Scrappy

Four words written on a piece of paper: “shelter, warm, comfort, dignity.” This is where ShelterBox began. Tom Henderson, the original founder of ShelterBox, turned with his idea to his local Rotary Club in Helston, England for support, and they took up the mantle. Today, over 20 years later, Rotary International is still a key partner. Here in the U.S., Kerri Murray is at the helm of the largest ShelterBox affiliate in the world. Since 2015, Kerri has personally overseen relief efforts for some of the most dire events in recent memory, including conflicts in Syria and Yemen, and most recently in Ukraine, an earthquake in Haiti, a typhoon in the Philippines and famines in Africa, just to name a few.

Chris Straigis – 00:01

Welcome to Scrappy, the podcast about small companies doing big things. I’m your host, Chris Straigis. I walked by a sign not too long ago in downtown Philadelphia. That read “start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.” It really stopped me in my tracks, three simple sentences, but a profound and moving manifesto. We all have within us to power to affect change, I really do believe that. And I also believe that as a general rule, most humans when confronted with another suffering will skew heavily towards compassion. Now where those two traits intersect, you’ll find positive action; action that solves big problems or helps to alleviate the pain of another. For those special people who find themselves in the middle bit of that venn diagram, they do in fact begin where they are with what they have, and then they take action. Usually in our stories, we focus on a person singular who took up the mission-driven call to use their skill or talent, or simply their will and drive to make the world a better place in some specific way.

Chris Straigis – 01:22

It’s easy to point to them and say, look, look at what that person is doing. We’ve always recognized, however that behind many, if not, most of the people we feature, there’s a team who also take up the mantle, motivated by the work or the cause, or even simply inspired by another person taking action. Today, we focus not just on the origins and the current leader of a company, ShelterBox, but we also turn a well deserved light on the selfless brave, and in some cases, heroic difference makers who are on the frontline, the boots on the ground for this global aid organization.

Chris Straigis – 01:59

Four words written on a piece of paper: “shelter, warm, comfort, dignity.” This is where ShelterBox began. In a 2008 CNN interview, Tom Henderson, the original founder of ShelterBox, describes the epiphany he had while watching news footage of disaster relief efforts.

Chris Straigis – 02:27

In that moment in 1999, his compassion for the scene turned into an idea, then into action. “If people have lost everything” Henderson asked, “why should they lose their dignity as well?” The idea was simple. Provide disaster relief victims with an easily transportable kit that included the most basic needs for survival: shelter, clean water tools. He eventually turned with this idea to his local Rotary Club in Helston, England for support, and they took up the mantle. Today, over 20 years later, Rotary International is still a key partner, with its global reach in hubs in nearly every corner of the world. Kerri Murray is at the helm of the largest ShelterBox affiliate in the world here in the United States. Kerri’s been President of ShelterBox US since 2015 and has personally overseen relief efforts for some of the most dire events in recent memory, including conflicts in Syria and Yemen, and most recently in Ukraine, an earthquake in Haiti, a typhoon in the Philippines and famines in Africa, just to name a few. Kerri, thank you so much for talking to me today. Uh, I usually like to start by following the breadcrumbs into the past to help paint a picture of how one ended up doing the work they do now, but I wanna change it up a bit today and start by asking this, what do those four words mean to you? “Shelter, warm, comfort, dignity.”

Kerri Murray – 04:02

For me, those four words represent really one of my reasons for being, and certainly the work that we do every day at ShelterBox. Those words are at the core of why we exist. Coming back from the Ukraine, Poland border where I was working, I think those words are even more important to me than ever before. And they represent to me that people who’ve been affected by disasters and some of the worst humanitarian crises in our generation have the basic things that they need to sustain their life and to enable their recovery. And I think those four words are at the core of what we do every day. And it’s, it’s why I do the work I do at ShelterBox.

Chris Straigis – 05:00

That’s a great answer. And it says a lot about why you’re doing the work that you do. Most of our shows hone in on the specific key person who’s behind the wheel of an organization or movement. But I also think ShelterBox is such a great example of the hard work, dedication and shared mission of so many people, especially your SRTs or ShelterBox response teams. We’ll get into that. But I think that your personal story might just be a great analogy to step into that broader scope. So I wanna touch a bit on you and your path. Let’s do a quick, deep dive. You were born and raised in the proud new England area. So it’s the 1980s, in the small town of Naugatuck, Connecticut. A young Kerri Murray is sitting in her room listening to, I don’t know, maybe the Pixies and the Cars, thinking about the future. What did you want to be when you grew up?

Kerri Murray – 05:53

Well, in the 1980s, I was playing on the softball team, uh, at my school as well as on the boys’ baseball team. And there’s no question that I really was dreaming about being the first woman on the Boston Red Sox. And I am a huge baseball fan, I’m a huge Red Sox fan. It didn’t pan out quite as I expected, but that’s probably, uh, what I was thinking.

Chris Straigis – 06:25

In 1991, you made a big step into your future at Providence College, right up the road in Rhode Island. You took a path toward political science. Why was that your focus?

Kerri Murray – 06:38

You know, I always had a, just an affinity to public service. I just always felt this burning desire to be part of the political process I had worked and been part of on some campaigns in, in high school and grammar school. And I just wanted to find a way to serve. And when I got to Providence College, what was so unique was that about a mile and a half down the road was the State House. And I learned early on when I started school that I actually could intern and I started interning for a state representative there. And then I was hooked. I just found myself in the throes of Rhode Island state politics. And I absolutely loved it. And actually, um, my last year of college at Providence, I ended up really going to night school there because I was really just so swept up in working in Rhode Island politics that my last year of school, I became a lobbyist and I became a lobbyist for an environmental group, which is an incredible humanitarian organization called Save the Bay. And I started lobbying for them. I was their first lobbyist and really advocating against the dredging of Narragansett Bay. And that was, uh, an incredible opportunity for me. So that was my last year of college, and then I graduated in the spring of 1995.

Chris Straigis – 08:10

Facing the realities of graduation. Kerri told me that she had decisions to make. And with her tuition loans coming due, she turned to corporate work and in a fateful move, landed with a global pharmaceutical giant.

Kerri Murray – 08:25

In the late 1990s, I started working for GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals and I spent 13 years there and it was the most transformational experience, learning deep business skills and working both in the United States and in Europe. But in really in 2004, my whole life changed. I was pregnant with my first and only daughter and in an instant, everything went wrong and, um, she stopped breathing and I had an emergency C-section and they had said that she had a cord wrapped around her neck many times, three times. And they said she hadn’t grown for the last 10 weeks of my pregnancy and they didn’t think she’d make it. But eventually they said that if she lives, she’ll never talk because she had paralyzed vocal cords. And so that was really a transformation for me in realizing that so many parts of the world being pregnant can be a death sentence.

Kerri Murray – 09:29

And in many parts of the world, I would not have made it. My daughter certainly would not have. The difference was we had access, right? Access that so many people in the world don’t have. During that experience, I started getting involved again, on the side, with a lot of different humanitarian organizations, just volunteering, anything I could, whether it was my time, whether it was resources. And then in 2009, we had a new CEO that came in at GlaxoSmithKline and really his agenda was trying to transform the industry, the pharmaceutical industry. And he wanted to do that by starting with our company. And he tapped me and a handful of other executives from around the world and he asked us if we would be willing to do nonprofit assignments.

Kerri Murray – 10:24

And so at the end of 2009, I was embedded into an organization in California called Direct Relief. And they had been founded in 1948, but were having a lot of issues just, uh, overall with sustainability. Expenses exceeded their revenue every year, they were having trouble, uh, really raising funding for the organization, and awareness. And so I came in to help them on a six-month assignment. And I was on the job for a month when the earthquake in Haiti hit. And that was a disaster that was heard around the world. It was devastating. It killed hundreds of thousands of people. It displaced a million and a half people in an instant. And I went to Haiti and I, and I saw that it was these incredible nonprofit organizations on the ground that were really filling gaps around basic needs, food, water, shelter, access to medical care. And that was the first time I actually saw ShelterBox. Um, that was one of the largest responses in their history. They were everywhere providing temporary shelter to Haitians who’d been displaced in an instant.

Kerri Murray – 11:45

I fell in love with humanitarian relief work and particularly disaster relief work in that experience. And I came back to, uh, from Haiti and I just realized that I could leverage everything I ever learned in my corporate life and I could apply it to these nonprofits. And ultimately it didn’t mean we were making more money. It meant that we could save more lives. And so I got off the corporate in 2010 after my six-month assignment and I spent the next five-and-a-half years with that organization until one day I got the call from ShelterBox in 2015 to come serve as their president.

Chris Straigis – 12:34

Just so that we’re all on the same page. Can you describe ShelterBox for me? And what’s at the core of your mission.

Kerri Murray – 12:41

We’re a global humanitarian relief organization that provides emergency shelter and essential household items to people who’ve been displaced in an instant, either by a natural disaster or by a crisis situation, conflict situation, civil war situation. And so the center of gravity of what we do is the provision of the shelter. And then the other things that we provide that you think about that when you need to set up household very quickly, that are essential for life. Things like light. So you’ve lost power in so many of these instances, we include inside the box, waterproof solar lanterns. We also see often in disaster situations, contamination of the water source, so we include a water purification unit, containers to store purified water. You see aid organizations bring in food and water, but what are you gonna boil water in? What are you gonna prepare a hot meal in? So we include a whole stainless steel cook set. Then we have mosquito nets to protect against vector-borne disease in wet conditions. We include everything from blankets to ground mats that you can sleep on, as well as a tool set. And it’s all about really giving these displaced families the tools that they need to enable their self recovery and shelter is the absolute first step in the recovery process.

Chris Straigis – 14:11

Tom Henderson originally took his idea to his local Rotary Club in that small town in England. And they provided some key early support to get it off the ground. Now today, Rotary International is a worldwide partner with ShelterBox and a key element in the speed and scale of your disaster relief efforts. Can you tell me a bit more about this partnership and the value that it brings to your organization?

Kerri Murray – 14:36

It was a simple, but great idea. Um, we’ve since become at ShelterBox, we’re a separate 501 C3 nonprofit. We’re a separate group. However, we remain the official project partner of Rotary International in emergencies. Now, across the world, there are 35,000 Rotary Clubs in 200 countries. And so Rotarians often answer the call and there are often in sources of information when awful things are happening in the world. Some of the first folks that we talk to, you know, even in the, in this whole situation with the Ukraine crisis, you know, the first folks we were talking to were Rotarians on the ground in the region to really get a good understanding of what was happening. So they often serve as providing information on the disaster or on the conflict situation. They often serve as volunteers locally, when does, especially in natural disaster situations, they mobilize and help us with logistics, supply chain training, putting tents up. So they are one very important partner in this global humanitarian mission.

Chris Straigis – 15:47

Now, as I mentioned earlier, uh, I wanna zoom in and shine a light on some of the incredible people that have taken up the cause. And in some cases are even putting their lives on the line to serve. It’s one thing to prepare and ship your boxes into a disaster zone. There’s sourcing materials, assembly, the transport logistics. But then there’s the very real challenge of the so-called last mile. You have to get large shipments of your relief product into some of the worst conditions geographically or even geopolitically. Obviously you can’t use FedEx or UPS for this. Instead you use SRTs. At a high level, can you describe these amazing people who are at ground zero for ShelterBox?

Kerri Murray – 16:30

When we were first started, our founders created something called the SRT, the ShelterBox Response Team. And these are volunteers that come from all walks of life, from all over the world. And essentially they apply to become a first responder with our organization. They go through about a year of training and one in 30 people will pass the program and become an SRT member with our organization. And so these are the folks that really help an enable ShelterBox to scale up a response and serve thousands of families when something really horrible happens. And this work can be extraordinarily challenging. It’s very physically demanding, uh, but it’s incredibly rewarding for these folks. And, um, it’s the only way that we’re able to really do the work that we do at ShelterBox, because at any given time, I mean, we’re responding all over the world. In addition to the Ukraine crisis right now we have, uh, a huge deployment going on in the Philippines for super typhoon Rai, which hit last December. We are deploying aid to Yemen, to Syria, to Cameroon, Ethiopia. So we are working in some of the most challenging disaster, but also conflict situations in our world. And we couldn’t do it without this incredible army of, of response team members.

Chris Straigis – 18:01

I’m sure every one of your SRTs comes away from a mission with some incredible stories. Can you share one or two stories about specific people or events that are the stuff of ShelterBox legend?

Kerri Murray – 18:14

Our organization works extensively in a country called Cameroon and we work in a refugee camp called the Minawao camp. And our claim to fame in this camp is that ShelterBox is the only provider of tents to new arrivals at this camp. And a few years back, uh, our teams met Esther. Esther is from Nigeria, Boko, Nigeria. And as a young teenager, Boko Haram, the militant group, stormed her village and she was with her family. And in the middle of the night, they killed her father. They raped and murdered her mother. They killed her brothers and they told her to run, which meant she was likely gonna be target practice.

Kerri Murray – 19:07

But Esther miraculously made it to the border of Cameroon and with a group of girls from her village, she was taken into Cameroon by security forces and she was left at the Minawao camp. And for so many Nigerian refugees who make it out the Minawao camp is the first step in their recovery. And really what changed her life was she took a sewing class at the camp and she became the finest seamstress of her block at the camp. And for these refugees, they could live for on average of 17 years at a refugee camp. And she’s become a seamstress, she’s married, she’s now had two children and she supports her family on her income. But she is indicative of the type of people that we work to find every day at ShelterBox and help enabling their recovery. And sometimes it’s newly displaced and sometimes it’s the long term displaced, but Esther is really the reason we do this work every day to help her with the basic things that she needs to help sustain her family when she’s gone through something, just absolutely horrible.

Kerri Murray – 20:18

Another story that comes to mind, I flew into Kraków, where our response team is working and we coordinate within the UN system. I actually went with one of my teammates and we went down to work on the border, the Ukraine border, just a few miles over the border into Poland. And we were working at the main train station over the border where 20,000 new refugees are coming every single day from Ukraine into Poland. And it was it’s the middle of winter. It’s extraordinarily cold. The people stepping off the train station were women, children, elderly, disabled, and then dogs and cats. And I saw very few men because if you’re between the age of 18 and 60, you’re forced to stay behind a fight. And so families are having to make these unbelievable decisions and choices about fleeing their country and oftentimes leaving family behind.

Kerri Murray – 21:18

And that was what I experienced. I talked to one woman, Julia, who spent five days fleeing the country on foot on bus and then train with her 10 year old son. And when I met her, she was absolutely exhausted. She wasn’t relieved. She was an absolute fear because she told me she had to leave behind her 22 year old son. And not only was she afraid, would she ever see her son again? Would her home be gone when? And, and if she could go back to her country? She also had had no idea where she was gonna sleep that night. And so, you know, we’re also seeing this moment right now, this situation, which I believe, I mean, we’re hearing it’s the fastest growing refugee crisis since World War II in Europe. And it’s incredible to look at the numbers. We’re approaching 3 million refugees. Millions internally displaced within Ukraine. I’ve never seen our refugee crisis situation moving so quickly like this one.

Chris Straigis – 22:25

Kerri, let’s dive in a little bit more on this current crisis in Ukraine. What, if anything makes this situation unique compared to other relief efforts that you’ve managed with ShelterBox?

Kerri Murray – 22:39

So what makes this Ukraine crisis so different right now is the scale and the severity and how fast moving this is. And so with many conflict situations that we’re now, you know, at the 11 year anniversary of our response in the Syrian refugee crisis. I mean, that was slower moving, obviously hugely consequential, half the pre-war population has been displaced. But this Ukraine crisis is moving so quickly. So we now you have nearly 3 million refugees, millions internally displaced. The numbers are expected to increase in the days and weeks and months to come. And that you have 12 million people already in need of humanitarian assistance in a country of, of 44 million. So what we’re seeing is that the, you know, the human costs are mounting each day. You know at ShelterBox we’re also having to do things very different to meet the unique needs of this situation. Different needs inside Ukraine versus what we’re seeing with refugees for people internally displaced, you know, they they’re living in damaged homes.

Kerri Murray – 23:50

Um, so it’s it’s shelter kits to help repair their homes. They’re in evacuation center, sleeping on the floor. So it’s mattresses, it’s blankets, it’s coats and hygiene kits. And then for refugees, it’s the basic things to help them sustain their family. So it’s small cash allotments to help buy food and medicine, it’s coats because we’re in the middle of the winter, it’s cold, it’s hygiene supplies because they fled without anything, and it’s basic things for, for their personal care. So, and you see this, you know, the refugees that are fleeing, it’s not to just one neighboring country it’s to the neighboring countries to Ukraine, but it’s also across the EU. So this is gonna be a fast moving refugee crisis situation that isn’t getting, going away and it’s only getting worse. And the UN is now estimating that there could be between eight to 10 million refugees all told.

Chris Straigis – 24:49

I mentioned in my intro, some of the disaster responses that you’ve overseen. And now we’re talking about this crisis in Ukraine, which is still so very troubling and so raw. But when I hear you talk, you are so enthusiastic and optimistic about your mission. What gets you up every morning? What drives you to continue to do this work in the face of the things that you deal with every day?

Kerri Murray – 25:17

I feel lucky every day, uh, back to 2004, I feel fortunate that I’m here. I feel fortunate that my daughter’s here and I know that I have the ability to really help people who are some of the most vulnerable people in our planet today. And that I could do that through my work at ShelterBox. And that, you know, it’s my first deployment I ever had, when I mentioned to you, in Haiti, I remember feeling really down and really sad. I mean the first place I went when I hit Port-au-Prince in 2010 was a ward with babies and it was awful. And I remember I was with a board member at the time and she kind of pinched me and kind of slapped my face gently. And she said, “Kerri, you know, you gotta perk up. We’re here to give these, these families hope.” And something shifted in that moment in me, and I’ve, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve changed forever on how I really envision this work, is that that is my job. I’m there to bring hope, I’m there to help provide the basic tools and just the, the basic things people need to help rebuild their lives. But also that these basic things that we’re providing can transform someone’s life. I just know that I’m in the right spot and this is where I’m meant to, to be. And where I’m meant to serve.

Chris Straigis – 26:40

You mentioned earlier a pivotal point in your life with the traumatic birth of your daughter. Now fast forwarding to today. Can you share how that turned out?

Kerri Murray – 26:52

Not only did her vocal cords restore, uh, and it was a while she, she didn’t have any voice for the first six months of her life. Uh, but today she’s 18, she’s a senior in high school and, uh, she’s a singer nonetheless. Um, she was one of the youngest contestants ever on the 2020 season of American Idol. And she, uh, she’s actually just went on tour.

Chris Straigis – 27:31

ShelterBox is currently hard at work in Ukraine and around the world to learn more about their missions, to donate, or maybe even to go through the process of becoming one of their elite SRTs, visit ShelterBox.org. You can also learn more about Rotary International and even find your local chapter at rotary.org. They’re always grateful for the support in their local communities. And you can find links and transcripts for today’s show at scrappypod.com. As always, thanks for listening to Scrappy.

The post ShelterBox appeared first on All Around Creative.

Marie Haas has worked with, and touched the hearts of, some of the most vulnerable citizens in our society – kids with autism and their families. She began and grew a company in Singapore called Embrace Autism. It was the fusion of science and art, born of a passion to care, connect and communicate. But that’s not what she set out to do, at least not officially. She actually just wanted to dance.

Chris Straigis – 00:02
Welcome to Scrappy the podcast about small companies doing big things. I’m your host, Chris Straigis. So we’re now nearing the end of 2021. And it’s been a little while since we’ve done a new episode, very sorry about that. But time has felt somehow distorted recently. I think I can safely say that in many ways, at least comparatively, our world was buzzing along in kind of a cruise control until early last year. COVID was, and still is, a catalyst for some major and massive transformations. It’s changed us. It’s changed a lot of things, from how we relate to each other, to how we relate to our jobs and even how we relate to our greater global society. Now, I know that many facets of these changes, didn’t just pop up out of nowhere. Our world, our experience is ever evolving. But this pandemic was a game changer for our generation.

Chris Straigis – 01:08
No one, not the very young, not the 20 and 30 somethings, not even the elderly are coming out of this unchanged. And really, I don’t think we’ve even begun to see the true transformation. Everything we’ve experienced over the last year and a half brought about short term and rapid change. It’s the ripples in the water well beyond the original splash that may turn out to be the most fascinating. In other words, how will a change to us change the world?

Chris Straigis – 01:41
At its core, this is what Scrappy is all about, transformation. It’s about everyday people, just like you and me, doing extraordinary things. Usually finding themselves, forging their destiny from materials they didn’t even know they had, and then watching those ripples roll out in ways they themselves couldn’t even foretell. And so it is with our guest today. Marie Haas has worked with and touched the hearts of some of the most vulnerable citizens in our society – kids with autism and their families. She began and grew a company in Singapore called Embrace Autism. It was the fusion of science and art, born of a passion to care, connect and communicate. But that’s not what she set out to do, at least not officially. She actually just wanted to dance, or more specifically explore movement, self-expression and communication through dance. Little did she know when she started, how connected her ideas would be in a world far from her own, and in a land far from home. Marie’s journey began in Houston, Texas in the early 1990s, her dad was a computer programmer and her mom, a school teacher.

Marie Haas – 03:03
I can remember when I was living in Texas, um, that my mom would, you know, work with both my sister and I at home on lots of educational things. Including, um, this hooked on phonics, which I’m not sure if you know what that is, but that was very popular at the time. And I can remember sitting in the floor in the living room, you know, doing this hooked on phonics even before we were, you know, in school.

Chris Straigis – 03:37
But an early and devastating shakeup in the family would send her far north in a move to Massachusetts and begin to drive her inward.

Marie Haas – 03:48
The circumstances through which I moved across the country, um, were traumatic in terms of they, that was the falling out of my parents’ marriage, and they had just gotten divorced. So, I didn’t want to move to Massachusetts, I didn’t want to leave my friends behind. I didn’t want to leave my cat behind. I was being uprooted from everything that I had previously known. When we were living in Texas, I was taking, um, gymnastics lessons and swimming lessons, but those things were not readily available or at least not close by, um, where we lived in Massachusetts.

