My Journey to Social Entrepreneurship
In this episode, we explore the life experiences that led me to pursue social entrepreneurship. From working for a start-up in the Silicon Valley to running from snakes in rural Kenya, we cover the fundamental lesson that led me to believe that business must be a key player in creating social and environmental balance.
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Imperfect Show Notes
While these notes are not perfect (AI translation is still improving), they give you the gist of the conversation. Enjoy!
My conversation with Morgan:
Morgan Bailey 0:02
Hello, and welcome to the profit meets impact Podcast where we explore the intersection of doing well and doing good in the world. I'm your host, Morgan Bailey. And I'm excited to bring you the wisdom of entrepreneurs and thought leaders that are using business to create sustainable and meaningful change across the globe. Welcome back. We have an exciting episode. Today, as we are going to be interviewing me, I guess, not so much interviewing as me much as me just doing a monologue. But I hope it's more exciting than that sounds. Several people have asked me about my background, sort of work that I do, or the experiences that led me to create this podcast and to really focus on social entrepreneurship. So I said, Okay, you know what, I think it's about time. So today, we're going to be diving into my background, and how and what experiences led me to see the world the way I do. So a core thing for me, as an individual. That's been true, ever since I was young was a deep connection with the environment. I still remember the first time I saw big mountains, you know, we were driving to Colorado and I saw this massive wall of green as these majestic mountains stood in front of me. And that was just something that stirred me deep inside, that has never shaken sense. And something that was really formative for me as a kid. Now, there's another element as well, it's something that always really, always really was important to me ever since I was young, that I'm still learning how to unpack today. But it's this idea of our common humanity. Some of my most exciting moments throughout my life, are when I see two people from disparate sides or disparate ideologies, they're able to connect on the fact that we're all human. So these are two core things. For me, I think rings true in everything I do in life, the environment in this shared humanity. There's also a love for business as well, we'll talk about. But these are some of the kind of the underpinning elements that really were important to me from a very young age. Now, this whole kind of got wrapped up in this idea of purpose and working for something bigger in the world. And purpose was something that was really core to me as I was a child. And I think it helped me through some of my darkest moments, it was like that flashlight that was able to show me that there's something bigger that you can work for that guided me through some difficult moments, which is really important. So it was these three elements, let's say there was there was purpose, there was environment, and there was a shared humanity piece that kind of set the stage for my life up until today. In this episode, there's a couple of core themes that we're going to go through as I talk about some my experiences and learnings. First and foremost is how do we challenge the status quo? How do we challenge the general approach that we have to solving some of the most persistent social and environmental issues? And how do we use certain business processes? And how do we use business in itself as a way to drive this impact in a sustainable and meaningful way. So these are, these are two things we'll kind of explore here, as we talk about my experiences. Now launching off, you know, I kind of talked a little bit about, you know, these elements of my childhood around and firemen shared meaning purpose. You know, I think when I was young, I really valued intellect. So I was like, I want to be really smart. I'm gonna go study physics, right? So, so out of high school, I said, I'm gonna go study physics, which I'd never actually taken a physics class at the time, but I was ambitious. And I thought, you know, maybe I'll go and solve the energy crisis, right, this was in the late 90s. You know, there was a, you know, looming energy crisis. And, you know, obviously, the effects of climate change, and carbon. And I launched off into a physics degree, which is really hard and I thought maybe I'll maybe I'll be able to solve cold fusion or something of that matter. Now, that was a little. Let's just say that didn't happen. I would say there are a lot of bright more brighter people out there than I am who are going to solve that sort of thing. But it did get me into the energy field. And I actually start pivoted from there and said, You know, I actually want to study hydrogen fuel cells. Now hydrogen fuel cells are way that you can create energy by taking oxygen and hydrogen and pushing them through a fuel cell outcomes water that also in at the same time generates electricity. So I went into an just happened to know somebody who knew the CEO of a hydrogen field of company, and I got connected with them. I joined in them as an intern initially, and then that led to a full time job as an engineer. Now when I started this, this, this group was called Iron America, it was eventually rebranded as Bloom Energy. Bloom Energy