The Social Entrepreneur Podcast

Latest Episodes:

BONUS Interview, Sally Koering Zimney, This Moved Me Mar 26, 2018

Show notes

This Moved Me helps purpose-driven changemakers speak with confidence, clarity, and authenticity so they can create talks that move the world.

This interview contains bonus material where Sally discusses:

How she learned to be a speaker and coach.
What she got wrong about coaching.
Her personal mantra as a coach.
How feedback can be a gift.

You can find the full interview here: https://tonyloyd.com/239

Social Entrepreneurship Resources:

Find the full interview with Sally Koering Zimney here: https://tonyloyd.com/239
This Moved Me: http://www.thismovedme.com
Sally’s TEDx talk on being an Un-Speaker: https://youtu.be/BJLA2GeRtOc
This Moved Me on Facebook:https://www.facebook.com/thismovedme
This Moved Me Talk Club on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ThisMovedMeTalkClub
This Moved Me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thismovedme
This Moved Me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thismovedme
This Moved Me podcast: http://www.thismovedme.com/podcast
Youth Frontiers: https://www.youthfrontiers.org
Book: Crazy Good Advice: 10 Lessons Learned from 150 Leading Social Entrepreneurs: https://tonyloyd.com/book

Science and Our Relationship with Nature, with Bonnie Keeler, The Natural Capital Project Mar 19, 2018

Show notes

The Natural Capital Project is developing practical tools and approaches to account for nature’s contributions to society.

As Bonnie Keeler grew up in Eagan, MN, she loved to explore Minnesota’s natural wonders with her family. “My mom was a master at relationships,” Bonnie recalls. “One of the things she taught me was, how people are at the center of everything. Every problem is essentially a problem of relationships. Science can take us part of the way there, in terms of providing the appropriate knowledge base. But when it comes down to actually making change, that’s all about relationships.”

Today, Bonnie is a lead scientist with The Natural Capital Project. The Natural Capital Project is a partnership between the University of Minnesota, Stanford University, the Nature Conservancy, and World Wildlife Fund. They solve big problems related with how we value nature, and the relationship between people and the environment.

The Natural Capital Project works with a variety of organizations from local community groups who are advocating for a particular environmental future, to private sector companies who are trying to green their supply chain, to national-level governments who are considering the impact of infrastructure. They collaborate with decision-makers to identify questions and develop new science and tools to answer those questions. They test and publish results in peer-reviewed journals.

“If you’ve made a big international commitment to the environment, how do we make that practical, and think of the implementation of it?” Bonnie asks. “Where do you protect? What landscapes do you restore? How do you invest in new infrastructure, whether it’s hydropower, or a big agricultural incentive program? Or a payment program to farmers to adopt different conservation practices? Those are big environmental management decisions that have a set of consequences, not just for those ecosystems, but for the people who depend on them.”

Social Entrepreneurship Quotes from Bonnie Keeler

“We’re so connected to the environment in so many ways.”

“The big problem is, those connections aren’t very visible.”

“We’re often not thinking of the full set of consequences.”

“There is a broad set of users and audiences that our projects serve.”

“We have partnerships around the world.”

“If you’ve made an international commitment to the environment, how do you make that practical?”

“We spent a lot of time car camping.”

“My mom was a master at relationships.”

“People are at the center of everything.”

“It’s the human dimensions that require careful thought.”

“I was searching for the connection between people and nature.”

“There was a way to be a scientist, but be engaged in those people-oriented, human dimension problems.”

“Partnerships are everything.”

“Are you reading the environmental page in your local newspaper?”

“Find someone who you have the opportunity to be inspired by.”

Social Entrepreneurship Resources:

The Natural Capital Project: https://www.naturalcapitalproject.org
The Natural Capital Project on Twitter:https://twitter.com/NatCapProject
The Natural Capital Project on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NaturalCapitalProject
Book: Crazy Good Advice: 10 Lessons Learned from 150 Leading Social Entrepreneurs: https://tonyloyd.com/book

E-Commerce for Everyone, with Isaac Hunja, Sky.Garden Mar 12, 2018

Show notes

The Power of a Simple Idea, with Lulu Cerone, LemonAID Warriors Mar 05, 2018

Show notes

LemonAID Warriors is a youth empowerment program that aims to give young people the tools that they need to turn their compassion into action, and raise funds and awareness for causes that they care about

Lulu Cerone was an entrepreneur from an early age. At the age of six, she opened her first lemonade stand. At first, she used the money to buy toys or candy. But her mom made a suggestion. Why not use the profits to help someone else? Lulu looked into it and found an animal shelter that needed the funds. “This really crazy thing happened,” Lulu said. “This crazy thing I was doing with my friends actually took on this whole new meaning. It became a lot more fun. My friends and I became more engaged. We felt like what we were doing was meaningful.”

