How This Unique Business is Lifting Communities and Protecting a Rare Mexican Desert Oasis
“¡Feliz cumpleaños Christine, que bueno que regresaste!” The Plan 2040 employees warmly welcomed me back with birthday greetings and big hugs.
With it being my second time in this unique desert oasis, I was overwhelmed with gratitude and joy that I was able to make it back for another St. Joseph pilgrimage and this time on my 33rd birthday. Just 3 hours northeast of Monterrey, Mexico, Cuatro Ciénegas is located in the Chihuahuan Desert and often called the ‘Galapagos of Mexico’ for its abundance of ancient flora and fauna and unique geography holding evidence from the beginnings of life.
On my first Camino de San José (St. Joseph pilgrimage), I remember being blown away by the transformational social work being carried out to lift the community of Cuatro Ciénegas out of poverty. In our welcome meeting seconds after stepping off the bus, I realized the massive paradigm shift and the generational revolution for good the people here were spearheading with this program, Plan 2040.
Image credits: Nicolás Sánchez Mejorada Girault
A New Generation of Hope in Cuatro Ciénegas
Checo was our Camino leader, a native from Monterrey with kind eyes and olive skin bronzed from numerous walks through the desert. He led us to the Plan headquarters, a small house in the center of town soon to be moved into a renovated Home of Hope which will serve and provide care and resources for the current and new generations of Cuatro Ciénegas.
Our group of pilgrims joined the already full room with the Plan 2040 team, they were deep in presentations sharing information and data on how their recent home visits had gone and their projected end of the year numbers of social transformation throughout the community. We learned about some of the biggest social struggles found throughout the town, almost half of the population in Cuatro Ciénegas lives below the poverty line and teen pregnancies are very common. They shared with us the significant impact we were making in someone’s life by being on this pilgrimage.
There was one man sitting in the middle of the room, he paid attention carefully to every detail and every presentation, asking direct questions after everyone’s presentation. He seemed very serious about “collecting the most accurate and up to date information and registering every new born baby and every family in the town into the Plan.”
What exactly was this Plan and why did they care so much about every birth in town and every family that lived here?
Something was pulsing life and economy back into Cuatro Ciénegas by directly combating this community’s worst social and economic problems. I wanted to know what this whole project was about and who was behind it.
Image Credits: Nicolás Sánchez Mejorada Girault
Doing Business for Good with Plan 2040
In the spring of 2016, a group of missionaries visited Cuatro Ciénegas for their annual Holy Week Missions and noticed the severe poverty that was present and the lack of basic necessities for a quality of life such as potable water, sewage systems, and bathrooms in homes.
The man in the center of that room during the Plan presentations was Alfonso González Arocha. As a local to Cuatro Ciénegas, Alfonso left his hometown to study at the Tecnológico of Monterrey, he went on to get his Master’s at the Instituto Panameicano de Alta Dirección de Empresas and in 1995, decided to start his own company, Qualfon.
In 2006, after participating in Holy Week Missions in his hometown, he realized the importance and responsibility he now had of lifting his own community out of poverty. Soon after, he created the Plan 2040 with Qualfon becoming the driving motor behind all of the transformation we were learning about while on our pilgrimage.
Qualfon is a people-focused global business services company providing contact center services, integrated marketing solutions, big data analytics, and back-office processing in Mexico, United States, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Philippines, India, and Guayana.
Together with the help of Qualfon and other sponsors, the missionaries set out to change some of the biggest social problems in town with a group of experts who carried out a thorough needs assessment of the entire community. Their results highlighted four specific areas of needs in Cuatro Ciénegas: family, health, education, and employment.
Shortly after, Plan 2040 was born and was designed to accompany every child and family in town from birth throughout high school until the year 2040 and beyond. Their mission was to transform the community by enabling the development of the new generations of people into dignified and fulfilled human beings with a strong sense of purpose and community.
But what made me fall in love even more with the work being carried out here was that the Plan didn’t stop with the people, which of course are significant and central to the health of the economy. But as an environmentalist, we know that without a healthy planet and a deep sense of purpose, there is no such thing as healthy people to propel forward a healthy economy.
It was immediately evident to me that Qualfon was a living example of the quadruple bottom line business model introduced by best selling author and serial entrepreneur, John Elkington.
The quadruple bottom line business model embodies 4 P’s in business to make the world a better place: People, Planet, Profit, and Purpose. These 4 P’s can be described as optimizing profit and maximizing value with your people within planetary limits. Businesses of all sizes are now realizing that the old way of doing business without a central purpose in heart is no longer fit for long-term sustainability.
When businesses unite all 4 P’s into their business model, they are committing themselves to greater social impact and in turn creating astoundingly more successful businesses with their people and the planet in mind.
