Serena

Serena Simmons Connelly was the most generous person I have ever known.

Serena gave all the time. This week I read through every email from Serena, every meeting, visit, event, and looking back I see it with great clarity: every time, Serena was giving.

Everyone knows that Serena supported so much in this community with an amazing generosity of resources. But to me what mattered was how she gave. She gave with her whole being. She shared vast amounts of her time. She connected so many of us in this community together, new relationships, new projects, new ideas that would never have been born without her. She opened her home to us. She shared her family with us. She took us places. She brought the world to us.

Serena was a teacher to everyone who had ears. She taught me about children and education and refugees and women, about war and equity and culture and empowerment. She taught me what Montessori means, and the difference between deaf and Deaf. Serena taught me what a social enterprise really is. She taught me what it means to be a philanthropist and how to be an impact investor.

She gave us love. Serena had a huge smile and a warm hug and boundless optimism. Her encouragement gave so many of us courage to follow big dreams. She gave us permission to take risks that no one else would, because she knew the power of learning through experience. She believed in us.

She gave us each other. “You should know Byron Sanders.” “Have you seen the Deaf Action Center?” “Do you know the Texas Muslim Women’s Foundation?” “Come meet Ishmael Beah.” “Let’s go to the Montessori school.” “I want to show you BOMLA.” “Come learn about the Human Rights Initiative.” “Let me introduce you.” “Be my guest.” “Meet my friend. Tell her your idea!”

Serena gave us her name. “Tell them I’m behind you!” “Tell them to call me!” “Do you want to have a gathering at my house?” “Tell them I sent you.”

Serena never stopped. She worked hard, even when she wasn’t feeling well. She cared for everyone else, giving and sharing and supporting others all throughout many very difficult circumstances of her own. Serena served us at her kitchen table, when she couldn’t partake herself.

Serena was my friend. Her messages were love and hugs and hearts. I absolutely loved going to visit her. I never once left a time with her without feeling completely energized.

I was supposed to visit Serena this month at home. Shelter in place prevented our last visit. Knowing how close Serena’s family is and the loss they are experiencing, I feel selfish being heartbroken, but I am.

 

serena

 

I will stop with all of you to grieve the loss of a great human being, Serena Simmons Connelly. Then, I will honor Serena the best way I know how – to do as she did. Give, teach, offer ourselves to each other, lend our names, believe in each others’ dreams, send our love, and work hard to create the shift we’ve been seeking.

Our Poor Nonprofits, Our Rich Opportunity

GR + Esperanza070
Esperanza International, an impact organization in Discovery mode, works with women to create transformational outcomes, like traveling a path from poverty to home ownership.

 

In order for nonprofits to transform the world, nonprofits first have to transform themselves. Nonprofits today are generally in one of three business model modes: Poverty, Discovery, or Scale.

Poverty Mode

You know a nonprofit is in Poverty mode when the leader is spending the majority of time and energy raising grants and gifts for repeat operations. This mode is where most nonprofits live – including many large, successful ones.

The reason most nonprofits live here is not complicated. They utilize all their income to execute their missions and run their organizations.

Imagine a provider whose mission is to assist women to escape trafficking, prostitution, and addiction. The provider’s model involves jail outreach, court support, and a survivor support group. It raises as much money as possible through grants and donations, and that money goes to pay staff and program costs.

The model itself puts that nonprofit into a poverty process – which is ironic, because the nonprofit is supposed to help women who are stuck in the poverty process themselves.

The group can only create more impact if it raises more money, and the capability is forever gone when the money is spent. Next year, it will have to raise the same amount of money again. The CEO will worry every day about money. No amount of fundraising will ever meet the needs of the community.

Traditional philanthropy funds our Poverty-mode nonprofits in an attempt to reduce what appear to be intractable problems and suffering in our communities. Donors give as much as they are willing and able, knowing that no amount of giving will ever be enough.

No amount of philanthropic giving can solve the greatest human challenges of a city, much less of the world.

