Scrappy

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In every episode, host Chris Straigis talks with a visionary who is making big strides to reshape the landscape of their community, their industry or even the world. It’s about business owners, community leaders and movers-and-shakers realizing their dreams, in spite of limited resources and significant barriers – with a little creativity and a whole lot of grit. You’ll hear about where they got their “big idea”, how they keep pushing in the face of adversity, and even how they’ve failed along the way.

Episodes

  1. 16/06/2022

    ShelterBox

    Four words written on a piece of paper: “shelter, warm, comfort, dignity.” This is where ShelterBox began. Tom Henderson, the original founder of ShelterBox, turned with his idea to his local Rotary Club in Helston, England for support, and they took up the mantle. Today, over 20 years later, Rotary International is still a key partner. Here in the U.S., Kerri Murray is at the helm of the largest ShelterBox affiliate in the world. Since 2015, Kerri has personally overseen relief efforts for some of the most dire events in recent memory, including conflicts in Syria and Yemen, and most recently in Ukraine, an earthquake in Haiti, a typhoon in the Philippines and famines in Africa, just to name a few. Links: ShelterBox USA Rotary International Rotary – Helston, England Save the Bay Direct Relief Providence College The Boston Red Sox (why not, she would’ve been great!) Full Transcript Chris Straigis – 00:01 Welcome to Scrappy, the podcast about small companies doing big things. I’m your host, Chris Straigis. I walked by a sign not too long ago in downtown Philadelphia. That read “start where you are, use what you have, do what you can.” It really stopped me in my tracks, three simple sentences, but a profound and moving manifesto. We all have within us to power to affect change, I really do believe that. And I also believe that as a general rule, most humans when confronted with another suffering will skew heavily towards compassion. Now where those two traits intersect, you’ll find positive action; action that solves big problems or helps to alleviate the pain of another. For those special people who find themselves in the middle bit of that venn diagram, they do in fact begin where they are with what they have, and then they take action. Usually in our stories, we focus on a person singular who took up the mission-driven call to use their skill or talent, or simply their will and drive to make the world a better place in some specific way. Chris Straigis – 01:22 It’s easy to point to them and say, look, look at what that person is doing. We’ve always recognized, however that behind many, if not, most of the people we feature, there’s a team who also take up the mantle, motivated by the work or the cause, or even simply inspired by another person taking action. Today, we focus not just on the origins and the current leader of a company, ShelterBox, but we also turn a well deserved light on the selfless brave, and in some cases, heroic difference makers who are on the frontline, the boots on the ground for this global aid organization. Chris Straigis – 01:59 Four words written on a piece of paper: “shelter, warm, comfort, dignity.” This is where ShelterBox began. In a 2008 CNN interview, Tom Henderson, the original founder of ShelterBox, describes the epiphany he had while watching news footage of disaster relief efforts. Chris Straigis – 02:27 In that moment in 1999, his compassion for the scene turned into an idea, then into action. “If people have lost everything” Henderson asked, “why should they lose their dignity as well?” The idea was simple. Provide disaster relief victims with an easily transportable kit that included the most basic needs for survival: shelter, clean water tools. He eventually turned with this idea to his local Rotary Club in Helston, England for support, and they took up the mantle. Today, over 20 years later, Rotary International is still a key partner, with its global reach in hubs in nearly every corner of the world. Kerri Murray is at the helm of the largest ShelterBox affiliate in the world here in the United States. Kerri’s been President of ShelterBox US since 2015 and has personally overseen relief efforts for some of the most dire events in recent memory, including conflicts in Syria and Yemen, and most recently in Ukraine, an earthquake in Haiti, a typhoon in the Philippines and famines in Africa, just to name a few. Kerri, thank you so much for talking to me today. Uh, I usually like to start by following the breadcrumbs into the past to help paint a picture of how one ended up doing the work they do now, but I wanna change it up a bit today and start by asking this, what do those four words mean to you? “Shelter, warm, comfort, dignity.” Kerri Murray – 04:02 For me, those four words represent really one of my reasons for being, and certainly the work that we do every day at ShelterBox. Those words are at the core of why we exist. Coming back from the Ukraine, Poland border where I was working, I think those words are even more important to me than ever before. And they represent to me that people who’ve been affected by disasters and some of the worst humanitarian crises in our generation have the basic things that they need to sustain their life and to enable their recovery. And I think those four words are at the core of what we do every day. And it’s, it’s why I do the work I do at ShelterBox. Chris Straigis – 05:00 That’s a great answer. And it says a lot about why you’re doing the work that you do. Most of our shows hone in on the specific key person who’s behind the wheel of an organization or movement. But I also think ShelterBox is such a great example of the hard work, dedication and shared mission of so many people, especially your SRTs or ShelterBox response teams. We’ll get into that. But I think that your personal story might just be a great analogy to step into that broader scope. So I wanna touch a bit on you and your path. Let’s do a quick, deep dive. You were born and raised in the proud new England area. So it’s the 1980s, in the small town of Naugatuck, Connecticut. A young Kerri Murray is sitting in her room listening to, I don’t know, maybe the Pixies and the Cars, thinking about the future. What did you want to be when you grew up? Kerri Murray – 05:53 Well, in the 1980s, I was playing on the softball team, uh, at my school as well as on the boys’ baseball team. And there’s no question that I really was dreaming about being the first woman on the Boston Red Sox. And I am a huge baseball fan, I’m a huge Red Sox fan. It didn’t pan out quite as I expected, but that’s probably, uh, what I was thinking. Chris Straigis – 06:25 In 1991, you made a big step into your future at Providence College, right up the road in Rhode Island. You took a path toward political science. Why was that your focus? Kerri Murray – 06:38 You know, I always had a, just an affinity to public service. I just always felt this burning desire to be part of the political process I had worked and been part of on some campaigns in, in high school and grammar school. And I just wanted to find a way to serve. And when I got to Providence College, what was so unique was that about a mile and a half down the road was the State House. And I learned early on when I started school that I actually could intern and I started interning for a state representative there. And then I was hooked. I just found myself in the throes of Rhode Island state politics. And I absolutely loved it. And actually, um, my last year of college at Providence, I ended up really going to night school there because I was really just so swept up in working in Rhode Island politics that my last year of school, I became a lobbyist and I became a lobbyist for an environmental group, which is an incredible humanitarian organization called Save the Bay. And I started lobbying for them. I was their first lobbyist and really advocating against the dredging of Narragansett Bay. And that was, uh, an incredible opportunity for me. So that was my last year of college, and then I graduated in the spring of 1995. Chris Straigis – 08:10 Facing the realities of graduation. Kerri told me that she had decisions to make. And with her tuition loans coming due, she turned to corporate work and in a fateful move, landed with a global pharmaceutical giant. Kerri Murray – 08:25 In the late 1990s, I started working for GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals and I spent 13 years there and it was the most transformational experience, learning deep business skills and working both in the United States and in Europe. But in really in 2004, my whole life changed. I was pregnant with my first and only daughter and in an instant, everything went wrong and, um, she stopped breathing and I had an emergency C-section and they had said that she had a cord wrapped around her neck many times, three times. And they said she hadn’t grown for the last 10 weeks of my pregnancy and they didn’t think she’d make it. But eventually they said that if she lives, she’ll never talk because she had paralyzed vocal cords. And so that was really a transformation for me in realizing that so many parts of the world being pregnant can be a death sentence. Kerri Murray – 09:29 And in many parts of the world, I would not have made it. My daughter certainly would not have. The difference was we had access, right? Access that so many people in the world don’t have. During that experience, I started getting involved again, on the side, with a lot of different humanitarian organizations, just volunteering, anything I could, whether it was my time, whether it was resources. And then in 2009, we had a new CEO that came in at GlaxoSmithKline and really his agenda was trying to transform the industry, the pharmaceutical industry. And he wanted to do that by starting with our company. And he tapped me and a handful of other executives from around the world and he asked us if we would be willing to do nonprofit assignments. Kerri Murray – 10:24 And so at the end of 2009, I was embedded into an organization in California called Direct Relief. And they had been founded in 1948, but were having a lot of issues just, uh, overall with sustainability. Expenses exc