Lulu became interested in community service. However, she had a hard time finding opportunities to serve at a young age. Most organizations require volunteers to be 16 to 18 years-old. She found a few opportunities through her school. Her parents tried helping her to find opportunities. Lulu explains, “It’s hard to know how to raise effective global citizens as a parent.”

In 2010, when an earthquake struck Haiti, Lulu was ten years old. She says, “That was the first time I was aware of a global tragedy. I remember being online with my mom and looking at pictures of kids whose lives had been completely changed by the earthquake. I really had this strong urge to help.” When Lulu went to school, she challenged the boys to a Boys vs Girls LemonAID fundraising competition. Her fifth-grade class raised just over $4,000 in two weeks.

This early success has had a ripple effect. “I found it spinning out of my control really quickly,” Lulu says. She looked back at what worked with the Lemonade stands and came up with bigger idea – PhilanthroParties. A PhilanthroParty is any gathering with a social purpose behind it. Lulu started an organization, LemonAID Warriors to spread this idea of youth empowerment. She wrote a book, PhilanthroParties!: A Party-Planning Guide for Kids Who Want to Give Back.

“This is such a simple idea, but people really latched onto it,” Lulu says. “There is power in simplicity.” Lulu has attracted partnerships for her business. She partnered with Mattel and Forever 21. She was recently recognized as a L’Oréal Woman of Worth. She is currently a freshman in collage as she continues to develop her nonprofit.

Social Entrepreneurship Quotes from Lulu Cerone

“Growing up, I had a passion for community service.”

“Young people can get involved.”

“They can do it in fun and simple ways that integrate social action into their social life.”

“That’s when I had my first PhilanthroParty.”

“It was the first time my friends and I felt like we could be agents of change.”

“I did not set out to start a nonprofit organization.”

“This is such a simple idea, but people really latched onto it.”

“There is power in simplicity.”

“LemonAID Warriors is youth-driven and community-based.”

“It was incredible being in eighth grade and having Mattel looking to me.”

“See yourself as an important agent of change.”

Social Entrepreneurship Resources:

LemonAID Warriors: http://www.lemonaidwarriors.com/
Book: PhilanthroParties!: A Party-Planning Guide for Kids Who Want to Give Back: http://philanthropartiesbook.com
L’Oréal Women of Worth:https://www.lorealparisusa.com/women-of-worth.aspx
Book: Crazy Good Advice: 10 Lessons Learned from 150 Leading Social Entrepreneurs: https://tonyloyd.com/book

Find Your Funding, Part 2, Cathy Clark, CASE Smart Impact Capital Feb 26, 2018

Show notes

CASE Smart Impact Capital is a toolkit that helps you to raise capital that aligns with your needs.

In 1992, Cathy Clark had a conversation with Lloyd Morrissett, the co-founder of Sesame Workshop. Lloyd told her “Change happens when the right people with the right idea and the right capital come together at the right time.”

This idea stuck with Cathy and has guided her career since. When Cathy first appeared on Social Entrepreneur in January 2016, she said. “It isn’t enough to have a good idea, to want to help people, but you have to have an organization to do it, and eventually that organization needs capital. And that has become the theme of my career.”

Cathy Clark is the faculty director for the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at the Duke Fuqua School of Business. She runs the Initiative on Impacting Investing.

Cathy and the team at CASE have developed a resource to help social entrepreneurs to be more efficient and effective in raising investment capital. The solution is called CASE Smart Impact Capital. It is a toolkit that contains short videos, downloadable resources, spreadsheets, and more. The modules are bite-sized and flexible. You can jump to any section at any time to match where you are on your fundraising journey.

CASE Smart Impact Capital was developed over a two-year period, while working with partner organizations such as MIT, Stanford, USAID, Uncharted, and Spring.

In this interview, Cathy takes the listeners from the theoretical basis of impact investing through a description of CASE Smart Impact Capital. If you want to jump ahead, leap to 15:50 in the interview. We didn’t get to everything we wanted to talk about, so we’ve put together a short Bonus episode, which you can find here.