When Poverty-mode organizations talk about raising “grant capital,” they are using the term capital incorrectly. True capital will, if successfully deployed, produce permanent increases in sustainability and capability. For a nonprofit, true grant capital is utilized to move into Discovery mode, and to transform into what I have termed an impact organization.

Discovery Mode

A nonprofit, company, or social entrepreneur moves into Discovery mode when they become committed to the idea that the key human challenge they seek to solve might be addressable with a value capture model.

When our example trafficking nonprofit serves women, it of course creates value – for the women they serve, for the community, for the donors, and for the staff. But it is not capturing any of the value for the long-term sustainability of the organization.

However, if our trafficking nonprofit decides to create a training and employment program for its clients, and they produce and sell a consumer good (say, candles) in the process, and the sales revenues offset some of the costs of the program, the organization is now capturing value. It is in Discovery mode. If it remains highly committed to increasing the amount of value that it can capture, continuously innovating its model until its revenue exceeds its program costs, it will reach Scale mode.

No matter how much a Poverty-mode organization works to be efficient, and no matter how successfully it collaborates with other Poverty-mode organizations, it cannot significantly increase its impact. It can only make marginal gains. Only value capture can create scale; efficiency and collaboration alone cannot.

Discovery mode is the impact organization’s entrepreneurial process of finding and implementing a value capture model.

Many simple value capture models have been around a long time, but those simple models generally create limited scale:

  • An endowment is a value capture model – the organization motivates donors to give into a permanent capital pool and lives off the returns. Because the value capture is one-time, at the time of the original donation, the model doesn’t feed itself to grow more.
  • A thrift store is a value capture model known to everyone. It provides value to the goods donor (emotional value, a tax deduction, and the convenience of dealing with items that are no longer wanted) and then captures value when it sells them to a customer.

More powerful well-known models include:

  • Employment and training social enterprises that create goods or services via their clients
  • Antipoverty microfinance models
  • Cooperative development programs

Significant advances have been made in each of these models in the last twenty years. New domain applications, the use of technology, and collaboration among impact organizations have all driven these models to become more widespread, successful, and impactful today than ever before.

The real power in value capture models is just now arriving. Model and technology innovations in housing, the delivery of education, healthcare, and water have already blurred the line between nonprofit and for-profit impact organizations.

The most important thing a nonprofit can do in its effort to become sustainable is to stop believing that its job ends when it creates social value. It must recognize that creating social value is different from capturing value. It must look throughout its environment and constituencies to identify how it can create value for another party in a way that is translated into money, services or assets for the organization.

We have a lot of discovery and learning in front of us to find and implement the right business models. While we can’t pretend it will be easy, we should be optimistic that commitment, collaboration, and innovation will uncover powerful new approaches to creating sustainable and scalable impact.

Discovery Mode Capital

Almost all impact organizations struggle to raise the capital needed for the work of Discovery mode.

For-profit companies that are addressing key challenges often find that they can make a profit, but not enough to make them attractive to angel or venture capital investors.

Nonprofits have even more difficult challenges. Discovery mode involves trying models that may not work, making talent and execution mistakes, and changing paths and plans as results come in. Traditional funders often will not fund Discovery mode:

  • They often do not want to be seen in the community as having made a mistake when innovation attempts fail.
  • They hesitate to use dollars to try experiments when that money could serve people in current need today.
  • Impact organizations that begin to earn revenue can be seen as “less needy” than those that spend all their income.
  • Discovery mode is a long process. I tell new impact funders that they should plan on a ten year process toward sustainability.

These concerns have the perverse effect of rewarding the status quo and missing the opportunity to fund those initiatives that could make much more significant progress against the problems that funders are concerned about in their communities.

Thankfully, the impact investing movement is raising awareness of the need for funders across the phases of the capital cycle of Discovery mode. (I’ll explain those phases and their associated financing instruments in an upcoming post.)

Scale Mode

If a nonprofit can develop a model that covers some of its costs, it can increase its impact and make its grant dollars go further. If its model can cover all of its costs, it reaches sustainability. If it can capture more value than its costs, it can scale.

