Your Mark On The World

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin. Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2Cfbnjd. Nancy Mahon, SVP of global philanthropy and corporate citizenship for The Estee Lauder Companies and global executive director for the MAC AIDS Fund, has some counsel for social entrepreneurs and other business leaders interested in impact. It begins with context. We are in “the golden age of purpose.” “We are seeing an acceleration of a trend that has been in motion for some time where consumers are voting with their dollars and they are saying yes we care that you care. We share your values and we want not only a good financial model, but great products and a place to work and a great stock to invest in, we want a sustainable business. You have to make the world a better place,” Mahon says. MAC Cosmetics, an Estée Lauder brand, has been selling Viva Glam lipstick for more than 20 years and giving every penny of the retail revenue to the MAC AIDS Fund t

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin. Robyn Shumer didn’t ever want to weigh 40 pounds. Before she was ten years old, she developed anorexia. To this day, she faces the effects of the disease. Courageously, she recently opened up about her story to help raise more than $10,000 for Project Heal on CaringCrowd.org. Preliminary Interview with Robyn Shumer Who Raised Over $10K for Project Heal. The following is a brief pre-interview that provides context for the recorded interview you may watch or listen to at the top of this article. Crowdfunding page: https://www.caringcrowd.org/heal-people-eating-disorders What is the purpose of your crowdfunding campaign? Our goal is to provide treatment assistance to as many applicants as possible. Project HEAL’s financial assistance program is their trademark service. They fund both inpatient, residential, intensive outpatient/partial hospitalization, as well as outpatient treatment for individuals who wish to recover from eating dis

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin. Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2BqpYXU. Even as India is increasingly recognized as a global power, the developing country continues to wrestle with vexing challenges. Some of the country’s leading entrepreneurs and corporate executives have come together to help scale solutions. Atul Satija, 40, is leading the charge through an organization called The/Nudge Foundation. He says, “In India, we are adding 1 million people every month to the labor market. Roughly 50% come from poor backgrounds; more than 25% are school dropouts and 50% lack skills to be employable. At the same time, there is a skill deficit of 400 million people in the country in the foreseeable future.” After just a few years of addressing this problem head on with a program called Gurukul, the leaders recognized that the social challenges in the country required additional interventions if poverty is to be eliminated. In respon

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin. Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2BqpYXU. Even as India is increasingly recognized as a global power, the developing country continues to wrestle with vexing challenges. Some of the country’s leading entrepreneurs and corporate executives have come together to help scale solutions. Atul Satija, 40, is leading the charge through an organization called The/Nudge Foundation. He says, “In India, we are adding 1 million people every month to the labor market. Roughly 50% come from poor backgrounds; more than 25% are school dropouts and 50% lack skills to be employable. At the same time, there is a skill deficit of 400 million people in the country in the foreseeable future.” After just a few years of addressing this problem head on with a program called Gurukul, the leaders recognized that the social challenges in the country required additional interventions if poverty is to be eliminated. In respon

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin. Serial entrepreneur Mark Jeffrey has developed a new platform using mobile devices that could give billions of people in the world access to emergency response for the first time. Available today, the Guardian Circle app allows you to build a network of friends who may be willing to come to your aid when you’re in a pickle or even have a real emergency. The platform incorporates five functions the use blockchain technology. The company is launching an ICO or initial coin offering now to fund the growth of the platform. Check out my free webinar where I share the secrets of successful nonprofit crowdfunding at http://crowdfundingforsocialgood.org.

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin. When Ken Martin left “Wall Street” to make a dent on “Main Street” he really wanted to make a difference. With so much of the economy still operating in small businesses in the old economy, he saw a need--and when an entrepreneur sees a need he sees an opportunity--small business lending for established companies. Regulation CF, the new crowdfunding investment rules issued by the SEC effective in 2016, create a new opportunity for ordinary investors to put their money to work in the businesses they frequent. For these businesses, a debt approach makes more sense than equity. As Martin says, “What good are seven shares of the local hardware store?” More to the point, the hardware store can afford to pay back a loan with interest. That’s a deal that is relatively easy for investors to grasp as well. Check out my free webinar where I share the secrets of successful nonprofit crowdfunding at http://crowdfundingforsocialgood.org.