    28 min

  2. 29/11/2021

    Embrace Autism

    Marie Haas has worked with, and touched the hearts of, some of the most vulnerable citizens in our society – kids with autism and their families. She began and grew a company in Singapore called Embrace Autism. It was the fusion of science and art, born of a passion to care, connect and communicate. But that’s not what she set out to do, at least not officially. She actually just wanted to dance. LINKS: Marie Lynn Haas Embrace Autism The Autism Treatment Center of America Emergent Improvisation Marco Iacoboni’s UCLA Lab Full Transcript Chris Straigis – 00:02Welcome to Scrappy the podcast about small companies doing big things. I’m your host, Chris Straigis. So we’re now nearing the end of 2021. And it’s been a little while since we’ve done a new episode, very sorry about that. But time has felt somehow distorted recently. I think I can safely say that in many ways, at least comparatively, our world was buzzing along in kind of a cruise control until early last year. COVID was, and still is, a catalyst for some major and massive transformations. It’s changed us. It’s changed a lot of things, from how we relate to each other, to how we relate to our jobs and even how we relate to our greater global society. Now, I know that many facets of these changes, didn’t just pop up out of nowhere. Our world, our experience is ever evolving. But this pandemic was a game changer for our generation. Chris Straigis – 01:08No one, not the very young, not the 20 and 30 somethings, not even the elderly are coming out of this unchanged. And really, I don’t think we’ve even begun to see the true transformation. Everything we’ve experienced over the last year and a half brought about short term and rapid change. It’s the ripples in the water well beyond the original splash that may turn out to be the most fascinating. In other words, how will a change to us change the world? Chris Straigis – 01:41At its core, this is what Scrappy is all about, transformation. It’s about everyday people, just like you and me, doing extraordinary things. Usually finding themselves, forging their destiny from materials they didn’t even know they had, and then watching those ripples roll out in ways they themselves couldn’t even foretell. And so it is with our guest today. Marie Haas has worked with and touched the hearts of some of the most vulnerable citizens in our society – kids with autism and their families. She began and grew a company in Singapore called Embrace Autism. It was the fusion of science and art, born of a passion to care, connect and communicate. But that’s not what she set out to do, at least not officially. She actually just wanted to dance, or more specifically explore movement, self-expression and communication through dance. Little did she know when she started, how connected her ideas would be in a world far from her own, and in a land far from home. Marie’s journey began in Houston, Texas in the early 1990s, her dad was a computer programmer and her mom, a school teacher. Marie Haas – 03:03I can remember when I was living in Texas, um, that my mom would, you know, work with both my sister and I at home on lots of educational things. Including, um, this hooked on phonics, which I’m not sure if you know what that is, but that was very popular at the time. And I can remember sitting in the floor in the living room, you know, doing this hooked on phonics even before we were, you know, in school. Chris Straigis – 03:37But an early and devastating shakeup in the family would send her far north in a move to Massachusetts and begin to drive her inward. Marie Haas – 03:48The circumstances through which I moved across the country, um, were traumatic in terms of they, that was the falling out of my parents’ marriage, and they had just gotten divorced. So, I didn’t want to move to Massachusetts, I didn’t want to leave my friends behind. I didn’t want to leave my cat behind. I was being uprooted from everything that I had previously known. When we were living in Texas, I was taking, um, gymnastics lessons and swimming lessons, but those things were not readily available or at least not close by, um, where we lived in Massachusetts. Marie Haas – 05:03However, um, my aunt owned a dance studio, a town over, and so I began taking ballet lessons with her at her studio after school. I think dance really offered me a place where I could express a lot of the things that I wasn’t able to express verbally. Um, so it was definitely an anchor in that sense. It was an outlet in that sense, it gave me something to really focus on. I was able to, to use dance, to really work out all of the complex emotions that I was holding in my body. In that way, there were a lot of times where dance was incredibly healing. It was also in a way a space where I could hide. I wasn’t necessarily having conversations, um, or willing to have conversations with people around me about how I felt or what was going on in my life or how it was affecting me. Um, and instead I just sort of buried it inside of this practice. Dance in many ways, became the way I felt seen in the world. Chris Straigis – 06:09What Marie discovered in dance was expression – expression of feelings and emotions that she wasn’t comfortable verbalizing. It was how she talked to the world around her and, more importantly, how she talked to herself. What she couldn’t have understood at the time, however, was that her study of dance as a form of communication for feelings of which she was unable to speak, would share a deep parallel in the work she would do in the future after college. But that journey to college and beyond first took another devastating twist, where Marie came face to face with an abrupt end of her dancing life. Marie Haas – 06:52We are rehearsing for a production at the performing arts high school that I went to. Um, and in the middle of this rehearsal, I get dropped. I landed pretty square on the center of my spine. For what felt like a really long time I couldn’t move, but I was in a lot of pain. I didn’t think that anything was broken. I wasn’t bleeding. And so I drove myself home eventually. Um, and then the next day, uh, went to the hospital to have some x-rays done and it didn’t show that anything was broken or that anything was off, but that I should take it easy. Um, but I didn’t really do that. In that particular time of my life. I really believed that, you know, part of this practice is pain and that you have to get back up and keep going. And that that’s part of it. And so I pushed myself, um, to continue rehearsing and continue dancing and to struggle through the injury. Marie Haas – 09:00But as a result, at that performance that we had been preparing for, at the end of a piece, I ended up collapsing and my entire back just gave out. We found out that a bunch of the tissues and ligaments around my spine had been torn and had were bleeding, essentially. And at that point I actually had to stop dancing altogether. I was also told that I probably wouldn’t be able to dance in the same way moving forward or in the future. I was also, never mind this performance, I was also in the midst of applying to colleges and a lot of colleges that had, um, more conservative dance programs that would ultimately thrust you into the performative world of professional dance. And it sounded like at the time that that really wasn’t going to be an option for me. And so that was incredibly heartbreaking and upsetting to feel like the, the thing that I had been working my entire life for at least, you know, since I was nine or 10, um, was just going to completely disappear before it had ever come to fruition. Chris Straigis – 09:58Years of hard work, the voice she had developed through this art form seemed gone and a flash. Faced with the end of her future in ballet, she, once again did what she had to do, she adapted. As the old saying goes, when one door closes, another opens up and for Marie, this is where the doors would begin to open. Marie Haas – 10:24At the time two of my dance teachers, um, at the performing arts school were primarily, um, modern dancers or contemporary dancers. And they also had a lot of experience in improvisation and in different types of improvisation. They came to me and said, “Hey, why don’t you take a couple of classes in this? And here’s some books…” And I worked with them closely and started experimenting with improvisation, and a little bit with composing and making my own dances. They were also floating ideas about different kinds of colleges and places that I could go and study, and Bennington College happened to be one of them. And so I started looking into Bennington College and was reading about Susan Sgorbati, who is at the time, one of the, uh, dance, um, professors there. And she was teaching emergent improvisation, the idea of spontaneous composition, or composing in the moment. And I think ultimately, you know, the improvisation work became the way in which I could really find catharsis in the process of creation. Chris Straigis – 12:03Marie ended up choosing Bennington College in Vermont, after all it was Susan Sgorbati’s program that gave her a new path, so it seemed like a perfect fit. And during her time there, her new chosen style of expression, improvisational dance, would also lead her down another unexpected path. One that would open her eyes to a different, more science-based aspect of communication. This revelation would prove to be key in what was to come. Marie Haas – 12:34In my senior year, I was collaborating with my long-time dance partner and best friend, Emily Climer on a duet practice, an improvisational duet practice, that we call the Recall Form, and is about cultivating what I was saying before this, this empathy that brings us into partnersh

