, Tesh sits down and starts her lesson.

It’s a dramatic new way that Tesh and others can learn to speak a foreign language, without having to fly overseas or be tied to a rigid classroom timetable.

The same freedoms come with language computer programs, like Rosetta Stone. But say the  Coopers, there’s just nothing like learning from a real person.

Clay Cooper: “You get that immediate response, that immediate sort of feedback. In terms of what you’re saying, is it correct, are you pronouncing the word correctly. And you get the emotional support. Because the tutors are very encouraging and very patient and they make you laugh, and they make it fun and it helps encourage you to want to take your lessons and stick with it.”

Cindy Cooper: “Yeah, and it engages your brain that really helps you retain the information. You’re talking in a way that is contextualized and you’re interacting in a really rich way with a real person. And that’s what motivates people. Is being to truly communicate with a real human being.”

Cindy says Speak Shop is an innovative new business model that promises not only to fundamentally change the way people learn a second language, but to also bring the world a little closer together.

As the business grows, she hopes customers will be able to learn any new language they want from the comfort of their own home. All they need is a computer, a $30 webcam and broadband access.

But the Cooper’s mission goes further.  Part of their reason for starting the business is to increase the amount of money teachers in the third world receive.

For example, says Cindy, it’s common that English teachers in Guatamala to have a university education but still live in open air homes with a dirt floors. To make matters worse, she says, the work is cyclical.

Cindy Cooper: “It’s driven by tourism and tourism is really only prolific in Guatemala for three months out of the year and for the rest of the year, these teachers are basically fired. There isn’t any way to pay them because there isn’t anybody there.   So the internet allows them to connect with a world market of students, year round. So not only are they making more per hour, and they’re netting about twice as much per hour on line right now through Speak Shop, but they’re able to teach year round, so it’s a huge significant increase in what they can bring home.”

Currently, if you fly to Guatemala to take lessons, you might pay $4 an hour.  Of that money, the teacher gets only about $1.50 an hour – because they’re employees of a school that has overhead costs.

Cooper says that with Speak Shop, teachers can bring in three times as much — about $4 an hour, after paying overhead.

Butting in on Sylvia Tesh’s lesson, I ask her teacher Aracey Rogel, what difference the additional income makes.

Sylvia Tesh: “Oh she says it’s a really wonderful economic good. Very often one’s husband doesn’t earn enough, so there’s more money for the school for the children, more money for just daily life.”

Tesh says she’s pleased to a be able to make such a difference in someone’s life. And she says, there’s just a certain joy in getting to know someone overseas.

Sylvia Tesh: “I feel I’m connected to her. I met her first on line. And I immediately felt that she could be a friend. Even though we only had a few lessons. She’s  wonderful person. And in fact, when I went to Guatemala last week, I felt like I was meeting a friend. We talked several hours a day for a whole week. And she invited me to her home, I met her family.”

So far, Speak Shop isn’t large. The Coopers have about 200 customers and their main living comes from  other part-time work they’re both doing.

But the Shop is growing.

It could also get a significant boost if it wins the “Project Enterprise Contest” — a competition for so-called “social entrepreneurs”  put on by PBS’s NOW. Speak Shop is one of just four national finalists out of a pool of 100.

 © 2007 OPB

Beaverton, OR (PRWEB) March 22, 2006 — Speak Shop, http://www.speakshop.com, a pioneer in online Spanish tutoring via webcam, announced today that it has been selected to receive the 2006 InnoTech Innovation Award.

Presented by the InnoTech Conference in Oregon, the InnoTech Innovation Awards spotlight and reward four Oregon companies for innovative development of a product or service. Clay Cooper, Co-Founder and CEO, will be speaking at the conference about applying leadership and innovation to successfully grow a company. As a company that measures both a financial and social bottom line, Speak Shop delivers a revolutionary Spanish education service while creating better job opportunities for educators in developing countries.

“We are excited and grateful for InnoTech’s recognition of our growing business,” said Mr. Cooper. “Speak Shop’s unique cross-cultural approach to Spanish tutoring came from my own experience as a struggling Spanish student. I was finally able to learn by taking immersion tutoring in Guatemala. It is incredibly rewarding to make the same type of instruction available to people all over the world through our service.”

Through Speak Shop’s website, people anywhere in the world can take one-on-one Spanish lessons with pre-screened Spanish tutors in Guatemala via webcam. A unique aspect of Speak Shop’s business is that tutors learn to work as business owners, managing their own rates and hours. Tutors receive training and support from Speak Shop to increase their tech skills and help them become entrepreneurial.

To make its services as widely available as possible, Speak Shop uses open source software and will soon be launching new learning tools developed on the Moodle education platform.

Speak Shop was awarded “Best Social Return on Investment” in the 2005 Social and Environmental Technologies competition.

About Speak Shop
Speak Shop was founded in 2004 to increase access to cross-cultural foreign language education and to generate economic opportunity for people in Latin America. People around the world use Speak Shop to take live Spanish lessons online while supporting international economic development. For more details on Speak Shop visit http://www.speakshop.com.