Each of humanity’s top challenges will become dramatically diminished when large numbers of impact organizations successfully discover and implement value capture models that enable them to scale.

Google’s founding mission statement was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” What if Google had been formed as a nonprofit library and sought foundation grants each year to index all the world’s information and give access to everyone? Would we have Google today?

Google’s growth and reach was possible because it developed a financially and operationally sustainable model.

Only Impact Organizations will be able to grow to the scale needed for our greatest challenges – and if you are looking closely, you will see that the seeds of the “Googles” of water, energy, justice, poverty, education, and more are being developed today.

Either Or, Dallas

“How can you be focused on global poverty when Dallas has its own poverty problem?” You can replace poverty with education, justice, food security, or slavery – I hear this concern from institutions working on Dallas’ serious social problems.

Many of my mentors and heroes – and sheroes, thanks Catherine Cuellar! – are people in Dallas who have dedicated their lives to solving our own poverty, education and justice challenges. I don’t want anyone to think that I’m diminishing the scale of the problems we face in Dallas at all, or to minimize the work that many passionate people are doing in Dallas.

I don’t believe in the either/or of working on global scale problems or local problems. In fact, I believe in a different either/or: either focus on the best, biggest, scalable solutions for all humanity, or miss out on tens of thousands of people whose minds, talent and resources can pitch in to solve our city’s toughest problems.

I’m asking us to consider a different strategy for our city – both for its problems, and for its potential.

My vision for Dallas is to become the Impact City – the center of the world for solving humanity’s greatest challenges. That center is going to emerge somewhere. If you work on our local social problems, I propose that you should actively support the emergence of Dallas as the Impact City:

  • Would it be better for our city if the greatest minds working on scalable poverty solutions live in Seattle, or in Dallas?
  • Do we want the top innovators from around the world working on improving educational outcomes for poor children to be concentrated in New York, or in Dallas?
  • Do we want the top global-scale foundations investing in food desert solutions to be located in Chicago, or in Dallas?
  • Which gives us a better chance of solving our local homelessness problem: if thousands of social entrepreneurs working on improving the lives of billions of people around the world are concentrated in London, or in Dallas?
  • What will happen to the city that invites tens of thousands of global-scale thinkers, social innovators, compassionate and passionate and committed people who dedicate their lives to solving deeply challenging human issues – do we want them to volunteer for nonprofits in Dallas, to be on the boards of the foundations in Dallas, to mentor the millennials of Dallas, to engage the corporations in Dallas, to teach at Dallas universities, to invest in Dallas social impact funds? Or is it better if they live in Cincinnati or Detroit?

How do we bring this energy to the city? By creating irresistible programs in Dallas that bring together the greatest minds and resources for global-scale impact. Once they are here, those minds will apply their passion and talent to the city’s challenges as well.

By bringing energetic innovators and a resource-rich ecosystem to our city, a whole new dynamic for solving Dallas’ local problems will emerge. Impact City isn’t just for the world, it’s for Dallas too.

We’ve already defined several powerful programs to launch the Impact City initiative, to become that magnet for impact organizations to come to the city. I’ll share them in upcoming posts – stay tuned.

Stand-Up

Everyone knows the classic joke about the man who complains, “Doctor, it hurts when I do this,” and the doctor says, “Well don’t do that.”

Think about it for a second – why is that funny to us?

The doctor’s advice is actually completely practical. But we all understand the doctor is ignoring the actual problem, and that makes it funny.

So – have you heard the one about the poor villager and the cause marketing business? The villager says, “We have no opportunity.” The business says, “Here, have these shoes.”

This time, it’s not funny. Not only is the problem being ignored, the prescription is creating side effects.

The reason people are without shoes is because they are in poverty. Shoelessness is, “Doctor, it hurts when I do this.” Dumping shoes on the problem is, “Don’t do that.” A real doctor – and a real social entrepreneur – will spend time to understand the root cause, and work with the patient to cure the condition.

