The Social Impact Podcast - Your Mark on the World with Devin Thorpe

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Sara Jones is perhaps the most American-sounding name one can imagine. She is as American as her name sounds. Raised in the United States by her adoptive white family, she admits that because of her Korean heritage she has been accused of being a banana--yellow on the outside but white on the inside.

Last year began, however, with an itch to find her biological family. Knowing little more than that she had been adopted from Korea, she began her search. The one other clue she had was a faint scar from having a tattoo removed from her arm when she came to the U.S. Recreating the tattoo with a marker, she shared photos of her arm with the markings on social media.

Much faster than she anticipated, she connected with her brother, who has the same tattoo on his arm. She learned that her father had given her up for adoption after her mother left. He had tattooed himself and the three children with the same, simple tattoo: a cross above four dots, representing a father and three children.

The experience of connecting with her biological family has provided her with a whole new perspective on life, one the recognizes the reality of a completely different path her life might taken.

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Samyr Qureshi, the co-founder and CEO of Knack, is scaling up the tutoring platform to serve more students. Knack helps schools to match students who have recently completed a course successfully with students who are taking the course to get the help they need to learn the material. Both students benefit from the experience and schools find this to be an affordable way to improve student outcomes.

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As a young professional--a trader at Citigroup--Rhoden Monrose felt a tug to do more good in the world at real scale. He also recognized that others in the Millennial generation had a similar passion for good but weren’t always getting the same opportunities older professionals did.

He created CariClub to match young professionals with nonprofits to serve as associate board members, offering the same sort of counsel and connections that their older peers provide on traditional board.

The innovative model provides a win to employers (who pay a fee for their employees to participate) in that they get more engaged employees who are building valuable experience at the same time they give back. Young professionals win as they get an opportunity to learn and develop new skills and a broader network even as they give back to their communities. Nonprofits win as they receive an infusion of young talent and perspective.

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Most teenages find themselves facing important life decisions about where to go to college or trade school. Kids who find themselves on the wrong side of the law or in the foster care system often face starker questions, like where to sleep tonight or how to find food to eat.

Such youth face additional challenges in the form of drugs and alcohol that allow them to self-medicate to avoid the pain associated with lives turned upside down, often by circumstances beyond their control.

More Than Words is a social enterprise that sells books but does so much more. The nonprofit employs youth who have been involved with the criminal justice system or foster care, teaching them life skills that can mean the difference between surviving as an adult outside the system and not.

Founded by Jodi Rosenbaum, the organization is proving to be such an effective intervention that when Boston brought Amazon executives to the city to show off all it had going for it in a failed attempt to woo the company’s second headquarters to the city, a stop at More Than Words was on the agenda.

Be sure to watch the full interview with Jodi in the video at the top of this article.

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Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2FkG0of.

Michelle Thimesch, 55, CEO of Crowdfund Mainstreet and her business partner Jenny Kassan, both attorneys, have a track record of social entrepreneurship themselves. They are passionate about reducing the funding disparities between male and female-led companies and between white and minority-led companies in America.

So, when Thimesch invited Kassan to join her in launching Crowdfund Mainstreet, a Regulation Crowdfunding platform governed by FINRA, it was an easy decision. Their mission is to help triple-bottom-line companies and small businesses, especially female-led and minority-led ones, to raise the money they need to be successful.

Kassan, for her part, has a long history of working with female entrepreneurs to raise money from nontraditional sources, using whatever exemption from registration made the most sense. Sometimes she helped entrepreneurs raise money under infrequently used exemptions like Regulation D 504, allowing issuers to raise money state-by-state from ordinary investors. Regulation Crowdfunding or Reg CF at it is commonly known, was implemented in 2016 after being written into law in 2012 during the middle of the Obama administration.

Thimesch, alongside her law practice, has been working as the executive director of East Bay Revitalization, an organization working to improve access to affordable housing and reducing unemployment.

Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2FkG0of.