Beaverton, OR (PRWEB) February 16, 2006 — Speak Shop, http://www.speakshop.com, an award-winning pioneer in live online Spanish tutoring, has been named a semi-finalist in the Global Social Venture Competition (GSVC).

GSVC is a global business plan competition organized by the Berkeley Haas School of Business, Columbia Business School, London Business School and the Goldman Sachs Foundation. What makes the GSVC unique is its focus on supporting the creation of businesses that generate social impact alongside profits. Plans must include a Social Impact Analysis that translates their social impact into dollars. Since its inception in 1999, the GSVC has demonstrated that businesses can be frontline participants in social change.

Every team must include at least one current or recent MBA student. Some ventures exist only on paper while others are in the start-up, pre-funding stage. More than 150 executive summaries were submitted for the initial competition round in November. Semi-finalists selected for the GSVC finals will travel to New York on April 7th to vie for the top prize of $25,000 by presenting their ideas to judges and venture capitalists.

Speak Shop, which has been operating for less than a year, has had a chance to test its concept in the market. An open marketplace designed to increase access to foreign language education and foster micro-entrepreneurship in developing countries, Speak Shop makes it possible for pre-screened Spanish tutors to teach students anywhere in the world via webcam. Tutors set their own hours and rates, thus ensuring they receive a fair wage for the quality of their service.

Speak Shop’s three-person team consisted of co-founders Clay and Cindy Cooper and Thunderbird graduate business student, Ashley Willms.

In 2005, Speak Shop won “Best Social Return on Investment Analysis” in the Social and Environmental Technology Inventors Challenge.

About Speak Shop
Speak Shop was founded by Clay and Cindy Cooper to increase access to cross-cultural foreign language education and to generate economic opportunity for people in Latin America. People around the world use Speak Shop to take live Spanish lessons online while supporting international economic development. For more details on Speak Shop visit http://www.speakshop.com.

The SET Challenge attracted entries from around the world. Judges evaluated financial profit potential, as well as each entrant’s social return on investment (SROI) based on magnitude, clarity and credibility. Measuring SROI makes it possible for companies to estimate their impact to society in dollar terms.

Speak Shop, which enables Spanish language teachers in Guatemala to profit from tutoring online using audio and videoconferencing, aims to bring more money and stability to thousands of people in developing areas. Until now, teachers depended entirely on the seasonal waves of study abroad students for work.

Speak Shop estimates that in 10 years it will generate a whopping $57 million dollar social return to teachers living in impoverishing conditions as a direct result of being able to teach online. It was this “social return” potential that garnered Speak Shop a top prize in the SET Challenge. Speak Shop will be featured in the SET Catalog to be released today. The catalog summarizes the 11 finalists and winners and is the first step of what will become an extensive online community and publishing platform.

Through Speak Shop, teachers can take control over their own livelihoods. They decide what to charge, set their own schedules and receive training and marketing support from Speak Shop – all free of charge. While a Spanish teacher will earn about $1.50 per hour working in Guatemala and face layoffs during slow seasons, at www.speakshop.com they can teach year-round at higher rates. But customers also benefit from the cross-national interaction. They pay just $5 or $6 an hour for personalized, private tutoring with native-speaking instructors and save themselves the hassles of driving to lessons or committing to fixed class schedules. Speak Shop supports its operations by charging a modest monthly membership fee.

Clay and Cindy Cooper, a husband and wife team, founded Speak Shop in 2002 knowing there would be many challenges. The digital divide was and continues to be very real and many people doubted that you could learn a language through videoconferencing. Speak Shop had to find partners that could support teachers with Internet access, webcam donations and banking services. After toiling with business plans, website prototypes and scouting Latin America for teachers and partners, Speak Shop began signing up customers in 2005.

“No one doubted that e-commerce could help people in developing countries out of poverty if they were just given the chance. It’s not easy to overcome Internet problems, transfer payments across countries and work around time differences, but we’ve shown that it’s possible,” Cindy Cooper, Co-Founder, says. “Another big hurdle has been proving that videoconferencing with the right teacher is a great way to learn a language. It seems a little too sci-fi for a lot of people. But our customers love it. It’s like studying abroad without leaving home.”

Speak Shop plans to expand beyond Guatemala and Spanish in the future. “We hope to create an international online community and make it easier for people all over the world to communicate,” said Cooper. “Globalization has connected our economies, but people are still divided by cultural, political and religious beliefs. Understanding starts with language.”

About Speak Shop
Speak Shop was created to increase access to foreign language education and to generate economic opportunity for people in Latin America. People around the world use Speak Shop to take live Spanish lessons online while supporting international economic development. For more information on Speak Shop visit www.speakshop.com

About SET Challenge
SET is the creation of two firms: SVT Consulting, founded by leading expert in Social and Environmental Return on Investment analysis, Sara Olsen; and Collective Intelligence, which was co-founded by serial entrepreneur, Kevin Jones, who has led several successful media and publishing firms in emerging markets.

Contact:
Sara Olsen
510-368-7272
www.set-info.com
www.svtconsulting.com
www.collectiveintelligence.net