Social entrepreneurs have a natural impulse to help others. But when you take large-scale actions, it’s important to look at the side effects of your activity.

What are the side effects when you give away masses of shoes in a poor area?

– What happens to the people who make shoes in the region? What about the people who make the leather or fabric for them? The people who bring them to the village to sell?

– What happens to a child when she wears shoes for six months and then outgrows them, and there is no replacement?

– If only half the children in a village receive free shoes, what is the impact on the other half?

Real, sustainable solutions to poverty focus on empowerment – which in practice means information and access to basic resources. If a social entrepreneur wants to make a healthy impact, she focuses on sustainable ways to increase access to water, nutrition, education, healthcare, capital, employment, and legal rights – the necessary foundations for sustainable prosperity. A family with access to these foundations will buy their own shoes – the right shoes for them, at the right time for them.

It’s important to follow our impulse to help others. It’s also important to be wise about how we go about providing that help. To address the right problems. To use tools of empowerment, so that those in the grip of poverty can stand up their own lives and their own communities. No joke.

The Easy Way

I once told my friend Lucy something I secretly had been thinking about for a while.

I told her I wanted to get rid of the few things I keep around in life, and move to the Dominican Republic to work for Esperanza International – an anti-poverty institution that I love and admire.

I’d spend half my time at headquarters, helping to improve operations and fundraising. And I’d spend half my time in the field, working directly with the women who are empowered by Esperanza.

It’s so compelling to me. For the rest of my life I would know that I had helped, hands-on, some of the most vulnerable people in my human family. I would forever have those memories, being shoulder to shoulder with the women and the field workers, changing lives. I would have the incomparable experience of helping to build a first class poverty fighting institution.

Lucy is one of the most practical people I know, so I thought she was going to tell me that wouldn’t be very wise for my career or retirement plans. But that’s not what she said at all. Her eyes flashed, and she spoke sharply, so I would remember it.

“Salah! You’re being selfish!”

It wasn’t the reaction I expected after just explaining that I wanted to get rid of all my worldly possessions and move to another land to help impoverished women.

Lucy said, “You’re mixing up feeling good about what you do with actual impact. There are many people who can go help the women of Esperanza. There are less that can help improve the operations of Esperanza, but there are still a lot. But you told me that you are working on a business model that could enable thousands of entrepreneurs to impact the lives of millions of people around the globe.”

“Your problem,” she said, “is that you are scared that you might fail. If you strive for something really big and really difficult, the likelihood of failure is high. You might waste precious years in your effort to create a platform to empower millions of lives. You might be left with nothing to show for your work. But if you don’t make the attempt, you will certainly not achieve your potential.”

“If you go to the island, the likelihood that you will help a few people is very high. It will certainly make you feel good. But you will be squandering any chance you have at making a big, worldwide impact. There’s nothing wrong with that – but see it with clear eyes. It’s selfish.”

If you are a social entrepreneur, I hope you have a Lucy in your life. Whenever I have a difficult decision to make, I remember what she showed me that evening. It helps give me the courage to go all-in. It keeps me from accidentally taking the easy way.

Thanks Lucy!

I’d like to hear your stories about risk taking and impact. Comments are open, or e-mail me at salah@soaphope.com, or connect with me on Facebook.

Stop Talking About The Poor

  • “I’m looking at the best models out there for using business to solve social problems.”
  • “This is so hard – I’ve been looking for the right organization to work with for almost a year. I don’t want to waste my time working on something that won’t really make a difference.”
  • “One day, I hope to get involved in ending poverty, so I’m studying as much as I can today.”

These are a few of the things I’ve been told by people in the last month who have e-mailed and called because they are passionate about social entrepreneurship and microfinance.

I hate to be the one to break it to them, but talking with other people about helping the poor does not help the poor. While you are talking, they are still hungry.

If you want to discover the best model for combining business and social problems, the very first thing you should do is start a business to solve social problems, or go work for one – right now. Then you will learn what is really involved in a social enterprise. I can tell you from experience, you will be throwing out almost all the ideas and opinions you have about the matter until you do it yourself.

