Impact at Scale

The Social Innovation Podcast had the pleasure of speaking with Lin Hwang, a co-Founder and the CEO of DamoGo, a platform that helps reduce food waste by helping retailers and farms sell their unsold food and produce at a discount before it gets thrown away.  Lin is an extremely experienced food-tech entrepreneur dedicated to making a positive impact through reducing food waste.

Lin and I discussed the following topics:

See the full transcript below.

The Social Innovation Podcast had the pleasure of speaking with Yuha Jin, the CEO and co-Founder of Tella.

According to Yuha, "Tella is short for "TellAfreeca"; a team that started out with the social mission of creating knowledge-based jobs in East African countries for university-educated youth. When my co-founder and I visited some East African countries, we experienced a totally different Africa than what the media portrayed (hunger, illiteracy, unskilled, etc).

We saw that hundreds of thousands of university graduates could speak at least 2-3 languages fluently. Yet most of them were jobless (83% of graduates unemployed in Uganda) or were underemployed. I believe creating knowledge-based jobs is not only important for giving people the means of a livelihood, but these individuals can eventually be the backbone of national economic development in their countries through the pragmatic application of the knowledge garnered on the job."

Suffice it to say that we had a fascinating discussion...

The Social Innovation Podcast had an incredible conversation with Chris Fong, a co-Founder, and Chief Innovation and Strategic Growth Officer at FeFiFo.  At FeFiFo, Chris is spearheading co-farming as a new model to disrupt and democratize the US$159b contract farming industry with a mission to make sustainable, profitable, smallholder farming commonplace.

Chris is passionate about affecting change for the better through process and technology innovation. He has strong business acumen and is also familiar with a wide spectrum of technologies both mainstream and emerging. In particular, he is interested in technology-driven innovation that decentralizes and disintermediates existing business models to improve inclusion, reduce costs, and increase efficiency and transparency.

Chris and I talked about:

You have to listen to this episode.  It will change the way you think about farming and the produce that you eat.

I had the pleasure of speaking with R. Scott Salandy-Defour, a co-Founder of Liquidstar.

Liquidstar offers a new category of energy distribution, utilizing Waypoint charge stations to deploy smart batteries for beyond-the-grid electrical power distribution. Liquidstar’s vision is to leapfrog off-grid markets to the ‘wireless’ battery-powered sustainable ecosystems of the future - solving energy access challenges for the powerless 1.1 billion and providing electricity for essential services during grid destroying disasters.

The core Liquidstar Decentralized Autonomous Utility (DAU) platform strings together various innovation layers provided by expert partners to manage the charging and distribution of source-agnostic electricity through batteries delivered by Power Ranger operators.

To understand the significance and importance of having affordable and sustainable energy in emerging and frontier markets, read a recent post from the Liquidstar blog that starts with this:

"Imagine being in lockdown, forced to sit home alone, unable to charge your phone or laptop. No Netflix, no Zoom - but it gets much worse. In cities across Africa, such as Lagos, Nigeria, people are facing starvation, violence, and riots."

The Social Innovation Podcast spoke to Hannah Thinyane, a Principal Research Fellow at the United Nations University Institute in Macau. Hannah leads the Migrant Tech Research Project. Since 2016 she has led a multi-disciplinary team, innovating and inventing ICTs to support proactive and consistent screening of workers in situations of labour exploitation and human trafficking.

She has over 15 years of academic and practical experience in the area of mobile computing, ICT for development, and human-computer interaction. During this time, she has undertaken applied computing research, conceptualizing, designing, developing and rolling out systems for underserved areas in Africa and Southeast Asia.  Through this work, she has made strong connections with mobile operators, local and national governments, inter-governmental organizations, industry and civil society organizations.

