Healthy Planet the way to go

This holiday season there was the inevitable challenge of finding suitable Christmas gifts. Many of the entrepreneurs that I met had new and interesting Christmas gift ideas, including Shaylesh Patel, and his company Healthy Planet.

Patel had the traditional career route of first working for a big accounting firm, and later found himself as the financial director of a retail and online travel company. When he became a father, he began to worry about a report that said, for the first time in recent history, the life expectancy of his children was less than his own.

Seeing the connection between the way we lead our lives and its effect on our health and the planet, he formed Healthy Planet with a friend, an expert geographer.

Healthy Planet has a very simple premise. Through the web site, you are able to adopt some land and everything on it, in one of the 77,000 national parks around the world. 90 per cent of the money you provide goes straight to the land in question, and you can then choose which particular local sustainability project you wish to support.

For example, if you are concerned about the Amazonian rainforest you can cover the costs of a park ranger who will help prevent illegal logging in your chosen park. Patel has teamed up with Google Earth, so you can monitor your land directly and feel a real connection with the precise piece of real estate that you care about.

Healthy Planet is already a great success, with a wide range of customers. Individuals adopt land as gifts and for themselves and their children, schools use the system for fundraising and engaging geography, ICT and citizenship projects and large organisations use their Corporate Social Responsibility budgets to help save the planet in a very specific, efficient and personal way.

The most interesting aspect of Healthy Planet is that, while it is a registered charity, it is also a bona-fide social enterprise. It is run like a proper business; for example, Patel and all the Healthy Planet team are measured solely on their performance like any good enterprise.

Healthy Planet and other similar organisations demonstrate an appropriate and realistic way forward out of the recession. Of course the blame for our current misfortune lies with the greedy and the stupid; capitalism as an economic system does work better than any other, but no system is perfect and all models are prone to abuse.

Hopefully the people in charge will set up better regulation in future, but I am not holding my breath.

Entrepreneurs are always busy thinking of ways to create wealth, and the big difference between this recession and the last one is that this time most of the young people who come to me for help are social entrepreneurs.

Some like Patel are busy trying to save the planet or help people in the third world directly. Others are building more traditional commercial ventures designed to make money, but also have one eye on helping those less fortunate than themselves, without detriment to their business.

The best Christmas present you could give someone this year is to provide encouragement.

The writer is a best-selling author, keynote speaker and entrepreneur mentor, and co-founder of Beermat.biz, an online resource for entrepreneurs