Marie Haas – 05:03
However, um, my aunt owned a dance studio, a town over, and so I began taking ballet lessons with her at her studio after school. I think dance really offered me a place where I could express a lot of the things that I wasn’t able to express verbally. Um, so it was definitely an anchor in that sense. It was an outlet in that sense, it gave me something to really focus on. I was able to, to use dance, to really work out all of the complex emotions that I was holding in my body. In that way, there were a lot of times where dance was incredibly healing. It was also in a way a space where I could hide. I wasn’t necessarily having conversations, um, or willing to have conversations with people around me about how I felt or what was going on in my life or how it was affecting me. Um, and instead I just sort of buried it inside of this practice. Dance in many ways, became the way I felt seen in the world.

Chris Straigis – 06:09
What Marie discovered in dance was expression – expression of feelings and emotions that she wasn’t comfortable verbalizing. It was how she talked to the world around her and, more importantly, how she talked to herself. What she couldn’t have understood at the time, however, was that her study of dance as a form of communication for feelings of which she was unable to speak, would share a deep parallel in the work she would do in the future after college. But that journey to college and beyond first took another devastating twist, where Marie came face to face with an abrupt end of her dancing life.

Marie Haas – 06:52
We are rehearsing for a production at the performing arts high school that I went to. Um, and in the middle of this rehearsal, I get dropped. I landed pretty square on the center of my spine. For what felt like a really long time I couldn’t move, but I was in a lot of pain. I didn’t think that anything was broken. I wasn’t bleeding. And so I drove myself home eventually. Um, and then the next day, uh, went to the hospital to have some x-rays done and it didn’t show that anything was broken or that anything was off, but that I should take it easy. Um, but I didn’t really do that. In that particular time of my life. I really believed that, you know, part of this practice is pain and that you have to get back up and keep going. And that that’s part of it. And so I pushed myself, um, to continue rehearsing and continue dancing and to struggle through the injury.

Marie Haas – 09:00
But as a result, at that performance that we had been preparing for, at the end of a piece, I ended up collapsing and my entire back just gave out. We found out that a bunch of the tissues and ligaments around my spine had been torn and had were bleeding, essentially. And at that point I actually had to stop dancing altogether. I was also told that I probably wouldn’t be able to dance in the same way moving forward or in the future. I was also, never mind this performance, I was also in the midst of applying to colleges and a lot of colleges that had, um, more conservative dance programs that would ultimately thrust you into the performative world of professional dance. And it sounded like at the time that that really wasn’t going to be an option for me. And so that was incredibly heartbreaking and upsetting to feel like the, the thing that I had been working my entire life for at least, you know, since I was nine or 10, um, was just going to completely disappear before it had ever come to fruition.

Chris Straigis – 09:58
Years of hard work, the voice she had developed through this art form seemed gone and a flash. Faced with the end of her future in ballet, she, once again did what she had to do, she adapted. As the old saying goes, when one door closes, another opens up and for Marie, this is where the doors would begin to open.

Marie Haas – 10:24
At the time two of my dance teachers, um, at the performing arts school were primarily, um, modern dancers or contemporary dancers. And they also had a lot of experience in improvisation and in different types of improvisation. They came to me and said, “Hey, why don’t you take a couple of classes in this? And here’s some books…” And I worked with them closely and started experimenting with improvisation, and a little bit with composing and making my own dances. They were also floating ideas about different kinds of colleges and places that I could go and study, and Bennington College happened to be one of them. And so I started looking into Bennington College and was reading about Susan Sgorbati, who is at the time, one of the, uh, dance, um, professors there. And she was teaching emergent improvisation, the idea of spontaneous composition, or composing in the moment. And I think ultimately, you know, the improvisation work became the way in which I could really find catharsis in the process of creation.

Chris Straigis – 12:03
Marie ended up choosing Bennington College in Vermont, after all it was Susan Sgorbati’s program that gave her a new path, so it seemed like a perfect fit. And during her time there, her new chosen style of expression, improvisational dance, would also lead her down another unexpected path. One that would open her eyes to a different, more science-based aspect of communication. This revelation would prove to be key in what was to come.

Marie Haas – 12:34
In my senior year, I was collaborating with my long-time dance partner and best friend, Emily Climer on a duet practice, an improvisational duet practice, that we call the Recall Form, and is about cultivating what I was saying before this, this empathy that brings us into partnership with one another. And as part of my research, um, outside of the studio, I began reading about how do we connect with others, um, and sort of what’s going on from a neurological perspective. And that’s how I found Marco Iacoboni in his book, Mirroring People and the Science of Empathy. He talks about how mirroring and imitation is the way in which we’re biologically tuned to connect with one another.

Chris Straigis – 13:47
And it’s here that her connection with autism begins.

Marie Haas – 13:51
One of the things that really struck me in reading his book was not just in relationship to this work that I was doing in dance, but he has an entire chapter on autism and dedicates an entire chapter on it in his book. And he talks about how some of this scientific research that is emerging around mirroring and imitation would support therapies that are utilizing those techniques. So I was ‘like light bulb moment,’ I’m going to volunteer at this place where they’re joining children and their exclusive and repetitive behaviors and activities, and that sounds a lot like mirroring an imitation. And it would make a lot of sense then why that’s such an effective form of building a connection and building a rapport and a relationship. I was being, you know, called in a sense to move in that direction, and towards, towards that work.

Chris Straigis – 14:58
Marie continued to dance and continued her research into Marco Iacoboni’s work, which would in turn deepen her understanding of its connection to people with autism. She would also meet her future husband, Nick, whose own path would prove pivotal for her as well.

Marie Haas – 15:17
In the year, following my graduation from Bennington college, I started volunteering at the Autism Treatment Center of America, which is the home of the Son-Rise program, which is the autism program that I’ve been heavily involved in. I was drawn to their program because of its similarities to my work in dance. Their program also focuses on connecting and building relationships with these children through what they call joining, which to me looked from the outside, very similar to these same forms of movement, um, shared movement that I was utilizing with my dance partners. And so that’s why I was really drawn, or at least that was one of the reasons why I was really drawn to what they were doing. Um, and I was also just really intrigued by their curriculum because they weren’t, you know, using the traditional curriculums that other autism therapies were using, they were using a developmental model, um, that again, really focuses on connecting and building relationships with children, but also works on building their ability to relate to others in the world and to socialize. Working in the Son-Rise Program playroom for me was ultimately no different from dancing and improvising with a partner in the studio.

Chris Straigis – 17:04
There are times, as Marie told me, that the universe just works in mysterious ways. As she begins to explore post-college life, she’s volunteering at the Autism Treatment Center of America and staying involved with Susan Sgorbati’s program. She’s still living near the college and growing roots. She’s also still dating Nick and they’re planning their future together. And then, in early 2010, he’s offered a job in Singapore and he wants Marie to go with him. This would be the second time in her young life that a move to a far away place would seem to disrupt everything. But then in the fall of that year, our friend, the universe steps in.

Marie Haas – 17:51
Nick got this, got this job opportunity in Singapore, and it was, at first it seemed like really crazy, like really crazy. And I was like, I don’t know if I can move all the way there and not know anybody or not having anything to do. In the fall of what would have been 2010, I met a family at the Autism Treatment Center of America who had come all the way from Singapore with their daughter for a Son-Rise Program intensive. And we met in the dining hall there and I said “this might sound crazy, but my boyfriend (at the time) just got a job in Singapore and I’m going to be moving to Singapore to join him, and would you be interested in me coming to work with your daughter?”

Marie Haas – 19:02
I think they were shocked in somewhat disbelief that that could possibly be happening or that I would eventually show up at their doorstep, but they agreed that they would absolutely love to have me come and volunteer in their home and work with their daughter. So ultimately that’s what I did. I picked up and packed all my stuff and I moved all the way around the world. In the first year I was still dancing, but then that kind of slowly started to become less and less, um, because I was spending more and more time, um, working with Izzy, which was the little girl that I had met at the Autism Treatment Center of America. And I was spending, at that point, eventually five days a week, I was at her home. So that became really my full-time work. Her mom and I would take turns or shifts in her playroom.

Marie Haas – 20:10
And so I would go in for a couple of hours and then she would go in for a couple of hours every day, Monday through Friday. I kind of in a certain way, I don’t really feel like even though I wasn’t dancing in the studio anymore, I didn’t really lose my, my, my dance or my improvisation practice because being with her in that room was really no different. You know, to her, I was, I was her playmate, but for me, she was really my dance partner. Sam and I Izzy’s mom, Sam, um, and I met Chris. And Chris who was another mom who was, uh, running a Son-Rise Program, playroom for her children, she was very, very connected, um, to the, to the community. And she had also been to the Autism Treatment Center of America for training in the Son-Rise Program. Once we connected with her, we began connecting with the community there. And, but there was a very, in terms of the Son-Rise Program, the community was pretty small. There was a lot of people who were interested and keen to learn about it and wanted help, even. But as far as I could tell, I was one of maybe a handful of volunteers who were helping these families and working with these children.

Chris Straigis – 22:06
Marie realized that there was a need. There was a large community of families who were in need of a better way to support their children with autism.

Marie Haas – 22:16
Most of what was offered in Singapore at that time were more traditional forms of ABA, speech or occupational therapy. Um, and there weren’t as many alternative programs. Um, and there certainly weren’t very many home-based child-centered programs like the Son-Rise Program. And at that point I started getting a lot of requests from other people – “Hey, can you work with my kid?” Um, or, “Hey, can you train my volunteers?” And of course, like I said, I was running and working with Izzy five days a week, and so I really didn’t have the bandwidth to do that. But I thought like, it seems like there’s a need for this. There’s a community of parents and children who are looking for other ways. I emailed Raun Kaufman, who is the Director of Global Education at the Autism Treatment Center of America. He’s also the author of Autism Breakthrough, which is the book that sort of offers this step-by-step look at running the Son-Rise Program with your children. And I was like, “Hey, I’m here. This is what’s happening. Do you think that you would ever be interested in running a week-long training program in Singapore?” To my surprise and my excitement one afternoon, I got an email saying that they would love to have a conversation about bringing the Son-Rise Program to Singapore.

Marie Haas – 24:02
That first conversation was really exciting. It was also incredibly overwhelming because I didn’t really realize what kind of can I was opening up, Suddenly, it was like, okay, in order for this to happen, you have to have an organization. And, you know, all the, the things that go into running a program, and not just a program, but really a not-for-profit. And I, at that point ,for as much as I was excited, I felt really overwhelmed. We, you know, we knew we were going to need help, and so we had reached out to all of these other parents and said, “Hey, we’re going to need volunteers. We’re going to need help.” And so we got a small group together at my apartment in Singapore, and we just had a big brainstorming session. And to be honest, I actually have no idea who said it, but at a certain point, that name was floated and everybody loved it.

Chris Straigis – 25:05
And so in 2014, Embrace Autism was born. As it’s said, ‘a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.’ And it was all Marie could do to take that one step at a time.

Marie Haas – 25:20
So at first we didn’t really have a long-term vision. We, we really just thought, okay, we’re going to create this company because we need it in order to partner with the Autism Treatment Center of America, to bring them over here, to teach the program. And then when it’s over, we’ll dissolve it, right. We won’t keep it because this was sort of going to be a one and done kind of situation. Like let’s help educate some people, and that was sort of, as far as the vision was initially. We also didn’t have any funding. So we started by the three of us contributing our own funds with the hopes that we would create and balance a budget that would pay ourselves back at the end of it. You know, this was just sort of a project, you know, a one-time project that we were working on initially.

Marie Haas – 26:28
Raun came over, and part of what they offer when they run the Son-Rise Program in other parts of the world, is first a lecture tour with Raun, where Raun comes and speaks. So we set up a series of lectures, a couple in Singapore, and also a couple in Malaysia, right next door. And set up a TV interview and a radio interview, an interview with a magazine, a local magazine in Singapore. And we did all of this by sort of word of mouth and connection. Like Chris was like, I know somebody here and Sam knew somebody here. And so we really started building this larger community of people, and surrounding ourselves with people who were also passionate about this, wanted to be involved and wanted to help. And as a result of really building and utilizing that community, we became bigger and bigger.

Marie Haas – 27:43
By the end of the lecture tour, we had reached over a thousand people, um, between Singapore and Malaysia. And so, and that far exceeded our expectation in terms of how many people were going to show up. And then we ended up having 135 participants registered for the training program that would then happen in May of 2015, and that would be the first program that we ran. We were just in awe and obviously so excited. It just organically grew from that place.

Marie Haas – 28:35
Other groups started reaching out to us from around Southeast Asia and we ended up partnering with a group in the Philippines and a group in Vietnam. It was really, really became much more than we envisioned. And it just took on a life of its own. You know, and really that’s, you know, in part, obviously a Testament to our, our passion for like helping spread this thing. But also I think more than anything, this community that was hungry for this and the people who just continued to show up and offer help and offer support and want to grow this thing with us.

Chris Straigis – 29:33
Trauma, relocation, injury – it all helped shape Marie’s young life. The separation of her parents, the move across the country, the near total loss of the one thing that helped her cope, dance. But other natural instincts drive and persistence and optimism, Marie used those tools to adapt and achieve more than she thought possible. They helped her find a way to help others. She’s been guided not only by instinct, but also by the chance people she met along the way – Susan Sgorbati, Marco Iacoboni, her husband, Nick, Raun Kaufman, and of course, Izzy a young girl with autism that would speak for the universe and clear a path for Marie to follow.

Marie Haas – 30:25
So I’m still in touch with her family. I’m in touch with her mostly via WhatsApp. Um, she she’ll usually WhatsApp me, um, in her evening, which is my morning. And she’ll ask me what I’m doing at home today. Mostly because of the pandemic. She’s outgrown her need for the Son-Rise Program and is really in school and making friends and thriving in the world. A lot of times I think about, you know, her footprint really, in the world and in a way being bigger than mine in terms of allowing this thing to come to fruition. Like if I hadn’t met her and moved to Singapore, then none of this ever really would have happened. And so my work with her, my relationship with her, my friendship with her has, has been incredibly special for me.

Chris Straigis – 31:43
To learn more about Embrace Autism. You can find them at facebook.com/embraceautism.sg, and you can get more information about the Autism Treatment Center of America and their Son-Rise Program at autismtreatmentcenter.org. For those of you into dance and movement, I’d also encourage you to visit emergentimprovisation.org, to learn more about Marie’s work with Susan Sgorbati. You can find transcripts and links from today’s show at scrappypod.com. And you can listen back to all of our previous stories at the website or wherever you get your podcasts. And we do have some great conversations slated over the next couple of months, so please do keep an eye on us. And of course, as always, thanks for listening to Scrappy.

The post Embrace Autism appeared first on All Around Creative.

In the mid- 1980’s, Debra Ruh was nurturing a successful career in the banking industry and looking forward to starting a family. But in 1987, her path took an unexpected turn after the birth of her daughter Sara. And today, that path has led her around the world to work with multi-national  companies, nations, the UN and more. As an advocate for accessibility and inclusion, Debra has dedicated her life to improve the lives those with disabilities.

Chris Straigis – 0:02
Welcome to Scrappy, the podcast about small companies doing big things. I’m your host, Chris Straigis. We’ve been working hard to collect stories and interviews for our second season. But in light of all the recent changes we’ve been going through from politics to pandemics to protest, we’ve decided to change things up a bit. Instead of waiting to launch a whole new season that would run over just 10 short weeks, we are instead going to let loose a new episode continuously each month or so. And in that way, get more great stories out more often. And I couldn’t think of a better place to start this season, then a big anniversary that our country has coming up this weekend. One you may not even be aware of.

Chris Straigis – 0:52
30 years ago, on July 26 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed into law The Americans with Disabilities Act. This groundbreaking legislation was the world’s first comprehensive civil rights law for people with disabilities. It would usher in a new era of rights, freedoms and care for one of our nation’s greatest untapped citizen resources. And it would bring into the fold an entire segment of our society that had for too long been marginalized, stigmatized, and second class. But 1990 was not the end of this work really, it was just the beginning. And today, the work continues with more momentum than ever before. And with a new era of advocates on the front lines, advocates like Debra Ruh.

Debra Ruh – 1:44
My name is Debra Ruh, and I’m the CEO and founder of Ruh Global Impact.

Chris Straigis – 1:49
Debra is kind of an unexpected hero in this fight. In the mid 1980s, she was nurturing a successful career in the banking industry and looking forward to starting a family. But in 1987, her path took an unexpected turn after the birth of her daughter Sarah. Before too long, she found herself forging her own way, employing an internal drive to help those in need – a drive that had long been waiting just below the surface.

Chris Straigis – 2:19
Debra, thank you for joining me today. There is so much that I look forward to learning about the work and advocacy that you’ve been doing for two decades now. But if we could, I want to start just a bit earlier. A young Debra Ruh was just coming of age in the turmoil of the late 60s and early 70s. How would the Debra of today describe that time and that little girl growing up in the deep south?

Debra Ruh – 2:48
Well, that’s a great, great question, Chris. And thank you so much for having me on your show, I really like your podcast. I am a baby boomer and I’m the later part of the baby boomers. And so I, the Vietnam War was going on and all the protests were going on and the hippie movements and burning the bras. And a lot of that was happening when I was in elementary school, in the beginning of, beginning into the middle school. Even then there was a lot of fighting about truly including African Americans in our society and why were we segregated, segregating everyone. And so there was a lot of turmoil. And there was a lot of turmoil, unfortunately, in my family, because my mother really, really struggled with mental health issues. And she was diagnosed as borderline personality disorder, which is a, it’s a really, really tough one. And she did, she did the very best she could and I understand that as an adult, but as a child, as a child, we just never knew what was going to happen from moment to moment, day to day. It was very turbulent inside the house. And so the outside world was just some other place that I didn’t completely understand. But it seemed like there was a lot of turmoil happening out there as well.

Debra Ruh – 2:59
In the midst of all that though, By the mid 70s, you were at the precipice of adulthood. And you were ready to sort of shape your future. What did you want to be when you grow up?

Debra Ruh – 4:29
Well, I wanted to be, I really wanted to be a journalist, even though I wasn’t a great writer, but I wanted to be a journalist. And then I thought, wait a minute, no, I think I’m gonna be a police officer because police officers, you know, help people and save the world. But I remember my father saying to me, no, you you can’t be a police officer Debra, you you won’t be able to handle it. Your heart is too tender. It’ll crush you. And so then I remember moving more to okay, I’m gonna be a psychiatrist. So I knew, I always knew I wanted to help people. I knew I wanted to make a difference. But at the same time, I was never encouraged to go to school and go to college. My family didn’t have a lot of money, so it was never, ever anything we talked about. We weren’t really encouraged to think about what’s your career and where you’re going to go.

Debra Ruh – 5:21
My both of my parents retired, they work their whole life and retired from AT&T. And when, when I graduated from high school, I graduated in 77, and my mom got me a job at AT&T. I was an overseas operator, so I was in that you see it in the shows the big switchboards, and people are plugging in the wires and stuff. I made really good money that time. I was making $35,000 a year plus expenses, which was great money… and I hated every single second of it. So after I did it for a year I thought, I’m doing this, and I quit. And I became a waitress. And I started working my way through college. But everybody was shocked, especially my mom. And she was so mad at me when I quit this really good job, but I just didn’t want to spend my whole life doing that. And so I guess I was a little bit of a renegade.

Chris Straigis – 6:23
You were in the mid 1980s. You’re in your mid 20s. You’re making good money before you quit. You met, where did you meet your husband? And when did you get married?

Debra Ruh – 6:32
I met him in the restaurant business. So when I quit AT&T, I went and started working at a restaurant. It’s not around anymore, but some people might remember it was called Victoria Station. And they had the best prime rib, it was the best prime rib. And it was modeled after the Victoria Station cars and so they actually would have a train, part of a train as part of the restaurant. I remember the first I met my husband when he had just moved there from Atlanta. I loved that he had such a gentleness about him and he felt very, very safe to me. And so that was very, very attractive, somebody that seems so stable and calm and, and gentle. And he is still that same way. We’ve been married 38 years in September.

Debra Ruh – 7:27
Unfortunately, my husband now has early onset dementia, because when he was a child when he was 11 years old, he was just getting a kite going, and if any of us anybody that’s ever gotten a kite, you finally get it going and get the airs lifted in as lifted though, you know, it’s flying. And he was running with it and he ran in front of a car, and the car hit him. He was 11. It threw him 750 feet. He actually died on the scene. They brought him back. They took him to the hospital, he was in a coma for a couple of weeks. And then he didn’t go back to school for months. And when he did go back to school, things were different for him. He used to be a straight-A student, and he was then you know, a medium student.

Debra Ruh – 8:14
And so, unfortunately, even though we have these amazing brains that rewire and figure out how to work around an injury, his brain was still very, very seriously injured. And so as he aged, the, the brain has aged into dementia. And that’s, that’s been a very interesting, you know, path. At the same time, but he still grew up, got married, had two children that worked, you know, in telecommunications, and so there was a success story, but it’s just now it’s, it’s so hard for him. It’s very hard for him, and it’s been hard for all of us. But there’s also beauty in it. There’s a very interesting beauty in this, this, this trip to this journey. Because my husband that was always there and gentle and kind and happy, um, not quite as high strung as his wife, he’s still there. But he’s lost a lot of processing abilities, but the soul, the person that he, that I fell in love with is still there. He still knows me. He still thinks I’m great. He’s still you know, he’s so patient with me. But so it’s interesting walking this because the person that makes him so important to me is still there.

Chris Straigis – 9:39
So, again, we’re gonna, I’m trusting my math here so you’ll correct me if I’m wrong, on a beautiful Easter day, I believe in 1987, you gave us to a daughter Sarah.

Debra Ruh – 9:53
Yes.

Chris Straigis – 9:55
As as happens to anyone on their first child, and I can speak from experience, there’s a seismic shift. There’s, there’s a beauty and optimism for life and future, mixed though, with an absolute fear of not knowing what actually being a parent really means. I’m sure that like anyone else, you get that vision in your mind of a healthy, happy child growing up to be a productive, successful adult. It can be a really magical time, but in just a few short months, before you even settle down from that first seismic event, an even bigger one was about to hit. One that literally changed the course of your life. So can you tell me a little bit about the moment when everything changed for you?