If you want to find the best organization to work with, go work for any organization that is focused on changing any life besides your own – right now. During the year you have been carefully avoiding wasting your time, you have wasted a year.

If you are studying as much as you can today, you have forgotten that while you are studying the problem, a child has missed her opportunity to go to school, so the cycle of poverty is being extended an entire generation in her family. Why are you studying to work on the problem later? The problem is now – work on it right now, and you will learn more than any book could ever teach you.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t talk, reflect, or study. But I have noticed there are too many people who are mostly talking, reflecting and studying. Ask yourself now, am I spending more time talking about changing the world than I am actually working on it? If so, I suggest correcting that imbalance – now.

Stop looking for the perfect way to participate. Go do anything for those in extreme poverty, anywhere – not for you, for them. Not a conference – first provide a meal. Not a study – first send money for medicine. Not a meeting – first fund a water well.

Raise money for Grameen Foundation. Volunteer with Women For Women. Buy a scarf from WORN. Fund a Bank of Hope at Esperanza International. Donate services to CitySquare. Start a weekend business that funds microloans.

Stop talking about it, and do it.

Put your money where your heart is

 
Friend: “Hey Salah, did you see the company selling scarves at the conference?”
Me: “You mean WORN?”
Friend: “That’s the one. Women refugees make the scarves. They can work from home and earn sustainable income. I think what they are doing is wonderful.”
Me: “So do I. I like the idea and I support their work.”
Friend: “Me too!”
Me: “That’s great! What did you get?”
Friend: “Oh I didn’t get anything, I just love what they are doing.”

I hope I don’t offend anyone, most of all my friend, by pointing out that she does not support WORN. She admires them. She thinks their concept is exciting. And she is glad that they are tackling a problem with their money and energy. But she does not support them.

WORN is a social enterprise – that means it’s a business. If my friend actually wants to support WORN, she has three options:

Buy a scarf.
Tell others to buy a scarf.
Give WORN her time.

Yes, social entrepreneurs are grateful when you recognize their efforts, and like all people they love to hear your encouragement. But if you want to actually participate in changing the world through social businesses, you must buy something from them – or drive other customers to them. Social businesses are businesses. Without purchases, there is no social change.

If you decide to actually support socially focused businesses, you have to become conscious of your buying patterns for a little while. It takes just a bit of attention at first to remember to purchase from social businesses. But once you get in the habit, it becomes second nature. You go to Demeter Project’s It’s A Grind for your coffee meeting instead of a chain. You wait until you get to a store that sells Project 7 gum instead of picking it up at the superstore. You take your spouse to dinner at Cafe Momentum for date night instead of your regular spot. And yes, you skip the household and body care aisles at the grocery store and buy online from Soap Hope instead.

I admit that it takes a small additional effort to buy this way. Sometimes you have to wait, and sometimes you have to go online. But if you aren’t willing to make that effort, why exactly are you excited about social entrepreneurship? Social entrepreneurs aren’t working to enable abstract masses of people to change the world through commerce: they are working to enable you to change the world through your choices. I don’t mean the general audience of this blog – I mean you, the person reading this blog right now.

Social entrepreneurs are realists. They know a $100 scarf or a $75 dinner might not be right for everyone’s budget right now, and they know everyone’s got a favorite flavor of something that they will never switch from – but you can still support these businesses by converting your social network into value for them. They need customers above all else. Put an entry in your calendar once a week to post a tweet, share a link on Facebook, or e-mail a friend. That’s the best kind of marketing there is, and in two minutes a week you will be truly supporting your favorite social entrepreneurs.

You can change the world with very little extra effort by doing this one simple thing: put a sticky note in your wallet that says “Who gets this money?” Whenever you take out your credit card, ask yourself who is receiving the profits. Is it a faceless investment pool with shares in a multinational corporation? Or is it someone whose life is being transformed by support from a social business?

