Tegu: Building Blocks to Rebuild Communities

We spoke with Chris and Will Haughey, co-founders of Tegu, about their company's mission in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Every toy the company sells contributes to reforestation and education efforts in surrounding Honduran communities.

Tegu was designed from the ground up as a way to create a sustainable, income-generating resource for its workers, their families, and underserved populations in and around Tegucigalpa. While serving at a missions-based orphanage, Chris saw an opportunity to establish a for-profit mission that could function independently from external donations. Honduras has an abundance of high quality hardwoods, which often never leaves the country. Using this resource sustainably, Tegu helps educate workers in building simple, magnetic wooden blocks that kids all over the world enjoy.

This attention to workers and sustainable production is coupled with a missional outlook that helps invest the company's profits back into the community. Every toy that sells helps fund reforestation and education efforts that will help build a better future for Hondurans. At the same time, the company is making a kind of long-term investment in the community and the ecology that it depends on.

Tegu's business model is a great example of how work and faith can connect. Combining a missional perspective with entrepreneurial creativity, the Haugheys have built a business that recognizes where its true wealth comes from: the people and the land that it serves, and the God who created them.

[stephengarfield]

Great idea. Thank you for telling us about it.