When Greenmaker Supply won one of the 2006 Innovate Illinois prizes awarded to the state’s most innovative small businesses, the green home-improvement retail store was not even a year old yet.

The store was a perfect fit for Chicago, a city where the mayor’s very public commitment to green principles includes a 2004 executive order that Chicago’s new public buildings must be built with eco-friendly designs and materials. Greenmaker Supply helps homeowners make that commitment, too.

“Green building is something I’ve always been interested in,” says co-founder Ori Sivan, who has a master’s degree in environmental engineering. “Business is the biggest engine for innovation, and while I could have gone into engineering or academics, I thought the thing to do was start a green business.”

In the fall of 2004, two worker-owners from Maquiladora Mujeres, a Nicaraguan women’s sewing cooperative, embarked on an anti-sweatshop speaking tour of the United States, starting in Washington, DC, at Green America’s Green Festival. Their next stop was Minneapolis, where their visit was sponsored by North Country Fair Trade, which had recently launched as a distributor of sweatshop-free clothing and accessories.

Working alongside migrant farm workers in California as a young man, Thomas Fricke developed an appreciation for organic agriculture firsthand, dodging the pesticides raining from the overhead crop dusters.

As the daughter of a State Department diplomat and social investment professional, Sylvia Blanchet grew up with an interest in international affairs and a tendency toward economic activism.

Jeff Lebesch was already a homebrewer of beer when he set off on a bike trip across Europe in 1986. Belgium’s famous beers inspired Jeff to duplicate their flavors once he returned home. He produced an amber ale and a brown dubbel (a darker “double ale”) named, respectively, Fat Tire and Abbey in honor of his trip, and won rave reviews from friends and relatives for their flavors.

In February 2006, college buddies Vaughan Lazar and Michael Gordon started throwing around ideas for starting a side business for fun. Lazar owned a printing and design firm, and Gordon worked for a real estate company.

“He was fed up with what he was doing, and I was bored with my business,” says Lazar, CEO of Pizza Fusion. The two decided to start a pizza restaurant because they liked pizza—eating and making it—and because it made good business sense; Americans eat approximately 100 acres of pizza each day, or about 350 slices per second. It didn’t take them long to start thinking of ways they could green their dream company.

In 1989, a small group of volunteers in Albuquerque, New Mexico, decided to take action to alleviate some of the poverty in developing nations around the world. Taking aid and inspiration from Ten Thousand Villages and the Mennonite Central Committee, these hard-working activists formed Peacecraft.

Peacecraft, which is staffed almost entirely by volunteers, sells handmade crafts and clothing from around the world, providing a fair market for people in developing countries who often have no other source of income. Soon after the store was born, it came under the care of Dr. Angelo Tomedi, a family practitioner in Albuquerque. Having done extensive work with problems of child malnutrition in Central America, Dr. Tomedi believed in the power of fair trade to transform peoples’ lives, and he used that dedication to help Peacecraft make it to its 15-year anniversary.