#plugintodevin - Your Mark on the World with Devin Thorpe

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Ann Webb envisioned herself on stage, making a fortune and changing the world. She set out to do just that. Then an “impression” inspired her to head in another direction.

Unsure if it would work, Webb decided to take her life skills training that had been helping people in the US to be more successful and apply the same techniques to helping people in Africa to envision and live more abundant lives. It worked.

Over the past five years, she’s taken hundreds of people to Africa in a dual mission to help the people in Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda and Ghana to become more prosperous. At the same time, she focuses on helping the people she takes to become real humanitarians, capable of changing even more lives.

Check out my free webinar where I share the secrets of successful nonprofit crowdfunding at http://crowdfundingforsocialgood.org.

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Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2GvpdwL.

Halal investing forbids investing in debt, making many traditional investment vehicles off-limits to Muslims seeking to follow Sharia guidance. As a result, many in the Muslim community have limited their investments to cash savings and real estate, leaving them poorly diversified. Junaid Wahedna decided to fix that.

Wahedna, who graduated from Columbia University and spent years working in finance in New York City, was in a good position to launch Wahed Invest, making Halal investing easy.

“I've been very, very fortunate to have a good education, the resources and wherewithal to be able to do something and so I felt quite personally responsible to give back,” Wahenda says. “What right do I have not to actually go in there and fix this problem?”

Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2GvpdwL.

Check out my free webinar where I share the secrets of successful nonprofit crowdfunding at http://crowdfundingforsocialgood.org.

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Zachary Schleien lost a friend, Louis, who suffered from schizophrenia, in a tragic and unnecessary death. His friend’s passing inspired him to do something.

Having just been introduced at work to CaringCrowd, Johnson & Johnson’s crowdfunding platform to support global public health efforts, Zach launched a campaign to raise money to help train hundreds of parents of children with schizoaffective disorder. The training, NAMI Basics, is led by the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

Check out my free webinar where I share the secrets of successful nonprofit crowdfunding at http://crowdfundingforsocialgood.org.

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Kathleen Kelly Janus, Stanford Lecturer and author of Social Startup Success, began her education in social entrepreneurship as a child, skipping church with her parents to help the homeless. That foundation led her to start a nonprofit called Spark alongside her legal career.

The book is about how to scale a nonprofit, with a focus on helping one reach a key milestone of sustainability: a $2 million annual budget. Written from the perspective of 100 nonprofits who did just that, the fresh take on growth in this key sector of the economy, the book is a must-read for nonprofit leaders.

Check out my free webinar where I share the secrets of successful nonprofit crowdfunding at http://crowdfundingforsocialgood.org.

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BDC is the only bank in Canada focused entirely on serving entrepreneurs. The bank is so excited about serving social entrepreneurs that it has a wide-ranging program to support them and provide the same banking services they provide to other entrepreneurs.

They don’t stop there. Craig Rayan, Director of Social Entrepreneurship says, the bank became a certified B Corp five years ago.

Check out my free webinar where I share the secrets of successful nonprofit crowdfunding at http://crowdfundingforsocialgood.org.

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Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2mke1d5.

Originally from inner-city Baltimore, Maryland, successful tech entrepreneur Clarence Wooten, 46, got into tech and computers through video games as a kid. He played on the old Atari, ColecoVision and Commodore platforms.

From those modest beginnings, a career blossomed. As a youth, Wooten looked up to people like Bill Gates and Reginald Lewis as role models. Lewis, the richest African American in the 1980s was born and raised in Baltimore. He died in 1993 after taking control of and subsequently growing Beatrice—the first African American-owned billion-dollar company. The power of role models would stay with Wooten throughout his career.

Still in Baltimore in the late 90s, Wooten founded ImageCafe, a startup that provided website templates for small businesses, something like what Wix and Squarespace do today.

Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2mke1d5.

Check out my free webinar where I share the secrets of successful nonprofit crowdfunding at http://crowdfundingforsocialgood.org.

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin.

Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2FitaEx.

At 29, Brett Durbin went to Tegucigalpa, Honduras to find a cause for his church to support. He’d never imagined how this would change his life. The organization he ultimately founded, Trash Mountain Project, serves the people who make their living—such as it is—by scavenging in the developing world’s trash dumps.

With fires constantly smoldering, burning a mix of toxic and noxious materials, these are literally hellish places, Durbin, now 37, explains. Toddlers, adults and the aged—entire multi-generational families—hunt for food to eat and anything of value to sell crawling and clawing through everything from animal to industrial waste.

After visiting Honduras, Durbin looked for an organization focused on serving the trash dump communities he’d seen. A professor counseled him, “The last thing we need is another nonprofit organization.”

Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2FitaEx.

Check out my free webinar where I share the secrets of successful nonprofit crowdfunding at http://crowdfundingforsocialgood.org.

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin.

Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2mdUnQ6.

Fresh out of college, Rob Gitin took a job working in homeless services along with one of his classmates, Mumtaz Mustapha. One day, she said, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if one day someone started a program that was specifically focused on the kids who either got kicked out of our program or who tell us that they’ve known about it for five years before they ever set foot in it?”

Over the months that followed, the conversation turned from someone else doing it to the two of them. One day, twenty years ago, with an Echoing Green Foundation grant deadline coming the next day, the two decided to apply for the funds to launch At The Crossroads, serving the youth no one else could or would in San Francisco.

Twenty years later, Gitin, now 43, is still at it. Mustapha left after four years to go to medical school and has become a financial supporter. Today, the organization has an annual budget of $1.7 million.

Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2mdUnQ6.

Check out my free webinar where I share the secrets of successful nonprofit crowdfunding at http://crowdfundingforsocialgood.org.

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin.

Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2lFBYfo.

Chris Soukup, 38, is a third-generation member of the deaf community. As a child, he remembers his paternal grandparents visiting each week with a list of phone calls to be made by his mother, who could hear. In those days, before the relay services offered by companies like Communication Service for the Deaf, or CSD, the nonprofit that Soukup now runs, members of the deaf community were effectively prevented from communicating by phone.

Soukup’s life was also influenced by injustice. His grandfather lost his farm when a banker explained he didn’t believe a deaf man could operate a farm.

There are approximately 1 million functionally deaf people in the United States. As many as 14% of adults are deaf or hard of hearing, many of them over the age of 65. About 8 million are hard of hearing, that is, they have difficulty hearing a normal conversation even when wearing a hearing aid. About 70% of deaf people are unemployed or underemployed.

For more insights, be sure to watch my interview with Soukup in the video player above.

About 40 years ago, CSD was founded by Soukup’s father, Ben Soukup, who was also deaf. While many people assumed that the younger Soukup would follow in his father’s footsteps at the helm of the organization, he did not, at least not until he got to college.

Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2lFBYfo.

Check out my free webinar where I share the secrets of successful nonprofit crowdfunding at http://crowdfundingforsocialgood.org.

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin.

Marty Tate, partner at Carman Lenhoff Israelsen, explains in this interview what a SAFE or Simple Agreement for Future Equity is and just how safe it is for both issuers and investors. If you’ve ever wanted to invest in an equity crowdfunding campaign, you do not want to miss this episode.

Check out my free webinar where I share the secrets of successful nonprofit crowdfunding at http://crowdfundingforsocialgood.org.