    33 min

  3. 23/07/2020

    Ruh Global Impact

    In the mid- 1980’s, Debra Ruh was nurturing a successful career in the banking industry and looking forward to starting a family. But in 1987, her path took an unexpected turn after the birth of her daughter Sara. And today, that path has led her around the world to work with multi-national  companies, nations, the UN and more. As an advocate for accessibility and inclusion, Debra has dedicated her life to improve the lives those with disabilities. LINKS: Ruh Global Impact website Debra’s Podcast – Human Potential At Work Debra’s bookstore ADA.gov Full Transcript Chris Straigis – 0:02Welcome to Scrappy, the podcast about small companies doing big things. I’m your host, Chris Straigis. We’ve been working hard to collect stories and interviews for our second season. But in light of all the recent changes we’ve been going through from politics to pandemics to protest, we’ve decided to change things up a bit. Instead of waiting to launch a whole new season that would run over just 10 short weeks, we are instead going to let loose a new episode continuously each month or so. And in that way, get more great stories out more often. And I couldn’t think of a better place to start this season, then a big anniversary that our country has coming up this weekend. One you may not even be aware of. Chris Straigis – 0:5230 years ago, on July 26 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed into law The Americans with Disabilities Act. This groundbreaking legislation was the world’s first comprehensive civil rights law for people with disabilities. It would usher in a new era of rights, freedoms and care for one of our nation’s greatest untapped citizen resources. And it would bring into the fold an entire segment of our society that had for too long been marginalized, stigmatized, and second class. But 1990 was not the end of this work really, it was just the beginning. And today, the work continues with more momentum than ever before. And with a new era of advocates on the front lines, advocates like Debra Ruh. Debra Ruh – 1:44My name is Debra Ruh, and I’m the CEO and founder of Ruh Global Impact. Chris Straigis – 1:49Debra is kind of an unexpected hero in this fight. In the mid 1980s, she was nurturing a successful career in the banking industry and looking forward to starting a family. But in 1987, her path took an unexpected turn after the birth of her daughter Sarah. Before too long, she found herself forging her own way, employing an internal drive to help those in need – a drive that had long been waiting just below the surface. Chris Straigis – 2:19Debra, thank you for joining me today. There is so much that I look forward to learning about the work and advocacy that you’ve been doing for two decades now. But if we could, I want to start just a bit earlier. A young Debra Ruh was just coming of age in the turmoil of the late 60s and early 70s. How would the Debra of today describe that time and that little girl growing up in the deep south? Debra Ruh – 2:48Well, that’s a great, great question, Chris. And thank you so much for having me on your show, I really like your podcast. I am a baby boomer and I’m the later part of the baby boomers. And so I, the Vietnam War was going on and all the protests were going on and the hippie movements and burning the bras. And a lot of that was happening when I was in elementary school, in the beginning of, beginning into the middle school. Even then there was a lot of fighting about truly including African Americans in our society and why were we segregated, segregating everyone. And so there was a lot of turmoil. And there was a lot of turmoil, unfortunately, in my family, because my mother really, really struggled with mental health issues. And she was diagnosed as borderline personality disorder, which is a, it’s a really, really tough one. And she did, she did the very best she could and I understand that as an adult, but as a child, as a child, we just never knew what was going to happen from moment to moment, day to day. It was very turbulent inside the house. And so the outside world was just some other place that I didn’t completely understand. But it seemed like there was a lot of turmoil happening out there as well. Debra Ruh – 2:59In the midst of all that though, By the mid 70s, you were at the precipice of adulthood. And you were ready to sort of shape your future. What did you want to be when you grow up? Debra Ruh – 4:29Well, I wanted to be, I really wanted to be a journalist, even though I wasn’t a great writer, but I wanted to be a journalist. And then I thought, wait a minute, no, I think I’m gonna be a police officer because police officers, you know, help people and save the world. But I remember my father saying to me, no, you you can’t be a police officer Debra, you you won’t be able to handle it. Your heart is too tender. It’ll crush you. And so then I remember moving more to okay, I’m gonna be a psychiatrist. So I knew, I always knew I wanted to help people. I knew I wanted to make a difference. But at the same time, I was never encouraged to go to school and go to college. My family didn’t have a lot of money, so it was never, ever anything we talked about. We weren’t really encouraged to think about what’s your career and where you’re going to go. Debra Ruh – 5:21My both of my parents retired, they work their whole life and retired from AT&T. And when, when I graduated from high school, I graduated in 77, and my mom got me a job at AT&T. I was an overseas operator, so I was in that you see it in the shows the big switchboards, and people are plugging in the wires and stuff. I made really good money that time. I was making $35,000 a year plus expenses, which was great money… and I hated every single second of it. So after I did it for a year I thought, I’m doing this, and I quit. And I became a waitress. And I started working my way through college. But everybody was shocked, especially my mom. And she was so mad at me when I quit this really good job, but I just didn’t want to spend my whole life doing that. And so I guess I was a little bit of a renegade. Chris Straigis – 6:23You were in the mid 1980s. You’re in your mid 20s. You’re making good money before you quit. You met, where did you meet your husband? And when did you get married? Debra Ruh – 6:32I met him in the restaurant business. So when I quit AT&T, I went and started working at a restaurant. It’s not around anymore, but some people might remember it was called Victoria Station. And they had the best prime rib, it was the best prime rib. And it was modeled after the Victoria Station cars and so they actually would have a train, part of a train as part of the restaurant. I remember the first I met my husband when he had just moved there from Atlanta. I loved that he had such a gentleness about him and he felt very, very safe to me. And so that was very, very attractive, somebody that seems so stable and calm and, and gentle. And he is still that same way. We’ve been married 38 years in September. Debra Ruh – 7:27Unfortunately, my husband now has early onset dementia, because when he was a child when he was 11 years old, he was just getting a kite going, and if any of us anybody that’s ever gotten a kite, you finally get it going and get the airs lifted in as lifted though, you know, it’s flying. And he was running with it and he ran in front of a car, and the car hit him. He was 11. It threw him 750 feet. He actually died on the scene. They brought him back. They took him to the hospital, he was in a coma for a couple of weeks. And then he didn’t go back to school for months. And when he did go back to school, things were different for him. He used to be a straight-A student, and he was then you know, a medium student. Debra Ruh – 8:14And so, unfortunately, even though we have these amazing brains that rewire and figure out how to work around an injury, his brain was still very, very seriously injured. And so as he aged, the, the brain has aged into dementia. And that’s, that’s been a very interesting, you know, path. At the same time, but he still grew up, got married, had two children that worked, you know, in telecommunications, and so there was a success story, but it’s just now it’s, it’s so hard for him. It’s very hard for him, and it’s been hard for all of us. But there’s also beauty in it. There’s a very interesting beauty in this, this, this trip to this journey. Because my husband that was always there and gentle and kind and happy, um, not quite as high strung as his wife, he’s still there. But he’s lost a lot of processing abilities, but the soul, the person that he, that I fell in love with is still there. He still knows me. He still thinks I’m great. He’s still you know, he’s so patient with me. But so it’s interesting walking this because the person that makes him so important to me is still there. Chris Straigis – 9:39So, again, we’re gonna, I’m trusting my math here so you’ll correct me if I’m wrong, on a beautiful Easter day, I believe in 1987, you gave us to a daughter Sarah. Debra Ruh – 9:53Yes. Chris Straigis – 9:55As as happens to anyone on their first child, and I can speak from experience, there’s a seismic shift. There’s, there’s a beauty and optimism for life and future, mixed though, with an absolute fear of not knowing what actually being a parent really means. I’m sure that like anyone else, you get that vision in your mind of a healthy, happy child growing up to be a productive, successful adult. It can be a really magical time, but in just a few short months, before you even settle down from that first seismic event, an even bigger one was about to hit. One that literally changed the course of your life. So can you tell me a little b

    34 min

  4. 18/06/2020

    Everyday Masks

    Staci Tinkelman and Becky Pyles realized early in the Covid-19 pandemic that masks were going to become a critical need – not just for front-line medical staff, but for the community at large. By combining Becky’s sewing talents and the infrastructure at Staci’s printing company, Quaker Chroma Imaging, they realized that they could help those in need, and get some of their people back to work. LINKS: Quaker Chroma Website Full Transcript Chris Straigis – 0:01Welcome to Scrappy the podcast about small companies doing big things. I’m your host, Chris Straigis.So far 2020 has been a year of, shall we say, changes. We woke up in January, got our coffee, went to work, met with friends for drinks, watched the games. But by March, we could hardly recognize this world as new routines took over in what seemed to be like an instant. And we also had some trouble recognizing each other due to the rapid cultural shift of wearing masks. Early in the pandemic masks were front and center as news of shortages became the lead story. Becky Pyles – 0:47I did reach out to them actually to say “Hey, is this something that you need?” and they were all desperate. The need was starting to increase by the day. Chris Straigis – 0:56At first, it was just for medical professionals. The folks on the front line. But a small team from a fabric printing company in New Jersey saw a bigger picture. And with it, they saw a unique opportunity to get some of their team back to work and provide resources for people in need. Staci Tinkelman and Becky Pyles pooled their resources, their talent and their business infrastructure at Quaker Chroma Imaging to start a new product line called Everyday Masks. Staci Tinkelman – 1:26My name is Staci Tinkelman. My positioned at Quaker Chroma Imaging is Vice President of Digital Imaging. And my position at Everyday Masks is Co-Owner. I want to shout out to Becky Pyles. Becky Pyles – 1:41I am the Head of Sewing Department, and at Everyday Masks I am co owner. Staci Tinkelman – 1:47She is our head seamstress our Head of Sewing Department, and she is amazing at figuring out difficult structures, giant structures, how they’re going to be sewn. That’s not an easy thing to do. With darts and turns and corners and things, a lot of stuff has to happen. And she’s amazing at that. Chris Straigis – 2:04How many employees does Quaker Chroma have? Staci Tinkelman – 2:08Anywhere between 30 and 40 at any given time. Quaker Chroma Imaging has been around for quite a while in that it was originally two separate companies. And they formed, they merged together I think about 2004. And since then, it was a great partnership. We went through trials and tribulations with the economy over the years. We moved out to Jersey from Center City. We were going gangbusters just building building building until you know the COVID-19 happened. Chris Straigis – 2:39Your businesses chugging along at the beginning of 2020. And then all of a sudden COVID-19. Obviously, it was spreading around the world. News of things starting to shut down here in the States came pretty quickly. So walk me through what you were doing at that point. And how you guys were we’re sort of talking about how you were going to handle what seemed to be coming? Staci Tinkelman – 3:06COVID-19 came and everything shut down. And we had to leave. Becky’s at home making mass because people, nurses and people know she sews, and they’re asking her “I’m desperate I need it.” They don’t have any PPE, they need something. Hospitals are saying ‘go out and buy bandannas in the store.’ Craig and her were talking about this and they’re like “we could do this we could make these things, help people and keep people busy and and do something about it.” Becky Pyles – 3:33And need was great for people to get masks in hand that didn’t have any PPE available to them. So they were my very first customers. And then it spread quickly. To the couple of nurses in my circle or medical staff in my circle. I did reach out to them actually say “Hey, is this something that you need?” and they were all desperate. The need was starting to increase by the day. In working with the nurses, I came up with a sized option where the mask actually fits over your face by the size of your face. So small, medium, large based on, and extra large, based on your frame of your face. That way the mask can actually go underneath the PPE that they’re supplied. And then for people in less risky situations, it was the only mask they’re wearing. And it was before the general public was even wearing masks that we started into production. So I went back to work check in let him know I was working on and brought this idea back, saying we could definitely do this. This is something that we can help, we can get masks out there. And the track was on trend to see that the regular public was going to need them as well. This wasn’t going anywhere. Working with our capabilities, which is printing, we were able to offer really unique designs really play the print to the scale of a mask, which you can’t just do with fabric. The downside of doing masks for myself from home is, I could have gone and bought fabric from Joanne’s but they the commercially available materials are getting harder and harder to source. So going wholesale with the materials really made a big difference on the quality and quantity of fabric we can get. So the ability to bring other sewers who were all at home sewing their own masks for their own friends and family and make it available to the public at large. That was really the goal is to get it out into as many hands as possible and make the shift that we’re not used to. It’s a cultural shift to cover our faces that but unnecessary one unfortunately these times. Chris Straigis – 5:58When you decided to work through the company through Quaker Chroma to start utilizing this the scale basically scaling up what you were doing and utilizing the the potential of bulk fabric. What, how did you sort of land on the materials you were going to use? Aside from the the idea of of printing on them, what was… Were there specifications or regulations you had to consider when when you were thinking about you know, PPE for medical professionals? Becky Pyles – 6:33I product just to preface it’s not PPE for medical professionals. It is an added convenience for them or or an option when PPE isn’t available, or trying to extend the life of it. We don’t, we can’t say that it’s PPE in any way. You know, I’m saying it’s not licensed, it’s not CDC, it’s not anything along those lines. We chose the fabrics that we use primarily based off of the guidelines that were set across, there were like CDC type guidelines. There were people who are nurses who were making patterns saying what they needed or wanted out of a mask. Most of them boiled down to a couple of factors – they wanted cotton if being used in the medical facility because it can tolerate very high heat when it’s being sterilized. So they want to be able to wash it and have it wear well and not break down in the sterilization process. So cotton mask is definitely something we wanted to offer in case they weren’t being used in an augmentation of the PPE. But we definitely want to go with multi layer because it adds more protection. It’s best practice you know, in best practice, multi layer is better for you than single layer. Chris Straigis – 7:51How did you decide on what patterns to use in terms of the design? Staci Tinkelman – 7:56Becky, and I picked suggestions of what we thought people would want, you know, American flag, camo, different things. And even to this, to today we’re looking at switching it out and putting new ones in and changing things up. Just because of what we see out there what we think maybe younger people might want. It’s sort of funny how Becky and I are, you know, Becky’s younger than me, I’m the old person here. But um, what I print out a couple different options and there’s a lot of the girls here that are sewing and guys that are sewing are younger than us and we’re like, what do you like? Becky Pyles – 8:35We did get input from the sewing department and many of them have been through fashion design school so their eyes pretty good. So when we pulled ideas, we did like a little bit of a vote when people first got back saying what do you like, but we had pulled quite a few designs to pick from but we got some input from the 20 somethings to help us stay on trend. Chris Straigis – 8:58How many people do have sewing currently, doing masks? Becky Pyles – 9:0313, 13 sewers. Chris Straigis – 9:05You brought 13 people back? Becky Pyles – 9:08Yeah, well, more than that, because there’s the support staff, but there are 13 seamstresses, we brought back to sew. Chris Straigis – 9:16And how many masks have you made to date? Becky Pyles – 9:18Oh goodness. Staci Tinkelman – 9:20So here’s the thing, we do make both the cotton and the printed masks. And we do make more than, like, especially the cotton mask, because those a lot of the ones we’re donating, we make a lot more than we sell, because we do donate a lot of them. So it’s hard to… Becky Pyles – 9:38We’ve given away more than 1800 already. We’ve we’ve managed to connect with the Center for Family Services in New Jersey, and we’re able to donate to the group homes and the foster care system. So it’s been really good, fulfilling to help these groups that wouldn’t otherwise have had the resources to purchase this many masks Chris Straigis – 10:01These are washable, right? Staci Tinkelman – 10:03Absolutely, a hundred percent. Actually the cotton masks when you wash them are even more because they’re a little stiff at

