Last week, Fast Company covered our client Proximity Designs, a non-profit design venture that designs products to ultimately help poor farmers in Myanmar. You can read all about it right here.

Okay, so we weren’t jumping up and down when we read the headline, but the article goes a long way to acknowledge a socially responsible company that is drastically improving lives by changing their economics.

It’s a market- vs. charity-based approach and it’s working. A powerful way to lift people out of poverty is to inspire their entrepreneurial drive with moneymaking products. More about how the approach is working can be found here.

Proximity recently received the Skoll Award For Social Entrepreneurship, an award given annually to a small number of social entrepreneurs who are solving the world’s most pressing problems.

Proximity founders Debbie Aung Din and Jim Taylor are indeed doing that, proximate to their customers. They listen to their customers. They even moved nearer to do so.

Listening. We like that.