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin. Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2FViACL. James Hagen admits his health wasn’t great while working as a hedge fund analyst. The stress and a chronic disease diagnosed as a kid left him looking for answers. When his parents decided to retire from their catalog dental supply business, he recognized the old catalog business needed to be converted to an e-commerce model and hoped to find a lower-stress environment. He decided it was time to head for home in Minnesota. His research into better health, not surprisingly led him to focus on diet, exercise and sleep. Then, attuned to the dental industry, he began finding evidence that better oral care can improve whole-body health. Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2FViACL. Check out my free webinar where I share the secrets of successful nonprofit crowdfunding at http://crowdfundingforsocialgood.org.

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin. Kevin Adair and Franz “Franky Fanfan started working on the Island of Hispañola in 2005, hoping to bring solar cooking to the Dominican Republic. Slowly, over the years, their focus has shifted to Haiti, where they are working to eliminate charcoal in favor of briquettes made from recycled paper, cardboard and sawdust. Up to 90 percent of the energy present in wood is lost when it is turned into charcoal. When you light a piece of charcoal, you are left with only 10 percent of the energy present in the wood used to make it. Adair and Fanfan are using a process for making briquettes that doesn’t start with burning away most of the energy. Instead, the briquettes are made in a slurry, formed and dried and can then be burned efficiently in special, highly efficient wood-burning stoves. Their approach is to convert institutional kitchens from charcoal stoves to their briquettes and high-efficiency stoves. Once done, a kitchen can cook mo

With most community college students hoping to transfer to a four-year college, statistics show that most don’t transfer and only half of those who do, finish. The Kaplan Educational Foundation, headed by Nancy Lee Sanchez, is working to help community college students transfer successfully to universities and earn bachelor's degrees. Interview with Nancy Lee Sánchez, the Executive Director of Kaplan Educational Foundation. The following is the pre-interview with Nancy Lee Sánchez. Be sure to watch the recorded interview above. What is the problem you solve and how do you solve it? Problem: 81% of first-time beginning community college students from the bottom income quartile aspire to complete a bachelor’s degree, but only 21% transfer to four year institutions within 5 years, and only 10% attain a bachelor’s degree. (Horn & Skomsvold (2011); Shapiro et al. (2013)). Bachelor’s degree holders earn 31% more than those with an associate’s degree and 84% more than those with just a high school diploma. (Car

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin. After a health crisis in her family, Margaux Khoury began working to create a healthy, environmentally friendly deodorant for herself and her family. After developing one that worked, she decided to share it with the world. She calls it The Best Deodorant In The World and hopes it really is the best deodorant for the world. Interview with Margaux Khoury, the CEO of The Best Deodorant In The World. The following is the pre-interview with Margaux Khoury. Be sure to watch the recorded interview above. What is the problem you solve and how do you solve it? Two problems in the natural deodorant industry: Problem 1: Natural deodorants don't work or they irritate pits Problem 2: packaging is plastic or glass (not eco) We solve both these problems: Solution 1: our natural deodorant works even in hot weather (really effective) Solution 2: we custom created a 100% biodegradable packaging that you could literally throw right in your

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin. Ann Webb envisioned herself on stage, making a fortune and changing the world. She set out to do just that. Then an “impression” inspired her to head in another direction. Unsure if it would work, Webb decided to take her life skills training that had been helping people in the US to be more successful and apply the same techniques to helping people in Africa to envision and live more abundant lives. It worked. Over the past five years, she’s taken hundreds of people to Africa in a dual mission to help the people in Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda and Ghana to become more prosperous. At the same time, she focuses on helping the people she takes to become real humanitarians, capable of changing even more lives. Check out my free webinar where I share the secrets of successful nonprofit crowdfunding at http://crowdfundingforsocialgood.org.

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin. Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2GvpdwL. Halal investing forbids investing in debt, making many traditional investment vehicles off-limits to Muslims seeking to follow Sharia guidance. As a result, many in the Muslim community have limited their investments to cash savings and real estate, leaving them poorly diversified. Junaid Wahedna decided to fix that. Wahedna, who graduated from Columbia University and spent years working in finance in New York City, was in a good position to launch Wahed Invest, making Halal investing easy. “I've been very, very fortunate to have a good education, the resources and wherewithal to be able to do something and so I felt quite personally responsible to give back,” Wahenda says. “What right do I have not to actually go in there and fix this problem?” Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2GvpdwL. Check out my free webinar

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin. Zachary Schleien lost a friend, Louis, who suffered from schizophrenia, in a tragic and unnecessary death. His friend’s passing inspired him to do something. Having just been introduced at work to CaringCrowd, Johnson & Johnson’s crowdfunding platform to support global public health efforts, Zach launched a campaign to raise money to help train hundreds of parents of children with schizoaffective disorder. The training, NAMI Basics, is led by the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Check out my free webinar where I share the secrets of successful nonprofit crowdfunding at http://crowdfundingforsocialgood.org.