Debra Ruh – 10:38
Yes, and thank you for asking. I wanted to have kids so bad. I was just one of those little girls that always wanted to have kids. And so when my husband and I got married when I was 23, we started trying and we, and nothing happened. But we would try and we would we try and we wouldn’t, and then when I was 28 I became pregnant. And I remember being just so excited that I was pregnant. And then as you said, Chris, and then I thought, wait a minute, I don’t think we’re qualified yet. So, but at that point, welcome. So when my daughter was actually born, I had this weird little thought float through my mind. And it when this thought floated through my mind, and I’ll say the thought the thought was, “wow, she looks like a little baby with down syndrome.” And immediately I thought, what would it, I don’t even know what a baby with down syndrome looks like. So I dismissed it.

Debra Ruh – 11:38
Four months later, the doctors were finding that she was having what they called ‘failure to thrive’. My beautiful, perfect little four-month-old baby. And when doctors started suspecting it was there was more, and they did the test and realize that she had Down Syndrome, and they called my husband and I… and this is a call that you know is not going to go well. I remember, I was at work, and I was working in telecommunications at a bank, and I get a call from the doctor’s office and they said, the doctor wants to see you and your husband today at 2:00. So my husband and I went in, and they told us that Sarah had Down Syndrome and they use the word Mongolism, which is no longer appropriate. They, they made comments about, you know, you could put her in an institution and, um, yeah, that’s not gonna happen. And I just, and what I, the first thing I blurted out, was, “well, I’m not telling my mother.” And the doctor said, “Deborah, you cannot hide that your daughter has Down Syndrome.” Oh yeah, you want to see? Oh yes I can. But it really did just, you know, change our world. And I didn’t think I knew anybody with a disability, which of course, I learned that’s ridiculous. But she I also had the gift that I already knew this this little girl I think she had been, you know, born four months before and she was so sweet and she was so loving and she was just just she was a great little baby. She still is a great woman. But at the same time, I did have to walk the steps denial. I’m not going to tell anybody. I remember, I drove one day through, through fast food. I remember it was a Hardee’s and the real sweet little teenager that was behind the window, as I drove up to get my my drink and food, she leaned out of the window and she said, “your baby so cute does she had Down Syndrome? Oh, she’s so beautiful. My brother has Down Syndrome.” And I felt like that teenager had stabbed me in the heart. I didn’t want people to know my daughter had Down Syndrome. I didn’t want to, I was still in that part of the journey. So it was, you know, life, life gives you a lot of opportunities to grow.

Chris Straigis – 14:09
With the lessons you were learning in, through the early years of Sara’s life by let’s say, by the 90s she’s she’s growing up and beginning to come of age just like that young Debra back in 1970s Gainesville. But the times obviously, are very different at this point. And so are young Sarah circumstances, obviously. What kind of unexpected challenges did you face, not just at home, but in society at large?

Debra Ruh – 14:39
The first thing I really hated right at the beginning, from the moment we found out, was how much people underestimated Sara, and how much people would learn that I that I had a daughter with Down Syndrome and they would say, “Oh, so sorry, it’s such a tragedy.” And I thought, well, why why is this such a tragedy? She’s a really cool kid. And she’s funny and she’s creative. And she’s it was a real smart alec and there was so many interesting things about her. And I didn’t understand why society couldn’t see. There wasn’t any information on how to raise her what to expect. There, you know, we were we were putting in her in early education and trying to give her advantages, but you were on your own unless you wanted to read the dark, dark, dark literature that was out at the time about people with Mongolism and all that it was just that they die really young. And the data that was out was all based on when we took babies and we put them in institutions. I didn’t have any support to go, you know, people just didn’t understand the journey. And I hope, I hope that’s better for parents now. I know that I’ve tried to be one of the leaders out there with information. But it was very, you’re alone, you just felt very alone.

Chris Straigis – 16:06
Well, you had mentioned Sara’s personality and and I have to expect that she gets her a lot of her personality traits, and specifically her optimism and resilience, from from you as well. I saw a story about how she made some friends on a bus ride to school.

Debra Ruh – 16:29
That’s a great story. I live in rural Virginia and my kids had a really long bus drive to school. And but I worked full time at the bank and my husband worked at Capital One. And so we we didn’t have the luxury of being able to drive them to school or anything. So a couple of houses down there were a couple of girls that lived there. And so they would get on the bus and Sara said to them one day, “hey, can I be your friend?” And the little girl said, “No, we don’t want to be your friend.” And seriously, why? And her brother was on the bus, he was so mad and some of the other kids were really mad too that these little girls did this. But they said, “no, we don’t want to be your friend.” So my daughter thought about it and everything. And so the next day, the bus, on the bus, the little girls get on and Sara’s like, “Hey, can I be friends?” And they’re like, “no.” So Sara did this to these little girls every single day for weeks. Finally, finally, the girls are like, “fine, fine, we’ll be your friend” because there was also not only Sara continuing to ask, but the peer pressure of all the other kids, because the kids really treated Sara like they understood that you shouldn’t be mean to her. Now they were horrible to each other, my son that you know, he got bullied and I’m sure they all dished it out themselves. But the kids, they didn’t really bully Sara I mean, these little girls were like I’m not gonna be your friend”, but she just wore them down. “Fine, we’ll be your friend.”

Chris Straigis – 18:01
Let’s fast forward to 2000, the year 2000. The year opens with the world bracing for a technology meltdown with Y2K. The year ends with the world learning the term “hanging chad.” So there’s a lot going on. But in your own life, your own life is is about to irrevocably change course. How did you go from average citizen to advocate?

Debra Ruh – 18:30
When they first told us that Sarah had Down Syndrome, I thought, how can I contribute? How can I contribute? And I couldn’t really figure it out for a long time. And I was in the banking industry. And I, you know, there was a project in our bank, they’d asked the managers, I was Vice President, they asked the managers if you would hire some people with disabilities, and so I did do that. And so that was some ways I could, could contribute. And when we would do United Way or eat Easter Seals or, I could talk about how those organizations supported our family when we were walking this. But I wanted to do more. So when Sara, she reached that middle school part, so she was in middle school, we had a conversation with her teachers, and the different special ed experts. And it was a meeting to talk about Sara’s future. And so when I was in this meeting with all these experts, and I’m just the mom, and they are talking about, pretty much Sara won’t be able to contribute anything to society in the future. She will not be welcome in the workforce. And it’s, you know, pretty much she’ll be dependent on all of us for the rest of her life. And I thought, what, Have you even talked to my daughter, and can we have a conversation about what she wants to do? And she’s so smart in her own way and why do you think there’s no room for her in society? And one of the people said, “Well, I guess what she could do is just bring shopping carts in from, you know, a Target or a Walmart.” And I thought, really, that’s the that’s the stretch goal you have for my daughter? So at that moment, I woke up to really the plight that many people with disabilities walk, and I thought, I don’t, I don’t think society should work that way.

Debra Ruh – 20:26
So, so I decided I was going to create my own company. I’ve never been somebody with a burning entrepreneurial desire to start a company. I never thought of myself as an entrepreneur. I really liked working for big corporations. So my identity was really wrapped up in working for big corporate America. But I thought, okay, I’m going to start my own business and I’m going to employ people with disabilities. So I created a company in 2001 called TecAccess. I love technology. My father was a technologist with AT&T, and I just love technology. So I, I thought, okay, I’ll be a technologist and I will employ people with disabilities that are technologists. And there was this law that had just been refreshed on the books the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. And in 2001, we updated it and put a little bit more teeth in the section 508 part of the law, saying that the United States government could not build, procure, buy any technology unless it was fully accessible to all citizens, including citizens with disabilities. So we were working with websites, but also software and hardware too, to make sure it was fully accessible to people with disabilities. And the majority of the team or people with disabilities, so I had a huge advantage over my competitors because I was employing the people that they were trying to make technology accessible for. I had all these super talented employees with disabilities.

Debra Ruh – 22:00
There was a gentleman that worked for me that lived in the Virginia home, in Richmond, Virginia. So he was a quadriplegic. And he, he needed around-the-clock care. I had a woman who actually still works for me at the new company, Rosemary, that, you know, was born with cerebral palsy. And Rosemary told me once that when she lies down flat, she can only blink her eyes. That’s the control she has of her body, but she’s brilliant. And she’s a creative and imaginative. She’s just a really amazing woman. And so, I learned so much by these individuals. I also learned that, I remember one gentleman that worked for me, he had very, very severe diabetes, and he sustained multiple traumatic brain injuries. And he said to me one time, you know, Debra, I know I’m not going to live this longer, as long as my peers just because of these disabilities, but I want to make a difference while I’m here. And so I started realizing this is not just about you making a difference, Deborah, this is about you making sure that he and others have the limelight so they can, their voices can be heard. But the corporation’s weren’t, and I still often feel are not still seriously taking true disability inclusion, accessibility to heart. It’s still a compliance issue for them to check off.

Debra Ruh – 23:24
My company TecAccess failed because of a bank we were with in Virginia, it was one of the first small business banks to fail because of the greed of the big banks. That’s when I took the my company and I merged it in with another company that also was in the field, and all of my employees got hired and got pay increases. And so I lost a lot of money, some investors lost a lot of money, but I saved my employees with disabilities, which was very important to me at the time. So, but so I stayed with that company for about 18 months, and it wasn’t really my cup of tea. And so I went and created a Ruh Global Impact, because I just didn’t think anybody was telling the stories about, you know, yes, we need to be accessible, and yes, we need to include people with disabilities. But why? What are the stories and and why is it important in to these these corporations to do this and these organizations? It’s not just for corporations. I mean, why should anyone care about these topics accessibility and inclusion? I just felt that the stories needed to be told. And I didn’t see anyone doing that.

Chris Straigis – 24:39
What does accessibility mean to you?

Debra Ruh – 24:43
Good question. Accessibility means that technology works for all of us. And, and I think also accessibility is bigger than technology. It’s certainly ICT – internet communications and technology because it’s got to to be all the devices have to work, I have to have, you know, good internet connection. So the digital inclusion is part of it. Your software, your apps, your, you know, I mean, as you know, technology and communications has just changed and changed and changed and change so much, but, but at the same time, also, the built environment has to be accessible. Because if I can’t go into a restaurant, because I’m with a friend that’s in a wheelchair, you know, I don’t, I’m not going to go to that restaurant. So everything has to be accessible. And the good news about accessibility is when you make things accessible, it makes it accessible for everybody else.

Debra Ruh – 25:41
So when we started captioning videos and transcribing audio, the good news is that 80 to 85% of people watch videos with the sound turned off. So if you’re captioning it, you’re gonna, whether you do open caption or closed caption, you allow me to turn it on and off. Maybe you don’t want to see the text, you’re going to make that experience more beneficial to everybody else. And another thing that I learned about accessibility is, and I talk about this all the time, as we live our lives, my husband’s a perfect example of that we change, we change. And according to AARP, 46% of us over the age of 65 have disabilities. We don’t see as well, we don’t hear as well, we don’t move as well. We don’t concentrate as well. And also, a lot of times older Americans feel that they just, something must be wrong with them, they just must be so stupid. They can’t figure out how to use this technology. When, I don’t believe that’s true. I believe it is that the designers are not taking the time for a lot of different reasons. Not all of them, but they’re not taking the time to really make sure that technology is truly usable for all of us. And that means accessibility, but that also means somebody that is aged into a disability, also can use your technology.

Chris Straigis – 26:59
So today, with Ruh Global Impact, you work with Fortune 100 companies to help shape their efforts around the process and concepts of accessibility and inclusion for people with disabilities. When I think of the agility of companies like that, I get this vision of a 1000-foot cargo ship, trying to make a U-turn on a busy street in my neighborhood. And so, tell me something that you’ve learned working with those kind of companies. Tell me something that those companies don’t understand when it comes to the work you do.

Debra Ruh – 27:38
When they still don’t understand, and I do, I have been blessed to I have some of the biggest customers that are some of the biggest corporations in the world we’ve evolved into over the last few years. We are talking about it from a much broader lens than just people, than just people with disabilities. We’re also talking about the intersectionality of diversity and how this, and once again, this is not just about people with disabilities, this is about people that are aging into disabilities. This is about, you know, the African Americans that might have a disability. So it’s, it’s all about inclusion. I use often the word inclusion, diversity and disability inclusion. One thing I think that helped me get into these big corporations is that I come from corporations, and I know how it works. I know how even though you’re a gigantic brand, trillion dollar brand, or a billion dollar or hundreds of millions, the reality is you still have a budget, you still have only a limited amount of resources and you still have other goals that you have to do. So one thing that I still think is happening is that I think most of these gigantic corporations still are not taking this seriously. Now, I think it’s there’s a shift happening, but I still think that they’re looking at it more as a compliance. It’s something they have to do instead of looking at it from the front perspective of ‘first of all, society has expectations of you. Second of all, when you make things accessible and inclusive, it benefits all of your customers. And it really benefits you.’

Debra Ruh – 29:11
And so I think, I’ve written about this, I’ve written three books, but my last book was inclusion branding, and I talked about this, and I’ve talked about it from more and more societies expecting that you are going to include everybody in the workforce. You know, we’re finding that when we hire a diverse workforce, they’re actually more creative and innovative. So and they’re actually more productive. And well just look at that, we send everybody home teleworking, and they’re more productive. Wow, just think how much more productive they would be if the systems were accessible to them. I think technology needs to work for humans and we need to tie technology to humans and we need to make sure corporations and organizations of all sizes, all sizes, understand that why would you build anything that didn’t include all of us. And every time we make things, something accessible, it makes it more usable for us to use it. And the more we use it, the more we’re going to love your products, and the more we’re going to support you. So I think we still are there, which is why it’s so important in that you’re in the conversation, Chris, because you we need everybody in these conversations, because we’re not going to change society. If we don’t really take the time to reimagine what it could look like.

Chris Straigis – 30:30
Deborah, it’s been an absolute treat to talk with you today. The work you do is so important and the community you support is so engaged and has come so far, but I know there’s still a lot of work to be done. And I would encourage everyone to get involved at either their business or in their community, or even at a political level to help keep the ball moving forward. But before I let you go, you mentioned earlier that someone painted a future for your daughter, Sara, that she would at best be pushing carts at a grocery store. Can you tell me what she’s doing today?

Debra Ruh – 31:09
They told me that Sara would never be able to work in marketable positions. And you know, and and they were wrong. The experts were wrong. And she actually did work for 15 years for Nordstroms. And she worked before that, three years for Wendys, so she was in markable employment But then then Sara got sick, and she got very sick and she, she wound up having this rare disorder. It’s a blood clot disorder, which I didn’t realize it but it runs in my husband’s family. So she got very, very sick. So right now she’s much much, much better. She doesn’t speak on stage with me anymore like she used to. I’m hoping she’ll start doing that again because she’s a wonderful speaker. She’s talked on stage to audiences as large as 5000 people. She is, she’s a beautiful little soul. But right now she’s not working, but she moved out on her own (air quotes), because she’s in a supported apartment, not living with their parents, which she loves. And she lives with another woman that also has disabilities, intellectual disabilities. And then she has a staff that supports them. So they come in and they help them with meals, they help them with grocery shopping, but my daughter is thrilled to be on her own. So she’s very happy. And what more do you want for your children than for them to be happy? So she’s thriving right now. She’s really thriving and it is, it warms my heart.

Chris Straigis – 32:55
Debra’s work has taken her around the world to help create programs, develop strategies, and implement processes that fully include persons with disabilities. It’s a critical cause that I’d encourage everyone to learn more about. To learn more about Debra and her corporate and advocacy work, please visit rueglobal.com. And listen to her podcast, Human Potential At Work, wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find her on Twitter and Facebook @debraruh. You should also check out the Americans with Disabilities website, ada.gov. There you can find news, technical assistance materials, laws and regulations, and much more. You can find transcripts and links from today’s show at scrappypod.com and you can listen back to all the great stories from Season One at the website or wherever you get your podcasts. And of course, thanks for listening to Scrappy.

The post Ruh Global Impact appeared first on All Around Creative.

Staci Tinkelman and Becky Pyles realized early in the Covid-19 pandemic that masks were going to become a critical need – not just for front-line medical staff, but for the community at large. By combining Becky’s sewing talents and the infrastructure at Staci’s printing company, Quaker Chroma Imaging, they realized that they could help those in need, and get some of their people back to work.

Chris Straigis – 0:01
Welcome to Scrappy the podcast about small companies doing big things. I’m your host, Chris Straigis.
So far 2020 has been a year of, shall we say, changes. We woke up in January, got our coffee, went to work, met with friends for drinks, watched the games. But by March, we could hardly recognize this world as new routines took over in what seemed to be like an instant. And we also had some trouble recognizing each other due to the rapid cultural shift of wearing masks. Early in the pandemic masks were front and center as news of shortages became the lead story.

Becky Pyles – 0:47
I did reach out to them actually to say “Hey, is this something that you need?” and they were all desperate. The need was starting to increase by the day.

Chris Straigis – 0:56
At first, it was just for medical professionals. The folks on the front line. But a small team from a fabric printing company in New Jersey saw a bigger picture. And with it, they saw a unique opportunity to get some of their team back to work and provide resources for people in need. Staci Tinkelman and Becky Pyles pooled their resources, their talent and their business infrastructure at Quaker Chroma Imaging to start a new product line called Everyday Masks.

Staci Tinkelman – 1:26
My name is Staci Tinkelman. My positioned at Quaker Chroma Imaging is Vice President of Digital Imaging. And my position at Everyday Masks is Co-Owner. I want to shout out to Becky Pyles.

Becky Pyles – 1:41
I am the Head of Sewing Department, and at Everyday Masks I am co owner.

Staci Tinkelman – 1:47
She is our head seamstress our Head of Sewing Department, and she is amazing at figuring out difficult structures, giant structures, how they’re going to be sewn. That’s not an easy thing to do. With darts and turns and corners and things, a lot of stuff has to happen. And she’s amazing at that.

Chris Straigis – 2:04
How many employees does Quaker Chroma have?

Staci Tinkelman – 2:08
Anywhere between 30 and 40 at any given time. Quaker Chroma Imaging has been around for quite a while in that it was originally two separate companies. And they formed, they merged together I think about 2004. And since then, it was a great partnership. We went through trials and tribulations with the economy over the years. We moved out to Jersey from Center City. We were going gangbusters just building building building until you know the COVID-19 happened.

Chris Straigis – 2:39
Your businesses chugging along at the beginning of 2020. And then all of a sudden COVID-19. Obviously, it was spreading around the world. News of things starting to shut down here in the States came pretty quickly. So walk me through what you were doing at that point. And how you guys were we’re sort of talking about how you were going to handle what seemed to be coming?

Staci Tinkelman – 3:06
COVID-19 came and everything shut down. And we had to leave. Becky’s at home making mass because people, nurses and people know she sews, and they’re asking her “I’m desperate I need it.” They don’t have any PPE, they need something. Hospitals are saying ‘go out and buy bandannas in the store.’ Craig and her were talking about this and they’re like “we could do this we could make these things, help people and keep people busy and and do something about it.”

Becky Pyles – 3:33
And need was great for people to get masks in hand that didn’t have any PPE available to them. So they were my very first customers. And then it spread quickly. To the couple of nurses in my circle or medical staff in my circle. I did reach out to them actually say “Hey, is this something that you need?” and they were all desperate. The need was starting to increase by the day. In working with the nurses, I came up with a sized option where the mask actually fits over your face by the size of your face. So small, medium, large based on, and extra large, based on your frame of your face. That way the mask can actually go underneath the PPE that they’re supplied.

And then for people in less risky situations, it was the only mask they’re wearing. And it was before the general public was even wearing masks that we started into production. So I went back to work check in let him know I was working on and brought this idea back, saying we could definitely do this. This is something that we can help, we can get masks out there. And the track was on trend to see that the regular public was going to need them as well. This wasn’t going anywhere. Working with our capabilities, which is printing, we were able to offer really unique designs really play the print to the scale of a mask, which you can’t just do with fabric.

The downside of doing masks for myself from home is, I could have gone and bought fabric from Joanne’s but they the commercially available materials are getting harder and harder to source. So going wholesale with the materials really made a big difference on the quality and quantity of fabric we can get. So the ability to bring other sewers who were all at home sewing their own masks for their own friends and family and make it available to the public at large. That was really the goal is to get it out into as many hands as possible and make the shift that we’re not used to. It’s a cultural shift to cover our faces that but unnecessary one unfortunately these times.

Chris Straigis – 5:58
When you decided to work through the company through Quaker Chroma to start utilizing this the scale basically scaling up what you were doing and utilizing the the potential of bulk fabric. What, how did you sort of land on the materials you were going to use? Aside from the the idea of of printing on them, what was… Were there specifications or regulations you had to consider when when you were thinking about you know, PPE for medical professionals?

Becky Pyles – 6:33
I product just to preface it’s not PPE for medical professionals. It is an added convenience for them or or an option when PPE isn’t available, or trying to extend the life of it. We don’t, we can’t say that it’s PPE in any way. You know, I’m saying it’s not licensed, it’s not CDC, it’s not anything along those lines. We chose the fabrics that we use primarily based off of the guidelines that were set across, there were like CDC type guidelines. There were people who are nurses who were making patterns saying what they needed or wanted out of a mask. Most of them boiled down to a couple of factors – they wanted cotton if being used in the medical facility because it can tolerate very high heat when it’s being sterilized. So they want to be able to wash it and have it wear well and not break down in the sterilization process. So cotton mask is definitely something we wanted to offer in case they weren’t being used in an augmentation of the PPE. But we definitely want to go with multi layer because it adds more protection. It’s best practice you know, in best practice, multi layer is better for you than single layer.

Chris Straigis – 7:51
How did you decide on what patterns to use in terms of the design?

Staci Tinkelman – 7:56
Becky, and I picked suggestions of what we thought people would want, you know, American flag, camo, different things. And even to this, to today we’re looking at switching it out and putting new ones in and changing things up. Just because of what we see out there what we think maybe younger people might want. It’s sort of funny how Becky and I are, you know, Becky’s younger than me, I’m the old person here. But um, what I print out a couple different options and there’s a lot of the girls here that are sewing and guys that are sewing are younger than us and we’re like, what do you like?