has since grown massively. At the time we started there's only about three The five people. And they were very well funded by people such as Kleiner, Perkins, John Doerr, their initial clients were Google Microsoft. So they had a lot of momentum going in. But what really caught me was beyond the technology, which was fun, I love to building things, and breaking things, to challenge the system sort of thing. But what really kind of caught my eye was how they marketed the product, right? I mean, we were in the technology sector, this was high tech, right? And I remember sitting in a meeting where the, the VP of Marketing said, hey, you know, what, we are going to make this product sexy. And he's like, you know, you're probably thinking, what is sexy have to do with fuel cells, right? Like, we're not going to market this as simply like, hey, you know, this is more effective efficient, we're not going to use the logical flame framework, we're also going to try to create some emotional drives that people want to see these things. They're not things that you're going to hide behind your building. They're actually beautiful pieces of art that are also technology that makes an impact. And that lesson always really stuck with me. And that was one of my first lessons about how can we use business to make an impact, and what are the sorts of business tactics or techniques or marketing techniques that we can use to drive impact, but not necessarily in a way that forces it down people's throat, but actually kind of draws them into it. Now, I'm also aware that this same very technique that I'm touting here is something beneficial towards impact business can also be used for quite the opposite, which is greenwashing. And putting information out there to draw consumers in to make them feel good about environmental or social impact via products that don't actually deliver on the impact promise that is made by the company. So that's an entire other episode. So we'll dive into more of that another time. Eventually, I realized that I wanted to see the world and I want to move beyond the lab. Figuratively, and and literally speaking. And I ended up taking a year abroad before grad school went down to South America had tons of adventures down there, which was really great started kind of shift and shaped my my social lens, my way of seeing the world. And after that year abroad, I went into a graduate program for environmental engineering with a focus on water. Because as I shifted and pivoted my technical career, I was like, you know, I want to be technical, but I also wanted to make an impact. And I thought, you know, water is such a global challenge, it's only going to get more dire. Let me let me focus on that. So my research was focused on coastal water quality, but my heart was actually more in water quality issues and global communities, much to the ire of my my PhD advisor. But this opened the door for me to start doing some international development work. And I helped found the UC Irvine chapter of engineers that borders and lead the several of their first projects. And one of their first project that brought me out into the world was around sanitation and building latrines, in a school in rural Kenya, near Mount Kenya, which is a really beautiful, amazing place, you know, our walks in the morning that were elephants and giraffes, it it felt very, I mean picture as kind of what you would think of, with when you think of Africa, and there was Mount Kenya, just sitting there in the background, which was really beautiful. Part of this work, you know, we were partnering with a with a mission there. And there was a key lesson there that was important for me, in what I started to see is actually some institutional racism, which was really difficult. That was we are working with these missionaries, you know, the way that they treated, the local population was definitely felt elite, it definitely felt colonial, and I really struggled with it, you know, and it kind of really started to paint started to paint this negative picture of how philanthropy can actually be perpetuating a cycle of dependency and a racist institution. So that was that was kind of something that was happening, the backdrop of that, as we're doing this project, one of the other things that we're doing was taking health surveys. So we would be driving far off into these these communities. And, you know, it was very, you know, it was extremely rural community. I mean, there was no electricity, there were no water sources. And we'd pull until you would effectively look like little Hamlet's and we would drive in there with our translators and our locals who are helping us navigate the space. And we'd have these, you know, sometimes 1520 minute health interviews about what things are going on. Now, and one of these interviews in particular that really stuck with me there was a very distinguished looking man he was from the Maasai tribe. And we were interviewing him and you know, through that process, learn that you know, he, he was drinking water out of a dam, which I tested it and the water quality was was, it was dangerous to say the least. He also didn't have a latrine. He didn't have electricity, right. So and this was common for most people living in that area. But as we were talking, he paused us. And he pulled his cell phone out of his back pocket and answered it. Now, this was 15 or so years ago, I don't even know if I had a cell phone back then