Social entrepreneurs are in it because they want to do the heavy lifting – they will identify the problems, the people, and the sustainable solutions. But they need you to become conscious of your buying habits. At Soap Hope we say, “Your choice is your voice.” So become aware of how your money contributes, or doesn’t, to society. Put your money where your heart is.

Soap Hope supports WORN. To make the scarves even more wonderful, we send cuts of fragrant soaps to WORN that they sprinkle throughout their inventory to give the scarves a gentle and wonderful aroma. We plan to have WORN available for sale at Soap Hope later this summer. If you would like to be notified when WORN scarves are available on our site, please sign up for Soap Hope’s weekly e-mail.

What You Spend Is What You Get

I often ask people, “What’s the biggest problem in the world?” If you don’t know your personal answer to this question, please stop and take a moment to think about it. When you know what the biggest problem in the world is to you, keep reading.

Did you say “potato chips and soft drinks?” No one ever does. Some of the most common answers I hear are water, energy, poverty, intolerance, and war. But did you know that last year, PepsiCo spend over $50 billion in their business of distributing drinks and snacks across the globe? Compare that to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) budget last year of just $5 billion.

You may not think of your potato chip purchase as a driver of human behavior, but it is. PepsiCo has built factories all around the planet; hired some of the smartest engineers, scientists, financial minds, and management experts; created an IT infrastructure that spans the globe – all to support the purchase of potato chips by you and billions of other people. It’s because you spend money on snacks and drinks that drives PepsiCo to create this amazing infrastructure and to organize these incredible resources.

Are snacks and soft drinks ten times more important than global health? They why do we spend ten times as much through PepsiCo than we do through the WHO?

Whatever your biggest problem in the world is, here’s how NOT to solve it: try to convince people to spend their potato chip money on your world problem instead. Trying to change powerful forces like capitalism or culture is a recipe for wasting time and energy. If you want to solve a problem quickly and effectively, use existing forces to accomplish your goal.

That’s where most non-profits take a wrong turn. They reframe the question like this: “How do we arrange for money to be spent on problems we care about like World Health, rather than on problems we don’t care about like Potato Chips?”

It’s the “rather than” that’s the error in thinking. Instead we need to ask the question in forms like these:

  • “Can we get people to spend money on World Health every time they spend money on potato chips?”
  • “Can we get potato chip companies to spend money on World Health?”
  • “Can we create powerful financial incentives for investors that will motivate them or their companies to invest in World Health?”

Guess what: the answer to all these questions is, “Yes!”

There are many ways to leverage existing forces to solve world problems. My favorite is to teach companies that they can make bigger profits if they will partner with world-problem-solvers under a model I call Good Returns (see Scaling Social Ventures).

So I ask you again, “What’s the biggest problem in the world?” Each person has their own answer, so to make it easy to write about here let’s just call it Your Opportunity for now. Now I challenge you to think about Your Opportunity using our new approach: can you get people to spend money on Your Opportunity every time they spend money on coffee? Can you get a glass cleaner company to spend money on Your Opportunity? Can you create powerful financial incentives for investors in a fast food chain that will motivate them to invest in Your Opportunity?

The answer to all these questions is, “Yes.” Now, go do it. Don’t delay, Your Opportunity is here.

If you read my blog, please shop at Soap Hope where we carry everything good for body and home. Every dollar of profit is invested into programs that enable women to lift themselves from poverty.

If you appreciate my ideas, please write on your blog or Facebook right now about Soap Hope and help me solve the biggest problem in the world – poverty in women. You’ll be busy tomorrow, so write a post now!

The Deep Well

Regardless of any political party, sociological theory, or business organization telling you to the contrary: it is a fundamental part of our humanity to help those who are in great need. It is totally unacceptable to allow another human being to suffer in poverty without assistance.

I did not teach myself to read, did not haul my own drinking water across miles today, did not give myself a vaccine against polio. Because I’m smarter or work harder? Of course not – it was a gift of the circumstance of my birth, and yours.

