Transcripts For CSPAN2 Leila Janah Give Work 20171015

[silence] okay. Its like the perfect, perfect 30second friendship. All right. Lets come back. This is a kind of audience. I hope you guys are like this when it comes to Live Audience questions that would be good. Well, in extremely kiting news, youre actually at only the second event to take place in this auditorium. That is worth, worth a round of applause. We are freshly moved into our brangd new home at 110, 140 years old and weve been renting and incredibly excited and really possible because doneesers and members and attendees like you so thank you for showing up anding us a reason to build a brand new building anyones first time here at the club . So for people who dont though were a nonprofit to only do this and 400 programs year with our members and our donors and our volunteers so membership includes parks like discounts on tickets to event leak this and various Exciting Events like next week and other benefits so if youre interested we have friends happy to talk or you can check your emails tomorrow for a little discount codes on membership. Other great things coming up october 24th actress and entrepreneurial gabrielle yon entrepreneur and on 9th hearing from artist writer about drone warfare so we really cover all of the bases here at the club. Now, tonight like i said all you talk to folk who is have questions for lyla and in last 15 minutes theres a microphone and hear lora give you a remindinger to start lining up if youre not familiar with questionses theyre short and dont include personal stories and end with question marks. So lora is professor i have a feeling shell crack down if you get long winded were live streams tonight on facebook for any of your pretends feel free to share it on common club on facebook and live tweeting. Lyla and lar la handle as well as ours is on right to left so please chime in and who you really want to hear from i would love to introduce to the stage please welcome lyla and tyson. [applause] good evening its really nice to be inaugural event in such a lovely space. Ive been in San Francisco a long time and when i first came years ago i did do newel rows things with the Commonwealth Club so lovely to continue that tradition. Its a great pleasure to serve as your moderator tonight we have outstanding entrepreneur ceo, and founder of a Nonprofit Organization but also ceo and coceo and founder of lix immediate wasnt clear if you use acronym or okay and so were here today to talk about her work in both areas. And also to help her launch her new book which we have here. Im married it a writer it is very important that we buy books. So i will be [laughter] i will be buying a book. And i hope that well get a preview of whats in the book in our conversation. So following the discussion, there will be a reception and there will be books available. There are so many questions that one could ask lyla. Sheaccomplished so much in sucha shorter amount of time, and just in my conversation with her backstage, shes already thinking about next steps and what and what she can do so shes a great inspiration. I want to start with et company that you first founded the one that gets a lot of attention deservedly so that is the source and i really want to start with if you were doing elevator fitch to describe the source and its mission so that everybody has the kiefs sense of what it is. That this is trying to do can you give us that . Sure i have head of communications here in front so this is a live [laughter] it means equal or balanced in the script and or mission is to connect low income people to work through the interpret and move them out of poverty. And we do that in really interesting way, we work with Large Data Services or Large Technology enterprises to provide data service ises things like image tagging and other content Services Boost their Product Offerings so doing image tagging that powers selfdriving cars, or a few prominent automakers. So giving that mission you have to link pup to a number of different organizations. You have to link up, you have to link to the individuals who you want to help find these jobs. You have to find them, train them, link them to and then you have to find all of those other organizations and their jobs so talk a little and youre using the internet so talk a little bit about the challenges or way you go about that and find a set of jobs to find people that you want to help train. Sure. Well ill start on this side of the people that we help train so i got into this, ive been working in africa for many years, and studied Development Exhibition and felt like most proferl way to help people was to give them living wage jobs and one of the best ways to do that in modern era is through technology because all of a sudden you have a way to connect someone living in a very is poor party of the world with a job and a rich part of the world that means they can make a lot more money than they could make doing anything else selling to a local market so theoretically very powerful so i thought to myself what if i created a company that only recruited people who came from very poor backgrounds which is, obviously, an unusual recruiting criteria are. [laughter] might even be illegal recruiting criteria in our case we only recute people who make less than two or three dollars a day average income of workers at source is if 2. 