The Giving Vine Through cause marketing OneHope is working to improve many lives.

For Jake Kloberdanz, the desire to try and help change the world was sparked by a retail trend he happened to notice in 2005.

"I was stocking a lot of shelves in grocery stores and saw that charity promotions like Yoplait's breast cancer project got great floor space and sold well," says Kloberdanz, who at the time was the district sales manager in greater Los Angeles for the Gallo wine company, one of the largest distributors in the world. "Why not start a whole brand built on serving other causes? It wouldn't ride on the coattails of the charities we serve--we'd try to build a product with good value and serve nonprofits outside of using their name."

Kloberdanz mulled the idea over until April 2006, when a good friend was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma. "Until then, in my head, cause marketing was just a salesman's dream," he says. "It wasn't until my friend got cancer that I said 'I have to do this.'"