Becky Pyles – 8:35
We did get input from the sewing department and many of them have been through fashion design school so their eyes pretty good. So when we pulled ideas, we did like a little bit of a vote when people first got back saying what do you like, but we had pulled quite a few designs to pick from but we got some input from the 20 somethings to help us stay on trend.

Chris Straigis – 8:58
How many people do have sewing currently, doing masks?

Becky Pyles – 9:03
13, 13 sewers.

Chris Straigis – 9:05
You brought 13 people back?

Becky Pyles – 9:08
Yeah, well, more than that, because there’s the support staff, but there are 13 seamstresses, we brought back to sew.

Chris Straigis – 9:16
And how many masks have you made to date?

Becky Pyles – 9:18
Oh goodness.

Staci Tinkelman – 9:20
So here’s the thing, we do make both the cotton and the printed masks. And we do make more than, like, especially the cotton mask, because those a lot of the ones we’re donating, we make a lot more than we sell, because we do donate a lot of them. So it’s hard to…

Becky Pyles – 9:38
We’ve given away more than 1800 already. We’ve we’ve managed to connect with the Center for Family Services in New Jersey, and we’re able to donate to the group homes and the foster care system. So it’s been really good, fulfilling to help these groups that wouldn’t otherwise have had the resources to purchase this many masks

Chris Straigis – 10:01
These are washable, right?

Staci Tinkelman – 10:03
Absolutely, a hundred percent. Actually the cotton masks when you wash them are even more because they’re a little stiff at first because there’s three layers of cotton, but then when you, after you wash them, they’re like softer. You know it’s, you know, they they’re they seem to wash really well. I’ve washed mine several times and they seem to wash great.

Chris Straigis – 10:21
They become like a like a comfortable t-shirt.

Staci Tinkelman – 10:24
Exactly. Like you have your I have my favorite masks that I like to wear.

Chris Straigis – 10:28
Do you accessorize your masks with what you’re wearing that day?

Becky Pyles – 10:32
I do.

Chris Straigis – 10:33
See, there you go. Listen, we can we can be protected and fashionable all at the same time. What’s your most popular pattern?

Staci Tinkelman – 10:48
What do you think Becky?

Becky Pyles – 10:49
Really, the tie-dye has done a little bit better than whiskers. But I think the galaxy and the flag are the two that I would say are the most popular.

Chris Straigis – 10:58
Yeah. And what’s your favorite Becky?

Becky Pyles – 11:02
I just made a new one that says “Strong is the new pretty” so that’s my favorite.

Chris Straigis – 11:06
I like that! Strong is the new pretty? Well, that’s gonna be trending soon. You know, you know, like in the old comics when when somebody would curse and it would be just like a series of characters. Right? You know, it’s never like an asterisk and an exclamation. That would be a funny one. Have that just printed on the over the mouth.

Staci Tinkelman – 11:28
That would be awesome. Hey, can we use that?

Chris Straigis – 11:31
You can use that, yep, that’s for you

Staci Tinkelman – 11:33
Okay. Okay, Becky, I’m on it.

Chris Straigis – 11:43
Within a few days of my interview, I got a delivery from Staci and Becky. It was the mask that I joked about when we talked. They weren’t kidding about using the idea. You can actually now find it on their website along all of their other great designs. Oh, right, the website…

Becky Pyles – 12:00
The website address is everydaymasks.net. And then we are, you can also find us on Facebook, and you can find us on Instagram.

Chris Straigis – 12:13
We are hard at work on our next full season of Scrappy which we hope to have out by this fall. In the meantime, you can go back and listen to season one at scrappypod.com. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram @scrappypod. We’d love to hear from you with feedback on any of our stories or ideas for people we could talk to for future episodes. Thanks for listening to Scrappy.

The post Everyday Masks appeared first on All Around Creative.

Michael Morin and his brother Bryan were beginning to gear up for a new year at their family-owned pizza shop in New Jersey. Then, out of the blue, Covid-19 changed the scope of what their bustling business would look like going into the Spring of 2020. Faced with state mandated closure of walk-in businesses, their first thoughts were of the 20 employees that were the cornerstone of their success. So, following the advice of their father to “always take care of the people who take care of you”, they took quick action to secure a $50,000 loan to ensure that they wouldn’t lose any staff. When word got out of their selfless act, the public response was immediate.

Chris Straigis  – 0:01

Welcome to Scrappy, the podcast about small companies doing big things. I’m your host, Chris Straigis.

Michael Morin  – 0:09

My father always said take care of the people that take care of you. These guys and girls that work for me are all just top shelf. And without them, I don’t have a business.

Chris Straigis  – 0:21

It’s been a little while since we wrapped up our first season. In case you missed it, you can go to scrappypod.com to hear the inspiring stories from 10 pretty amazing people. A lot has changed since then. The global pandemic from COVID-19 has affected just about every aspect of our lives. And we’ve had to adapt the best way we can. Throughout this spring in summer, we’re busy building our next season. But in the meantime, we’ve heard so many great stories about ordinary people in small businesses, stepping up their game to take care of others. So we decided to do a couple of many episodes to bring some of those folks to light.

Mike Morin is co owner of Federico’s Pizza in New Jersey. When the governor made the decision to close most walk in businesses in an effort to curb the spread of COVID-19, Mike and his brother Bryan sprung into action, in an effort to take care of the people that work for them, even while Bryan caught the virus as well.

Michael Morin  – 1:24

My name is Michael Morin. I am co owner of Federico’s Pizza in Belmar, 700 Main Street, Belmar, New Jersey. Federico has been in business, I think we’re going on 25 years now. So we’re pretty much established.

Chris Straigis – 1:30

It’s a family business, right?

Michael Morin  – 1:42

Yeah. My father was always, you know, in the corporate trucking industry. And he, you know, it’s just like a lot of other people they, you know, corporate burns you out. So he said, you know, let’s do something on the side. You know, he had four kids. So and three of us were going through college at the time. And that’s pretty much when we bought it. It was a small store we did a lot of pickup delivery there was only like maybe say 7 tables in the front.

So I think it was 16 or 17 years ago. We bought the building diagonal across the street, which was much bigger. Inside we have 80 seats. Outside we have a patio areas that’s has an awning. So in the summer, we open up the patio. So it’s been it’s been good to us.

Chris Straigis – 2:34

How many how many pizzas do you make on an average day? Not counting COVID average?

Michael Morin  – 2:40

Yeah, yeah. On the average? I mean, like a Friday night you’ll do you know 300. In the summer, you know, you know, a couple hundred pies maybe maybe a night? Yeah. And we do a lot of dinners on Saturday. It’s funny Friday nights pizza night, Saturday nights dinner night.

Chris Straigis  – 3:05

So let’s dive in a little bit to what we’re talking about today. When you noticed COVID was going to start to present a challenge and and the restrictions were going to start to present a challenge at the very beginning, how were you expecting it to play out? What did you think was gonna happen in terms of from the business front?

Michael Morin  – 3:28

So we figured we’d be okay, because like our dining room is more, it’s a lot busier like Friday, Saturday, obviously all year, but in the summer, it’s a lot busier because you get more more of a crowd during the week. It was you know, sporadic, but we thought we’d be okay but we didn’t realize the extent of you know, it’s the first time we ever you know, the government steps in says you got to close your restaurant. Once that hit it was like, ‘holy crow,’ because I think that hit I think we had to close, I think it was on March, I think it was St. Patty’s Day. I think it’s when they they locked us down, and said, you know, you’re pretty much, there’s no inside seating. And then with that we do a lot of catering.

So it took took a huge hit, like, you really you weren’t prepared? Nobody? No, you know, you look around, everybody’s like, you know, you can close for two weeks, a month, whatever. And then how are these people going to survive?

Chris Straigis  – 4:28

How many employees do you have? Or did you have at the time?

Michael Morin  – 4:31

We have 20. We get a couple more waitresses in the summer, just because like I said, the inside’s a lot busier. That’s pretty much what we keep on.

Chris Straigis  – 4:41

You decided at some point to take out a loan as a way to shore up the business to make sure that your employees were taken care of what was walk me through a little bit of the the thought process behind that.

Michael Morin  – 4:55

It’s funny, that, it was basically, it was a, it was a two minute discussion, like, ‘hey, Bry, you know, you want to, let’s make sure we have money aside to take care of the people that take care of us all year, and that they’ve helped us through some really harsh times. So let’s, let’s just take money out, and then we’ll put it aside. If we don’t need it, we’ll give it back if, you know, let’s just have it, just in case we need it. And I was like, okay, and that was it. We went got it done.

Chris Straigis  – 5:32

Because that’s what you’re supposed to do, right? You don’t I mean, because it’s, it’s supposed to take care of, you know, the people that are there for you, you know, so for him, and I was kind of like that, you know, it wasn’t even a second thought it was just like, because that’s what you should do. You know?

So, how did the community respond overall?

Michael Morin – 5:53

I was amazed, like, you know, I guess, it was funny, my my delivery guy you know, [unclear] you know, as soon as the story hit, we’re getting calls from all over the United States. People just call and saying ‘thank you,’ people wanting to donate. And we’re like, well, we’re not… the first night I had to go down there. I was off, it was a Sunday. And I kept trying to call to get through and I couldn’t get through. So I went down there. And I ended up staying and working because they was phones were off the hook. And my brother looked at me, he’s like, ‘Mike, I don’t know what’s going on.’ He said, ‘I’m getting calls from like Arkansas. I’m getting calls from Florida like they want to donate. What are we going to do?’

I said, ‘I don’t know Bryan like we’re not taking donations, we didn’t do this for like for donations.’ And then at that point, we said, you know what, like, I was, like I said, it was like a two second conversation. I’m like, ‘you know what, Bry? Let’s take the donations. It’ll keep our people working and we’ll donate the food. We’ll donate the food to the hospitals, the the to police the fire EMTs in the town.

So we got the word out there. You know, we were doing that and people started donating more and we ended up… We go to the hospital, we were in the beginning, for the first month, it’s twice a day. Now we scale back we go at least once a day with donated food. My guys are working. So we got we’ve been taking care of the hospitals.

Chris Straigis  – 7:26

You ended up having to close your business for about 10 days, I think right? Because your brother and co owner tested positive.

Michael Morin  – 7:34

Yeah, yeah. That was, um, that was a little crazy because he, he was fine. Then he went home. And then in the morning, I got a call. And he said, ‘I don’t really feel good.’ I was like, all right, well, let’s figure this out. And he goes, he’s like ‘my, I have a little fever and a cough.’ I go Alright, so we’re closing because that’s what you’re supposed to do.

If anyone has symptoms or whatever, I’m not gonna put it, we don’t want to put anybody else in jeopardy. So we made the decision within a couple minutes. We said, ‘you know what, we’ll just close it, figure it out.’ He’s gonna go get tested and, and go from there. And thank God we did because he ended up having it. I think it was the right call people were like, but you know, some people were saying, ‘well, you don’t have to close it’ and like even the doctors are saying, ‘well, technically, you don’t have it because you didn’t get the test.’ We’re like, it doesn’t matter. Like we have to close it because I’m not putting anyone else in jeopardy. Like I don’t care. You know, do you have a symptom, you close it. You figure it out later because I noticed you know, a lot of places you know, you see it now the Meatpacking industry, all that stuff like where they’re, they’re making people go to work and it’s just keeps going and just yet spreading and getting worse.

Chris Straigis  – 8:58

So how’s your brother doing? Did he did he get very sick

Michael Morin  – 9:02

He had a cough for two days and he had a mild fever like 101. That was it for like two days and then he was good. You know, he stayed out for like two weeks. And then we just decided 10 days because the doctor, we spoke with four or five doctors and they said, Well, you know, as long as he’s not there, you’re fine. But we said no, let’s give everybody a break. And then we’ll reopen 10 days later.

Chris Straigis  – 9:32

I’m glad to hear that he’s healthy and he came through it.

Michael Morin  – 9:35

Okay, thank you.

Chris Straigis  – 9:37

So, you sound to me like the kind of guy who who doesn’t generally take a lot of time off. You sound like you love your job. You love to work.

Michael Morin – 9:46

I love what you do.

Chris Straigis – 9:47

What did you do for 10 days.

Michael Morin  – 9:51

I love my family too. Like it’s we split it up pretty good, but it I have I love what I do. Before this, it’s so funny, before this is like, everyone always thought ‘I just need a couple days to myself a couple days.’ And then you get it, you’re like, ‘what the heck am I gonna do?’

Chris Straigis  – 10:11

Yeah, I know, everybody, I’ve never seen more people ready to go to work in my whole life.

Michael Morin – 10:19

Yeah, even my children like, I have three kids. They’re like, ‘I can’t wait to go back to school.’ I’m like, ‘what?’

Chris Straigis – 10:29

I think that what you’re, you know, what you’re doing with the donations you mentioned a few minutes ago is is very inspiring. Where you you’re donating food to the, to the people on the front line of this thing. It’s It’s such a great such a great kind of thing.

Michael Morin – 10:43

Thank you. It’s, it’s, it’s, it makes you feel good because it makes you feel like you’re doing something. You know, everybody sits there and like, you know, what can I do? What can I do? Well, you know, and that was the one of the biggest things when we had to close for 10 days. I’m like, Damn I’m like… I’m sorry, I shouldn’t say that.

Chris Straigis – 11:02

That’s okay!

Michael Morin – 11:05

I was like, that was one of the biggest things. I’m like, oh, we were doing, you know, we’ve gone to helping out the health care workers and, you know, we’re doing our thing as best as we could. And then that stopped and that that kind of upset me.

Chris Straigis – 11:19

I  was reading an article that was written about you guys and and you had mentioned some some, some advice that your father had given you, when it came time to sort of wrap your head around that two minute conversation of wrapping your head around taking out a loan to make sure your employees recovered. Your dad gave you some good advice, what was that?

Michael Morin – 11:39

My father always said take care of the people that take care of you. I mean, because you can’t really leave them in the street, you know, in a time of need. That’s the thing, these these these guys and girls that work for me are all just top shelf. And without them I don’t have a business. I mean, you got to do something, you know? I think… I just I have so many things going in my head, like, ‘Why can we do this?’ There’s other people that could have done it, my brother and I could have just, you know, just made sure our families were safe and, and to hell with everybody else. But that’s not the type of people we are.

Chris Straigis – 12:19

So now that you’ve lived through, or are living through this, this strange and unique experience of this pandemic, and not knowing exactly how it’s gonna play out for the next couple of months or the next year, what would what would your advice to somebody be?

Michael Morin – 12:41

It’s easy just to give up, but it’s, it’s hard to figure it out. That’s what I’m learning. Like, there’s so much so many different things. So you if you gotta, you know, just figure it out because it’s not going to get figured out for you.

Chris Straigis – 13:02

All right, well here you can settle, you can settle a couple of debates for me, a couple of raging debates. New York style or Chicago style?

Michael Morin – 13:11

Wow. Honestly, I’ve never had, I want to try Chicago style, but I got, you gotta give it to New York style.

Chris Straigis – 13:17

Okay, good, you’ve got too. What’s the most popular pizza?

Michael Morin – 13:22

Most Popular pizza I would say is it’s, I gotta say, it’s gotta be pepperoni. I mean, that’s the number, that’s the number one topping. So I’m gonna say pepperoni. I like pepperoni.

Chris Straigis – 13:38

All right, and the other debate: pineapple or no pineapple?

Michael Morin – 13:43

Oh, man. Wow. I’m gonna say no pineapple. I don’t understand it. I think we sell one a week, maybe? I don’t know why.

Chris Straigis – 14:08

Thanks for listening to Scrappy, you can go to scrappypod.com to listen back to all of Season One. And find us at scrappy pod on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to learn when all new episodes drop, including Season Two coming up later this year.

The post Federico’s Pizza appeared first on All Around Creative.

Henry Salinas was called to service throughout his life – helping to tend farms with his parents as a boy, joining the Army as a young man and raising a family of his own. Then, he found an even greater mission: devoting his time, energy and passion to helping children in his hometown of Chandler, Arizona, find a better way forward than with the drugs and gangs that were destroying their neighborhoods and stealing their futures. He became a staple of his community and devoted himself to building a better path for countless kids. Henry passed away in 2017, but his legacy lives on.

Chris Straigis – 0:01
From AAC Studios, welcome to Scrappy, the podcast about small companies doing big things. I’m your host, Chris Straigis.

Chris Straigis – 0:16
Henry Salinas, embraced and embodied the idea of service – service to his country, service to his community, and service to his family. He passed away in 2017. But his son Fernando, speaks of him with reverence and legacy.

Fernando Salinas – 0:36
A lot of the kids that were going to the Boys and Girls Club, you know, they were showing up with their bandanas and different colors, and there was a rival gangs showing up and, you know, in an effort to try to keep the peace, you know, so that the younger kids were not involved in any violence or affected by any violence from these teenagers. You know, he is just thought like I need to I need to do something I need to, I need to help these kids, they need it.

Chris Straigis – 1:09
Today we’ve arrived at Episode 10, the final episode of our first season. And I’d like to thank you for coming along to meet these incredible and inspiring people, each, in their own way are trying to make the planet a better place in ways both big and small, because they all have the drive to build a better world.

Chris Straigis – 1:33
You know, every so often, if you’re lucky, you may get a chance to meet a motivator like Jennifer Lynn Robinson, or innovators like Julie & Scott Brusaw of Solar Roadways, or a game changer like David Katz of Plastic Bank. Our goal here at Scrappy is to give you the chance to meet lots of these kinds of folks. If you haven’t yet, please go back and listen through the rest of the season to learn more about what makes the people tick. Then connect with us on Facebook and Twitter to hear updates about Season Two, which will be coming out a bit later this year. And it’s not too late to drop us a note if you know someone who might be a great fit to feature on an upcoming show.

Chris Straigis – 2:20
As a young boy, Henry Salinas left school to help tend farms with his family in the American Southwest. His tack towards service was evident, even way back then.

Fernando Salinas – 2:35
My father was born and Lubbock, Texas, his parents were migrant farm workers. They used to migrate, his family, his parents used to migrate working in the farms and the agriculture, migrating to California, Texas, Arizona. And they settled in Arizona when he was about four years old and then he started growing up and Chandler, going to the schools. He spoke Spanish first, you know and even though he was a proud American, never forgot that story where he went to kindergarten and he didn’t know how to, you know, ask to go use the restroom and he learned how to speak English. He sued to always say, like “you can learn really fast.” Chandler at that time was a very small town – mainly a lot of farms and, and agriculture there. Eventually he had to leave school early, I think around the eighth grade to to help out the family. So he was always, you know, raised with hard work. He was always a sociable person. He was always a joy to be around if you ask people that knew him when he was young.

Chris Straigis – 3:52
At 19. Henry found good work at a military base and would eventually see a new path to service. This time for his country.

Fernando Salinas – 4:04
He had started working at Luke Air Force Base, which was a base in Chandler. I think it’s closed now, was working there. He had got married, I think he was 17 or 18 years old, got married young, to a woman named Yolanda. And, you know, shortly after that, he enlisted in the army and, and they started training to go to, to Vietnam. So, went through boot camp, and they were scheduled to fly out just a few weeks later, and they had gotten his, you know, notice that his wife was given labor and that she was having some difficulty and so, the army had given him a permission to go down to see his wife and she ended up passing away during birth. And a couple days later, his his first son Henry, also passed away.

Chris Straigis – 5:13
Henry would stay in California for a few more years, finishing his stint with the army and eventually remarrying. And though the trauma of losing his first wife and child was always with him, he would once again start to build a family having two children before moving the family out of California, and back to his roots in Chandler, Arizona. Fernando would be born soon after.

Fernando Salinas – 5:38
In Chandler at that time, you had its old parts and it’s kind of newer parts. And we had bought the house in the newer side of Chandler. So that on that growing up on that street was like, like The Wonder Years, you know, like there were so many middle class families, everybody had kids, you know, just all around the same age everybody go outside and play kick the can, hide and seek. And so we, all this, just this one mile long street, you know, of kids of different ages just grew up with each other. And for many for many years, it was just a great, great time growing up. And so, you know, we grew up we played sports, he always, you know, kept us involved in sports. He volunteered at the Boys and Girls Club, got us into the Boys and Girls Club, went to church.

Fernando Salinas – 6:36
And he started the Thanksgiving meals and started doing that annually. I mean, just these terrific meals, I mean, he would, you know, cut all the watermelon and different shapes, you know, and just like if it was a, you know, five star hotel. and so, you know, a lot of the inner-city families would go in, they would just get this, you know, grand meal that was just, you know, lavish for you know, just for any standards, like in the ham and everything was just amazing, amazing, you know, everybody that showed up the people, the families that showed up the business, you know, volunteers are like, what, how is this? And he would organize, you know, use his recipes, but he would organize people that were volunteering and you know, just really lead them and motivate them and just, you know, have this beautiful energy.

Chris Straigis – 7:35
The Salinas family had settled into their life in Chandler, and Henry was becoming a staple of the community. But it was a rapidly advancing world, the 80s and early 90s would see a fast moving national evolution taking place. And with these unprecedented changes came some unexpected challenges.

Fernando Salinas – 8:04
So the early 90s, if you remember the, there’s a lot of gangs that started, you know, it just started happening, you know, the movies that were coming out the music, you know? And so things started changing and it depended on what, you know, kind of what area, the neighbor of Chandler, you you grew up in, whether you saw it on a regular basis or not. So, um, you know, a lot of the gang started happening. So you had, you know, some older established gangs in Chandler already, um, and they weren’t really, you know, as violent as it started happening in the early 90s. And then you had, you know, other groups that were not necessarily gangs, but just big groups of friends. But because of the gangs, you know, as they would go to festivals or, you know, concerts, you know, anytime there was a big group of guys, you know, it would always, you know, clash with others, you know, like were, you know, they would start asking where are you from, and, and whether they were associated with the gang or not, a fight would ensue. And so, a lot of these groups that were not gangs started kind of turning into gangs just to protect themselves, you know, and so it just kind of grew, you know, out of that, and, you know? So growing up, you know, I started seeing, you know, a lot of things on our, on our street. I mean, There were drive-bys, you know, on a regular basis, a lot of things starting to happen. And you know, and a lot of people, a lot of us young people were desensitized to a lot of this that we were seeing out on the, on the streets, you know, and you know, in the movies and everything was just, it was just there. So it was just kind of part of life, you know?