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Dr. Kevin Shurtleff, a tenured professor at Utah Valley University, has developed a prototype of a system that will remove algae from water during an algal bloom and then convert it to energy. While the energy produced cannot financially support the operation, there are reasons governments would pay to remove the algae.

Public safety and environmental benefits may justify paying to have the algae removed. Once removed, it can be converted to energy.

Kevin is looking for partners to commercialize the idea.

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Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2Rs9QgY.

Uniti CEO Lewis Horne, 34, thinks selling his nimble little electric cars will be like offering sneakers to a world full of people walking around in big, clunky clown shoes.

With the UN’s October IPCC report suggesting we may have less than 12 years to radically reduce carbon emissions to avoid the worst effects of climate change, finding ways to make wholesale shifts in consumer behavior is a central premise for this Swedish startup.

To make that shift over the next decade, Horne notes that hundreds of millions of internal combustion engine-driven cars will need to be removed from the roads and replaced with efficient electric ones.

Uniti, which has 18 employees and is pre-revenue, is in the midst of a £30 million (about $38.1 million) capital raise, including about £1 million (about $1.27 million) available to the public via a crowdfunding campaign on UK-based CrowdCube. As of this writing, the goal has been exceeded but the site continues to accept investment pledges.

The shares are being sold at a valuation of £97 million (about $123 million) even as a parallel private offering to large investors at that valuation is ongoing. U.S.-based investors must be accredited and invest at least $10,000 but investors elsewhere are not required to meet accreditation standards and may invest smaller amounts.

Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2Rs9QgY.

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Regenerative agriculture is suddenly sexy. Practitioners have been advocating its use for more than a decade but only recently has it begun to catch media attention and with it the public imagination. Why now? Some might say that it is because we are just waking up to the gloomy reality that the planet and every person on it are at risk even if regenerative agriculture is successfully implemented and are almost certainly doomed if we don’t.

Kevin Doyle Jones, co-founder of GatherLab and John Steven Bianucci, director of impact for Earth’s New Ways, are among the activists preaching the gospel of regenerative agriculture and they are finding an increasing number of adherents.

Regenerative agriculture is not just organic but involves other techniques, like no-till planting and rotating grazing animals on the land, to help the soil retain moisture and carbon, improving yields and

Be sure to watch the full interview with Kevin and John Steven in the player at the top of this article.

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When Jake Teitelbaum was fighting cancer, he hated wearing the hospital-issued socks and instead brought bright socks from home. It gave him a way to manifest his fighting spirit.

Having recovered, he’s launched a social enterprise called Resilience Gives, which helps people like Jake himself to design a flashy pair of socks and then sell them to their friends to raise money for a charity of their choice.

So far, he reports raising $117,000 from the sale of more than 14,000 pairs of socks in 72 different designs, each one for a charity.

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On November 27, 2018, I hosted the second annual #GivingTuesday #GTstreamathon. We had five segments with CaringCrowd or people raising money on the platform. I am proud to be associated with CaringCrowd because its global health mission aligns so well with mine.

John Brennick, the co-founder of CaringCrowd joined me to talk about CaringCrowd and together we visited with two of the people who were raising money on #GivingTuesday.

First, Philemon Padenou joined us to talk about his work with Code to Hope. “Our mission is to fight poverty by giving future leaders the tools they need to empower their communities.”

Next, John and I visited with Stephanie Bowers, the founder of Jakes Diapers, an organization that provides reusable cloth diapers to mothers in the developing world who are often forced to make difficult choices between food and disposable diapers.

Later, I visited with Ethel Yang of Operation ASHA. Operation ASHA uses a data and technology-driven approach to deliver last-mile care to the world's most vulnerable. OpASHA is boldly and rigorously tackling tuberculosis (TB), the world's leading infectious disease killer, across India and Cambodia.

Finally, I visited with Joanne Chiwaula, the founder of African Mothers Health Initiative. “We are supporting home-based care for critically ill women after delivery and vulnerable babies in Malawi.”

Be sure to visit CaringCrowd.org and search for these organizations to find their current campaigns.

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