Social Entrepreneur: Conscious Companies | Benefit Corporations | Impact Investing

Nina Smith has been thinking about social justice since she was eight years old. It’s natural that today she is working to end child labor. You might think that child labor is a thing of the past, relegated to black and white pictures from the 1940s. Unfortunate for millions of children around the world, that is not true. According to the Global Slavery Index, 45.8 million people are enslaved in the world today. In the handmade carpet industry alone there are nearly a quarter of a million children who are being exploited. Nina Smith grew up in a Jewish household, where her grandmother taught her the Jewish tradition of tzedakah, or social justice. As an eight-year-old, she was first introduced to her cousin Mark. She was told by her mother and grandmother that Mark would tell her and her sister a story. The story, as it turns out, was the story of the holocaust. “That was the first time I understood about the injustices in the world,” she told me. Nina sees echoes of this injustice in the lives of modern-day