About the Authors

Kevin Lynch is president of Rebuild Resources, Inc., a $2.2 million nonprofit social-purpose business in St. Paul, Minnesota, that helps chronic addicts and alcoholics find a path to sobriety through a program of spiritual recovery and work. Rebuild’s business operations include a custom apparel and promotional-items business and a contract manufacturer. These businesses provide the recovery environment for Rebuild’s student-employees and serve as the economic engines that fuel the enterprise.

Lynch is currently a board member of the Social Enterprise Alliance and has served on several national and local boards, including those of Social Venture Network, Headwaters Foundation for Justice, Twin Cities Community Gospel Choir, and (as the cofounder) Responsible Minnesota Business.

After starting and selling a direct mail business in college, Lynch spent twenty-one years in the advertising industry, the last fourteen as founder and principal of Lynch Jarvis Jones, a social enterprise ad agency whose mission was to create positive social change through the power of advertising and marketing. In early 2001, a series of synchronicities convinced him it was time to move on from the agency. He went on a two-year sabbatical, wherein he took a five-hundred-mile walk across Spain, shot photos, sang daily, learned a new language, served the peace movement, and, on the ninth anniversary of his own sobriety, stumbled into his current position at Rebuild.

Julius Walls, Jr., is CEO of Greyston Bakery and senior vice president of Greyston Foundation. Walls is also an adjunct professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, where he teaches social enterprise, and at Bainbridge Graduate Institute near Seattle, where he teaches social justice and business.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Walls attended high school and college seminary before pursuing a career in business. He studied business at Baruch College and completed his degree at Concordia College. After beginning his career at an accounting firm, he joined a chocolate manufacturing company and at age twenty-six was appointed vice president of operations of the $23 million company. In 1992, he founded his own chocolate company, Sweet Roots, Inc., which sells the only chocolate bar using exclusively African cocoa and produced by an African-American.

Walls worked with Greyston Bakery to bring its cakes and tarts to the White House in 1993. In 1995, he joined Greyston as a marketing consultant and in November 1997 became CEO of the Bakery, adding vice president of Greyston Foundation in January 2000. A core ingredient of Walls’s life and career is his spiritual practice. He encourages employees to actively bring their whole selves to work, including their cultural and spiritual selves. He has spoken extensively throughout the country on the topics of social ventures, social purpose businesses, spirituality in the workplace, and business development in the inner city. He is active in service to the community, serving on eight local and national boards. Walls resides in Yonkers with his wife, Cheryl, and three children.