According to a global survey done by Accenture, 62% of customers want the companies they purchase from to take a stand for something they care about such as sustainability, transparency, and fair employment practices. Consumers care just as much about the impact a business has on our environment and our society as they do about the product they’re purchasing.
Image Credits: Nicolás Sánchez Mejorada Girault
The Genesis Lab
Qualfon addresses the preservation of this unique desert oasis we walked through on our pilgrimage with their very own environmental program and microbiology lab, Genesis. Genesis is a microbiology living lab that functions as a union between the scientific community, businesses, and locals of Cuatro Ciénegas, with the purpose of promoting research, science, environmental education, and biotechnological development of the Cuatro Ciénegas Biosphere Reserve.
Director and Biotechnology Scientist at Genesis 4C, Dr. Héctor Arocha, shared with us the abundance of animal and plant life found throughout this desert holding the greatest number of endemic species in North America. He shared with us how Cuatro Ciénegas is classified by RAMSAR as an essential wetland ecosystem and studied by NASA as one of the most similar places on Earth to Mars.
The Cuatro Ciénegas wetlands are made up of more than 400 turquoise colored streams and ponds, or pozas, flowing with some of the oldest water on the planet with characteristics from the Precambrian Era. The earliest fossil evidence of life on earth, called stromatolites, are also found here. These microbial reefs emerged in the ocean, formed protective calcium barriers, floated to the surface, and then invented photosynthesis 3.5 billion years ago allowing for life on Earth to form as we know it today. You can say it’s almost like an ancient time machine full of living organisms that provide a rich source for new life-saving medicines to emerge in the future.
This second time on the pilgrimage, I made sure to squeeze in some time to interview Héctor about his work. As he walked me around his lab showing me brightly colored petri-dishes filled with hundreds of different bacteria collected from the local ponds, he told me that Brandon is one of his brightest students and that he hired him from the local restaurant after learning about his passion for microbiology.
Héctor goes on to explain, “We’re here to lift people up in this community and we prioritize hiring locals so that they have opportunities to stay in Cuatro Ciénegas. If we don’t invest in our own local talent for the Plan and Genesis, we can’t teach them about the importance and the fragility of their own backyard.”
For more on the unique biodiversity this rare desert oasis holds, read here.
Image Credits: Nicolás Sánchez Mejorada Girault
Mission 360
After getting a 360 view of what this Plan 2040 was all about, I realized Qualfon does business even beyond John Elkington’s quadruple bottom line approach. Qualfon operates on what they call their Mission 360, doing business always centered on their values with a 360 degree approach.
Mission 360 is the north star for all decisions within the business, it represents a deep-lasting and positive impact across the entire company. The mission essentially encompasses everyone they touch throughout business and life as a whole, their employees, clients, families, and their environment taking a person-level 360 dimension approach to how they work and how they interact with each other. Using this people-centric approach to business allows them to truly value the complete mind, body, and spirit of each person they encounter as well as the environment they work in.
When you place value and respect on the people that drive your company forward, you’re in turn fueling a more committed and loyal workforce, representing a positive impact on your clients, employees, their families, and their communities. This business culture might just be the answer to the Great Resignation we’re seeing unfold around the world.
“It’s the individuals inside of a business working together as a team that make a business successful.”
Another added value to Qualfon’s business model is their diversity. They work with employees and clients across the globe in 7 different countries helping the company uphold a global perspective on business, stay on top of different market trends around the world, as well as open the door for new business opportunities.
“We are enriched by working with people in Asia and all across America, we are better when we embrace diversity and learn to work with people from different backgrounds.”
The realization that these employees, families, clients, and stakeholders are directly lifting communities and families out of poverty in Mexico just by doing business together is massively impressive. This cannot be the future of how we do business, it has to be the NOW of how we do business.
A new way forward
With the social impact mission behind Qualfon, broken families become purpose-driven families full of joy and love, lack of access to healthcare is prioritized to reach increased healthcare coverage and medical care for babies and families across the community, and young unemployed mothers and fathers are given job opportunities, resources and new skills development, as well as mother-infant bonding classes.
There is no other way to see it other than a group of people with a big vision to do business not just for profit, but for good, full of compassion, deep empathy, and a real drive to make a change. Whatever race, gender, religion, or background you identify with, it’s impossible to visit Cuatro Ciénegas and see the work Qualfon is supporting without acknowledging that they are directly addressing some of our biggest challenges we face today, such as the meaning of family, extreme poverty, unemployment, lack of access to healthcare, and lack of education for the protection of our environment.
Qualfon’s Mission 360 can be a strong example for other businesses around the world struggling to incorporate strong social and environmental initiatives into their business model and can also serve as an example for businesses looking for ways to reignite a strong sense of purpose within their own employees.
Read more here about how you can get involved with the Plan 2040 and Genesis.
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