She has authored more than 90 peer-reviewed publications based on her research, publishing in both academic and policy circles. Hannah’s work has been presented at / showcased by: UN Special Rapporteur on Human Trafficking (2019); UN Business and Human Rights Forum (2019); World Justice Forum (2019); and at INTERPOL’s 2018 Global Conference on Human Trafficking and Migrant Smuggling.  In 2019 she was invited to speak to the Police Advisers to UN Member States (Nov 2019. Australian Mission to the UN, NY) on using technology to support human trafficking victim identification by law enforcement.  She has also served as a panelist at the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery’s webinar on using tech to assess working conditions in supply chains (June 2020); Code 8.7: Using Computational Science and AI to End Modern Slavery (Feb 2019. UN Headquarters, NY); and the Thomson Reuters Anti-Slavery Summit (Aug 2017. Hong Kong).

The Social Innovation Podcast had a fabulous conversation with Bethany Jinks, the Founder of Zoobie.   Bethany was raised in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, Australia in the state of Victoria.  In her own words, she has always been obsessed with animals which she says comes straight from her parents.  You can hear the passion in her voice when she talks and when she says her love for animals is "in her blood", you know she means it.  Bethany tells a great story about how her father once saved a young pig named 'Oinkle' from greyhound racing.

"Zoobie is an online platform connecting animals that are looking for a home with their perfect family, a safe and ethical pet sales, and adoption platform. Zoobie provides a secure, comprehensive, and easy-to-navigate way for Australian animals to find their perfect home.

Zoobie integrates listings from individuals, shelters, and breeders on one platform so that buyers can navigate the pet marketplace with ease. By tailoring search results to the requirements of the buyer and the unique characteristics and traits of each animal, Zoobie aims to reduce the number of pets who require rehoming because they are unsuited to their first owner’s lifestyle."

While the conversation was serious, I felt like we had a lot of fun.  After the recording, I shared a picture of the best dog in the world with her (full disclosure, my daughter Kyla's dog) Jazz.

Listen to the entire episode and help support Zoobie...

In this episode of the Social Innovation Podcast, Michael Waitze was joined by the esteemed Anne-Marie Brook, a co-Founder of the Human Rights Measurement Initiative.  Anne-Marie is a trained economist and holds a Masters Degree in Economics from Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs.  She spent the better part of 20 years working as an economist including almost 6 years at the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) and almost a decade between the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and the New Zealand Treasury.  Anne-Marie knows her stuff.

It was while she was in Paris working at the OECD that Anne-Marie had what she describes as her first "light-bulb moment" that led her to the founding of HRMI with Susan Randolph and K. Chad Clay.  At the OECD, Anne-Marie was giving economic advice to governments across the globe and noticed that Human Rights were quite a big issue.  She began looking for ways to include these Human Rights issues into her economic advice and she found that she was not able to do so because she could not find the proper data sets.

As an economist, Anne-Marie notes, her recommendations have to be based on empirical data and it was this lack of data on human rights that led her and her co-Founders to begin to build HRMI.  HRMI is a global collaboration between human rights academics and human rights practitioners that is producing a comprehensive human-rights-focused database.  This data is used to measure how countries score on multiple human rights according to those set out by international law.  The idea is to produce data that can be used both by academics to write journal articles and human rights practitioners to really understand what is happening on the ground in the countries in which they operate.

You can support HRMI by participating in their crowdfunding as they continue to expand their business in East and Southeast Asia.  for more general inquiries, you can contact them here.

The Social Innovation Podcast had a fabulous conversation with Azalea Ayuningtyas, the co-Founder and CEO of Du Anyam.  Du Anyam is the leading ethical craft brand in Indonesia with a vision is "to empower women, promote culture, and improve livelihood."  Azalea originally intended to be an academic after receiving a BS in Cell and Molecular Biology from the University of Michigan and a Masters Degree in Epidemiology from Harvard University's School of Public Health.

However, during a field study in India, she had an experience that changed her career perspective.  While interviewing a young woman in her home in the slums of Mumbai, the elder woman of the house came into the interview and yelled at Azalea and told her to leave.  After leaving the house, during a conversation with the translator, Azalea learned why she was asked to leave.  The older woman was upset because many researchers have come into her house to ask questions and learn about her life and yet nothing has changed.