20 a day. Which means that prior to working with pus they are if theyre employed at all it is informal economy doing things like literally working in a query breaking rocks and selling stuff bit side of the road or another worker who used to brew a mine shine and sell it on the street to make a buck 50 a day. So before they join us we recruit them and partser in with many local nonprofits a abundance where we work, and we train in basic computer skills and then of that group we pull some people in to work for us fulltime. Okay. On the other side here in San Francisco companies who are who are sales team cringes when i get into thing backgrounds because the story they pitch to our clients is, we are a you know a very high quality Data Services pirm we provide Training Data to the best companies in silicon valley, and to the most advance Machine Learning teams working at the forefront of the technology. So for example, the worker that i mention that used to brew moon shine tag image for one of the most prominent autocompanies in the country working on selfdriving cars. And that work believe it or not we can train someone to do in a relatively short period of time because weve broken down projects into small units of work so thats how it works so our front facing operation here in the bay area is focused on high quality delivering results, you know being a really competitive enterprise, and then on the back end it looks very derchght from what people might panel in the sense that were only recruiting people from very poor backgrounds to do the work and were paying living wages along the way. So when you when youre jotward facing lane here so these companies have big projects. They have lots of ways they might source labor. I assume most of this labor thats being sourced is being sourced on a project basis these are not longterm Employment Contracts theyre basically to do promotes so why qowld they whats your fitch for why they should come to you they must be other ways you can source this kind of talent. Sure. Well i used to say fight poforts and get your work done and that, obviously, didnt work very well for project managers in bay area. [laughter] so so luckily i got wise enough to hire better salespeople than me who peghted me how we win contracts so our, you know, the first Value Proposition we put forward is were Higher Quality service provider. Interestingly when you hire people from marginalized iting backgrounds where we work theres no other formal Work Opportunities and they take this extremely seriously. They will e shough up early to work. They are interestingly like people often ask isnt it hard to train freem background how do they show up . Least of our problems is our work force it is incredible these are most motivated people. Theyre loyal to an employer thats willing to quickly pay, you know, far and above what they would make doing anything else so as a result quality is something that we can sell as a major, you know, attribute and we dont really the social mission piece comes in after we have convinced client that we offer the best you know best services. In terms of cost were not the cheapest option. But increasingly for someone who then charge of developing the next selfdriving trial or developing, you know, a smart chip for your phone to recognize faces and images that person is more concerned with quality often than cost. And wants to make sure that data thats going into training this algorithm is good data thats how we win and what most should focus on rather than selling the customer on the social mission we have to talk about it as trojan horse you have to sneak in social impact or sustainability and its a its a nice to have it is icing on the cake. Thats a really interesting point because you also inier work talk about the importance of a term i think ive not heard before so pill give you credits for it impact sourcing which is try that there are companies out there that actually for whom the social mission say of sourcing this job through this population or sourcing for some positive mission has become more important. So its interesting that youre saying essentially that secondary and i guess it should be to the quality of the labor. You can make the social case but the social case is an addon you get highly professional, committed well train individual to be part of a team. And in addition youre youre addressing a social mission. I think it makes it sticky to be honest all other things being equal as long as youre sure that this vend her give you quality result why not choose vender which is fighting poverty and what we find is once people are in these contracts with us ive had so many stories of people who work many Big Tech Companies who tell me i was about to quit i was demotivated i wanted to do something more meaningful with my life rather than work at a Big Tech Company and then we hired the souse and i started working directly with people moving out of poverty from, you know, from places like kenya, inked why and haiti i have purpose when i come into work and i can name names of bheem stayed two years longer at their Product Management job that Big Companies because they felt more motivate ared to come to work every day. I think at some point we should tell that to our customers. That is really exciting because we have your book sites and probably people in this room no there are lots of statistics indicating for millennials that meaningfulness of their work