    13 min

  5. 26/05/2020

    Federico’s Pizza

    Michael Morin and his brother Bryan were beginning to gear up for a new year at their family-owned pizza shop in New Jersey. Then, out of the blue, Covid-19 changed the scope of what their bustling business would look like going into the Spring of 2020. Faced with state mandated closure of walk-in businesses, their first thoughts were of the 20 employees that were the cornerstone of their success. So, following the advice of their father to “always take care of the people who take care of you”, they took quick action to secure a $50,000 loan to ensure that they wouldn’t lose any staff. When word got out of their selfless act, the public response was immediate. LINKS: Federico’s Pizza Website Full Transcript Chris Straigis  – 0:01 Welcome to Scrappy, the podcast about small companies doing big things. I’m your host, Chris Straigis. Michael Morin  – 0:09 My father always said take care of the people that take care of you. These guys and girls that work for me are all just top shelf. And without them, I don’t have a business. Chris Straigis  – 0:21 It’s been a little while since we wrapped up our first season. In case you missed it, you can go to scrappypod.com to hear the inspiring stories from 10 pretty amazing people. A lot has changed since then. The global pandemic from COVID-19 has affected just about every aspect of our lives. And we’ve had to adapt the best way we can. Throughout this spring in summer, we’re busy building our next season. But in the meantime, we’ve heard so many great stories about ordinary people in small businesses, stepping up their game to take care of others. So we decided to do a couple of many episodes to bring some of those folks to light. Mike Morin is co owner of Federico’s Pizza in New Jersey. When the governor made the decision to close most walk in businesses in an effort to curb the spread of COVID-19, Mike and his brother Bryan sprung into action, in an effort to take care of the people that work for them, even while Bryan caught the virus as well. Michael Morin  – 1:24 My name is Michael Morin. I am co owner of Federico’s Pizza in Belmar, 700 Main Street, Belmar, New Jersey. Federico has been in business, I think we’re going on 25 years now. So we’re pretty much established. Chris Straigis – 1:30 It’s a family business, right? Michael Morin  – 1:42 Yeah. My father was always, you know, in the corporate trucking industry. And he, you know, it’s just like a lot of other people they, you know, corporate burns you out. So he said, you know, let’s do something on the side. You know, he had four kids. So and three of us were going through college at the time. And that’s pretty much when we bought it. It was a small store we did a lot of pickup delivery there was only like maybe say 7 tables in the front. So I think it was 16 or 17 years ago. We bought the building diagonal across the street, which was much bigger. Inside we have 80 seats. Outside we have a patio areas that’s has an awning. So in the summer, we open up the patio. So it’s been it’s been good to us. Chris Straigis – 2:34 How many how many pizzas do you make on an average day? Not counting COVID average? Michael Morin  – 2:40 Yeah, yeah. On the average? I mean, like a Friday night you’ll do you know 300. In the summer, you know, you know, a couple hundred pies maybe maybe a night? Yeah. And we do a lot of dinners on Saturday. It’s funny Friday nights pizza night, Saturday nights dinner night. Chris Straigis  – 3:05 So let’s dive in a little bit to what we’re talking about today. When you noticed COVID was going to start to present a challenge and and the restrictions were going to start to present a challenge at the very beginning, how were you expecting it to play out? What did you think was gonna happen in terms of from the business front? Michael Morin  – 3:28 So we figured we’d be okay, because like our dining room is more, it’s a lot busier like Friday, Saturday, obviously all year, but in the summer, it’s a lot busier because you get more more of a crowd during the week. It was you know, sporadic, but we thought we’d be okay but we didn’t realize the extent of you know, it’s the first time we ever you know, the government steps in says you got to close your restaurant. Once that hit it was like, ‘holy crow,’ because I think that hit I think we had to close, I think it was on March, I think it was St. Patty’s Day. I think it’s when they they locked us down, and said, you know, you’re pretty much, there’s no inside seating. And then with that we do a lot of catering. So it took took a huge hit, like, you really you weren’t prepared? Nobody? No, you know, you look around, everybody’s like, you know, you can close for two weeks, a month, whatever. And then how are these people going to survive? Chris Straigis  – 4:28 How many employees do you have? Or did you have at the time? Michael Morin  – 4:31 We have 20. We get a couple more waitresses in the summer, just because like I said, the inside’s a lot busier. That’s pretty much what we keep on. Chris Straigis  – 4:41 You decided at some point to take out a loan as a way to shore up the business to make sure that your employees were taken care of what was walk me through a little bit of the the thought process behind that. Michael Morin  – 4:55 It’s funny, that, it was basically, it was a, it was a two minute discussion, like, ‘hey, Bry, you know, you want to, let’s make sure we have money aside to take care of the people that take care of us all year, and that they’ve helped us through some really harsh times. So let’s, let’s just take money out, and then we’ll put it aside. If we don’t need it, we’ll give it back if, you know, let’s just have it, just in case we need it. And I was like, okay, and that was it. We went got it done. Chris Straigis  – 5:32 Because that’s what you’re supposed to do, right? You don’t I mean, because it’s, it’s supposed to take care of, you know, the people that are there for you, you know, so for him, and I was kind of like that, you know, it wasn’t even a second thought it was just like, because that’s what you should do. You know? So, how did the community respond overall? Michael Morin – 5:53 I was amazed, like, you know, I guess, it was funny, my my delivery guy you know, [unclear] you know, as soon as the story hit, we’re getting calls from all over the United States. People just call and saying ‘thank you,’ people wanting to donate. And we’re like, well, we’re not… the first night I had to go down there. I was off, it was a Sunday. And I kept trying to call to get through and I couldn’t get through. So I went down there. And I ended up staying and working because they was phones were off the hook. And my brother looked at me, he’s like, ‘Mike, I don’t know what’s going on.’ He said, ‘I’m getting calls from like Arkansas. I’m getting calls from Florida like they want to donate. What are we going to do?’ I said, ‘I don’t know Bryan like we’re not taking donations, we didn’t do this for like for donations.’ And then at that point, we said, you know what, like, I was, like I said, it was like a two second conversation. I’m like, ‘you know what, Bry? Let’s take the donations. It’ll keep our people working and we’ll donate the food. We’ll donate the food to the hospitals, the the to police the fire EMTs in the town. So we got the word out there. You know, we were doing that and people started donating more and we ended up… We go to the hospital, we were in the beginning, for the first month, it’s twice a day. Now we scale back we go at least once a day with donated food. My guys are working. So we got we’ve been taking care of the hospitals. Chris Straigis  – 7:26 You ended up having to close your business for about 10 days, I think right? Because your brother and co owner tested positive. Michael Morin  – 7:34 Yeah, yeah. That was, um, that was a little crazy because he, he was fine. Then he went home. And then in the morning, I got a call. And he said, ‘I don’t really feel good.’ I was like, all right, well, let’s figure this out. And he goes, he’s like ‘my, I have a little fever and a cough.’ I go Alright, so we’re closing because that’s what you’re supposed to do. If anyone has symptoms or whatever, I’m not gonna put it, we don’t want to put anybody else in jeopardy. So we made the decision within a couple minutes. We said, ‘you know what, we’ll just close it, figure it out.’ He’s gonna go get tested and, and go from there. And thank God we did because he ended up having it. I think it was the right call people were like, but you know, some people were saying, ‘well, you don’t have to close it’ and like even the doctors are saying, ‘well, technically, you don’t have it because you didn’t get the test.’ We’re like, it doesn’t matter. Like we have to close it because I’m not putting anyone else in jeopardy. Like I don’t care. You know, do you have a symptom, you close it. You figure it out later because I noticed you know, a lot of places you know, you see it now the Meatpacking industry, all that stuff like where they’re, they’re making people go to work and it’s just keeps going and just yet spreading and getting worse. Chris Straigis  – 8:58 So how’s your brother doing? Did he did he get very sick Michael Morin  – 9:02 He had a cough for two days and he had a mild fever like 101. That was it for like two days and then he was good. You know, he stayed out for like two weeks. And then we just decided 10 days because the doctor, we spoke with fou