Fernando Salinas – 10:27
my dad saw these things happening and the change and, you know, with a, you know, with with everybody, you know, with the community with his, his son me, you know, getting involved and becoming rebellious. And, you know, he wasn’t really like a big preacher, you know what I mean? He wouldn’t just, like preach to you and talk your ear off, you know? And you know ‘why you shouldn’t be doing this, you shouldn’t be doing this,’ you know, he would just lead by example, show love, and talk to you and get on your level and, you know, just be a friend to you and listen to you, you know, and somebody you can kind of open up to. He was at the Boys and Girls Club, and these things started happening. And a lot of the kids that were going to the Boys and Girls Club, you know, they were showing up with their bandanas of different colors. And there was a rival gangs showing up and, you know, in an effort to try to keep the peace, you know, so that the younger kids were not involved in any violence or affected by any violence from these teenagers. You know, he just stopped like I needed I need to do something. I need a need to help these kids. They need it.

Chris Straigis – 12:02
At this point in his life, Henry dedicated his service to his family. He was commuting back and forth to Phoenix, waking at four in the morning and working all day. He’d come home to spend time with his children, driving them to sports, cooking, being an attentive father, and at the same time he had gone back to school to earn his GED. His plate was very full. And it was here that his life would evolve into something else, something bigger than him. His innate impulse to serve would begin him down a path that would take him through the rest of his life, all while changing the lives of countless others. It began with him just trying to clear his head after a long day.

Fernando Salinas – 12:46
You know, he started walking the streets, just to get out. And at first, you know, they didn’t, he wasn’t received, you know, and he was threatened by a lot of gang members, you know, they didn’t know him. They didn’t know his intentions. And, you know, he just stuck with it, you know, he walked all over Chandler and people were just like, who is this guy? But for me, it was just, he didn’t change. He was just, he never changed though, like who he was, you know?

Fernando Salinas – 13:20
So I just always knew, that’s my dad, there he goes. He just started befriending. You know, and he kind of knew, because he had worked in the prisons and in Watsonville, so he knew, and he had been in the army, So he knew there was a structure. You know, he knew that the young people were just, you know, following the leaders, and, you know, so and the leaders were following, whoever had led them before or a lack of. And so, you know, he’s still just really getting involved with the leaders, you know, and talking to them and saying, hey, let’s, uh, well, you know, let’s, let’s go play some basketball, you know, and he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t mentor them and, you know?

Fernando Salinas – 14:14
And he’d started listening to the, to the kids, you know, ‘we can’t play basketball because there’s another gang there and they they own that, you know? And, what, you know, so he would go over there and talk to them and, you know, kind of go through the same cycle of befriending them and, you know, so he would do that with each group with each game. And, you know, they would voice their concerns and what they thought about the other group, and so he was just really getting all the intel and good understanding of what was going on. Of course, a lot of it was, you know, a lack of the family structure or, you know, the siblings were in prison. And you know, it’s just kind of just domino effect and the poverty, you know, the lack of education and what none so the parks, some of the parks didn’t have lights and they weren’t being kept up by the city of Chandler, but yet there was other parks and, you know, brand new parks in nice areas, you know, newer housing, you know, with with beautiful parks, and, you know, so he, you know?

Fernando Salinas – 15:42
Eventually he would go out and, you know, he would go with him and say that let’s, you know, let’s go play ball and he would just, he would be there as the adult, you know, and would talk to the other games and said, “hey, let’s let’s you know, let’s have some peace for a little bit.” It started in the basketball courts out at you know, the evenings. And he would get some games competitive games going on between the games.

Fernando Salinas – 16:15
You know, of course, fights would break out every once in a while, but, you know, it took that that energy and you know, and put it into a positive competitive game and he would do that and they would, they would play tackle football, you know, or flag football ended up becoming tackle football. You know, and he understood that there were just young kids that had a lot of energy, a lot of strength and, you know, just needed some guidance and some activities, some positive activities.

Chris Straigis – 16:56
It wasn’t just the neighborhood kids and the gangs who came to know Henry. Parents in the community started to recognize what he was doing. And sometimes in desperation, they’d seek his help.

Fernando Salinas – 17:10
You know, he started getting some parents, other parents started calling him and when their daughters would run away, you know, with their boyfriend or something, they would say, you know, the kids would say, you know, you should call Henry, you know? And get his number and, you know, and the parents would get connected and, you know, he would answer phones at late at night, and two in the morning, three in the morning, you know, he would go pick up kids, you know, that were stranded or whatnot, you know? And, of course, throughout all this, you know, my mom’s is like, “what are you doing?” Even to this day? I don’t know how he did it.

Chris Straigis – 17:53
While, his outreach and community support continue to grow, Henry was finding bigger and better ways to raise the bar. And help kids in his neighborhood.

Fernando Salinas – 18:04
You know, he started getting connected with the parents and they started getting involved, you know?And they reached out and you know, to the local school, junior high, to the principal, they opened up to the school there on the certain days. He was very political, he loved politics, oh man, we would we would just debate back and forth. He was that, he loved it. He loved that we were just informed. And, you know, he would listen to the kids and say, you know, you know, you know, you can you can tell the city that you know, you are a resident of the city, you know, the city owes you. So he took the kids to the city of Chandler, to the council, City Council, brought them all, in all the gang, all these gang kids, you know, and set them right there. And said, “yeah, you can go up there and and talk to him and tell him what you’re needs are.” And he started organizing them and showing them how they can make change on through the, you know, democratic process and through the, through the city. And all this was new, you know, and so the kids started just getting motivated, like, ‘wow, you know, we can do this.’

Fernando Salinas – 19:18
And things started changing and other and city council members started getting involved in and one, Patti Bruno in particular. You know, she met my dad and they talked and she was like, ‘okay, this guy is like the real deal. He really loves these kids.’ She saw his vision. And, her being a part of Chandler for a long time she saw the same thing happening. Um, and, you know, she was there to help them and she was there since day one. Patti Bruno was always there.

Fernando Salinas – 19:58
So They ended up going to the schools, and they got the police department involved. And there was always a truce within that, he made the senior ranking of the gangs, you would call them together and say, “hey, we want to do this, you know, but we need some peace,” you know? They would do car washes, car washes was a huge thing, they start getting together on the weekends and doing a car washes and, you know, they never been to Disneyland or, you know, Magic Mountain, you know? And they’re like, man, we would like to go to the beach and my dad would say, “yeah, you can do it.” Like what? “Yeah, you know, we could just do some carwashes and raise some money, you know?” And the parents got involved, you know, and they started taking them out side of their, you know, their box. Just really started opening up their minds and, you know, they took them to just different places like that different field trips, you know, fishing and you know? My dad loved fishing, you know? I grew up, I mean, practically on the lake. I don’t know how he found the time. It’s just still crazy, you know, because he always took us fishing and you know, and boating and he had bought a boat and he would invite everybody, you know, it was all the family and whoever wanted to come, you know, neighbors, you know, he just shared everything that he had, which was not a lot. And so, you know, just just really, he was just doing everything. You know, you know, in his power and listening to other ideas.

Chris Straigis – 21:49
Henry realized that his mission needed more organization. It needed some kind of structure. It needed a home base.

Fernando Salinas – 21:58
So yeah, I think he felt that he needed to give them, they needed something to call home. And eventually they got a small little little office space in Chandler and there was no money, and he would use his money, they would, other parents would you know, give part of their salary just rent this place, just to have a you know, a building to start something you know, because the schools w as not it wasn’t theirs you know? So once they got the building, this building was just a little office space, and then you know, they were continuing to look like and you know, we’re growing we’re getting more kids, you know, some of these kids don’t have food you know? We need to find a place that maybe has like a little kitchen and refrigerator, and maybe a basketball court. So they found the next place they’re in downtown Chandler and and you know, they had a basketball court there, you know, they a little gym, a little kitchen, and they started doing more and just getting food from the food banks and, and helping kids. And these kids needed tutoring and he, you know, knew that a lot of these kids were failing so you know he would reach out to you know some of the kids that were doing really well in school, and and university students, and say hey, can you come and tutor some of these kids? And just other people from the community from Chandler would come and tutor.

Chris Straigis – 23:25
Henry kept this incredible pace for years. he continued to grow the network of kids and parents, the community tent would get bigger and bigger until they even outgrew their first location. By now they were, for all intents and purposes, of formal organization. And they needed a name.

Shelby Pedersen – 23:44
When Henry started ICAN he really wanted to improve the lives of youth living within the Chandler community and so Improving Chandler Area Neighborhoods was very, it resonated with him because he knew that if he can improve the youth lives and really get them engaged in something productive after school, he was going to be helping the whole community.

Chris Straigis – 24:06
This is Shelby.

Shelby Pedersen – 24:08
Shelby Pedersen and I’m the CEO and ICAN.

Chris Straigis – 24:11
She worked with Henry for years and now runs the show. She told me a little bit more about how Henry approached the organization that his outreach eventually became.

Shelby Pedersen – 24:21
So we’ve started using the acronym ICAN over the years instead of Improving Chandler Area Neighborhoods. And it’s great that it spells ICAN because it’s this empowering and uplifting, positive message to any child that participates in our program. I can do it or, you know, I can be that person I want to be, I can overcome challenges that I’m facing, whatever that is for them. It’s just a really powerful, uplifting statement. Henry was such a humble leader. One of the things I respected the most about him outside of his incredible vision was his humility. And he was always very good about even very early on saying, I need help with x, y and z, can you, you know, I need to find somebody who can do this so that ICAN can be great 10 years down the road. So he always was very upfront with, you know what he needed help with. He would go to the city council and ask for different things. And he found staff early on in areas where he knew he didn’t have an expertise. He was just a really, really humble guy that knew he didn’t have the skills to do every single thing.

Shelby Pedersen – 25:32
Well, he had this amazing vision, he had access to the kids, and he was this charismatic, amazing leader who could come in and put this place, could put this plan in place. He You know, he always chimed the same message and the same key things that he wanted to see ICAN do. And, you know, as a result, it’s been very drilled into our culture, what his vision was, and so there’s no question if you ask anybody in this building and anyone on our board with Henry’s vision was, you’ll get a variation, maybe different words, but the exact same story, you know? He wanted a free, safe place for kids to go after school that would make investments in them. You know, it wasn’t, you know, just a place for kids that wasn’t fun that didn’t have, you know, skill building, he wanted them to have some kind of investment made in their life for them to be better than they were walking in the door. The fact that it was free and accessible to all kids, despite what label had been placed on them was important to him. And that was that investment in the kids that Henry was so passionate about what what can we do to make their lives better?

Shelby Pedersen – 26:37
And it did evolve over time to be a whole lot more focused on not just keeping them busy after school but really giving them the skills to say no to the gang and to drugs and everything else in between. You know, how can we how can we use our time wisely in the after school setting with these kids to impress upon them the importance of staying staying away from drugs and staying out of gangs. So we started to offer programs to a wider range of kids, more age groups at that time. And again, that is only improved the program, it’s only made us stronger. Henry was such a special guy, you know, he gave hope to teenagers at the time who really, they didn’t see themselves as having any future. And, you know, we have alumni who have come back and said, you know, ‘I would have died, there’s just no question i would i would have died. And nobody thought I was worth anything. I you know, I was making horrible decisions and I was hurting myself and hurting others and, and Henry believed in me and Henry stuck his, you know, his arm out for me. And, you know, I took hold of his hand and we walked out of that situation together. And you know, he was the one person in my life that helped me.’

Chris Straigis – 27:53
Henry was making a fundamental difference in the lives of these kids, and quite frankly, on the entire town. he’d found his mission, his ultimate call to service. But then in 1997, Henry’s path shifted once again. Serious health issues blindsided the family, and would burden him for the rest of his days.

Fernando Salinas – 28:17
So he was, you know, working and I think it was 1997. In April, he just was having some difficulty walking and every time he would walk it was like his knees would give out a little bit. So, he went to the doctor and you know, just to get a checkup. He’s like, ‘hey, I had this going on at work and it’s kind of weird. My knees just kind of buckle in.’ So, you know, he called us from the hospital like, hey, I’m here. I’m getting checked out. And the next call we got is like, hey, your your dad’s in a coma. We’re like, what? It was hard to you know, hear like what my dad’s sick and like in a coma and we didn’t really understand that and so on. So, they had misdiagnosed him originally with the with Guillain-Barré and you know after so many things they ended up saying that he was he had Neurofibromatosis, which is a lot of the tumors alongside the spine and his brain.

Fernando Salinas – 29:25
So that that took a toll. He was in a coma for months. He used to talk to me about it and he could hear everything like he was still awake, right? So, he remembers everything, all the conversations, everything when people would come in and out, you know, and you know, the, the the praying people praying for him people talking to him. And he said he would just try to like move his finger because of the nurses would say, Henry, can you move you, and, you know, but he said he felt like, just like his spirit like numb like, not in a body, you know it just but he couldn’t do anything. But he was he said he would try to scream and just talk because then he eventually started hearing the doctors that had come in with me and my mom and you know, talking about you know, pulling the plug, you know?

Fernando Salinas – 30:25
You know, he said he was just trying to like to like move and kick like, and tell people ‘I’m alive, I can hear you, I’m here,’ you know? And, you know, they had talked to my mom and said, Hey, you know, he’s not gonna come out, if he does, you know, he’s gonna have brain damage and you know, this and that. And so she said, no, you know, we talked about now, you know, she said, ‘I know my husband. You don’t know him, he is so strong. He’s the strongest man I know.’

Fernando Salinas – 31:12
Shortly after, a couple weeks after, he started moving his toes, he started moving his eyes, you know? And you know, it was a long process, but he, you know, he opened his eyes, you know, he could talk again, and we brought him home. And he had to learn everything all over again – how to hold his head up, he had lost all of his muscle. He couldn’t even hold his head up. It was he was he would say it was like a baby he couldn’t walk, nothing – how to write again everything all over again. His drive and his spirit, you know, and the love and the support that he had from us, you know, just and all of his friends and family you know, just I can you know that the family from I can and Patty and Trinity and everybody that was there, I mean, just so much support. But he always said, he’s like, mijo, son. I’m gonna walk again. I’m gonna walk again and I’m going to be back to work. He’s always he’s always say that I’m gonna be back, to work, get back to work.

Fernando Salinas – 32:28
You know, so he eventually started getting stronger and he went up to out of the wheelchair to the, to the walker, you know, use the walker for a long time. And he, you know, one day we were moving, we were washing the car right there in the driveway. And I told him one day, “Dad, can you move the blazer,” we had a Chevy Blazer. “Can you move the blazer so I can move the Ford Explorer?” He’s like, “no, I can’t drive.” I said, “Who says?” He’s like, “your mom.” You know, it’s like, you know, “my eyesight is not that great anymore.” And I’m like, “dad, it’s just, let’s just move it, just move it into the, you know, to the road right there just back and reverse it,” because he loved to drive. That was his, he had so many passions, so many passions, you know, and he loved to drive and he was the greatest driver, greatest driver.

Fernando Salinas – 33:27
I hopped into the, he started it, I hopped into the passenger seat. And then he moved it into the road. And I said “dad, let’s just go around the block.” He’s like, “you sure?” Like, yeah. And that was it. You know it, you know, we went around the block and we went down the street. You know, we went to the Circle K and he’s, you know, he’s just, he felt, you know, like he he okay. He could do something. He has a purpose. We came back and my mom was outside on the street, you know, waiting and she saw him driving up and about lost her mind, she’s like “leep kiss doesn’t” you know what are you, in Spanish you know, what are you, “Qué estás haciendo?” “What are you doing? You can’t drive!” and he’s like “yes I can.”

Fernando Salinas – 34:25
So, you know, he started making the errands, small errands to Circle K just down the street, you know, for milk, for this and that. And just started getting some independence again. I mean everything he put his mind to and envisioned, you know, it was like the energy and the faith and, you know, just the the law of attraction and whatever powers in the universe, you know, would just magnet, you know, and into it, you know, and and it did and, you know?

Fernando Salinas – 34:56
He came to a full recovery and he started working again. At that time ICAN was, you know, being ran by a CEO, you know, so he’s like, you know, ‘I know ICAN is in good hands,’ you know, it was structured, you know, still providing, you know, what I had envisioned. And so, you know, they, they all would always would reach out to my dad, like, invite him, you know, and that’s the beauty of ICANN, they, they, they kept him at the core. You know, they knew everything he did, and they always kept him at the core and would ask him, you know, for his advice, and, you know, what do you think, you know? ICAN as always had the founders a part of it, you know, you have Eddie Upshaw, you have Patti Bruno, you have, you know, AJ, you just had a lot of these people that stuck with I can with the same vision. And he felt, you know, 100% at peace, you know?

Fernando Salinas – 35:17
But then he had some relapses, you know? He had some relapses and, you know, he, we were, like, the second time we’re like, ‘man, we don’t we don’t think he’s,’ you know, we were like, he’s like, ‘no, it’s gonna happen.’

Chris Straigis – 36:22
Henry’s relapses were taking a serious toll. He struggled to fight back from paralysis, begin to work again, and then find him right back into sickness.

Fernando Salinas – 36:32
He went through three surgeries, you know, and then that’s when it started to change. You know, after the third surgery, they were like, ‘listen, you know, his spine is completely filled with tumors, his brain, they keep on popping up, you know, we need to try some radiation.’ So he started doing you know, chemotherapy, radiation treatment. You know, just treatment after treatment and you know, and that started having a toll on him. And you know, so he started losing its balance started getting weaker, and eventually just kind of, he was fighting, just therapy and the tumors just got in the way, neurologically, and he eventually, you know, couldn’t, couldn’t move anymore, he was immobile.

Chris Straigis – 37:39
By 2017, Henry was bedridden at home, in a coma, and under hospice care. He hadn’t opened his eyes for days. But then, just a day before his wife’s birthday, the strength he’d relied upon his whole life rallied one last time. He opened his eyes to spend some time with his wife once again, before taking his final breaths.

Fernando Salinas – 38:04
Towards the end. He was just surrounded with with family and friends and everybody, you know? Everybody loved him and he just… I wish you would have been able to meet him.

Chris Straigis – 38:36
Henry served his whole life. He was at his best and he was whole, when he was giving of himself to make the lives of others better, his family, his community. He was not one to passively observe, he was a doer. He understood that making deposits in the lives of others would reap untold rewards for generations to come. ICAN lives on and is stronger than ever. The legacy he built continues to foster the kids in Chandler with bigger and better programs, and it continues to grow in the light of its founder.

Chris Straigis – 39:15
Thank you for listening to Scrappy, you can go to scrappypod.com for show notes and links to ICAN. Please find us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and connect to us on Facebook and Twitter to stay up to date with Season Two which will be coming out later in 2020.

The post ICAN appeared first on All Around Creative.

Hani White’s mother and grandmother made sure that cooking was a family event as she grew up near Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia. For them, cooking was a shared experience that strengthened family and community bonds. And in her part of the country, a great deal of that cooking involved readily available vegetable oils. Disposing that used oil was as simple as throwing it into a local trash pit. After immigrating to the US, Hani continued those same cooking traditions – but trying to dump her used cooking oils was much more complicated in the middle of a bustling city. With help from her neighbors, Hani has found a better way to repurpose the oils, helping the environment and bringing her community together in the process.

Chris Straigis – 0:01
From AAC Studios, welcome to Scrappy, the podcast about small companies doing big things. I’m your host, Chris Straigis. Today we talk with Hani White, co-founder of Feed the Barrel, an organization in Philadelphia that collects used cooking oil to repurpose it into useful products like soap and biofuel, and keeps it out of landfills and water treatment facilities where it can create big environmental problems.

Hani White – 0:31
How about we do this for our kids? How about we do this for our next generation. This is a great opportunity to bring our community together to teach our kids about how they could contribute to American society. And at the same time, we’re going to make their Earth better.

Chris Straigis – 1:01
One of the most communal activities shared by our human cultures around the world is the experience of food – spending time cooking and eating with friends and family. Hani White is taking this shared experience to another level by coordinating her community around one specific aspect of food, or rather, a food preparation byproduct – used cooking oil. Feed the Barrel is a cooking oil recycling program that was started by Hani and some friends from her Indonesian neighborhood in South Philadelphia. They’re not only helping people avoid costly plumbing disasters, but they’re helping to protect the environment, creating new useful products from waste and, in the process, demonstrating how one small action can change a big city for the better. Feed the Barrel’s roots formed at the crossroads of cultures from two different sides of the globe.

Hani White – 1:56
When I was a kid, I ate anything and everything. I remember my mom say that like if there is an elephant in the room you going to eat those elephant, right? I am not a picky eater. I eat anything, but we ate a lot of vegetables. The thing is like my grandma grew a lot of vegetables, and meat, fish tend to be more expensive. So I remember that my mom usually purchased some meats but not a lot. She got it really small to share it with everyone but there is always either meat or fish or chicken. But the main thing is vegetables. I could not quite remember where when my mom never cooked. She cook sometime two times a day. And it’s always like, a family affair, right? She always took me to the market. She always took me in the kitchen. And another plus is my grandma, she grow her own food. So we have this full cycle right when my grandmother that lives with us have a garden in the side of the house that growing our own food, and then my mom go to market to buy the meat or the chicken or the fish, and we just combining it. It just so amazing that it’s such a playground for us. Cooking it’s become like a daily part of our lives.

Chris Straigis – 3:36
Growing up in Indonesia, Hani says that vegetables were a very common and very large portion of the meals. But how those vegetables were prepared depended largely on where in Indonesia you were.

Hani White – 3:48
Absolutely, lots of vegetable. The reason is, like I say it’s a very tropical country. Anything that we put underground it will grow like without even we taking care of. So it’s easy to have like multiple different type of vegetable. But the method of cooking itself is really different. Indonesia have 17,000 Island. So it’s really depend on where you live. If you live closer to the mountain, of course you ate a lot of vegetable and you steam it, but where I’m from as like, I’m in the capital city, and we not too close to the mountain and we not too close to the ocean. So we ate basically everything and the method of cooking, a lot of steaming, a lot of frying, and a lot of deep fried also, somehow, anything that we could think of, like there is always component of frying, either is for breakfast, lunch or dinner. Like you always have your steamed rice on the side. It might be like fried chicken or fried egg or fried beef. With the vegetable, the soup is always… like even the rice, if let’s say the rice from the previous day we not finishing up, the next day we fried it become a fried rice and that’s become our breakfast. And it’s always like frying with cooking oil.