I was late adopter, I tried to avoid this for as long as possible. But if there definitely wasn't very high penetration in Africa, particularly in rural Africa, we were, but this individual had a cell phone. And as he sat and chatted away for a little while, I thought, man, you know, most people would say, Hey, this guy doesn't have access to water, electricity, electricity, he doesn't have the basic health services, that a lot of philanthropic efforts would would be pushing. So he probably wouldn't be able to have a cell phone. But somehow he got a cell phone he had he found money for it. He count found someplace to buy credit for it. And he found some way to charge it. Right? And if not, what's the difference here? Like, why does he have this and in not water? And I thought, well, you know what, because a business created a value proposition for him. That made a lot more sense. That was just it made it so easy for him to adopt it, right. And he's also like, I don't have to walk, you know, 10 miles, you know, to see my family member, I can call them right. And there was so much value in it that someone said, hey, you know, we'll, you know, we'll create some place to, you know, locally to sell the cell phones to buy the credits, somebody's probably through a solar panel up on the roof. And all of a sudden, you see this, the supply chain and business model around something that didn't exist? And that really got me thinking about what if we approached things like sanitation and water? And some of these these social services and health services? What if we approached it much more from a business lens and a philanthropic lens? Much more from a value proposition? Like what is the value proposition there, that's actually going to get you to want to treat your water or to build and use a latrine, both of which can be pretty recent, you know, you don't need a lot of resources to do that necessarily. But how can we articulate the value in such a way, using more of a business mindset than a philanthropic mindset to be able to drive change? So that was a really important lesson to me. It was one of the things that really started to get me to question the paradigm of we used when we talk about solving social and environmental problem. Now fast forward a few years and I've done a lot traveling worked in India for a while worked in in Latin America for a while doing stuff with with cookstoves and more stuff around with sanitation. And I found myself doing a postdoc. And along the way, I also got a master's in public health to really be able to bridge the health as well as the environment engineering piece, which ultimately led me to this this postdoc around environmental health specifically around sanitation. So I found myself living on a remote island in Kenya, in Lake Victoria, and it was a wild experience I would tell a lot of locals where I lived and they're like, you know, they're like, man you live you live in the bush dude. So you know in a local tells you live in the bush, you are you are out there. You know, maybe a few to run ins with snakes, including one of a cobra mo stepped on. And yes, they do throw their neck out like that, which is the first thing I thought before I realized I was staring at a cobra. And you know, I think were the other fun things around there as I got called Chuck Norris a lot, you know, Chuck Norris is very popular, at least was back then, in East Africa a few times I just got called Jesus because I had long hair. So between chuck, chuck norris and Jesus, those are common themes, like I got called over there, in my experience, but beyond all that, what I was really there for was to test this intervention called community led total sanitation. Now, this is an intervention that was used globally, it was started in Southeast Asia and rural populations to actually use shame and people's aversion to, to fecal matter ship to be able to actually create a level of disgust around poor sanitation practices. Now, this has been very successful. It was Kenya had adopted as their national strategy, a lot of a lot of countries that adopt it for for rural populations who had low access to sanitation. And my curiosity was once you run this intervention, what happens to the train adoption because nobody had actually really, like measured that, you know, if you run this intervention, how quickly do people start building latrines and what percent of the population does but in the midst of all that there was another thing I was really curious about as well, which is with that also create a market for sanitation products without actually increased demand for sanitation products where I was living. There were nobody was selling sanitation products. Nobody was selling the trains. Nobody was Selling the pieces of that, you know, you the pieces of latrine you put on the floor that have the hole on it, which are usually made out of concrete, or porcelain. Nobody was selling, you know, toilet seats. Nobody was selling anything around sanitation products. But if you ran this intervention, and all sudden people started demanding it, would you create a market for it? Would you create an opportunity for people to build these to create jobs? I could this actually not only increase health, but could this also impact the local economy in a positive way? Unfortunately, due to red tape, and some things with bureaucracy, I didn't I didn't get to fully dive into that. But that question lingered and carried with me.