    15 min

  6. 23/01/2020

    ICAN

    Henry Salinas was called to service throughout his life – helping to tend farms with his parents as a boy, joining the Army as a young man and raising a family of his own. Then, he found an even greater mission: devoting his time, energy and passion to helping children in his hometown of Chandler, Arizona, find a better way forward than with the drugs and gangs that were destroying their neighborhoods and stealing their futures. He became a staple of his community and devoted himself to building a better path for countless kids. Henry passed away in 2017, but his legacy lives on. LINKS: ICAN Donate! Full Transcript Chris Straigis – 0:01From AAC Studios, welcome to Scrappy, the podcast about small companies doing big things. I’m your host, Chris Straigis. Chris Straigis – 0:16Henry Salinas, embraced and embodied the idea of service – service to his country, service to his community, and service to his family. He passed away in 2017. But his son Fernando, speaks of him with reverence and legacy. Fernando Salinas – 0:36A lot of the kids that were going to the Boys and Girls Club, you know, they were showing up with their bandanas and different colors, and there was a rival gangs showing up and, you know, in an effort to try to keep the peace, you know, so that the younger kids were not involved in any violence or affected by any violence from these teenagers. You know, he is just thought like I need to I need to do something I need to, I need to help these kids, they need it. Chris Straigis – 1:09Today we’ve arrived at Episode 10, the final episode of our first season. And I’d like to thank you for coming along to meet these incredible and inspiring people, each, in their own way are trying to make the planet a better place in ways both big and small, because they all have the drive to build a better world. Chris Straigis – 1:33You know, every so often, if you’re lucky, you may get a chance to meet a motivator like Jennifer Lynn Robinson, or innovators like Julie & Scott Brusaw of Solar Roadways, or a game changer like David Katz of Plastic Bank. Our goal here at Scrappy is to give you the chance to meet lots of these kinds of folks. If you haven’t yet, please go back and listen through the rest of the season to learn more about what makes the people tick. Then connect with us on Facebook and Twitter to hear updates about Season Two, which will be coming out a bit later this year. And it’s not too late to drop us a note if you know someone who might be a great fit to feature on an upcoming show. Chris Straigis – 2:20As a young boy, Henry Salinas left school to help tend farms with his family in the American Southwest. His tack towards service was evident, even way back then. Fernando Salinas – 2:35My father was born and Lubbock, Texas, his parents were migrant farm workers. They used to migrate, his family, his parents used to migrate working in the farms and the agriculture, migrating to California, Texas, Arizona. And they settled in Arizona when he was about four years old and then he started growing up and Chandler, going to the schools. He spoke Spanish first, you know and even though he was a proud American, never forgot that story where he went to kindergarten and he didn’t know how to, you know, ask to go use the restroom and he learned how to speak English. He sued to always say, like “you can learn really fast.” Chandler at that time was a very small town – mainly a lot of farms and, and agriculture there. Eventually he had to leave school early, I think around the eighth grade to to help out the family. So he was always, you know, raised with hard work. He was always a sociable person. He was always a joy to be around if you ask people that knew him when he was young. Chris Straigis – 3:52At 19. Henry found good work at a military base and would eventually see a new path to service. This time for his country. Fernando Salinas – 4:04He had started working at Luke Air Force Base, which was a base in Chandler. I think it’s closed now, was working there. He had got married, I think he was 17 or 18 years old, got married young, to a woman named Yolanda. And, you know, shortly after that, he enlisted in the army and, and they started training to go to, to Vietnam. So, went through boot camp, and they were scheduled to fly out just a few weeks later, and they had gotten his, you know, notice that his wife was given labor and that she was having some difficulty and so, the army had given him a permission to go down to see his wife and she ended up passing away during birth. And a couple days later, his his first son Henry, also passed away. Chris Straigis – 5:13Henry would stay in California for a few more years, finishing his stint with the army and eventually remarrying. And though the trauma of losing his first wife and child was always with him, he would once again start to build a family having two children before moving the family out of California, and back to his roots in Chandler, Arizona. Fernando would be born soon after. Fernando Salinas – 5:38In Chandler at that time, you had its old parts and it’s kind of newer parts. And we had bought the house in the newer side of Chandler. So that on that growing up on that street was like, like The Wonder Years, you know, like there were so many middle class families, everybody had kids, you know, just all around the same age everybody go outside and play kick the can, hide and seek. And so we, all this, just this one mile long street, you know, of kids of different ages just grew up with each other. And for many for many years, it was just a great, great time growing up. And so, you know, we grew up we played sports, he always, you know, kept us involved in sports. He volunteered at the Boys and Girls Club, got us into the Boys and Girls Club, went to church. Fernando Salinas – 6:36And he started the Thanksgiving meals and started doing that annually. I mean, just these terrific meals, I mean, he would, you know, cut all the watermelon and different shapes, you know, and just like if it was a, you know, five star hotel. and so, you know, a lot of the inner-city families would go in, they would just get this, you know, grand meal that was just, you know, lavish for you know, just for any standards, like in the ham and everything was just amazing, amazing, you know, everybody that showed up the people, the families that showed up the business, you know, volunteers are like, what, how is this? And he would organize, you know, use his recipes, but he would organize people that were volunteering and you know, just really lead them and motivate them and just, you know, have this beautiful energy. Chris Straigis – 7:35The Salinas family had settled into their life in Chandler, and Henry was becoming a staple of the community. But it was a rapidly advancing world, the 80s and early 90s would see a fast moving national evolution taking place. And with these unprecedented changes came some unexpected challenges. Fernando Salinas – 8:04So the early 90s, if you remember the, there’s a lot of gangs that started, you know, it just started happening, you know, the movies that were coming out the music, you know? And so things started changing and it depended on what, you know, kind of what area, the neighbor of Chandler, you you grew up in, whether you saw it on a regular basis or not. So, um, you know, a lot of the gang started happening. So you had, you know, some older established gangs in Chandler already, um, and they weren’t really, you know, as violent as it started happening in the early 90s. And then you had, you know, other groups that were not necessarily gangs, but just big groups of friends. But because of the gangs, you know, as they would go to festivals or, you know, concerts, you know, anytime there was a big group of guys, you know, it would always, you know, clash with others, you know, like were, you know, they would start asking where are you from, and, and whether they were associated with the gang or not, a fight would ensue. And so, a lot of these groups that were not gangs started kind of turning into gangs just to protect themselves, you know, and so it just kind of grew, you know, out of that, and, you know? So growing up, you know, I started seeing, you know, a lot of things on our, on our street. I mean, There were drive-bys, you know, on a regular basis, a lot of things starting to happen. And you know, and a lot of people, a lot of us young people were desensitized to a lot of this that we were seeing out on the, on the streets, you know, and you know, in the movies and everything was just, it was just there. So it was just kind of part of life, you know? Fernando Salinas – 10:27my dad saw these things happening and the change and, you know, with a, you know, with with everybody, you know, with the community with his, his son me, you know, getting involved and becoming rebellious. And, you know, he wasn’t really like a big preacher, you know what I mean? He wouldn’t just, like preach to you and talk your ear off, you know? And you know ‘why you shouldn’t be doing this, you shouldn’t be doing this,’ you know, he would just lead by example, show love, and talk to you and get on your level and, you know, just be a friend to you and listen to you, you know, and somebody you can kind of open up to. He was at the Boys and Girls Club, and these things started happening. And a lot of the kids that were going to the Boys and Girls Club, you know, they were showing up with their bandanas of different colors. And there was a rival gangs showing up and, you know, in an effort to try to keep the peace, you know, so that the younger kids were not involved in any violence or affected by any violence from these teenagers. You know, he just stopped like I needed I need to do something. I need a need to he