Social Entrepreneurship Quotes from Cathy Clark

“The term impact investing was coined almost ten years ago.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact

“Anyone who is investing is taking their dollar and putting it into a capitalist system, where that dollar has an impact.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact

“It’s basically, people voting with their dollars.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact

“Anyone who has an investment account is already investing in an outcome.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact

“We live in a finite set of resources. The planet earth is not infinite.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact

“Unlimited growth within a resource-constrained environment simply does not make sense.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact

“We have to tilt capitalism in a slightly different direction.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact

“I teach at a business school because I believe business has the largest leverage point.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact

“At CASE, we call it leaping the chasm. Other people call it the pioneer gap.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact

“I’ve been looking at this for over 20 years.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact

“What I saw was completely demoralizing.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact

“We really wanted to build this around the needs of entrepreneurs.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact

“We have a template or a tool, where you make a decision, and you move on.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact

“We wanted to make this modular and easy.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact

“We created a triage process.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact

“Most of our entrepreneurs had the wrong list.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact

“The stakes are really high.” @cathyhc, @CASESmartImpact

Social Entrepreneurship Resources:

CASE Smart Impact Capital: https://casesmartimpact.com
The Center for Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at Duke University:https://centers.fuqua.duke.edu/case/
Cathy Clark on Twitter:https://twitter.com/cathyhc
Book: Crazy Good Advice: 10 Lessons Learned from 150 Leading Social Entrepreneurs: https://tonyloyd.com/book

BONUS Episode: Cathy Clark Talks About Larry Fink’s Letter to CEOs Feb 26, 2018

Show notes

BONUS Episode: Cathy Clark Talks About Larry Fink’s Letter to CEOs

Cathy Clark stopped by to talk about CASE Smart Impact Capital, a rich resource to help entrepreneurs to be more efficient and effective in raising investment capital. While she was here, I took the opportunity to ask Cathy about a letter that Larry Fink, CEO of Blackrock, wrote to CEOs. Blackrock manages $6.3 trillion in investments. In this letter, Mr. Fink said, “To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society. Companies must benefit all of their stakeholders, including shareholders, employees, customers, and the communities in which they operate.” You can read the entire letter here. You can hear the full interview with Cathy where she talks about CASE Smart Impact Capital here.

I asked Cathy about this letter, and about the dynamic tension that business leaders sense between shareholders and other stakeholders. You can hear her answer to these two questions in this bonus episode.

Social Entrepreneurship Resources:

Cathy Clark’s full interview: https://tonyloyd.com/235
Larry Fink’s Letter to CEOs: https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/en-no/investor-relations/larry-fink-ceo-letter
Cathy Clark on Twitter:https://twitter.com/cathyhc
CASE Smart Impact Capital: https://casesmartimpact.com
The Center for Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at Duke University:https://centers.fuqua.duke.edu/case/
Book: Crazy Good Advice: 10 Lessons Learned from 150 Leading Social Entrepreneurs: https://tonyloyd.com/book

Find Your Funding, Part 1, Jeff Ochs, Venn Foundation Feb 19, 2018

Show notes

The Venn Foundation uses Program-Related Investments in surprising new ways.

This week, we’re kicking off a two-part mini-series how to fund a business that does social good. We did something like this in April 2016. Next week, Cathy Clark is going to be here to talk about CASE Smart Impact Capital, an online resource to help social entrepreneurs figure out how to find the right capital at the right time.

This week, we’re talking to Jeff Ochs of the Venn Foundation. Jeff is an experienced entrepreneur and investor. He invented and commercialized an educational party game that was licensed by Hasbro. He started a successful nonprofit, Breakthrough Twin Cities. And he was the Executive Director of an angel investing network. In each of these instances, Jeff saw the difficulty of getting the right investments to the right startups at the right time.

Jeff explains that today there are two types of capital:

Charitable donations, which support causes we care about with no expectation whatsoever for financial return.
For-profit investments, which are designed to make as much money as possible for investors on a risk-adjusted basis.

“In this current capital system, it is obvious why there is no investment capital available that is willing to accept ‘below-market’ financial terms,” Jeff explains. To meet this challenge, Jeff partnered with Rob Scarlett and Jeanne Voight to launch the Venn Foundation.

Jeff says, “At the highest level, Venn Foundation has a method for using charitable donations, which today we just give away, to make investments. This allows us to create the below-market investment capital that we badly need. Charitable investments have all the same tax advantages of donations, are anchored against -100% financial returns of donations, and allow the precious charitable donation to be recycled over and over again. Venn Foundation is where charity and investing meet.”

Venn is creating a marketplace for charitable investing. They are removing the obstacles that donors face in making charitable investments directly. By opening a special donor-advised fund called a Venn Account, any individual or organization can recommend that their charitable dollars be used by Venn to make Program-Related Investments, or PRIs. Venn can syndicate any PRI among any number of Venn Accounts. Financial returns from these PRIs go back to participating funds for the donors to redeploy into new PRIs or to grant out as desired.

