We recently connected with Laure BOTTINELLI and have shared our conversation below.

Laure , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – walk us through the story?

As a Water, Hygiene and Sanitation Program Manager working for non-profit organizations and the United-Nations, I oversaw local and expat teams in the field, often in war zones or natural catastrophe settings. My experience focused on conducting the operations of large-scale humanitarian responses to major public health crisis. I, however, had zero experience in how to run a business.

Running a small business requires a vast spectrum of skills and knowledge. Before launching ANACAONA Community, I had never: raised seed money, employed workers, developed HR policies, designed Marketing and Social Media initiatives. I had never carefully looked at what was needed to have soap sanitized and approved by laboratories, nor had I ever had to prepare bookkeeping and accounting for the end of the fiscal year. I knew very little about the Haitian private sector and had close to zero knowledge about what it takes to make all of this happen. But I knew one thing: I was determined.

Despite my family and friends’ cautious advice, I moved forward and listened to my inner desire to build a business to help Haitians. It will be hard, I thought, but I can do this, and it will be worth the effort. With the help of my friend Melanie Geiser, I worked relentlessly to launch ANACAONA Community. As time passed by, I was fortunate to be surrounded by supportive and smart Haitian entrepreneurs and transformed my idea into a flourishing social business. By the end of 2016, only twelve months after the launch of ANACAONA Community, I became the youngest foreign female businessowner of a legal small social business in Haiti.

Was it risky? Yes. Was it the right time to do it? Maybe not. But I learned over the years there is never a perfect time. There will always be reasons to postpone your dream. The secret? Follow your gut feeling!

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

For the first six years of my career, I worked internationally for NGOs and the United-Nations as a Water, Hygiene and Sanitation (WASH) Program Manager. I supported communities in need of basic hygiene services in urban towns of Madagascar, rural schools on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines, small villages in Bangladesh and a refugee camp in South Sudan. In 2012, I arrived in Haiti to support the cholera outbreak relief efforts and worked for four years alongside Haitians and international communities.

In 2015, I burnt out. I knew deep down that even though I wished to stay in Haiti, I wanted to have a different impact and way of interacting with the Haitian people. I wanted to create long-lasting employment for Haitians, I wanted to be in control of the projects being developed, and I wanted to give Haitians a voice in how to improve their health. I grew up with a father who owned a small family business, and I always felt drawn by the idea of having my own initiative. That’s when I read a lot about social businesses and discovered the soap recycling industry. I took an online MasterClass with HEC Paris, a French business school, which led me on the path to my social initiative: ANACAONA Community

To gain more hands-on experience, I packed my bags and spent four months in South-East Asia, visiting soap recycling non-profit organizations in Indonesia and Cambodia. EcoSoapBank welcomed me with open arms and taught me a great deal about how to recycle used soap bars from hotels into new, clean bars and redistribute them to vulnerable communities.

Knowing too well the challenges of the non-profit world and the need to constantly look for funding in order to function, my dream was to have a sustainable business model. For ANACAONA Community, a part of the upcycled soap would be sold to boutiques (upcycling means to recycle in such a way as to create a product of higher quality or value than the original). The money generated by the sales would pay for the workers and cover the general operations and overhead costs. The other part of the upcycled soap would be donated to school children and communities. As a Hygiene Specialist, I pushed the model further as I knew that merely distributing clean soap bars would not be enough to improve community health. I hired and trained local community mobilizers and created a model where they accompany teachers and students from elementary schools and teach them how to properly wash their hands.

After overcoming a lot of challenges, ANACAONA Community was founded in January 2016 and became the first soap upcycling initiative in the Caribbean. Today, we are a team of 17 staff members, accompanying 20 elementary schools and supporting more than 5,000 children and 16,000 people in two regions of Haiti. We train schools and communities on the importance of handwashing, water treatment, toilet use and menstrual hygiene. We also upcycle soap bars, produce liquid soap and washable menstrual pads.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

In 2020, four years after launching ANACAONA Community, I was forced to make a drastic shift in the way the organization was functioning. Like most soap recyclers, our main source of supply came from used soap bars donated by hotels. In Haiti, just like everywhere else in the world, COVID-19 put a stop to traveling and all Haitian hotels closed for many months. This is when I realized I had to quickly diversify our products if I wanted the organization to survive. Within a few weeks, our teams started making liquid soap, and they learned how to sew to make washable menstrual hygiene pads.

A few months later, I was contacted by Suzanne Siebert, the founder of Pass The Bar, a wonderful small woman-owned soap company based in Washington. She wanted to learn about ANACAONA Community and asked how she could help. She asked me if there would be a way for her to send us her soap scraps. At first, I was skeptical as I always took pride in supporting the Haitian economy and pushing for local solutions first. Ever since we started, our soap scraps came only from Haitian hotels. But COVID-19 halted the local supply and when it came to choosing from either providing employment to single mothers so they could support their families or prioritizing a 100% local production, the decision was easy: support mothers!

For the past three years, not only did Pass The Bar send us their soap scraps, but Suzanne created an awareness platform in the United States through Social Media. As of today, more than 3,000 pounds of soap have been shipped to ANACAONA Community in Haiti, thanks to dozens of generous soap makers in the United-States.

Pivoting my business model from a single product line to several and being open to sourcing raw material from abroad saved my social business. As one knows, being flexible is key if one wants to grow, but staying as close as possible to the founding values of the organization is just as important.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

I co-founded ANACAONA Community with a good friend of mine who also had a humanitarian career background. Within the first twelve months, Melanie Geiser and I worked hard to launch the organization: legal registration, crowdfunding, human resources, soap production, marketing, building a clientele, finding partner schools… At the end of the year, Melanie accepted a position with a large non-profit organization in Africa, and I became the only founder running the business. This is when I realized that I needed to anchor myself and my organization locally. I knew many expats and Haitians from living in Haiti for four years, but I was not familiar with the local private sector.

Throughout the years, I was lucky to have met extraordinary young Haitian entrepreneurs who helped me grow ANACAONA Community. Thanks to Christopher, Hanz and Luidji (last names intentionally excluded), I learned what it really meant to be a business owner in Haiti. A friend of mine connected us as he thought they might be interested in seeing my small initiative.

One late afternoon in 2017, the three of them came to my tiny workshop, saw my three soap makers and myself wrapping up for the day. My office was the kitchen table and the living room was the workshop. I was skinny and sweating after a long hot day of work. I was tired but more determined than ever. They could not believe that an inexperienced foreigner who had never been in the soap production industry and with basically no money, had actually been running a small business for 12 months in the challenging and often dangerous city of Port-au-Prince, had won several small grants and awards and was running a growing business. They saw the potential, but knew I needed support. They decided to roll up their sleeves and help me.

The three of them were soap engineers and taught me the intricacies of soap productions. They also opened my eyes to the difficulties and challenges that come with corruption, threats, HR issues, and political violence. ANACAONA Community would not be what it is today without them, and there isn’t a single week where we don’t connect to find creative ways to solve what at first seems like impossible barriers. Surrounding myself with local experts was a game changer and imperative to the success of ANACAONA Community.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.anacaona.org
• Instagram: @anacaona.community
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laure-bottinelli-05924396/

Image Credits
Maxence Bradley