    40 min

  7. 14/01/2020

    Feed the Barrel

    Hani White’s mother and grandmother made sure that cooking was a family event as she grew up near Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia. For them, cooking was a shared experience that strengthened family and community bonds. And in her part of the country, a great deal of that cooking involved readily available vegetable oils. Disposing that used oil was as simple as throwing it into a local trash pit. After immigrating to the US, Hani continued those same cooking traditions – but trying to dump her used cooking oils was much more complicated in the middle of a bustling city. With help from her neighbors, Hani has found a better way to repurpose the oils, helping the environment and bringing her community together in the process. LINKS: Feed the Barrel Eden Green Energy Weavers Way Co-op Philadelphia Citizens Planning Institute Full Transcript Chris Straigis – 0:01From AAC Studios, welcome to Scrappy, the podcast about small companies doing big things. I’m your host, Chris Straigis. Today we talk with Hani White, co-founder of Feed the Barrel, an organization in Philadelphia that collects used cooking oil to repurpose it into useful products like soap and biofuel, and keeps it out of landfills and water treatment facilities where it can create big environmental problems. Hani White – 0:31How about we do this for our kids? How about we do this for our next generation. This is a great opportunity to bring our community together to teach our kids about how they could contribute to American society. And at the same time, we’re going to make their Earth better. Chris Straigis – 1:01One of the most communal activities shared by our human cultures around the world is the experience of food – spending time cooking and eating with friends and family. Hani White is taking this shared experience to another level by coordinating her community around one specific aspect of food, or rather, a food preparation byproduct – used cooking oil. Feed the Barrel is a cooking oil recycling program that was started by Hani and some friends from her Indonesian neighborhood in South Philadelphia. They’re not only helping people avoid costly plumbing disasters, but they’re helping to protect the environment, creating new useful products from waste and, in the process, demonstrating how one small action can change a big city for the better. Feed the Barrel’s roots formed at the crossroads of cultures from two different sides of the globe. Hani White – 1:56When I was a kid, I ate anything and everything. I remember my mom say that like if there is an elephant in the room you going to eat those elephant, right? I am not a picky eater. I eat anything, but we ate a lot of vegetables. The thing is like my grandma grew a lot of vegetables, and meat, fish tend to be more expensive. So I remember that my mom usually purchased some meats but not a lot. She got it really small to share it with everyone but there is always either meat or fish or chicken. But the main thing is vegetables. I could not quite remember where when my mom never cooked. She cook sometime two times a day. And it’s always like, a family affair, right? She always took me to the market. She always took me in the kitchen. And another plus is my grandma, she grow her own food. So we have this full cycle right when my grandmother that lives with us have a garden in the side of the house that growing our own food, and then my mom go to market to buy the meat or the chicken or the fish, and we just combining it. It just so amazing that it’s such a playground for us. Cooking it’s become like a daily part of our lives. Chris Straigis – 3:36Growing up in Indonesia, Hani says that vegetables were a very common and very large portion of the meals. But how those vegetables were prepared depended largely on where in Indonesia you were. Hani White – 3:48Absolutely, lots of vegetable. The reason is, like I say it’s a very tropical country. Anything that we put underground it will grow like without even we taking care of. So it’s easy to have like multiple different type of vegetable. But the method of cooking itself is really different. Indonesia have 17,000 Island. So it’s really depend on where you live. If you live closer to the mountain, of course you ate a lot of vegetable and you steam it, but where I’m from as like, I’m in the capital city, and we not too close to the mountain and we not too close to the ocean. So we ate basically everything and the method of cooking, a lot of steaming, a lot of frying, and a lot of deep fried also, somehow, anything that we could think of, like there is always component of frying, either is for breakfast, lunch or dinner. Like you always have your steamed rice on the side. It might be like fried chicken or fried egg or fried beef. With the vegetable, the soup is always… like even the rice, if let’s say the rice from the previous day we not finishing up, the next day we fried it become a fried rice and that’s become our breakfast. And it’s always like frying with cooking oil. Hani White – 5:23Another reason why cooking we cook with a lot of oil because it’s easily available. We have a lot of palm oil production in Indonesia. And we do have a lot of coconut oil also. So it’s really depend on what kind of food like we could have like multiple different type of oil that we could use, and it’s easily available and it’s very affordable. And back then back home in Indonesia, because it’s tropical country, we always never really think like how to trash it, and there is no sophisticated trash system in Indonesia. We always have like in the backyard, we have like a big hole and we just dump our trash there. And then either we it’s become a compost, or we burned it. And it just as simple as that and we never think of it right? So my mom was like, “oh, the oil is too dirty,” she just trash it on the ground. And we don’t never without ever know that it’s could pollute the ground. It’s not part of our knowledge, I guess. And of course, as soon as you don’t see it in your house, you don’t think it’s your problems, goes to the water stream and it’s like it’s not, no longer our problem. It’s become like part of the part of the soil part of the land part of the whatever, but we never have that kind of education that is not good if you trash the oil just like that. Chris Straigis – 7:02in 1998, Hani immigrated to the United States with her family. But really her journey to America has started many years earlier when her father planted a seed in her head as a young child. Hani White – 7:14Since I was small, little kids, my father, he is, he adored United States as a country a lot. And as a few years old kids, I remember, he showed me like a beautiful book about United States, and he told me someday you’re going to be at this country. And he showing the picture of New York City, he showing the picture of Grand Canyon and multiple different parks, national parks in the United States. And I think my subconscious mind start working there. Chris Straigis – 7:50When she finally took the journey in the late 90s, Hani settled in South Philadelphia in a community of other Indonesian immigrants. Hani White – 7:58We are a smaller, very small community in South Philadelphia, the Indonesian community, really just that move it into Philadelphia after 1998. So we grow in community, and we start having, like, we start organizing ourselves. We say like we want to be successful immigrant community, we look at a different model with the Korean community, the Chinese community, the Vietnamese community, we start looking at those community that is like, oh my God, they are so advanced. They already have their own mall, they already have their own economic power, right? We want to do something that make a difference. Chris Straigis – 8:41Hani, like the rest of her community brought a love of her native foods with her to the States. They also brought the same methods of cooking, using various vegetable oils as a mainstay of the process. What Hani and her neighbors didn’t realize at the time, was just how different oil act when it runs through cold pipes here in the northeast us. Hani White – 9:03When we came to United States, we was thinking that like trashing the oil down the drain is not a big problem. That mentality because back home like I say it’s 90 degree, and we don’t basically computed here that it’s a different totally different climate, right? So we cook the same way, right, the way our mom cook. And when I moved to South Philadelphia, we knew that the infrastructure is really, really old, but we never really think it further than that. Just like oh, it’s an older pipe is an older type of home. And we just trash the oil the way our mom trash it back home, we pour it down the drain, right? Or sometime we just put it in a container and now we put it with our trash. There is no other, we do not know either way how to do it like, what is the better way? So then we start realizing that some people in different blocks have a clogged pipe. And, you know, as mothers, we talk about our house, and talking about our kids, right? And one day my two of my friends have a conversation at the school yard. Hani White – 10:27And we mentioned about like, here, my pipe is clogged and something happening, you know, and we have no clue what it is. And the other mother actually have their basement flooded. And what’s really funny is she worked for EPA. And she was like, wow, is not only my community problem, someone that work for EPA have the same problem. And we start having that conversation that like, Hey, I think I know the mother that work for EPA. She’s not saying that like I think I know what’s going on. And we like what’s going on, right? It’s like, did you put the oil down the drain and put

    31 min

  8. 20/12/2019

    SunFarmer

    As a young boy growing up in Nepal, Avishek Malla dreamed of being a famous athlete, a cricket champion. His career ended after college, though, and he took on a new passion. He garnered inspiration from carrying out some environmental work in rural areas of his home country, and had a medal bestowed upon him by a king. Today he helps his country’s residents pull power from the sun, and irrigate their once-dry fields. And his work is changing the lives and lifestyles of Nepal’s people. LINKS: SunFarmer See some of their projects here Get Involved Full Transcript Chris Straigis – 0:01From AAC Studios, welcome to Scrappy, the podcast about small companies doing big things. I’m your host, Chris Straigis. A quick note at the top – we will be off for the next two weeks for the holidays and releasing the last two episodes of this season in early January. Also, we’re in the process of building Season Two, which will be coming out in mid-2020. If you know someone you think would make a good guest for the show, please go to scrappypod.com, click the comment link on the top right and send us a note. We’d love to hear from you. Chris Straigis – 0:47Historically, anthropologists have defined four basic human necessities: food, water, shelter, and clothing. By many of today’s standards, you could argue that the list has grown a bit. But the basic premise is that there are certain things that make human life well, effectively livable. In this day and age, many of us in developed societies take these things for granted. We’ve designed and built massive systems that allow us to just turn on a faucet to get water, or flip a switch on the stove to cook food. And we don’t even have to think about where those resources come from. However, there are still so many parts of the world where these core needs can be a struggle to meet. Often, these are also places that are hit hardest by accelerating climate change. And they have very few ways to adapt to it. Chris Straigis – 1:41So the big question, how can we take our modern developed technology and put it into places where it’s needed most? Meet Avishek Malla. He runs a company in Nepal that works to provide the infrastructure for several of those basic human needs to be met. with ease, and some of the downstream effects of their work are surprising. Avishek Malla – 2:06My name is Avishek Malla, and I’m the CEO of Sunfarmer Nepal. Sunfarmer is a solar energy based social enterprise. It’s located in Kathmandu, Nepal. We have done over 2500 projects in various districts of Nepal of various sizes. We offer three types of services. The first service is a power purchase agreement, where we sign up purchase agreement with clients for systems of various sizes and we sell electricity for an agreed period of time. The second service we provide is turnkey service where we basically work as a EPC, engineering, procurement and construction. And the third service we provide is asset management. In this asset management model, it’s basically like 7we get funds from donor organizations or individual donors. And in their mandate, we execute the project from start to finish. Chris Straigis – 3:12Avishek is on a bit of a different path from where he started as a young boy in Nepal. Like many of us, the course of his life took a turn after his college years, some unexpected inspiration from a King helped illuminate that path, and landed him right back home where he started. Avishek Malla – 3:34When I was in my childhood, I always wanted to be a cricketer. I had a good career like local career playing cricket. So I was as captain of my university, we won several different tournaments. But, you know, like, in Nepal, I mean, you just cannot earn a living via sports. You know, even when I was doing my bachelor’s degree, I had absolutely no idea, you know, what are we doing? And, and I would never have thought that I’ll be working as a social entrepreneur. Like if I look back 10 years back and you know, after [I] completed my degrees or even though I was doing degrees, but what gave me the vision, the passion and the breakthrough was, was the first job that I did. Avishek Malla – 4:29So the first job I did after I left after I completed my graduation was to work in one of the most remotest areas of [the] Nepal homeland. And back then, you know, the nearest road connecting to that area was 16 days walk. The only way you could reach there was by plane, and the flights were very, very irregular and some days would not fly. And there, you know, I caught, you know, I was I was exposed and I got experience in implementing renewable energy technology for not only electricity, but for cooking for for drinking water, you know, for growing food with, you know, passing greenhouse technologies and those kind of things. And, you know, working with the community, you know, working with the technology, you know, it gave me this, it basically taught me that how important you know, a light is, you know, how important the energy is. Avishek Malla – 5:34And I was amazed to see like, how much change it can bring to, you know, one’s individual life and the society. So, I was like really thrilled with this holistic kind of approach and I that’s why I never see renewable energy as electron, I never see [renwable] energy producing electricity. I always see what services it’s going provide them and how can you make that service accessible to the, to the people in a in a, you know, in a in a model that is that is sustainable. And that benefits the society for long term. That whole thinking, you know, sort of like that seed was sown when I did that first job and, working there, you know, I was like very sort of like determined that I’m going to do my Masters in [Inari] and I will come back and you know, sort of see how this technology can you know, like, help improve the society. Back then we had we had, we had King, currently we don’t, so the King would, you know, provide gold medal to to the best student that has taught, you know, the whole country in their in their faculty. So I got that award from from the King and, and in that award there was this script that was mentioned, you know, it basically, if I translate it, basically says that, you know, “ones knowledge is not useful, or useless, if it’s not utilized to serve once country.” So that script basically, you know, like made me think and, and again, you know, this work that followed with working in that remote area, it’s sort of like, gave me the direction and passion to, you know, do something for the society with the knowledge I have. So, yeah, definitely, you know, that had, you know, quite deep influence in my life and every day, you know, like when I’m doing a project, I remember this script. Chris Straigis – 7:55Nepal is an ancient country. It’s geographically diverse, and home to more than 25 million people. It’s a landlocked region nestled between China and India, and boasts many notable historical features. It’s the birthplace of the Buddha, and home to some of the highest peaks in the world in the Himalayan Mountains. But overall, it’s still behind many parts of the developed world in terms of infrastructure. Today, for example, almost 40% of the population lives off the grid, not connected to the country’s utilities. Avishek Malla – 8:30When we started Sunfarmer back in 2014, electricity reliability was a very big problem. There was even, in the urban centers, there was more than 12 hours of power cut every day. You know, solar can be a very potential solution to address this problem, both on the off-grid side and also in the urban side, but the investment cost for installing solar was very high. And there was no financial mechanism at that period of time. And plus the systems that were installed at that time, which is I’m talking about 2014 you know, they were you know, largely smaller systems and you know, there was serious problems with the technical abilities of local technicians to execute quality installations. Avishek Malla – 9:24Our priority was to make solar affordable; not only affordable, but also ensuring that high quality work was done during installation and followed by very good operation and maintenance service, because there is no standard as such in Nepal for for good quality installation. I, um, when I started in Australia, there were you know, codes, you know, like standard practice codes and standards for solar installations. But in Nepal that was non existent, which resulted in In you know, non-functional systems over a very short period of time, and that was not creating a very good image of the technology in the country. So, we were addressing, you know, sort of like a holistic problem in the in the sector when we started. Avishek Malla – 10:15When we started creating the standard for our own projects and installations, we also, you know, we were also requested by the government body, which is the Alternative Energy Production Center, which is in Nepal, and with them, we created two standards. One was for the institutional solar photovoltaic system, which is basically focusing on the off-grid ruler captive installations. And the other was on on-grid side, so, basically for the focused on the urban centers on you know, grid-connected type of systems. So those two standards, we were very heavily involved in and collaborated with the government and they’re currently, you know, forming their policies and an instruction regulation on on on those documents. Avishek Malla – 11:16We have done a lot of projects in birthing centers and they’re, you know, the indicators that we measure is you know, the, the decrease in mortality rate, you know, the numbers of birth that has increased after the system intervention. And if I have to just look at the health sector, the latest number that we