Hani White – 5:23
Another reason why cooking we cook with a lot of oil because it’s easily available. We have a lot of palm oil production in Indonesia. And we do have a lot of coconut oil also. So it’s really depend on what kind of food like we could have like multiple different type of oil that we could use, and it’s easily available and it’s very affordable. And back then back home in Indonesia, because it’s tropical country, we always never really think like how to trash it, and there is no sophisticated trash system in Indonesia. We always have like in the backyard, we have like a big hole and we just dump our trash there. And then either we it’s become a compost, or we burned it. And it just as simple as that and we never think of it right? So my mom was like, “oh, the oil is too dirty,” she just trash it on the ground. And we don’t never without ever know that it’s could pollute the ground. It’s not part of our knowledge, I guess. And of course, as soon as you don’t see it in your house, you don’t think it’s your problems, goes to the water stream and it’s like it’s not, no longer our problem. It’s become like part of the part of the soil part of the land part of the whatever, but we never have that kind of education that is not good if you trash the oil just like that.

Chris Straigis – 7:02
in 1998, Hani immigrated to the United States with her family. But really her journey to America has started many years earlier when her father planted a seed in her head as a young child.

Hani White – 7:14
Since I was small, little kids, my father, he is, he adored United States as a country a lot. And as a few years old kids, I remember, he showed me like a beautiful book about United States, and he told me someday you’re going to be at this country. And he showing the picture of New York City, he showing the picture of Grand Canyon and multiple different parks, national parks in the United States. And I think my subconscious mind start working there.

Chris Straigis – 7:50
When she finally took the journey in the late 90s, Hani settled in South Philadelphia in a community of other Indonesian immigrants.

Hani White – 7:58
We are a smaller, very small community in South Philadelphia, the Indonesian community, really just that move it into Philadelphia after 1998. So we grow in community, and we start having, like, we start organizing ourselves. We say like we want to be successful immigrant community, we look at a different model with the Korean community, the Chinese community, the Vietnamese community, we start looking at those community that is like, oh my God, they are so advanced. They already have their own mall, they already have their own economic power, right? We want to do something that make a difference.

Chris Straigis – 8:41
Hani, like the rest of her community brought a love of her native foods with her to the States. They also brought the same methods of cooking, using various vegetable oils as a mainstay of the process. What Hani and her neighbors didn’t realize at the time, was just how different oil act when it runs through cold pipes here in the northeast us.

Hani White – 9:03
When we came to United States, we was thinking that like trashing the oil down the drain is not a big problem. That mentality because back home like I say it’s 90 degree, and we don’t basically computed here that it’s a different totally different climate, right? So we cook the same way, right, the way our mom cook. And when I moved to South Philadelphia, we knew that the infrastructure is really, really old, but we never really think it further than that. Just like oh, it’s an older pipe is an older type of home. And we just trash the oil the way our mom trash it back home, we pour it down the drain, right? Or sometime we just put it in a container and now we put it with our trash. There is no other, we do not know either way how to do it like, what is the better way? So then we start realizing that some people in different blocks have a clogged pipe. And, you know, as mothers, we talk about our house, and talking about our kids, right? And one day my two of my friends have a conversation at the school yard.

Hani White – 10:27
And we mentioned about like, here, my pipe is clogged and something happening, you know, and we have no clue what it is. And the other mother actually have their basement flooded. And what’s really funny is she worked for EPA. And she was like, wow, is not only my community problem, someone that work for EPA have the same problem. And we start having that conversation that like, Hey, I think I know the mother that work for EPA. She’s not saying that like I think I know what’s going on. And we like what’s going on, right? It’s like, did you put the oil down the drain and put the bacon grease, or like after Thanksgiving the turkey grease down the drain? And we like look at each other, we like you read our mind you read our, you know? And she was like, oh my god, it’s actually I was realizing that not only as problem as an immigrant, because the reason that we should be bring it up like I said she have a flooded basement and in South Philly, if we have flooded basement we never think it’s because of the clogged pipe because of the oil right? Imagine that you losing the entire basement. Right? Your stuff is down there. You need to pay router router. It could be hundreds, hundreds of dollars, and we not like economically, we not like middle upper income, we are middle lower income. So like $400, or $500, $600, that’s it’s like sometime it’s like half of your rent. And it’s happening from house to house. And we start seeing this as a as a community problem.

Chris Straigis – 12:21
The more Hani talked to her friends about the plumbing, the more they began to realize it was a much bigger and wider spread problem. And solving this one issue safely and conveniently disposing of used cooking oil could help bring their community together and create change not only for themselves, but future generations. It could be one step to help build that more advanced community that they dreamed of.

Hani White – 12:46
We want to have a better voice. And we start talking to different mom and dad. And we start seeing this as like possible project that we could carry on and bringing our community together, right tackling it together. And plus we have the incentive of this EPA mother that have like the same problem with us. And this EPA mother is like we we start having further conversation, and she’s like, maybe EPA could help us. And we start seeing this as an opportunity that like, if we call up, collaborate with good institution, legit institution, this is going to make our community better and stronger. And, of course, it’s solving the problem to. We could use this as a momentum, as a movement that can bring the community together, learning about the environmental and work with government federal institution.

Chris Straigis – 13:56
As Hani and the other mothers discuss possible options, they realize that their solution could not just center on a way of disposing of the cooking oil. The best way forward was not only to get rid of it, but to recycle it, which would have a positive environmental impact as well.

Hani White – 14:12
Originally, we like oh, the only thing that we know is trashing the oil down the drain or trashing the oil with the trash every week, right? And then EPA say that like, hey, do not trashing the oil with your trash, it’s actually going to end up in landfill. And when it’s end up in landfill, it’s going to create this methane gas that actually going to pollute the landfill also. And we look at each other like, we didn’t know that. So there is no other way. We trashing down the drain, it’s cost us money. We have this basement flooded, right? But if we trash it with our trash, it’s bad too because we pollute the landfill.

Hani White – 14:58
So we’ll look at each other like , oh my God. And the EPA say like, how about if we developed something that we collecting it? And that’s when the one of the head of the Indonesian Diaspora Network start thinking like, that’s right, collecting it, collecting on where people have a meeting together. Because he is a pastor, he know that, like, if we collecting it, we need to have masses of people that collecting this oil and going to bring the oil to somewhere other than their drain or their trash, right? And we stop, we start thinking that like, that’s right, every Sunday, we could collect the oil, right? And mothers could come to the church with their oil instead of just trashing down the drain. And EPA say like let’s we do research about it, how we could just collect it, and then maybe we could donate it to someone right?

Hani White – 16:01
Because there is a way to kind of like recycling something and we like wow there is a recycling of dirty cooking and we do not know. And then the next meeting the EPA coming out with like ideas that like, do you know there is a company in Philadelphia that actually willing to get your oil and help you to recycle? And we like, no we do not know. And we start doing the research together. We find a company that owned by another immigrant. And we like this is so perfect, we are immigrant here and there is a company that actually doing oil recycling, and he also immigrant. He’s from Italy. And he got the idea on recycling oil because in Europe they’ve been doing this for years – in Barcelona, in Italy, they have this concept for years in Germany, in UK and they just like it’s so new in United States.

Chris Straigis – 17:06
The Italian is Domenico Finocchiaro, who collects oil for Eden Green Energy, a vegetable oil recycling plant. Domenico’s organization already had an infrastructure to process the used oil. It was simply a matter of creating a new collection structure for Hani’s neighborhood.

Hani White – 17:24
And he said like, “you know what we could provide you with the barrel”, we like what barrel? And he started showing us picture of the barrel. “This is what we put in different restaurant. This is what we put in grocery store.” And was like, wow, we actually could have that in our churches. And he’s like, “sure,” and we’re like, “but our church don’t have money and looks like it’s expensive barrel.” He’s like ‘it’s okay, we could provide you with free barrel not the most expensive one, like we provide restaurant, but the basic one, at least you could hold the oil at the barrel and every two month, every three month whatever the barrelful, we could come and pick it up.”

Chris Straigis – 18:04
For the plan to take off. However, Hani would need more than the support of a few friends and an EPA Rep. She needed to get buy in from her entire community and have them agree to place a barrel for collecting oil right at their church.

Hani White – 18:18
We say like, Okay, I think we have the model. I think we know what to do. But we’re not going to move anywhere if there is no participation, right? And of course, the pastor say like, no problem. Let’s invite all the church, we just need to put like a community meetings and see what the community say. And we have the first community meeting, we invite all the Indonesian churches, we have the partner, which is the Italian guy and the EPA. Just beautiful, we show the pastors and the community the barrel, we give the presentation we say that like this is going to be a great thing. You don’t need to spend money anymore to like clean your clogged drain. And, and we get the buy-in. At first, like the church is kind of like hesitate. They’re like “do we really want to have barrel at our church? Like it might be smelling our church might be going to smell like a fried chicken.”

Hani White – 19:32
But then I remember there was one guy his, like, uh, he’s a community blogger, his name is Pat Bonoh, oh, I remember that. He just like, everybody like look at each other. They’re like, this is something great but we do not really know whether we want to have the barrel in our church right? And he just step up he said like, “friends family and pastors, let think about this. How about we do this for our kids, how about we do this for our next generation? This is the great opportunity to bring our community together to teach our kids about how they could contribute to American society. In the same time, we’re going to make their Earth better. And this is our time to make a difference.”

Hani White – 20:26
He just stepped up like that. Everybody just like us, right? We are newly immigrant that immigrated here. We want to contribute to the society. We want to contribute to our home South Philly, and we want to do this for our kids. And then we ask the question like, “which church that willing to host the barrel?” All hands up. We like this is too good to be true. And then that night seven church sign up to host the barrel.

Chris Straigis – 21:05
And from there, Feed the Barrel was officially off the ground. Hani estimates that since they started the program in 2014, they’ve collected over 3000 gallons of cooking oil. That’s 3000 gallons of oil that’s been saved from drains and landfills and repurposed into usable items.

Hani White – 21:24
He processed the oil to become biofuel, compost and soap. And he show us like this is how we separate the oil from the food, dirty food. And then after that, this is the clean oil and we turn it we put some chemical to it. We turn it to become biofuel and we sell it to the farmers in Lancaster or whatever area so they could run their tractors right? And the food that coming out from all this oil, they press it they make it really dry and there is a food scrap, right? And they turn it to become compost by putting red worms. And they show us like a cute little soaps. And we just stunned. We just like, this is so cool that actually things that we trash have a second life. And what really hit me because my mom, my grandma, did grow our own food. And my husband started growing our own food in our backyard. And we like now we can get a compost from you? And he said “feel free to come anytime.” We thought that we just tried to solve the problem so our drain not clog. We just don’t want to spend money. This is crazy. It’s killing us right? But then it’s become this beautiful thing.

Chris Straigis – 22:49
Even after getting their community to buy in Hani and the rest of the Feed the Barrel group still encountered some challenges – mainly some pushback from their local government. Hani and her husband decided to place a barrel in their community garden. And at first the idea wasn’t so well received by the City of Philadelphia.

Hani White – 23:10
One day there is a letter from a City Philadelphia INI saying that like you need to remove the barrel or we going to start fining you couple hundred dollar everyday because you have inflammable dangerous barrel at your backyard. And we’re like, okay, and we like calling the Italian guy like, “I need to remove the barrel, they say this is inflammable, this is they say this is dangerous. It’s such a danger to the community.” And I start thinking about the churches, oh my God, my the churches could have the same problem, right? People could complain and think that this is dangerous. And then he say like, oh, You have that kind of problem? Yeah, don’t worry about it. Because this is actually like a public knowledge that cooking oil is not inflammable. And we have the secure barrel is not just like, regular barrel, we have the top and we have the lock on the barrel. So unless somebody would really want to try to do something, it’s not going to be dangerous to the community.

Chris Straigis – 24:25
The whole experience ended up teaching Hani, how important it was to educate not just her own Indonesian community, but the greater community around them. By showing people how they could make a difference with one simple act, Feed the Barrel was able to make a much bigger impact.

Hani White – 24:43
I realized that then I feel like okay, we need to have that conversation. Because we try to do good thing, but other people seen it different differently, right? Because they try to make sure they are they’re protecting the community, they’re protecting their constituents. And the way we think it that like, hey, we actually doing such a great thing for the environmental for the environment, they see it as a danger to the community. So that’s why we feel like the outreaches need to be better and bigger. And then we, we we start doing some reaching out like, like, we do not know who to reach out and EPA actually helping us a lot. They say like, how about reach out to the Office of Sustainability under the Mayor’s office? And we have we make that connection. And we have another office under litter, like a street department. We talked to them. So there is a like a couple different offices under municipality that well aware of our program now.

Hani White – 25:56
So we feel like we need to do that. Be able to grow because like, the more we want to have more barrels in different community, the the more communication we need to do with not only the community but also the municipality. So what really cool, actually the Vietnamese community start reaching out to us. They say like, “hey, we’re actually doing a lot of cooking to, we doing a lot of cooking with deep fried. So let’s do this together.” And also a lot of African American church actually reaching out to us and they say, like, “hey, you guys have such a great program, how we could tap into your program.” So we link them with the Italian guy. Now that church have their own barrel, and we possibly have a program also with their youth this summer.

Chris Straigis – 26:56
Weavers Way, a co-op grocery with a few locations in Philadelphia and Ambler also reached out to the group. They now host barrels in their stores so that their customers and partners can recycle their oil. Hani has also been in contact with the Citizens Planning Institute, which aims to introduce Philadelphians to processes like city planning and zoning, so they can help shape and preserve their neighborhoods. Her goal is to take Feed the Barrel from a standalone program run by mothers and community members, to a full-fledge program that is ingrained in the day to day operations of the city.

Hani White – 27:32
So sort of the next step is want to kind of like have this program a home, because for the past four years, it’s as mothers in South Philly. We have 3, 4, 5 kids, right? So we do it as much as we could, right? When Weavers Way say like, “hey, we have table for you, why don’t you host it or teach our youth.” And between us we scramble like, okay, who has availability this weekend who needs to take care of the kids? And it’s, it’s, it’s really us doing it right. And now we start thinking and we still communicating with EPA like, what is it going to be really beautiful if we could make this as institutional just like what they did in Barcelona, and in Italy, it’s become part of program of municipality.

Hani White – 28:35
So that’s actually what we hope it’s becoming with Water Department. Because from our conversation is a huge concern of them. They they see this as a problem because the Water Department really to need to make sure the quality of the water inside of Philadelphia up to par, and if people still doing what we did trashing the oil down the drain, it’s become a problem, right? They see this as an even bigger picture than us. They see this as a structural problem, we see this as a much deeper environmental solution. We understand that to grow this thing to become bigger and better, we need to work and collaborate and have this program as stronger home instead of just as mothers.

Chris Straigis – 29:31
Regardless of what’s ahead for Feed the Barrel, Hani is immensely proud of what her cohort of mothers pastors and community members have been able to do so far. With one simple change of habit, they’re making their city a better place to live. All because of a group of people who weren’t afraid to take a chance and find a new way to solve an old problem.

Hani White – 29:52
You know how kids want to learn how to swim, right? Like you never know until you jump into the water, right? At first you panic. First you do not know what to do, first you just try to have your head above the water. We’re like, okay, we just tried to get our people not trashing their oil, so we don’t need to spend the money. And then we start seeing like, this is a great thing. We could have the voice in the community we could give back to our society, right? And then we’re like, oh, yeah, we could educate our kids. And then we start learning. They’re like, oh, it’s much bigger thing. And the city is actually interested. And we’re like, oh, my God, this is much bigger than us. We just never knew this is going to be this way. We never knew that. One day we the Office of Sustainability invite us to talk in the same stage with Mayor.

Hani White – 30:50
We never knew that Grit Magazine put us in the cover of the magazine. I could imagine if no one raised me their hand at that community meeting. They raise their hand they step up their plan their flag, they say like, let’s do this. And it I feel like that’s so American, right? That’s give me chill. It’s crazy!

Chris Straigis – 31:29
Thanks for listening to Scrappy. You can go to scrappypod.com to find transcripts and show notes including links to the group’s Facebook page, the Eden Green Energy website, and the Citizens Planning Group.

Chris Straigis – 31:43
We’ll be back next week with our season finale, the story of how Henry Salinas helped transform the town of Chandler, Arizona by giving kids an alternative to the drugs and gangs that were devastating their community. Henry passed away in 2017 after years of battle health issues, but his legacy lives on at the program he started and in the thousands of lives he touched.

The post Feed the Barrel appeared first on All Around Creative.

As a young boy growing up in Nepal, Avishek Malla dreamed of being a famous athlete, a cricket champion. His career ended after college, though, and he took on a new passion. He garnered inspiration from carrying out some environmental work in rural areas of his home country, and had a medal bestowed upon him by a king. Today he helps his country’s residents pull power from the sun, and irrigate their once-dry fields. And his work is changing the lives and lifestyles of Nepal’s people.

Chris Straigis – 0:01
From AAC Studios, welcome to Scrappy, the podcast about small companies doing big things. I’m your host, Chris Straigis. A quick note at the top – we will be off for the next two weeks for the holidays and releasing the last two episodes of this season in early January. Also, we’re in the process of building Season Two, which will be coming out in mid-2020. If you know someone you think would make a good guest for the show, please go to scrappypod.com, click the comment link on the top right and send us a note. We’d love to hear from you.

Chris Straigis – 0:47
Historically, anthropologists have defined four basic human necessities: food, water, shelter, and clothing. By many of today’s standards, you could argue that the list has grown a bit. But the basic premise is that there are certain things that make human life well, effectively livable. In this day and age, many of us in developed societies take these things for granted. We’ve designed and built massive systems that allow us to just turn on a faucet to get water, or flip a switch on the stove to cook food. And we don’t even have to think about where those resources come from. However, there are still so many parts of the world where these core needs can be a struggle to meet. Often, these are also places that are hit hardest by accelerating climate change. And they have very few ways to adapt to it.

Chris Straigis – 1:41
So the big question, how can we take our modern developed technology and put it into places where it’s needed most? Meet Avishek Malla. He runs a company in Nepal that works to provide the infrastructure for several of those basic human needs to be met. with ease, and some of the downstream effects of their work are surprising.

Avishek Malla – 2:06
My name is Avishek Malla, and I’m the CEO of Sunfarmer Nepal. Sunfarmer is a solar energy based social enterprise. It’s located in Kathmandu, Nepal. We have done over 2500 projects in various districts of Nepal of various sizes. We offer three types of services. The first service is a power purchase agreement, where we sign up purchase agreement with clients for systems of various sizes and we sell electricity for an agreed period of time. The second service we provide is turnkey service where we basically work as a EPC, engineering, procurement and construction. And the third service we provide is asset management. In this asset management model, it’s basically like 7we get funds from donor organizations or individual donors. And in their mandate, we execute the project from start to finish.

Chris Straigis – 3:12
Avishek is on a bit of a different path from where he started as a young boy in Nepal. Like many of us, the course of his life took a turn after his college years, some unexpected inspiration from a King helped illuminate that path, and landed him right back home where he started.

Avishek Malla – 3:34
When I was in my childhood, I always wanted to be a cricketer. I had a good career like local career playing cricket. So I was as captain of my university, we won several different tournaments. But, you know, like, in Nepal, I mean, you just cannot earn a living via sports. You know, even when I was doing my bachelor’s degree, I had absolutely no idea, you know, what are we doing? And, and I would never have thought that I’ll be working as a social entrepreneur. Like if I look back 10 years back and you know, after [I] completed my degrees or even though I was doing degrees, but what gave me the vision, the passion and the breakthrough was, was the first job that I did.

Avishek Malla – 4:29
So the first job I did after I left after I completed my graduation was to work in one of the most remotest areas of [the] Nepal homeland. And back then, you know, the nearest road connecting to that area was 16 days walk. The only way you could reach there was by plane, and the flights were very, very irregular and some days would not fly. And there, you know, I caught, you know, I was I was exposed and I got experience in implementing renewable energy technology for not only electricity, but for cooking for for drinking water, you know, for growing food with, you know, passing greenhouse technologies and those kind of things. And, you know, working with the community, you know, working with the technology, you know, it gave me this, it basically taught me that how important you know, a light is, you know, how important the energy is.

Avishek Malla – 5:34
And I was amazed to see like, how much change it can bring to, you know, one’s individual life and the society. So, I was like really thrilled with this holistic kind of approach and I that’s why I never see renewable energy as electron, I never see [renwable] energy producing electricity. I always see what services it’s going provide them and how can you make that service accessible to the, to the people in a in a, you know, in a in a model that is that is sustainable. And that benefits the society for long term. That whole thinking, you know, sort of like that seed was sown when I did that first job and, working there, you know, I was like very sort of like determined that I’m going to do my Masters in [Inari] and I will come back and you know, sort of see how this technology can you know, like, help improve the society. Back then we had we had, we had King, currently we don’t, so the King would, you know, provide gold medal to to the best student that has taught, you know, the whole country in their in their faculty. So I got that award from from the King and, and in that award there was this script that was mentioned, you know, it basically, if I translate it, basically says that, you know, “ones knowledge is not useful, or useless, if it’s not utilized to serve once country.” So that script basically, you know, like made me think and, and again, you know, this work that followed with working in that remote area, it’s sort of like, gave me the direction and passion to, you know, do something for the society with the knowledge I have. So, yeah, definitely, you know, that had, you know, quite deep influence in my life and every day, you know, like when I’m doing a project, I remember this script.

Chris Straigis – 7:55
Nepal is an ancient country. It’s geographically diverse, and home to more than 25 million people. It’s a landlocked region nestled between China and India, and boasts many notable historical features. It’s the birthplace of the Buddha, and home to some of the highest peaks in the world in the Himalayan Mountains. But overall, it’s still behind many parts of the developed world in terms of infrastructure. Today, for example, almost 40% of the population lives off the grid, not connected to the country’s utilities.