A close up look at the lives of those in extreme poverty will show that the poor are creative, resourceful, and hard-working – contrary to common prejudices held by many in the developed world. Realize the amazing enormity of the gifts you were given in life, and give just a small share to those who haven’t been so lucky. Use your time, talent or money – all three if you can. Start right now, not tomorrow.

If you don’t know where to start, I invite you to go to any of the pages at the end of this post to learn about nonprofit microfinance, my preferred way of enabling those in very deep poverty to lift themselves up.

If you are in a deep well, no amount of creativity and hard work will get you out of that well. You will need someone outside the well to throw you a lifeline, or you will die in the well.

Those in the deep well of poverty cannot climb out without a ladder provided by someone else. Nonprofit microfinance is such a ladder. It’s not charity. The recipient does all the climbing themselves.

Pick whatever you see as the greatest need that another human being is facing, and begin to do something about it, today – don’t let this day go by without taking an action for another human being who needs you.

Please visit:

Grameen Foundation
Grameen America
Chiapas International
Esperanza International
The PLAN Fund

– Salah

How Good Is Magnified (or, thank you Herb Kelleher)

Today I was at a luncheon honoring Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines. He probably doesn’t realize it, but 27 years ago I got a letter from Mr. Kelleher that would change my life – and if I get it right, that will change the lives of millions of women in poverty around the world.

Although I was only 15 years old at the time, I had already decided that my career would be as a classical concert pianist. The proof came when the head of the piano department at the University of Texas at Austin extended an offer to accept me as a student in his college studio. We didn’t have the resources to pay for those lessons, and he offered to teach me without pay. The only problem: how would I get from my home in Dallas to my professor’s studio in Austin for my 3-hour lesson every two weeks?

Without telling me, my teacher wrote a letter to Herb Kelleher explaining the investment that he wanted to make in a promising young pianist and asked for his help. A few short weeks later, I received a surprise letter from Mr. Kelleher. It contained 12 round trip vouchers in it – enough for half a year of lessons – and a note wishing me good luck in my career.

Well I did have good luck – seven years later I was fortunate enough to travel the world playing concerts in America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. While on tour I was invited by the Ambassador of Kenya to a high-level dinner where I was seated by the country director of the World Bank in Kenya. He told me a story that has always haunted me: he explained that at least 50% and perhaps up to 90% of the aid being delivered to the people of Kenya was being lost to corruption. His story led me to a lifelong interest and study in creating effective solutions to end poverty.

What Herb Kelleher did for me is what an antipoverty group like Esperanza International does for its clients. It gives people an opportunity to break free of circumstantial limitations and create their own destinies. I have been to visit with these women, so I know from first hand experience that the poorest in our world have powerful internal resources: intelligence, drive, creativity. They need just a small amount of education, healthcare and capital to become self-sufficient and to break the cycle of poverty for their children and their communities. To become a concert pianist, you need the startup resources to get to your teacher. To have a microenterprise and escape poverty, you need the startup resources to learn your trade and start your business.

Now 27 years after receiving that letter, I spend all my efforts to scale enterprises that address global challenges, starting with poverty in women. My social venture Soap Hope sells natural products nationwide and then invests 100% of profits into antipoverty efforts for women. I’m on a nationwide recruiting effort to bring 1,000 more companies under this model, which I call Good Returns, to create a billion dollar capital pool for scaling sustainable social ventures.

The moral of this story is: don’t hesitate to help those around you. Do it in small ways and large, as often as possible. You don’t know how the seed you planted will grow. Herb Kelleher sent me 12 tickets to Austin; he didn’t know those 12 tickets would start a process that would lead me around the world and ignite a passion for making a global impact on poverty. So listen for those opportunities, and be a Herb Kelleher for someone in your world as often as you can.

And Mr. Kelleher, thank you for the tickets.

Salah Boukadoum
Co-Founder, Soap Hope

Please share the Soap Hope mission – empowering institutions that help women in poverty around the world – with friends,  family, and the media. Buy from Soap Hope and help change the world.

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