    25 min

  9. 12/12/2019

    Jennifer Lynn Robinson

    Jennifer’s journey is quintessentially American. It’s a story of a daughter of hard-working, immigrant parents who came to this country and strove to make good in the land of opportunity – a daughter who followed in her father’s footsteps, fostering a family legacy and living the American Dream. Until, that is, a terrible accident changed the course of her life, and forced her to reckon with her new normal. Just like her parents and grandparents before her, she faced her challenges head on, and like the phoenix that rises from the ashes, she reinvented herself to make purpose out of tragedy. LINKS: Purposeful Networking Villanova Law Saved Me Animal Rescue Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania Bryn Mawr Rehab Hospital Full Transcript Chris Straigis – 0:02From AAC Studios, welcome to Scrappy, the podcast about small companies doing big things. I’m your host, Chris Straigis. Today, we’re heading back to the east coast, to my native Philadelphia, for a story that really is quintessentially American. The story of a daughter of hard working immigrant parents, who came to this country and put all of their effort into providing a life full of opportunity that they wouldn’t have found back home. And then that daughter taking the reins of that effort and making good – until fate changed her course. Chris Straigis – 0:41Jennifer was following in her father’s footsteps, building success in the field of law and giving back through community activism. But then, in an instant, a tragedy that irrevocably changed the course of her life, or more accurately forced her into a new life. While a situation like hers can knock even the toughest players out of the game, Jennifer drew on the strength inherited from her parents and grandparents and instead became the Phoenix that rose from the ashes. This is Jennifer Lynn Robinson. Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 1:15My business is purposeful networking. I’m the founder and CEO. Chris Straigis – 1:20Jennifer is a business networking expert, motivational speaker and moderator who’s been on CBS, NBC and Fox. And she’s been featured in Forbes, the Huffington Post, the Chicago Tribune and more. Her story of strength and endurance really begins with her parents and grandparents. Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 1:41I am first generation American so both my parents were immigrants and that definitely had a big impact on my childhood. My grandmother was amazing. So she, most of her family died in the Holocaust and her and one sister hid in a hole on a farm during the war. In exchange for seamstress work, and they survived the war, she met my grandfather. They had my father and fled Poland – an after-war kind of situation – and came into Ellis Island with nothing, with my father as a toddler. Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 2:16So my mom family is from Fez, Morocco and my dad from Krakow, Poland. Her family left in the late 60s Morocco because of anti semitism from the ruler there – said they were going to a wedding in Paris, took a suitcase with them left their house never came back. And my mother met my father in Israel. My father was there visiting with a law school classmate of his, and they met there. So I think for me, my parents, you know, knew what it was to have nothing. You know, grew up in kind of turbulent circumstances and education was really kind of the main thing you know, that was what was stressed in our house more than anything else. Chris Straigis – 2:57So for Jennifer, she grew up in a space where the emphasis was on hard work and education, these were the key to the American dream. Her parents put that into practice every day. Her dad working his way through law school, and her mom earning an advanced degree. Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 3:14My father, so he was a big trial lawyer, you know, very well known, and I would go watch him do trials, I would he taught at Temple law for a long time. So I would go watch him teach. And, you know, so from a very young age, I not only knew I wanted to be a lawyer, but I wanted to be a litigator or a courtroom lawyer, because that’s what he did. And that’s what interests me. I love to talk love to argue. So yeah, that was a path from a very young age. I wanted to go down. Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 3:45So he worked very hard to get there. And as a result, you know, to be honest, we didn’t see him much. He was always working. So yeah, he stressed education, but he really wasn’t around much. You know, we weren’t the kind of family that sat and had dinner together. My mom was the driving force. She had a PhD that she got when she was pregnant with my youngest sister, was working on it for years, and also spoke seven languages. She was, she’s passed away, but she was really impressive lady. And my parents split up when I was, I believe around 13 or 14. They had a very public long, bitter divorce that was on the press, and that made things very, very difficult for our family. Chris Straigis – 4:27Unfortunately, this was all too much a part of the American landscape too – a bitter divorce with her and her two sisters caught in the crosshairs, left to try and build their lives through the trauma. But Jennifer kept going, parlaying her ingrained focus on education into an acceptance to college. Though it was a bit of a rocky start. Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 4:49I got accepted to Temple and Villanova. I come from a Temple family, pretty much everybody went to Temple. And the idea of going to an urban school in the middle of the city just didn’t sit well with me. And it’s funny because I’m not that person at all now, but at the time, the idea of going down the road to the same, you know, suburban area I was in to go to Villanova had a lot more appeal to me. And, you know, I think what was wrong with it was, you know, I would say two things at the time. And again, this was many years ago, so things have changed at both schools. Villanova didn’t have any kind of trial program. And that’s what I wanted to do. I took a few classes there that were the first time they had offered, you know, trial advocacy, advanced trial advocacy. I was very much a minority there. I want to say there were somewhere around nine to 10 Jewish students. And I remember at one point going to a professor my first year telling them that I would have to miss class for High Holidays for Yom Kippur, and them pointing to the cross above them and saying, I chose to go to a Catholic school and they wouldn’t help me make up the work. Chris Straigis – 5:49She was also dealing with some unexpected medical issues in that first year of college. She told me how these almost derailed her momentum, but instead solidified her self confidence as a fighter. She had emergency surgery for her gallbladder and ended up missing most of her entire second semester. Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 6:10When I did come back, I got called them to the Academic Dean, and was asked to drop out and restart the year. And so at that point, you know, I took on, like most people, tons and tons of loans, and I said, ‘well, are you going to reimburse me the tuition for the year?’ And they said, no. And I said, ‘well, I’m not going to drop out.’ You know, I think that was kind of the start of me, being in a situation where somebody was telling me I couldn’t do something. And I was like, ‘try me’, you know? Chris Straigis – 6:36Jennifer realized that she wasn’t going to graduate with Honors, but that wasn’t going to stop her. While still in school, she landed a job as a law clerk with Cigna in their major litigation department. She knew this was a pretty big break considering many of her school colleagues were working in much more mundane positions. Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 6:56So I came out of college went directly to law school, and then while I was in law school, I got a job. I was Cigna down here in their major litigation department. I would go into Cigna, actually, three days a week and do all my classes two days a week, because, you know, I wanted the experience and I needed money. I felt very fortunate to get that job as a law clerk, because I would say the majority of my friends that had jobs during law school, they were making copies and, you know, making you know, looking at the case and analyzing it, maybe. I was fortunate in the people I worked for at Cigna, they gave me real work. Upon graduation, they hired me into their major litigation department, which was super interesting work, because at the time, that was tobacco litigation, environmental spills, product liability. It was very high-level and it was challenging. And so I feel like that was, you know, something great to start with as a young person. Jennifer Lynn Robinson – 7:47I started volunteering, actually with the Bar Association, and then through the Bar Association got involved with Community Legal Services. And it was, I mean, it could not have been farther from what I just described at Cigna. So basically, you know, as a volunteer attorney for them, my role was to have people come in and tell me their circumstances, which were all tragic and sad. And then based on the situation, even though they were all sad, I had to determine if they had the legal grounds to go in front of a judge and get immediate relief from what they were requesting. And, you know, that’s really hard, you know, when people are in bad circumstances, but you know, I would regularly hear about abuse and neglect and you know, a lot of situations where people were either at home kids at home with either no parent, or one parent or a boyfriend and the picture that was abusing them or something of that nature, lack of food resources, showers, you know, money, all kinds of terrible circumstances. Chris Straigis – 8:48So Jennifer had gotten some great experience with Cigna and conversely had seen a wh

