Voting with your money - part III: Coca-Cola

For the last couple of days I've been writing about the potential of large corporations to become engines for positive change. So it seemed serendipitous that I found some interesting links today about an effort to use Coca-cola's distribution channels (which are ubiquitous) to distribute medicine (which is not). The name of the organization pushing this idea: ColaLife

I try to avoid linkblogging, but I also want to give credit where it's due. I found out about this by reading an article on the worldchanging site.

Evidently this guy - Simon Berry - had this great idea and started a facebook group. I'm not sure how he and his group managed to take the idea from Facebook to approaching reality (Coca-cola is at least talking about the idea now) but that's what they did.

Evidently Coca-cola does more than just talk about this kind of stuff.

That being said, at the end of the day Coca-cola profits by plying people with caffeine and either high-fructose corn syrup or aspartame. No one puts a gun to anyone's head and forces them to buy the drinks in question, but still.

Discolosure: These days my caffeinated soft drink of choice is tea, but on too many occasions it's still more convenient to buy a plastic bottle of Coke (or maybe a plastic bottle of tea) than it is to brew a pot of tea.

At least it's good to know that when I occasionally indulge in a Coke that I'm voting for a corporation with either (A) a conscience, or (B) the business sense to see that helping to keep their customer base alive is good for the bottom line.