Our Mission:
Ensure wellbeing radiates throughout every aspect of our product’s journey.
Our Vision:
Organic Route intends to be one the largest East African - America collaborations aimed at empowering rural communities through vertical integration of Uganda’s agricultural sector.
Who We Are.
Get to know our staff, our Ugandan advisory board and our international advisory board.
Our company started with three best friends from two continents that had the same goal in mind: to promote peace while making a sustainable and impactful change in the world.
As an aspiring benefit corporation, Organic Route is not only committed to paying above fair-trade wages, but also using profits to support a wide array of programs, including:
Teaching former child soldiers sustainable agricultural practices
Promoting clean and renewable energy initiatives
Funding small business management classes for developing international communities
We know you will love it as much as we do! Please share your recipes with us. We'd love to try them and share them with our families and friends!
MEET THE TEAM.
At Organic Route, each of our dedicated staff members play an important role in making sure everyone that is involved in our product’s journey benefits.
Issac plays a crucial role as Organic Route's operational director. He coordinates all the staff involved in our supply chain throughout Uganda. Isaac loves to go to church and harvest honey from his bee farm in his free time.
Max founded Organic Route in 2018. He currently maintains a mentor position on our advisory board. Max received his bachelors in chemistry in 2018 from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR, USA. Max serves on several NGO and business boards in East Africa. He is passionate about public health, chemistry, and business.
Percy is one of our outstanding social entrepreneur sales agents. She loves that her job is greeted with grateful smiles from her customers and that she can afford to pay for her brother's schooling. When she is not at work, she loves to cook.
Organic Route's Administrative Director, Bertha, manages our guiding policies, our annual budgets, and our local partnerships. In her off time, Bertha enjoys attending church and working on her motorcycle.
Alan is one of Organic Route's most organized and efficient regional sales coordinators. Alan ensures Organic Route's social entrepreneurs throughout northern Uganda are well stocked and trained to address the needs of their communities. After work Alan likes to sit with his friends and eat pork.
Emma serves as an accountant at Organic Route ensuring stock, sales and expenses are accounted for at our multiple locations. He received his degree as a CPA from Lira University, Uganda in 2018. He is passionate about racing motorcross motorcycles and attending races.
Our International Advisory Board
Michael Davis
Mr. Davis has direct executive leadership of 10 business units across 5 countries and strategic advisory of over 50 companies within the investment portfolio. He manages over 2400 employees in East Africa and is responsible for franchise management of Pizza Hut, Europcar, and Radisson in East Africa.
Shannon Keith
A trip to India, in 2005, inspired Shannon to take action and disrupt the social enterprise space and create lasting impact for survivors and those at high risk of sex trafficking led her to found and cultivate Sudara – a certified Benefit Corporation. Sudara’s mission is rooted in job creation. Since founding Sudara, Shannon has received multiple accolades and rewards for her groundbreaking conscious approach to business ventures. She has been honored as a Social Impact Winner at Oregon’s largest Angel investing conference, BVC, won female Entrepreneur of the year in 2017, spoke at TEDx, and was a Top 25 SheEO World Venture Finalist, in addition to being featured in The Good Trade, Conscious Magazine, Real Simple, Forbes and more.
Jerry Carleton
Jerry adds value as a strategic business partner to entrepreneurs and provides clients counseling on legal issues, and also advice from a business perspective. Jerry and his wife Heather have founded or co-founded nine companies in different industries to date, spanning durable medical equipment, SaaS, cryptocurrency mining, non-profit, private foundation, revenue capital, legal services and commercial real estate.
Sharon Brabenac
Sharon has an MBA from Portland State University and has worked as a community development leader as a passionate and effective advocate for causes that fundamentally change people’s lives. She has had an interest in Africa since she was in third grade and has worked on numerous projects in partnership with leaders and families. Sharon joined Africa Bridge in March of 2018 so that she can use her fundraising background to assist in effective networking that creates synergistic relationships that create lasting change for vulnerable children to thrive in Tanzania.
Max Clary
Max has spent the past decade committed to social entrepreneurship and finding ways to make a positive change in the world. He has been involved in representing Oregon’s Amnesty International chapters, designing extremely inexpensive photocatalytic clay disks for water remediation, and rehabilitation work with sex trafficking victims in India and the US. In 2016 he cofounded KareMeKuc, a nonprofit that partners with local Ugandan stakeholders to assist in the rehabilitation of former child soldiers. He went on to found Organic Route, an East African social enterprise focused on agricultural value addition and export as well as food safety consultation. Organic Route provide livelihoods for many of beneficiaries of KareMeKuc as well funding support for locally-run nonprofits in Uganda.
For his humanitarian work Max, he has been featured in the Portland Business Journal and the Keene Sentinel. He was named Pamplin Honor Society Fellow in 2015, 2015 recipient for the 100 Projects for Peace Grant, 2018 Finalist for Oregon Entrepreneurship Network’s top college entrepreneur and Alumni Spotlight at Lewis & Clark College as well as The Dublin School.