    22 min

  10. 05/12/2019

    Plastic Bank

    Growing up on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada, the beach was David Katz’s playground; and his father, a merchant marine and craftsman, would take the young David on adventures out to sea. This upbringing instilled in him a love of the ocean and the precious beauty of nature. But as time passed, David noticed a growing problem – the constant flow of plastics and trash washing up on the shores. With the passion passed down from his father, and a natural tack towards problem solving, David decided to take matters into his own hands. He developed a plan to not just clean the beaches, but also to lift millions of people from poverty at the same time.  LINKS: Plastic Bank website A TED Talk with founder David Katz Turning the tide on waste with Shell Blockchain-based solution with IBM Partnership with product giant Henkel Environmental Stewardship with SC Johnson Full Transcript Chris Straigis – 0:02From AAC Studios, welcome to Scrappy, the podcast about small companies doing big things. I’m your host, Chris Straigis. Chris Straigis – 0:16Plastic is truly a game changing material. It has taken on infinite shapes and properties, and shown up in just about every corner of our lives. In fact, our modern world might not be nearly as advanced without its development. It’s inexpensive, it’s easy to produce, and it’s durable – It lasts a long time. But that durability is also one of the biggest problems with plastic. Once it’s made, it doesn’t really go away. It doesn’t dissolve, it’s not biodegradable; it will long outlive all of us. And unfortunately, an incredible amount of that long-lasting, man-made material is ending up in the world’s oceans and waterways. This is literally decimating plant and animal life and changing entire ecosystems. This is a big, complex global problem. But sometimes to solve a big complex problem, you need someone to see things from a different perspective. Chris Straigis – 1:23Today we’re talking to David Katz, founder and CEO of Plastic Bank. They’re an economic development firm that empowers disenfranchised communities by letting them exchange any type of plastic… for currency. His unique strategy solves two problems at once. It creates revenue in otherwise impoverished communities. And it helps clean up the plastic pollution that’s overtaking our seas. David grew up on Vancouver Island, Canada. As you might imagine, for someone who was raised surrounded by water, his love for the ocean sparked at a very young age. And that love was stoked by his father, a merchant marine, who taught David about a lot more than just fishing. David Katz – 2:15The family house was across the street from the beach, it was always my playground and on the way to school, I also walked along about a half mile long beach to get to school. I did that for a decade or so. And even as a kid as I walked that beach, play to the beach and walked it. Part of this story really is about those times because I was able to then as well witness garbage washing up on the beach. David Katz – 2:47So it’s been in my realm decades longer than most. My father was a mariner as well, he was Merchant Marine. And even in my youth as well, my father, the mechanical genius that he was, built a 47 foot sailboat from the hull up, by himself. And then sailed that to, you know, the very southern tips of Mexico, mostly by himself, but I joined him in that journey as well, sailing the ocean and encountering all the life that we would have encountered and, and then sailing back up, back up to the west coast of Canada. So that journey, of course, was a part of it. My parents were entrepreneurs, immigrants and entrepreneurs. And even as a child, you know, I attribute much of my creativity and entrepreneurship to a spark that my brother gave me when I was like 10. David Katz – 3:38We had this family business and he had these other ideas and like, oh, well, we could do this, and we could do that. Or we could open a poster store, which was really big when I was a child. And I was just, I was like, yes, of course, we can do that, that’s amazing. That sounds like a sense of freedom and creativity. And that was the spark. It was the new awareness that it became a possibility that even if could be… And I think that much of what we do in the Plastic Bank is a reflection of that as well. Where many people want to stand up and make a change in the ocean but don’t know how. And this is an opportunity for them to as well be a part of that change. And I really, I think that part of the conversation with everyone is that we’re the summation of all of our experiences and all of our decisions. We are today where we are as a result of everything that we have ever encountered. Chris Straigis – 4:39Of course, taking measures to protect the Earth with better waste management is nothing new. We’ve been recycling for decades, and more recent pushes like banning single use plastic bags or restaurants eliminating plastic straws have gained a lot of attention. But there’s an important distinction between these type of actions which address singular products and Plastic Bank’s purpose, which addresses greater societal dilemmas across the globe. David recognized early on that problems with plastics are much more acute, much more detrimental and much harder to address in some of the most socio-economically underdeveloped parts of the world. And he realize that this could be a two birds one stone kind of solution. David Katz – 5:30Straw bands are beautiful. Those are really nice. Not the issue, right? That’s not the cause of things. It’s nice, it’s good, it’s important. All those things are important. Poverty is the issue. A lack of opportunity, is the issue. Chris Straigis – 5:41David’s idea was unique because it wasn’t just about cleaning up the environment. Instead, it was about creating a new mindset and motivation around recycling and the opportunities that could unlock. David Katz – 5:58I think what I’m doing is easy in comparison, because nothing I’m doing is against the laws of physics. I don’t have to play with physics to figure it out. We could say the change of thinking sometimes it may be greater than the change of physics. But in this context, it’s really about not convincing anyone against their will to do anything. It’s really this transformative opportunity where within the collection communities, they see something that’s in it for them. We don’t have to teach them about recycling. They’re already creative and resourceful. David Katz – 6:28Now, in my experience, when I had the idea, which was May the 11th 2013, I was at a learning event in Silicon Valley, that thing called Singularity University. And then Singularity University, they express great new emerging technologies and things that are going to be changing the world and these base pyramid challenges. And one of the seminars was about additive manufacturing or what we called 3D printing. Avi Reichental, was the CEO of 3D Systems at the time, the first publicly traded company focused on 3D printing, and he was speaking and as part of the examples that he brought to exhibit the power of it. He had this big brown belt, it was a plastic belt, of course. It was manufactured out of one long single strand of plastic. Just using a nozzle and moving the nozzle to determine shape. I asked what was the sale price of the item – $80 was the response. And when I asked what the cost was – $10 was the response. And in that moment, the birth of the Plastic Bank occurred. David Katz – 7:37What I determined was that it was only the shape of the plastic that determine the margin, the markup and the value. It was still plastic, it was just a shape. Just like if you go buy a piece of plastic for your car, it could be hundreds of dollars – the value of the material, maybe pennies. The shape determined the price. So perhaps inside of that I thought could be the nucleus for change. If I could not maybe change the physical shape on the outside, but change the value perception inside the mind. That can be the change. You know, some of the powerful conversations I have, and I’ll ask you, if every bottle or every piece of packaging that you saw was worth $5 US dollars, how many would you leave on the ground? So it’s not the plastic, it’s us in the way we view it. And that is the origin of the Plastic Bank. The name itself implying the value, bankable, valuable, to be steward to be cared for. David Katz – 8:50One of the people that I met at Singularity University, was an industrialist in Peru. When I had the idea I shared it with with him, we became nice friends. Inspired by the idea, he is well agreed that it should be a success and he said ‘David come to Peru will fund you, everything will be great.’ He’s, you know a fellow who owns Peru Rail and all, and I thought ‘wow how how beautiful – we’ll go to Peru will launch, Lorenzo is there, we’ll be funded, it’s going to be great!’ Well, of course we agreed to go, we hired some staff we thought we’ll launch. Well of course we get to Peru, no Lorenzo. Lorenzo is not answering any of my calls anymore. So we we struggled and and had to learn what not to do. But it gave us great insight. As everything is back to the knowing that we are the product of the decisions and experiences of our lives. When we can view them and say where is the gift inside of this? We have the ability to continue to transcend and move forward, and no matter what you encounter, takes you to the destination that you’re standing forward for. And, and much of that as the philosophy of my life. David Katz – 10:17It was this sense of open mindedness, this awareness of big picture that David has always carried with him in his travels. And, and one of his trips to South America, he recogn

    26 min
  • 10 Episodes

About

In every episode, host Chris Straigis talks with a visionary who is making big strides to reshape the landscape of their community, their industry or even the world. It’s about business owners, community leaders and movers-and-shakers realizing their dreams, in spite of limited resources and significant barriers – with a little creativity and a whole lot of grit. You’ll hear about where they got their “big idea”, how they keep pushing in the face of adversity, and even how they’ve failed along the way.

Information

  • Creator
    All Around Creative Studios
  • Years Active
    2019 - 2022
  • Episodes
    10
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © All Around Creative 2024
  • Show Website
    Scrappy