Avishek Malla – 8:30
When we started Sunfarmer back in 2014, electricity reliability was a very big problem. There was even, in the urban centers, there was more than 12 hours of power cut every day. You know, solar can be a very potential solution to address this problem, both on the off-grid side and also in the urban side, but the investment cost for installing solar was very high. And there was no financial mechanism at that period of time. And plus the systems that were installed at that time, which is I’m talking about 2014 you know, they were you know, largely smaller systems and you know, there was serious problems with the technical abilities of local technicians to execute quality installations.

Avishek Malla – 9:24
Our priority was to make solar affordable; not only affordable, but also ensuring that high quality work was done during installation and followed by very good operation and maintenance service, because there is no standard as such in Nepal for for good quality installation. I, um, when I started in Australia, there were you know, codes, you know, like standard practice codes and standards for solar installations. But in Nepal that was non existent, which resulted in In you know, non-functional systems over a very short period of time, and that was not creating a very good image of the technology in the country. So, we were addressing, you know, sort of like a holistic problem in the in the sector when we started.

Avishek Malla – 10:15
When we started creating the standard for our own projects and installations, we also, you know, we were also requested by the government body, which is the Alternative Energy Production Center, which is in Nepal, and with them, we created two standards. One was for the institutional solar photovoltaic system, which is basically focusing on the off-grid ruler captive installations. And the other was on on-grid side, so, basically for the focused on the urban centers on you know, grid-connected type of systems. So those two standards, we were very heavily involved in and collaborated with the government and they’re currently, you know, forming their policies and an instruction regulation on on on those documents.

Avishek Malla – 11:16
We have done a lot of projects in birthing centers and they’re, you know, the indicators that we measure is you know, the, the decrease in mortality rate, you know, the numbers of birth that has increased after the system intervention. And if I have to just look at the health sector, the latest number that we have is we have impacted over 1.7 million in terms of population that has no access to health services after intervention. In Nepal, even like you you have, if you have 100 watt solar, you can Just change the birthing center and you can provide, you know, I mean, I think sometimes we take for granted lights. You know, but when I visited some of the rural birthing centers, they told me stories that was you know, very scary. I mean they would put torch light inside their mouth so that their hands are free to deliver the babies, and some actually burn some firewoods for light, or kerosene which I think is absolutely dangerous for a newborn baby. But like 100 watt solar, it’s nothing, you know, it’s nothing. But two or three lights hyper lights, some charge to charge your mobile phone and some charge to work your fetal Doppler, just changes the service of a birthing center.

Chris Straigis – 12:53
For Avishek, the mission was clear and the results of their success stretched far beyond just being able to turn on a light. But in this part of the world, any challenge is magnified,

Avishek Malla – 13:06
You know the geography in Nepal is highly varied from places to places and we have almost you know, like 50% of our country is covered with hills and mountains that creates you know very difficulty in accessibility to these areas, because there are no good way the roads in these areas and sometimes there are no roads. So, it becomes a challenge to, one, is to not only transport the system, but also to you know, to take care of the systems remotely because of, you know, lack of skill, human resource in those areas. So, talking about the transportation side, you know, we have done projects, by carrying the equipment by ourselves, sometimes carrying the equipment on animals. You know chartered helicopters to transfer equipment. So, and you know, sometimes the weather is, especially during the monsoon four months, there’s a lot of landslide flood problem all over the country, which you know adds that extra level of difficulties in terms of logistics and you know supplying this equipments and installing there.

Avishek Malla – 14:24
Nepal is a landlocked country, so we, any of our borders does not touch ocean and the majorimportant is from India and China. But even when we import from China there is the cross-border roads are not very good. So, it has to come through the port of India. And it takes more than, you know, two to three months to get a consignment via China to Nepal through ship.

Avishek Malla – 15:03
When the earthquake struck in 2015, our business you know, just like started slumping down because, you know, probably everybody’s business got affected by the earthquake. And followed after the earthquake, we had, you know, some geopolitical tension between India. So, we are not getting you know supply from the Indian side. So, after the earthquake we were provided, you know, in a consignments of solar panels and other accessories to support earthquake construction activities in Nepal. But our shipment it got stopped in the Calcutta border, which is in India, for eight months. When we were like not having a lot of business, we went to our drawing board and we started thinking like, you know, probably this is a very good time for us to think like, what can we do next?

Chris Straigis – 16:00
Every business is confronted with challenges now and again. And new businesses are especially susceptible to growing pains. The true test of leadership comes in the form of how they face that adversity. And if they can convert it into positive momentum.

Avishek Malla – 16:17
We started thinking that, why can’t we introduce a power purchase agreement on the agriculture sector, which has been so successful on the health sector. So we started exploring that portfolio. And we talked to a bank, we talked to a cooperative on, you know, requesting them to finance the water pumps for farmers. And we faced two challenges. One was the farmers, you know, they were not aware about this technology and they were hesitant to sort of like, adopt. And the other thing was, the banks, also it was new for them. And banks are usually very, you know, very reluctant to go in rural areas to finance very small investment projects unless there is an aggregation of a number of farmers. And the cooperatives also told us that, you know, why don’t you put in your own capital and prove us that it works and then you know, we’ll follow.

Avishek Malla – 17:19
So we coordinated with the cooperative, we did few pilots. We did actually, we did like 27 pilots in one of the area. And, you know, the results were very good, you know, the payment system, we got around 94% repayments in the system, and the farmers were very happy and, you know, they could, you know, it added to, you know, productive use and, you know, helping with their income. So, that’s how we started on the agriculture sector. And now we have, you know, sort of like taking that concept and expanded not only to larger systems for irrigation, but also we recently piloted to community projects where we started thinking, why don’t we you know, do like community projects rather than individuals where we can, you know, amortize the cost over to a larger population and can make the service more affordable and attractive to the farmers. So that’s how we started the water service model in in agriculture. When we have, you know, done sampling and monitoring, we found out that their income has increased by nearly two times. Their nutrition habits has changed because of you know, because of access to more variety of vegetables, which previously they did not have because they’ve not had access to water for integrating the crop. So these are some of the indicators that you know, really are important to us and also our drivers for for you know, like pushing us to more better service.

Avishek Malla – 19:05
One of the pilot projects that we did in agriculture, three years back was a cattle farm. She told me that every day you know, per cattle, she has to carry 25 liters of water from her hand pump to her cattle shed and it’s a it’s a backbreaker and it’s like really difficult for her. So she wants to have this small solar water pump to, you know, to wash her cattle and to provide, you know, water, drinking water for the cattle. So, you know, we signed up an agreement, and we installed the system. After a year when I went there… Before installation, she had four cows. After one year, I went there and I I could see that she has now you know, like, six, seven cattle there. And she told me that due to the hygiene, her calf was also, you know, not suffering from, you know, some disease, I exactly don’t remember what disease she was talking about. And by feeding water regularly and washing them her milk production increased by 20%. So this was I was not expecting all this.

Avishek Malla – 20:27
And then she showed me other things. So she’s a very clever farmer. So she showed me that now, you know, because I have pump, I could water my vegetable gardens, and I could do you know, like, whatever. the manure she is watching from the cattle, she’d made a small cannal, which went to her vegetable garden as a slurry, which was now, you know, not only providing organic fertilizer but also, you know, she was providing water irrigation and she was getting better yields. And I was super surprised because, like, how people can start, you know, thinking about different things that they can do with such a small intervention. And then I went there after, recently, you know, like one year ago, you know, after two years of installation. I was like completely shocked because she started, she registered a cattle company, like a dairy company. She has increased her cattles to 12, and now she is like milk aggregator for the village, you know? All these unexpected things, you know, came up. We were just thinking we’ll give her a pump, I mean, in a ppm basis, and she’ll pay a small fee and then, you know, she could save her hard work and maybe utilize it some other things. But you know, the drastic, economical and social change that had with such a small system was truly, truly amazing. And this is, this is something that, you know, I can, you know, I would never have thought.

Avishek Malla – 22:07
A very recent project that we did you know, we decided to do a community irrigation project. And basically what the project would do is pull water from a river, pump it to to a collection tank and then, you know, distribute it through pipes to to several fields, which is controlled by valve. So, very, very simple project. So, so our design team went there, you know, did all the technical assessments and everything. And then the flood came in and the whole intake was taken by the flood because the river changed this course. Now, this is something that we learned, you know, we didn’t know that the river would change the course, you know? So that that was very good learning for us. In Nepal, everything is virgin, you know? We can adapt to so much technologies and models that have been successful in the developed countries or the developing countries, and contextualize it to Nepal and do so much good here and, you know, what else can you ask for from your profession.

Chris Straigis – 23:32
Sunfarmer’s original mission was simply to bring sustainable electricity to the parts of rural Nepal that needed it most. What they ended up doing was changing the lives and lifestyles of the recipients in ways they couldn’t have imagined. From safer and higher birth rates to better nutrition to rural farmers creating sustainable businesses of their own. Avishek and his team are changing the world, one installation at a time. You can go to scrappypod.com for show notes, transcripts and links to Sunfarmer. And remember, if you know someone who might make a good guest for the next season, please go to scrappypod.com, click the comment link on the top right, and send us a note. Or you can just let us know what you think of the show. Happy Holidays!

The post SunFarmer appeared first on All Around Creative.

Jennifer’s journey is quintessentially American. It’s a story of a daughter of hard-working, immigrant parents who came to this country and strove to make good in the land of opportunity – a daughter who followed in her father’s footsteps, fostering a family legacy and living the American Dream. Until, that is, a terrible accident changed the course of her life, and forced her to reckon with her new normal. Just like her parents and grandparents before her, she faced her challenges head on, and like the phoenix that rises from the ashes, she reinvented herself to make purpose out of tragedy.

Chris Straigis – 0:02
From AAC Studios, welcome to Scrappy, the podcast about small companies doing big things. I’m your host, Chris Straigis. Today, we’re heading back to the east coast, to my native Philadelphia, for a story that really is quintessentially American. The story of a daughter of hard working immigrant parents, who came to this country and put all of their effort into providing a life full of opportunity that they wouldn’t have found back home. And then that daughter taking the reins of that effort and making good – until fate changed her course.

Chris Straigis – 0:41
Jennifer was following in her father’s footsteps, building success in the field of law and giving back through community activism. But then, in an instant, a tragedy that irrevocably changed the course of her life, or more accurately forced her into a new life. While a situation like hers can knock even the toughest players out of the game, Jennifer drew on the strength inherited from her parents and grandparents and instead became the Phoenix that rose from the ashes. This is Jennifer Lynn Robinson.

Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 1:15
My business is purposeful networking. I’m the founder and CEO.

Chris Straigis – 1:20
Jennifer is a business networking expert, motivational speaker and moderator who’s been on CBS, NBC and Fox. And she’s been featured in Forbes, the Huffington Post, the Chicago Tribune and more. Her story of strength and endurance really begins with her parents and grandparents.

Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 1:41
I am first generation American so both my parents were immigrants and that definitely had a big impact on my childhood. My grandmother was amazing. So she, most of her family died in the Holocaust and her and one sister hid in a hole on a farm during the war. In exchange for seamstress work, and they survived the war, she met my grandfather. They had my father and fled Poland – an after-war kind of situation – and came into Ellis Island with nothing, with my father as a toddler.

Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 2:16
So my mom family is from Fez, Morocco and my dad from Krakow, Poland. Her family left in the late 60s Morocco because of anti semitism from the ruler there – said they were going to a wedding in Paris, took a suitcase with them left their house never came back. And my mother met my father in Israel. My father was there visiting with a law school classmate of his, and they met there. So I think for me, my parents, you know, knew what it was to have nothing. You know, grew up in kind of turbulent circumstances and education was really kind of the main thing you know, that was what was stressed in our house more than anything else.

Chris Straigis – 2:57
So for Jennifer, she grew up in a space where the emphasis was on hard work and education, these were the key to the American dream. Her parents put that into practice every day. Her dad working his way through law school, and her mom earning an advanced degree.

Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 3:14
My father, so he was a big trial lawyer, you know, very well known, and I would go watch him do trials, I would he taught at Temple law for a long time. So I would go watch him teach. And, you know, so from a very young age, I not only knew I wanted to be a lawyer, but I wanted to be a litigator or a courtroom lawyer, because that’s what he did. And that’s what interests me. I love to talk love to argue. So yeah, that was a path from a very young age. I wanted to go down.

Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 3:45
So he worked very hard to get there. And as a result, you know, to be honest, we didn’t see him much. He was always working. So yeah, he stressed education, but he really wasn’t around much. You know, we weren’t the kind of family that sat and had dinner together. My mom was the driving force. She had a PhD that she got when she was pregnant with my youngest sister, was working on it for years, and also spoke seven languages. She was, she’s passed away, but she was really impressive lady. And my parents split up when I was, I believe around 13 or 14. They had a very public long, bitter divorce that was on the press, and that made things very, very difficult for our family.

Chris Straigis – 4:27
Unfortunately, this was all too much a part of the American landscape too – a bitter divorce with her and her two sisters caught in the crosshairs, left to try and build their lives through the trauma. But Jennifer kept going, parlaying her ingrained focus on education into an acceptance to college. Though it was a bit of a rocky start.

Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 4:49
I got accepted to Temple and Villanova. I come from a Temple family, pretty much everybody went to Temple. And the idea of going to an urban school in the middle of the city just didn’t sit well with me. And it’s funny because I’m not that person at all now, but at the time, the idea of going down the road to the same, you know, suburban area I was in to go to Villanova had a lot more appeal to me. And, you know, I think what was wrong with it was, you know, I would say two things at the time. And again, this was many years ago, so things have changed at both schools. Villanova didn’t have any kind of trial program. And that’s what I wanted to do. I took a few classes there that were the first time they had offered, you know, trial advocacy, advanced trial advocacy. I was very much a minority there. I want to say there were somewhere around nine to 10 Jewish students. And I remember at one point going to a professor my first year telling them that I would have to miss class for High Holidays for Yom Kippur, and them pointing to the cross above them and saying, I chose to go to a Catholic school and they wouldn’t help me make up the work.

Chris Straigis – 5:49
She was also dealing with some unexpected medical issues in that first year of college. She told me how these almost derailed her momentum, but instead solidified her self confidence as a fighter. She had emergency surgery for her gallbladder and ended up missing most of her entire second semester.

Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 6:10
When I did come back, I got called them to the Academic Dean, and was asked to drop out and restart the year. And so at that point, you know, I took on, like most people, tons and tons of loans, and I said, ‘well, are you going to reimburse me the tuition for the year?’ And they said, no. And I said, ‘well, I’m not going to drop out.’ You know, I think that was kind of the start of me, being in a situation where somebody was telling me I couldn’t do something. And I was like, ‘try me’, you know?

Chris Straigis – 6:36
Jennifer realized that she wasn’t going to graduate with Honors, but that wasn’t going to stop her. While still in school, she landed a job as a law clerk with Cigna in their major litigation department. She knew this was a pretty big break considering many of her school colleagues were working in much more mundane positions.

Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 6:56
So I came out of college went directly to law school, and then while I was in law school, I got a job. I was Cigna down here in their major litigation department. I would go into Cigna, actually, three days a week and do all my classes two days a week, because, you know, I wanted the experience and I needed money. I felt very fortunate to get that job as a law clerk, because I would say the majority of my friends that had jobs during law school, they were making copies and, you know, making you know, looking at the case and analyzing it, maybe. I was fortunate in the people I worked for at Cigna, they gave me real work. Upon graduation, they hired me into their major litigation department, which was super interesting work, because at the time, that was tobacco litigation, environmental spills, product liability. It was very high-level and it was challenging. And so I feel like that was, you know, something great to start with as a young person.

Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 7:47
I started volunteering, actually with the Bar Association, and then through the Bar Association got involved with Community Legal Services. And it was, I mean, it could not have been farther from what I just described at Cigna. So basically, you know, as a volunteer attorney for them, my role was to have people come in and tell me their circumstances, which were all tragic and sad. And then based on the situation, even though they were all sad, I had to determine if they had the legal grounds to go in front of a judge and get immediate relief from what they were requesting. And, you know, that’s really hard, you know, when people are in bad circumstances, but you know, I would regularly hear about abuse and neglect and you know, a lot of situations where people were either at home kids at home with either no parent, or one parent or a boyfriend and the picture that was abusing them or something of that nature, lack of food resources, showers, you know, money, all kinds of terrible circumstances.

Chris Straigis – 8:48
So Jennifer had gotten some great experience with Cigna and conversely had seen a whole different side of the law with her community services volunteer work. It was a well rounded trajectory. She was firing on all cylinders. A friend recommended her to one of the biggest insurance companies in the country. And she dove headlong into the insurance world. Eventually coming to rest at a job she loved with AAA Mid Atlantic. She was happy; great co-workers, a great boss, and nowhere to go but up. That is, until a fateful day in 2008.

Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 9:30
I was working I was full time in-house at AAA Mid Atlantic, it was a great company to work for. The company obviously is big, but I worked in the Philly legal office, which was like nine or 10 of us at the time. So it was very close group, like a second family, and I loved my boss, loved the work. You know, my sister, my youngest sister, was getting married the week after my accident, and at the time she was living in University City. And most of my doctors were here downtown. So I had a routine doctor’s appointment, and I took a half day from work, went to HUP, you know, Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, had my doctor’s appointment and then my plan, I took off the rest of the afternoon. My plan was to go over to her apartment and help with some last minute wedding stuff.

Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 10:18
If you cross any city street, not just in Philly, but pretty much everywhere, you know, you look at the other side of the street and there’s usually like a countdown. But I looked at it and I thought, I may not have as many seconds as I need to cross the street safely. So I actually watched it turn, waited for a red light, waited a whole other cycle until it turned green again and I had the right away, and I started crossing the street.

Chris Straigis – 10:40
The truck wasn’t speeding or out of control in any way. It was simply a matter of timing, of fate. Jennifer was hit and literally pinned under the truck to the point where they needed to bring in another vehicle just to lift the truck off of her in order to get her into a waiting ambulance. It was bad; really bad.

Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 11:08
I wasconscious for the whole thing and didn’t lose consciousness until the ambulance and that’s probably one of the reasons I suffered so long with PTSD, and probably still suffer with it to some extent. Once they put me in the ambulance, I was unconscious. I don’t know for how long. There were initial injuries and then there were a lot of injuries that I had over time, but like, you know, people aren’t really concerned with what they’re trying to save your life. I had a severe head injury which resulted in what they considered mild traumatic brain injury. I had a hemorrhage of my eye, I had facial fractures. I had a broken ribs I had a collapsed lung. It’s hard to talk…

Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 11:46
My right arm was shattered. So, you know, that’s my dominant arm, so they were really concerned with that at the hospital because they were telling me for a few days they didn’t know if I’d have use of my arm. They didn’t know what the use would be what feeling I would have and ultimately, they had to have like a whole team of doctors do a very extensive surgery to put my arm back together. You know, I had cognitive problems, I balance problems. I ended up having, you know, shoulder surgery, hand surgeries.

Chris Straigis – 12:20
Eventually she was transferred out of the hospital for a long recovery.

Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 12:24
They didn’t feel like I was well enough to deal with going to a regular rehab at that point. I had a lot of issues going on. I couldn’t really hold conversations like I normally would. I had memory problems. I had problems with light and noise and distractions. I had nightmares. So they had Penn Care at home, come to my house to work with me for about two months. And then when they decided I could go in somewhat the regular population, I guess, I went to Bryn Mawr rehab for I want to say close to seven months. I didn’t work for six months. And then that was also some drama because I wanted to go back.

Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 13:04
I know I couldn’t go back to court – I wasn’t allowed to go back to court because of all the issues I talked about. I couldn’t remember my cases, I couldn’t think on my feet, I couldn’t hold conversations, all of that. I missed the people I worked with, I missed having some schedule and normalcy. You know, my whole life was rehab and medicines and doctors. And I mean, I, I literally would say at one point, I probably had 15 or 20 doctors I was seeing. So, you know, given all of that I said, I was going to go try to go back part time to my job at AAA Mid Atlantic, which was going to be, at that point, more of a desk job. And all my doctors, my therapist, my psychiatrist, like everybody I was working with at that time said I shouldn’t do it. And I was like, screw that. I thought it would help me because I was so depressed and I thought having some normalcy to my schedule was going to be a positive benefit. You know, I went back and in hindsight, now, years later, it was a mistake.

Chris Straigis – 14:06
She was making slow but steady progress with her therapy. But she was struggling to get herself back to where she needed to be, cognitively, to do the work she was trying to do. She just couldn’t seem to reclaim the level of concentration and focus that her job required.

Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 14:23
Even a few years out, I was not really doing better. Basically, from what I was being told, you know, I was never going to be able to go back to the kind of life I knew.

Chris Straigis – 14:37
Talking with Jennifer, she’s built such a successful career since her accident. But in the midst of it, the years of therapy and surgeries and a struggle to recalibrate her life, she was being told that this was her new normal. Looking back now, it’s obvious that she, like most strong, high-achieving people, ended up defining what that normal would be. But that didn’t happen overnight. In 2011, still dealing with the long term after effects of the accident, she was thrust into another trauma. Her mom and her mother in law, both died in the same week. It was another setback in her long recovery. Her therapist called it a compound trauma. Jennifer broke down.

Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 15:26
I mean, it was just like, ‘am I going to find a way to bring myself out of this or am I not going to?’ And that was pretty much what it came down to, you know. And you know, it really, it wasn’t like I just got up one day and said, this is it. But I mean, ultimately, those those are the choices. There’s so many things in life where you can just wallow in it and it can define your life and I had to look at my situation and then everything that my mom had gone through. And you know, that was really hard. And what I can learn from that, which was kind of like she let certain things define her life that didn’t have to define her life. And that was what she chose. And I didn’t have to choose the same thing.

Chris Straigis – 16:04
And so she made her choice. Jennifer decided to start a business. She knew that she wasn’t able to continue down the legal path. But she wanted to do something that allowed her strengths to shine. She figured that she could tie together her experience in business, nonprofit, and community work.

Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 16:22
I decided to open a business doing consulting, trying to bring businesses and nonprofits together, because I thought there was a lot of value in that. I’d seen how having these corporate relationships really helped the nonprofits and vice versa. And I thought that, you know, a lot of times nonprofits can’t afford to hire staff and I could serve as a consultant to help bring these people together. I started really hustling and like you have to when you start a business and people started coming to me for help with marketing and networking. And then, you know, a couple people I was close to said, ‘why aren’t you doing this? This is really what you’re good at.’ I would say in less than a year, I ended up rebranding it into focusing on networking. And that was because a couple key people in my life made me realize that that is what I was doing anyway.

Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 17:11
I think it was, in the first couple months of starting the business, I went to a networking event, and sat at a random table at the Union League with some people at the event and just started, you know, saying, ‘oh, I started this business and I never thought I’d be an entrepreneur and I really, I have no idea how to run a business. Frankly, I have no business doing this.’ And I started talking to this nice gentleman who ended up being the husband of the woman running FemCity at the time. So I guess he, you know, sensed that I needed some kind of support and said, ‘you know, you should join my wife’s organization.’ So I joined FemCity and for me, it’s been invaluable because all my connections at the time were really in the legal community, and I didn’t have that community anymore.

Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 17:54
And there were, you know, a lot of people in my legal community, including some family, that didn’t really understand what I was doing, didn’t understand why I wasn’t going back to law, didn’t really support you know, what I was trying to do at the time. So FemCity for me became that support, you know, of having that community around me – to encourage me, you know, to go to the event, to go to for resources and, you know, mistakes and all that stuff. It ended up being that community for me.

Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 18:24
So the the woman who ran it, who is a very good friend of mine, she had no intentions of not running it. But her husband had a job transfer to the Atlanta area. And so she tried to run it remotely for a year and I think we all felt collectively like it just wasn’t going as well. It needed a face that was local. So they started seeking out somebody else to run it and I took over.

Chris Straigis – 18:50
Out of the ashes, the Phoenix rises. Jennifer has transformed her life. She runs keynotes and workshops on business networking topics for law firms, universities and nonprofits. She’s a public speaker. She’s been in print and on TV. She’s a force. Spending some time with her, you can just feel the energy and strength and passion for life and the work she’s doing. I asked Jennifer about her current goals.

Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 19:22
I’ve gained a great reputation with the business, I think, and I’ve done some national things. But I’d love to do regular national stuff and even international if I could. So you know, getting hired for big level corporate conferences and across the country, you know, across different countries, across different parts of the world. Last couple years, I’ve been really vocal, you know, with my whole community and social media and everything about wanting to do a TEDx talk. I’ve been rejected a number of times, but I feel that my purpose is to be on that stage. So I will continue to pursue that. And I think the other like, this is really outside the box for me, I mean, one of the things I’ve done in the last couple years is I took up boxing, you know, I just had surgery, so I haven’t been boxing. But normally now I go five days a week. It’s been like the best thing that happened to me in my life. And I really have a goal – I’d like to challenge myself and I want to run the Broad Street. I’m not a runner, I don’t know why it’s an obsession of mine. But I’m determined to run the Broad Street even if I come in last. That’s that’s another goal I have in the next couple years.

Chris Straigis – 20:31
Oh, and when I jokingly asked her when she’s going to run for office.

Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 20:35
Yeah, I mean, I’ve been asked by a couple people to run for some different offices. I don’t think it’s the right time for me. You know, I think maybe it’s something I could see maybe in a five year plan.

Chris Straigis – 20:59
Jennifer is the kind of spirit that can only rise from the incredible trials that she’s endured, like her parents and grandparents before. And I can tell you, she’s hardly done building her future. She’s just getting started.

Chris Straigis – 21:17
Thank you for listening to Scrappy. Since we taped our interview, Jennifer has left the helm of FemCity Philadelphia to focus solely on her goals and aspirations. You can go to scrappypod.com to check out show notes and transcripts for this episode, including links to Jennifer Lynn Robinson’s company, Purposeful Networking. Oh, and also a link to Saved Me Animal Rescue. In addition to all of the other things she does, Jennifer sits on the board of this rescue. Being a rescue dog owner myself, I fully support the idea and encourage everyone to consider saving a pet in need.

The post Jennifer Lynn Robinson appeared first on All Around Creative.

Growing up on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada, the beach was David Katz’s playground; and his father, a merchant marine and craftsman, would take the young David on adventures out to sea. This upbringing instilled in him a love of the ocean and the precious beauty of nature. But as time passed, David noticed a growing problem – the constant flow of plastics and trash washing up on the shores. With the passion passed down from his father, and a natural tack towards problem solving, David decided to take matters into his own hands. He developed a plan to not just clean the beaches, but also to lift millions of people from poverty at the same time. 

Chris Straigis – 0:02
From AAC Studios, welcome to Scrappy, the podcast about small companies doing big things. I’m your host, Chris Straigis.

Chris Straigis – 0:16
Plastic is truly a game changing material. It has taken on infinite shapes and properties, and shown up in just about every corner of our lives. In fact, our modern world might not be nearly as advanced without its development. It’s inexpensive, it’s easy to produce, and it’s durable – It lasts a long time. But that durability is also one of the biggest problems with plastic. Once it’s made, it doesn’t really go away. It doesn’t dissolve, it’s not biodegradable; it will long outlive all of us. And unfortunately, an incredible amount of that long-lasting, man-made material is ending up in the world’s oceans and waterways. This is literally decimating plant and animal life and changing entire ecosystems. This is a big, complex global problem. But sometimes to solve a big complex problem, you need someone to see things from a different perspective.

Chris Straigis – 1:23
Today we’re talking to David Katz, founder and CEO of Plastic Bank. They’re an economic development firm that empowers disenfranchised communities by letting them exchange any type of plastic… for currency. His unique strategy solves two problems at once. It creates revenue in otherwise impoverished communities. And it helps clean up the plastic pollution that’s overtaking our seas. David grew up on Vancouver Island, Canada. As you might imagine, for someone who was raised surrounded by water, his love for the ocean sparked at a very young age. And that love was stoked by his father, a merchant marine, who taught David about a lot more than just fishing.

David Katz – 2:15
The family house was across the street from the beach, it was always my playground and on the way to school, I also walked along about a half mile long beach to get to school. I did that for a decade or so. And even as a kid as I walked that beach, play to the beach and walked it. Part of this story really is about those times because I was able to then as well witness garbage washing up on the beach.

David Katz – 2:47
So it’s been in my realm decades longer than most. My father was a mariner as well, he was Merchant Marine. And even in my youth as well, my father, the mechanical genius that he was, built a 47 foot sailboat from the hull up, by himself. And then sailed that to, you know, the very southern tips of Mexico, mostly by himself, but I joined him in that journey as well, sailing the ocean and encountering all the life that we would have encountered and, and then sailing back up, back up to the west coast of Canada. So that journey, of course, was a part of it. My parents were entrepreneurs, immigrants and entrepreneurs. And even as a child, you know, I attribute much of my creativity and entrepreneurship to a spark that my brother gave me when I was like 10.

David Katz – 3:38
We had this family business and he had these other ideas and like, oh, well, we could do this, and we could do that. Or we could open a poster store, which was really big when I was a child. And I was just, I was like, yes, of course, we can do that, that’s amazing. That sounds like a sense of freedom and creativity. And that was the spark. It was the new awareness that it became a possibility that even if could be… And I think that much of what we do in the Plastic Bank is a reflection of that as well. Where many people want to stand up and make a change in the ocean but don’t know how. And this is an opportunity for them to as well be a part of that change. And I really, I think that part of the conversation with everyone is that we’re the summation of all of our experiences and all of our decisions. We are today where we are as a result of everything that we have ever encountered.

Chris Straigis – 4:39
Of course, taking measures to protect the Earth with better waste management is nothing new. We’ve been recycling for decades, and more recent pushes like banning single use plastic bags or restaurants eliminating plastic straws have gained a lot of attention. But there’s an important distinction between these type of actions which address singular products and Plastic Bank’s purpose, which addresses greater societal dilemmas across the globe. David recognized early on that problems with plastics are much more acute, much more detrimental and much harder to address in some of the most socio-economically underdeveloped parts of the world. And he realize that this could be a two birds one stone kind of solution.

David Katz – 5:30
Straw bands are beautiful. Those are really nice. Not the issue, right? That’s not the cause of things. It’s nice, it’s good, it’s important. All those things are important. Poverty is the issue. A lack of opportunity, is the issue.

Chris Straigis – 5:41
David’s idea was unique because it wasn’t just about cleaning up the environment. Instead, it was about creating a new mindset and motivation around recycling and the opportunities that could unlock.

David Katz – 5:58
I think what I’m doing is easy in comparison, because nothing I’m doing is against the laws of physics. I don’t have to play with physics to figure it out. We could say the change of thinking sometimes it may be greater than the change of physics. But in this context, it’s really about not convincing anyone against their will to do anything. It’s really this transformative opportunity where within the collection communities, they see something that’s in it for them. We don’t have to teach them about recycling. They’re already creative and resourceful.

David Katz – 6:28
Now, in my experience, when I had the idea, which was May the 11th 2013, I was at a learning event in Silicon Valley, that thing called Singularity University. And then Singularity University, they express great new emerging technologies and things that are going to be changing the world and these base pyramid challenges. And one of the seminars was about additive manufacturing or what we called 3D printing. Avi Reichental, was the CEO of 3D Systems at the time, the first publicly traded company focused on 3D printing, and he was speaking and as part of the examples that he brought to exhibit the power of it. He had this big brown belt, it was a plastic belt, of course. It was manufactured out of one long single strand of plastic. Just using a nozzle and moving the nozzle to determine shape. I asked what was the sale price of the item – $80 was the response. And when I asked what the cost was – $10 was the response. And in that moment, the birth of the Plastic Bank occurred.

David Katz – 7:37
What I determined was that it was only the shape of the plastic that determine the margin, the markup and the value. It was still plastic, it was just a shape. Just like if you go buy a piece of plastic for your car, it could be hundreds of dollars – the value of the material, maybe pennies. The shape determined the price. So perhaps inside of that I thought could be the nucleus for change. If I could not maybe change the physical shape on the outside, but change the value perception inside the mind. That can be the change. You know, some of the powerful conversations I have, and I’ll ask you, if every bottle or every piece of packaging that you saw was worth $5 US dollars, how many would you leave on the ground? So it’s not the plastic, it’s us in the way we view it. And that is the origin of the Plastic Bank. The name itself implying the value, bankable, valuable, to be steward to be cared for.

David Katz – 8:50
One of the people that I met at Singularity University, was an industrialist in Peru. When I had the idea I shared it with with him, we became nice friends. Inspired by the idea, he is well agreed that it should be a success and he said ‘David come to Peru will fund you, everything will be great.’ He’s, you know a fellow who owns Peru Rail and all, and I thought ‘wow how how beautiful – we’ll go to Peru will launch, Lorenzo is there, we’ll be funded, it’s going to be great!’ Well, of course we agreed to go, we hired some staff we thought we’ll launch. Well of course we get to Peru, no Lorenzo. Lorenzo is not answering any of my calls anymore. So we we struggled and and had to learn what not to do. But it gave us great insight. As everything is back to the knowing that we are the product of the decisions and experiences of our lives. When we can view them and say where is the gift inside of this? We have the ability to continue to transcend and move forward, and no matter what you encounter, takes you to the destination that you’re standing forward for. And, and much of that as the philosophy of my life.

David Katz – 10:17
It was this sense of open mindedness, this awareness of big picture that David has always carried with him in his travels. And, and one of his trips to South America, he recognized Peru is one area of the world that is unfortunately the starting point for a lot of the plastic and waste flowing into the ocean. that’s largely because of the existing infrastructure for recycling.

David Katz – 10:41
Peru is a great leacher of plastic in the ocean, all of Latin America is. And not always this the biggest city, but those that live up river that have no solid waste management at all. And I have witnessed, as it is witnessed around the world, that in the middle of this town or city is a dumptruck – everyone throws their garbage in the dump truck, it drives up to the river and dumps it in the river. So the question then is how might we prohibit the flow of plastic from entering into the ocean to begin with? Okay, when we look at that we go okay, well, how might we keep them from throwing it in the river? Okay, well, why they throwing the river? There’s no other other opportunity. Well, where there’s no other opportunity, why is there no other opportunity? Well, there’s no money. So it’s a cause? Oh, hold on a second – how do we make it revenue? The poor don’t throw away cash.

David Katz – 11:27
The gears started to turn in David’s head as he realized the solution to the problem might lie simply in flipping that switch. But he had to grapple with just how big his idea was.

David Katz – 11:39
When I had that idea, that May the 11th, the enormity of it, it was such a big idea. It was so terrifying at the same time, I thought ‘oh, my goodness, this could be this could be it for the world. No one will throw away cash. How might we be able to turn plastic into money for the world so it’s never thrown away? That can be it. Oh my goodness.’ And then of course, the flood of ‘I’m gonna go and create a new, you know, supply chain of materials to the biggest brands in the world. I’m gonna have to go sell to the biggest brands in the world, I’m going to go have to create infrastructure within extreme poverty and scarcity and violence and, and, in the story and I’m how to connect the world and the consumer – what an overwhelm.’ Then of course, the first thing that went through my head was ‘oh, I can’t do that, that’s too big.’ And then the very next second I had a moment of consciousness. I had someone whisper thatDavid, you don’t need to be the person that could do that. You only need to become the person that can.

David Katz – 12:43
David describes Plastic Bank as the Airbnb of recycling – a digital platform that provides a system for people to create a recycling infrastructure wherever they are. Plastic Bank’s technology works across a few different models. One interesting example is within congregations – churches, mosques and other places of worship. These can become collection locations for their communities. Along with bringing an offering members can also bring their recycling.

David Katz – 13:14
I’m most proud, I mean, all the staff have their their beauty inside of it. But this this interfaith model… I mean we’re really needing to build the world’s largest recycling organization without owning anything. One of those models is within congregations, so that within churches or mosques or wherever you may find your sense of spirituality, and wherever you may be in tithing or bringing of service or gift to the poor or to the world, instead of just bringing an offering on your day of worship, you bring your recycling with you as well. And that becomes a collection, collection location and an opportunity to be engaged in the stewardship over the earth and the poor as well. And remember, when we alleviate poverty, we also alleviate many of the environmental concerns. And I’ll be in the expression that poverty, the element of poverty that we need to serve the most as poverty of the soul. And most people still believe that a lack of material wealth is poverty. And that is not the case.

Chris Straigis – 14:14
By harnessing that sense of community spirit, Plastic Bank has been able to make an impact on a global level, not just in single cities or countries.

David Katz – 14:24
When we alleviate poverty of the soul, then we’ve got a great paradigm as well, that can also bring a level of consciousness, gift, love, service, and everything else that the world is so hungry for. So we solve a lot of problems. We’re gathering the world together, it’s a core value of the company ‘gather together.’ It’s not about us gathering every human of course, we want to, but it’s about gathering companies that then can gather others. Really our model is it unfolds in front of us is we create cooperatives. Our most powerful models around the world, like one of our recent ones in Naga City in the Philippines, we took 176 individual collectors – what other people were calling waste pickers – collectors, entrepreneurs, that were all individuals collecting material and then selling it to a middleman. Well, we came in with the work of the city, we created a set of bylaws, and we created a cooperative where a president is appointed, voted for, the board is voted for, and we give them a physical location. And just in that very action, they were able to remove the middleman and they doubled their income. We took 176, mostly women, and doubled their income overnight.

David Katz – 15:42
And you visit, they have tears in their eyes for the impact that it’s created. Now in that as well, they also created a little daycare so that many of them could work while the children were taken care of. They created the savings and investment group. When we took people who didn’t have enough money for the rest of the day, and now they have savings and an investments.

David Katz – 16:02
What really drives the success of Plastic Bank’s model is a combination of conscious capitalism, and what David refers to as ‘winning to the sixth power.’

David Katz – 16:13
Well, here’s the thing, I say this all the time and I love it – everyone has a favorite radio station, It’s WII FM – ‘what’s in it for me.’ And so when there’s a what’s in it for me, awesome. And the beauty of what we do within the conscious capitalism movement, it’s called a win of the six power, win, win, win, win win. Maybe I missed a win in there, but better. And, and it’s to the six power so it’s like exponential, so that everybody wins, and your success develops my success, my success, our success then develops the next person success. And even with us, the plastic wins because it becomes new again. Nothing loses with us. It’s so powerful. It’s so beautiful. It’s so important for the world, just the thinking is important for the world. If all we did was bring a new way of thought, and a new way of being, that would be enough.

David Katz – 17:17
We don’t sell recycled plastic or virgin plastic, we sell social . We have our own category of material. And that material has a value that transfers itself into the lives of people who encounter it. So we don’t necessarily compete against the traditional pricing models. Now as well, just to be in reference there, it’s not that the China has turned down as well, that’s not the case with China. What China decided to do was stop taking other people’s garbage. So they’re hungry for pelletize material. They’re hungry for raw material. But then what they don’t want to have happen is people sending in their their crap.

David Katz – 17:52
In truth, it’s not just underdeveloped countries that are struggling. With the traditional models of recycling, even here in the States, the old models are breaking down, and we’re starting to see some major shifts in recycling. The type of plastic used to make milk and detergent bottles, for example, is currently bringing only about a third of the price that it did from just a couple of years ago, which makes it a much harder business model to sustain. This has a lot to do with what local municipalities and governments are doing with the collective recycle material to get more value out of it. Plastic Bank’s goal is to make sure that they’re creating as much value as possible to open up those wider opportunities and enrich the lives of all those taking part in the mission as well.

David Katz – 18:44
The gifts in what we do as well is we get to ship material when there’s a purchase order, so we’re not necessarily just shipping garbage, we’re shipping a raw material that we flake the material or hot wash it sometimes pelletize it. We work with the local infrastructure to add as much value in country as possible. It’s an ecosystem. So everyone that participates, makes a profound difference. And one of the gifts of what we work with in our relationship is we provide purpose into the minds of every single employee as well. So we provide more than just the material we provide purpose and a sense of being. We have an opportunity for people to show up at work, knowing that what they’re doing is not just selling soap, but changing the world. How powerful is that? You see, it’s not just the material, but it’s what the material does. That’s the value in what we provide is the authenticity, the story, the gift, the love.

Chris Straigis – 19:50
David knew that because of the scale of the challenges and the scope of his solution, he couldn’t go it alone. He was going to have to get people involved and on board. at a higher level, and some of the partnerships that Plastic Bank has forged may seem a little unlikely, like Shell, for instance. As an energy producer, environmentalists tend to look at companies like Shell in terms of how they’re hurting the environment. But that’s exactly the reason that David sees value in their partnership.

David Katz – 20:21
We had a beautiful pilot at first. Everything starts small and slow with all of the big multinationals. We’re moving to a collection process in the Philippines, which should be emerging. And I have a beautiful knowing that everyone gets to redeem themselves. You know, a lot of people were in the consideration of our relationship like, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t do that.’ Well, why should we not be in a relationship with someone who’s polluting the world? Of course we should! Those are the people we should be contributing and they should be contributing to us. Those should be the partners. Give them an opportunity to make change.

Chris Straigis – 20:57
Another key partnership is with IBM who developed an app for Plastic Bank to collect and analyze data and perform monetary transactions around the world.

David Katz – 21:08
They ultimately seeded the architecture and development of the product. They’ve been such great stewards of us this, you know, this blockchain, this hyper ledger, you know, blockchain platform that allows us to authentically transfer value around the world and giving a sense of security and banking to the poor. That then gets transferred into cash. Like we’re really plastics alchemists, it’s really cool. Deposit plastic at a branch in Bali, and then, oh, a second later, there’s cash in your in your bank account. That way, and then all the dashboarding the volumes and materials and there’s 100 ways that we use that material for recyclers and processors and other things in the world. For sure, lots of data to be collected. Last Mile collection of the material and last mile distribution to the poor is something that we continue to be an influence of as well. What, how might we provide a platform for other organizations around the world that want to provide things to those that only make a few dollars a day? Well, let’s begin to create a database of all those people and create a way to send that information to them and engage them. There’s a whole. there’s the data inside of all of this as well of course. There’s lots of ways that we you know, are monetizing the gift of all of this, right? I mean, we’re a for-profit business, and as well, we everything that we look at is for profit. So that is the paradigm as well so just as I look at everything as a gift, I look at it and how does it add value? How does it add value? How does it create more value than what existed before?

David Katz – 22:47
So, five years from now,we have a, you know, we’re continuing to build a global infrastructure of recycling. So we’ll be global at that point. There’s no question we’ll be in every community. Just interfaith will be in every community around the world. There’s a digital platform that allows everyone to participate in a social franchise in the end. So anyone in the world can can own a business as long as they gather 10 or 15 of their friends with them. So becomes a cooperative where they all own a little piece of the business.

David Katz – 23:17
If you’re looking at plastic bank and wondering how such a big idea ever got put into motion in the first place, it might help to remember that those were the exact fears David had when he got started. Today, he’s a plastic alchemist who’s changing the world. And he’s confident that we all, every one of us regular people, has the same potential to create an impact. As long as we just take a step and get started.

David Katz – 23:42
It’s the simple knowing that you can do and achieve anything in the world – that you’re as good and bright and smart and strong as anyone else in the world that’s ever achieved anything. They’re just regular people doing irregular things, doing things outside of the norm. Just irregular, and that’s why it shows up because it’s irregular. But it’s just a regular person persevering. And I would probably much guarantee you that they’re just in the process of becoming it because no one just shows up as a game changer. They become a game changer. And when you take that reference and you say, I’m going to change the world, I’m going to change the game, I’m going to change the rules. And you show up, everything that you’ll encounter is in reference to how you’re going to change the rules. It comes as a gift.

David Katz – 24:31
And then I’m truly led by all of the obstacles in my life. I know that whatever I don’t want to do is precisely the thing that I need to do. Think of any conversation you’ve had that you didn’t want to have. Was that the conversation you were supposed to have? For sure. All the things you didn’t want to do, were those the things you needed to do first, of course they were. Be guided by the things you don’t want to do and the success lies in those. It leaves tracks, it leaves a trail. It’s really easy.

Chris Straigis – 25:20
Thanks for listening to Scrappy. You can get show notes and links and see a transcript from this episode at scrappypod.com. Plastic Bank wants to encourage everyone to be part of the solution. And to set the example his organization has collected and processed over 14 million pounds of plastic to date and changed countless lives. Join David’s revolution at plasticbank.com If you like our show, please go to scrappypod.com for more episodes, or subscribe and download wherever you get your podcasts.

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