Now, a few years later, I went to go work at a nonprofit as operations director and Programs Director. And I took all this knowledge with me, and it was very, very curious about how can we take a social enterprise? And how can we start to use social enterprise in a business approach to solving some of these big challenges? Now, one of the areas that we're working in was the monarch biosphere in Michoacan, Mexico. This is where the eastern portion of the monarchs migrate all the way from Canada, to this little spot in Mexico, that, you know, it takes several 1000 acres, not a huge area for all of these monarchs to come and land on these trees with so many monarchs, that you would actually they would break the branches of these trees on the weight of the butterflies. So you imagine how many butterflies that takes place was a pretty amazing situation. So it was it was amazing to see them. And one of the things that we were doing there was we were we had a cookstove project. And when I first arrived there, they were giving these cookstoves away, but people weren't necessarily using them. And they were good cookstoves. They're actually designed in Mexico, they were they were designed by Mexicans. They had a big Komal. Or that that big plate for making tortillas. So they were culturally like a fit. But people weren't necessarily valuing them. And so one of the things I said, Well, how can we instead of giving them way? How can we come up with some form of selling them? How can we take a more social enterprise approach? So we figure out a price point that people are able to sell them for so heavily subsidized? You know, that price point was somewhere around 10? Or $15? The Stokes cost about 100? Or like, how can we actually sell these to get people to want to feel much more committed to actually owning these as, as opposed to simply you know, giving them and people don't find the value in it. So we actually hired a bunch of women to go around the community and access salespeople, and we provided incentives for them to sell. And when they came in, they didn't just simply talk about, hey, this is good for your health net was fantastic for your health. I mean, it was an extremely efficient stove, that forced all of the smoke out of the home, because many of these homes had just, you know, the roofs were black, from all the smoke that was in there, respiratory issues were rampant, particularly with children and women. So this was an issue. So these stoves had huge health benefits. But we weren't necessarily relying just on a health benefits, you know, kind of going back to my experience at Bloom Energy, how can we sell them on something different? So what we did was, we came up with a program to sell them on more of like, Hey, this is a social status thing. Like you're going to have these new stoves, yes, it's going to help your health? Yes, it's going to speak to that. But also, it's just it's a status symbol, right? So it was like, How can we increase the demand in that way. So that was one of the elements we did. And in addition to increasing supply chain, and things of that nature, which eventually be the stoves being built, they're increased by tenfold, through it through multiple different factors. But we definitely saw the stickiness of those stones within communities, and particularly within households, and the use of them increased much more once we started to market them in a much different approach. So that taught such a big lesson about a bit the commitment about the money, creating value, and how to market that. I've worked with this nonprofit for quite a while and again, really trying to institute business practices, and they're really also trying to quantify impact, like how do you quantify impact? It's a really slippery thing with nonprofits. And eventually, my mind went to like, you know, what, I don't know, for me, if the nonprofit model is going to have the scale of impact that I'd like to see in the world. And I always thought, you know, if you could change 1% of businesses across the world for the better, you could dwarf all the impact that nonprofits are doing. And in fact, not that I think nonprofits is be clear. I think nonprofits have a lot of value in what they do in specific areas. However, a lot of nonprofits seem to be cleaning up the mess that corporations have. So I thought, what if we didn't have to do that? What would business look like? So I started getting even more curious around. How can you approach business from a profit driven level with measurable business outcomes, but deeply interwoven with making an environmental endorse social impact. And so that's what got me curious to really start pursuing. What does this look like for Social Entrepreneurs? How are social entrepreneurs doing this, however, some of the most interesting businesses and the most impactful business doing this, which is one of the things that said, Well, why not just start a podcast and talk to these people? That was the inception of this idea. And since then, I work as I work as a consultant, I work as a coach working with large corporations, but also supporting social entrepreneurs, we really tried to shift how businesses can approach solving some of these issues again, while remaining profitable, and really reinforcing business but also reinforcing impact. So if you made it through this far, I greatly appreciate it. Thanks for that time. I hope at a minimum, you found it entertaining and at a maximum perhaps you learned some valuable information. So again, really appreciate it. I have one favor to ask before we go. If you have enjoyed this podcast or any of the previous podcasts, can you leave a five star rating and review on wherever it is that you download your podcast? It would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for listening to another episode of the profit meets impact podcast. If you enjoy this experience. Please subscribe wherever you find your podcasts and leave a positive review. You can also find out more about the podcast at www.profitmeetsimpact.com