The Montara
Circle
Where entrepreneurs, activists, and community leaders design businesses that end trafficking.
Not For Sale’s invitation-only workshop where field knowledge becomes investable enterprise — two days, one challenge, a company as the output.
Montara, California
via REBBL alone
format has been applied
from the methodology
The bridge between a root cause and a business that addresses it.
The Montara Circle is Not For Sale’s design-to-action workshop — a concentrated, invitation-only gathering where entrepreneurs, investors, technologists, and community leaders from vulnerable regions are challenged to design for-profit business solutions to modern-day slavery and ecocide.
It is the mechanism through which the Impact Stack moves from research to enterprise. Named after the coastal village south of San Francisco where the first session was held in February 2011, the format has since been replicated in Amsterdam and adapted into the Entrepreneurship Challenge in Uganda and Rwanda.
“The community must be in the room. The solution must be commercially viable. The enterprise must sustain itself without ongoing philanthropic subsidy.”
The Three Principles of the Montara CircleHow it works
From frontline data to a company that changes economic conditions on the ground — four stages, then the enterprises they produce.
Field Research
Frontline teams identify at-risk communities through direct work with survivors and vulnerable populations.
Community Needs Identified
Field teams map the economic vacuum — the opportunity gap that makes communities vulnerable to trafficking.
Montara Circle Convened
Two intensive days. Cross-sector participants design enterprise-based interventions for viability and mission.
Enterprise Launched
The best ideas are incubated through Just Business, co-founded by David Batstone and Mark Wexler. The goal is a company.
The idea that became a nationally distributed brand.
Fifty entrepreneurs, technologists, investors, and Peruvian community leaders. One challenge: design a for-profit business solution to human trafficking in Peru’s Amazon — where indigenous communities were trapped in debt bondage and forced into illegal gold mining.
San Francisco Giants pitcher Jeremy Affeldt pitched the winning idea: a beverage company that would source ingredients directly from those same communities, creating economic demand that would structurally reduce vulnerability.
programs to date via REBBL
What came out of the Montara Circle.
From a two-day design session to a nationally distributed brand — the road from Montara to $2M+ returned.
REBBL
Roots · Extracts · Berries · Bark · Leaves — the beverage brand that turned the first Montara Circle into structural economic demand for the communities most vulnerable to trafficking.
What the Montara Circle has produced.
Five enterprises built on the principle that a commercially viable business is the most durable form of impact.
REBBL
Born from the February 2011 Montara Circle. A nationally distributed beverage brand sourcing from AFIMAD cooperatives in Madre de Dios — communities vulnerable to trafficking. Returns 2.5% of net revenue to Not For Sale.
Dignita
Amsterdam’s social restaurant where 100% of profits fund survivor training through Not For Sale Netherlands.
↗Entrepreneurship Challenge
The Montara Circle format adapted for refugee communities. Not For Sale seed-funds every pitch; top winners receive two years of salary.
↗Not For Sale Ale
A craft beer that donated 100% of profits to Not For Sale — consumer product as mission delivery.
St. Clare Coffee
Specialty-grade coffee from Akha hill tribe communities in Thailand, employing survivors in the SF Bay Area.
Watch the Circle.
YouTube channelInterested in hosting a Montara Circle?
The format is replicable. If you work in a community facing trafficking or ecocide and want to convene a design session, we want to hear from you.