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin. Kathleen Kelly Janus, Stanford Lecturer and author of Social Startup Success, began her education in social entrepreneurship as a child, skipping church with her parents to help the homeless. That foundation led her to start a nonprofit called Spark alongside her legal career. The book is about how to scale a nonprofit, with a focus on helping one reach a key milestone of sustainability: a $2 million annual budget. Written from the perspective of 100 nonprofits who did just that, the fresh take on growth in this key sector of the economy, the book is a must-read for nonprofit leaders. Check out my free webinar where I share the secrets of successful nonprofit crowdfunding at http://crowdfundingforsocialgood.org.

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin. BDC is the only bank in Canada focused entirely on serving entrepreneurs. The bank is so excited about serving social entrepreneurs that it has a wide-ranging program to support them and provide the same banking services they provide to other entrepreneurs. They don’t stop there. Craig Rayan, Director of Social Entrepreneurship says, the bank became a certified B Corp five years ago. Check out my free webinar where I share the secrets of successful nonprofit crowdfunding at http://crowdfundingforsocialgood.org.

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin. Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2mke1d5. Originally from inner-city Baltimore, Maryland, successful tech entrepreneur Clarence Wooten, 46, got into tech and computers through video games as a kid. He played on the old Atari, ColecoVision and Commodore platforms. From those modest beginnings, a career blossomed. As a youth, Wooten looked up to people like Bill Gates and Reginald Lewis as role models. Lewis, the richest African American in the 1980s was born and raised in Baltimore. He died in 1993 after taking control of and subsequently growing Beatrice—the first African American-owned billion-dollar company. The power of role models would stay with Wooten throughout his career. Still in Baltimore in the late 90s, Wooten founded ImageCafe, a startup that provided website templates for small businesses, something like what Wix and Squarespace do today. Read the full Forbes article and watch the

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin. Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2FitaEx. At 29, Brett Durbin went to Tegucigalpa, Honduras to find a cause for his church to support. He’d never imagined how this would change his life. The organization he ultimately founded, Trash Mountain Project, serves the people who make their living—such as it is—by scavenging in the developing world’s trash dumps. With fires constantly smoldering, burning a mix of toxic and noxious materials, these are literally hellish places, Durbin, now 37, explains. Toddlers, adults and the aged—entire multi-generational families—hunt for food to eat and anything of value to sell crawling and clawing through everything from animal to industrial waste. After visiting Honduras, Durbin looked for an organization focused on serving the trash dump communities he’d seen. A professor counseled him, “The last thing we need is another nonprofit organization.” Read the full F

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin. Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2mdUnQ6. Fresh out of college, Rob Gitin took a job working in homeless services along with one of his classmates, Mumtaz Mustapha. One day, she said, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if one day someone started a program that was specifically focused on the kids who either got kicked out of our program or who tell us that they’ve known about it for five years before they ever set foot in it?” Over the months that followed, the conversation turned from someone else doing it to the two of them. One day, twenty years ago, with an Echoing Green Foundation grant deadline coming the next day, the two decided to apply for the funds to launch At The Crossroads, serving the youth no one else could or would in San Francisco. Twenty years later, Gitin, now 43, is still at it. Mustapha left after four years to go to medical school and has become a financial supporter. Today, the or

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin. Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2lFBYfo. Chris Soukup, 38, is a third-generation member of the deaf community. As a child, he remembers his paternal grandparents visiting each week with a list of phone calls to be made by his mother, who could hear. In those days, before the relay services offered by companies like Communication Service for the Deaf, or CSD, the nonprofit that Soukup now runs, members of the deaf community were effectively prevented from communicating by phone. Soukup’s life was also influenced by injustice. His grandfather lost his farm when a banker explained he didn’t believe a deaf man could operate a farm. There are approximately 1 million functionally deaf people in the United States. As many as 14% of adults are deaf or hard of hearing, many of them over the age of 65. About 8 million are hard of hearing, that is, they have difficulty hearing a normal conversation even w

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin. Marty Tate, partner at Carman Lenhoff Israelsen, explains in this interview what a SAFE or Simple Agreement for Future Equity is and just how safe it is for both issuers and investors. If you’ve ever wanted to invest in an equity crowdfunding campaign, you do not want to miss this episode. Check out my free webinar where I share the secrets of successful nonprofit crowdfunding at http://crowdfundingforsocialgood.org.