This inspired Azalea and helped her realize that as potentially impactful as academia and its resulting research can be, it is necessary to wait for someone to act on that research and implement solutions based on its findings, conclusions, and resulting policy recommendations.  Remembering her parents running their family business and being able to see the impact of their own decisions began to make Azalea a bit impatient.  It was also around this time that she started to learn about Social Enterprises.  This was very intriguing to her because Azalea figured out that she could use business principles to solve social problems.

Listen to this episode to find out more about Du Anyam and its newest vertical, Krealogi, created to solve craft supply chain bottlenecks and empower all craft SMEs.  You can reach the Du Anyam team here and follow them on Instagram here.

Quote: "Being In This Skin Is the Only Way to Really Experience It"

You simply have to listen to the conversation I had with Troy Prince.  Troy is the Founder of Wall Street Bound, an education and training organization focused on the recruitment, exposure, licensing, and placement of inner-city youth into front office intern positions on Wall Street.  Troy is also a graduate of the prestigious Bronx High School of Science and the NYU Stern School of Business.

Troy and I talked about what it was like growing up in a strong, close-knit, education-focused family in the Bronx.  The southern-most section of the Bronx is a mere 10.2 miles away from Wall Street according to Google Maps, and yet it may as well be on a different planet.  Most kids that grow up in the Bronx have little to no exposure to the world of global finance nor the employment opportunities it presents.  Troy is committed to changing this and believes that while IQ and Talent are equally distributed, opportunity is not.

Troy and I have known each other for more than 20 years.  We met when he was a buy-side trader at Barclays Global Investors in Tokyo and I was a sell-side portfolio trader at Goldman Sachs.  We talked about our experiences in Tokyo and how it was the first time I experience being a 'visual minority', something that Troy has to deal with every day of his life.  We also noted that it was the first time a lot of the foreign traders in Tokyo felt somehow out of their comfort zones.

Troy also spent almost five years living and investing in Vietnam as an angel investor, but could not get the idea of 'Wall Street Bound' and the positive impact it would have on under-served communities out of his mind.  He decided to stop thinking about it and start doing it, like a true entrepreneur.

Wall Street Bound currently runs three impactful programs with more on the way.  Most recently, WSB has created a program in partnership with Maverick Trading that trains urban youth to trade and manage real money in live markets.

Listen to this episode and the rest of the Social Innovation Podcast to learn about how business principles can be applied to create profit and real social impact at the same time.

If you would like to contact the team, e-mail them at [email protected].

I was joined by the esteemed Michelle Jamieson, Communications and Change Consultant at Green Door Solutions.  Michelle has traveled the world and is currently based in Toronto, Canada.  Apparently, Canadians love to talk about the weather, which I did not know.  Hockey, I knew...but the weather was new to me.

Although born in Calgary, Michelle is definitely a third-culture kid...OK, not SO much a kid anymore, but you know what I mean.  Her father is Canadia and her mother is from India.  When Michelle was going into the 8th grade, her father (Walter Jamieson) got a job in Bangkok, Thailand, and moved the family there with him.  Michelle attended the International School of Bangkok (ISB) and was excited by the inherently diverse population.  As a multi-cultural family, they were always interested in travel, but living in Bangkok "opened the door to these incredible adventures", Michelle explained.  Travel to Southeast Asia, China, and India became much easier and she was quickly bitten by the travel bug.

The experience at ISB was such a departure from her life in Calgary and it opened Michelle's eyes to an entirely new world.  Through traveling, she also became involved in her father's work, which was community-based tourism, and looking for ways to incorporate socially responsible economic development.  As Michelle matured and graduated from university, there was a clear confluence of interests between her and her father.  It was from this shared experience and interest that Green Door Solutions was born.

Michelle and I had a great discussion about over-tourism, the impact of COVID-19 on traveling in general, and how responsible and thoughtful tourism can forge economic development without destroying the places that people want to go see and experience.  We also went through some strategies that locations can employ to create robust tourist economies that are not solely based on the number of arrivals.  Clearly, these topics are complex and nuanced and Michelle's perspective was based on years of experience and research.

I learned a lot and you will too as you listen to this deeply insightful episode.