Venn recently made a program-related investment to Binary Bridge. BinaryBridge creates software that helps humanitarians do their work effectively and efficiently. You may recall our conversation with BinaryBridge founder Lori Most.

Who should seek program-related investing? Jeff suggests that business and nonprofit leaders ask themselves, “Is that I’m doing helping advance a charitable cause as defined by the IRS? And if the answer is yes, or maybe yes, the program-related investment tool is something that could apply to you and your goals.”

Social Entrepreneurship Quotes from Jeff Ochs

“If that kind of capital existed, what could we do?” Jeff Ochs, Venn Foundation

“It’s where charity and investing meet.” Jeff Ochs, Venn Foundation

“Today, there is not a market for charitable investing.” Jeff Ochs, Venn Foundation

“If capital behaved differently, what would be possible?” Jeff Ochs, Venn Foundation

“Capital is the lifeblood of our economy.” Jeff Ochs, Venn Foundation

“If we can change the nature of capital, we can change the way our economy works.” Jeff Ochs, Venn Foundation

Social Entrepreneurship Resources:

Venn Foundation: https://www.vennfoundation.org
BackpackEMR:https://www.backpackemr.com
Book: Crazy Good Advice: 10 Lessons Learned from 150 Leading Social Entrepreneurs: https://tonyloyd.com/book

Mobile Gaming for Social Good, with Elizabeth Sarquis, Global Gaming Initiative and Jukko Feb 12, 2018

Show notes

Global Gaming Initiative provides a suite of tools and services to make it easier for game developers and publishers to produce and monetize games for social good.

Elizabeth Sarquis was born in a small town along the Magdalena River in Colombia. When Elizabeth was five years old, her family moved to the US. Growing up, she went to school in the US and spent time her summers in Colombia. Elizabeth says “It struck me when I would see children on the streets begging. Then I would go back home, and I would have everything. It didn’t make sense to me.”

As an adult, Elizabeth worked in nonprofits focused on children’s issues. During the 2008 financial meltdown, Elizabeth observed how difficult it was for nonprofits to raise funds. And, after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, she noticed that there was a wide gap between the money raised and the impact of those funds. “I knew something had to change,” she says. “I wanted to create a model that used technology, which I love, and create an impact.”

In 2010, Elizabeth’s 14-year-old son traveled to Ecuador to volunteer with a nonprofit. Her son told her a story about a boy he met. The boy did not have transportation, and therefore, did not attend school. Elizabeth’s son challenged her to help. Around this same time, Elizabeth found herself playing Angry Birds for hours. She thought, “Can’t we figure out a way to use games, tied to impact?” From this thought cam Global Gaming Initiative.

Global Gaming Initiative is a mobile game company that creates games and aligns them with social impact. They are a cooperative. They work with game developers who want to create social impact through their game. Global Gaming Initiative is a BCorporation. They have been selected as a “Best for the World” company two years in a row.

Global Gaming Initiative was not successful right away. They hired eight engineers and animators, spent months on the game, but it was not commercially successful. “We didn’t bring marketing in soon enough,” Elizabeth explains. “At that time, it was a bit more of the wild west in the app store.”

One of Global Gaming Initiative’s first successful games was Sidekick Cycle, a competitive retro arcade game that positions players in a race against time. Profits from in-app purchases and advertisement go towards bicycles for kids. The game is popular and has provided lots of bikes. However, parents began to push back on the content of the advertisements.

To help control the types of ads that are presented on their games, Elizabeth and her team created Jukko. Jukko connects game players with socially-conscious brands. Jukko is scheduled to launch around April of 2018.

Social Entrepreneurship Quotes from Elizabeth Sarquis

“You can make games and you can have an impact.” @elizabetsarquis, @GGInitiative

“You have to surround yourself with a network of people who believe in what you’re doing.” @elizabetsarquis, @GGInitiative

“Get involved in your community.” @elizabetsarquis, @GGInitiative

Social Entrepreneurship Resources:

Global Gaming Initiative: https://www.globalgaminginitiative.com/
Global Gaming Initiative on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GlobalGamingInitiative
Global Gaming Initiative on Twitter: https://twitter.com/gginitiative
Jukko: https://jukko.com
Jukko on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/myjukko
Jukko on Twitter: https://twitter.com/myjukko
Free Bikes 4 Kids: http://fb4k.org
Book: Crazy Good Advice: 10 Lessons Learned from 150 Leading Social Entrepreneurs: https://tonyloyd.com/book

Figuring Out Faith in Business and Marriage, with Jessica Jackley Feb 02, 2018

Show notes

The Terrifying, Magical Life of a Social Entrepreneur, with Emily Hunt Turner, All Square Jan 29, 2018

Show notes

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