PFNC stands for ‘Por Fin Nuestra Casa,’ Spanish for ‘Finally, a Home of Our Own.” Founded in 2007 by Brian McCarthy, Pablo Nava and Mackenzie Bishop, the for-profit company converts used shipping containers into low-cost housing for poor families in Juarez Cuidad and other Mexican border communities. Each PFNC unit costs around $10,000 US.
This is how you change the game. You follow your heart. McCarthy, Nava and Bishop grew up in El Paso and Albuquerque. They’d seen the awful poverty in which the families of the maquiladora towns lived, and it had moved them. After acquiring needed experience in the homebuilding business, they acted on their feelings. When you wake up in the morning and there’s no roadmap for where the business might take you that day, you can still be confident that you’re going to be productive and going to get results, as long as you follow your heart. When you invest completely in every minute of your day, you don’t stress so much about where you’re going to be at the end of the month.
I like that PFNC is in business to make money. I also dig the fact that it’s not the only thing they’re in it for. In pursuing a ‘triple bottom line’ of responsible profits, social impact, and environmental sustainability, PFNC follows a model of social entrepreneurship that absolutely must become the norm if we are to grow our way out of the bad game we’re stuck in now, when too much of business centers around the idea of maximizing profits at the expense of the other two items in the triple bottom line.
We have become servicers of debt in this country. We pay the vig for a living. PFNC demonstrates how the new game can be both socially responsible and entrepreneurial in the classic free market sense. There’s a need for this kind of housing in Jaurez, where an estimated 25,000 families live in substandard or dangerous conditions. PFNC has identified a need in the market and filled it. It doesn’t get any more Business 101 than that.
The GameChangers are usually not looking to change the game. They’re looking to express how they feel about the world. Act on their passions. Support their scene partners. Make the most of the gifts they’ve been given. And then one day they and everyone else realizes they are playing a brand new game. Finally, a Game of Their Own.
Tags: Albuquerque, Brian McCarthy, containers, El Paso, Game, GameChanger of the Month, GameChangers, Gifts, homebuilding, housing, January 2009, Jaurez, Mackenzie Bishop, Mexico, Pablo Nava, PFNC, profit, shipping, social entrepreneurism, triple-bottom-line