as well as the the technical challenges of their work but those things determine the stickiness whether theyre loyal to the company and to the job so here you have an opportunity some of these were some of these project workers in the Tech Companies may have as you said left but combining mission with the work is important and particularly for millennial for younger generations. I often use the statistic but cone Communication Survey millennials in work portion and found that 80 of millennials only want to work for a company that has a strong socially mission. And increasingly thanks to technology, were able to discern Whose Mission is full of fluff and who is already deliver egg and more and more we can show what factory on the floor looks like and show result of Income Survey for if workers in that factory that becomes Heart Diseaser and harder to, you know, to create a glossy pang that isnt translate to what company is doing. So we should more and work too on these metrics i agree with you theyre compelling. Before we move on to to other questions i want to talk a little bit about what i think is something called a school which is way it is a source, and maybe involved in doing similar activities in the u. S. And i think that given the conversations going on in the u. S. About the ability to create meaningful jobs for work percent in various rule and far plunge and often poverty places in the u. S. , is the school involved in that and how . Im sew glad you brought it up and my team will laugh but i own domain we have just source . School, so School Started several yearsing ago it actually has a funny origin o opinion story and weve been running ads on hulu Internet Tv Service that run a pilot which i thought was inspiring train these ferry refugees to do work for Big Tech Companies with a really cute Public Service announcement that ran on this channel and i got the thatsiest nastyist email from a guy in ohio. Guy in ohio. He is emailing everyone at some point. Thats right not joe the plumber. [laughter] less charismatic joe from ohio wrote an email that subject line was you are ruining america. And then it said, you know, people, people you and your kind your kind are, you know, ruining their stealing jobs sending them to africa and middle of rescission how dare you do this and i reads pee mail, of course, my First Response was like i was so lived at the time i was literally source is none profit i was sleeping on my exboyfriends futon at one point it was so poor myself. I thought he thinks im some sort of like millionaire sitting in my mansion in San Francisco, enjoying all of the profits im ranking in from sending jobs to refugee camps and i where a nasty email to him and then slept on the advice of it. And next morning i deleted i email i said joe ive looked at unemployment statistics in ohio i get where youre coming from maybe we can adopt to maybe work here. Believe it or not joe wrote back the nicest response he said thank you so much forren willing im really sorry about the tone of my last email i lost my job recently. And i just, you know, your ad just is really made me upset because i want to do more to create jobs here in america and i feel like we were getting left behind. It was interesting precursor to what has been happening. And so it inspired me to go to board so say maybe we can do something in the u. S. I think it is important for International Organizations to not be stay silo we have a distinction between people who work for foreign mgo and domestic poverty and it is tragic because it is the same issue and same bad guys so question need to Work Together more. So we try a couple of different experiments working in the u. S. And cap the similar molds to overseas here and it didnt work. It didnt work because xans have been outsourcing this work for a very long time already to places i understood why and china so trying to get that basic data service to come back onis shore i think is phyts. P futile so what can we do to make sense for america and we looked at economy so net improvement growth and it came all growth between 2005 and 2015 in the u. S. Has been in the independent work arena so that is you know, contract work basically. Including all of these new gig economy platforms yet our Work Force Training in america has no instructions for workers on how to benefit from this. How you benefit, connect. Teaching people to do jobs that have gone away, ten years ago. And so we said well what if we focus on applying learning in tech world to creating curriculum to teach people to benefit from new platforms which sometimes get a bad rep and look the data speaks speaks for itsee not going to shift the whole economy by boycotting one or two labor platforms instead lets work with them and figure how to provide portable benefits and living wages and importantly how we can prepare the most marginalized people in our society to actually benefit from these platforms. And so thats what the school does. We have the first gig economy training, or independent, you know, worker training, for low income americans deployed in San Francisco and city we signed a contract with office of education and work force development. And so that raining now going out to people here and weve seen amazing Success Stories people going from eight an hour you know midge retail jobs where they have no flexibility, no online reputation theyre not get any longterm benefits from doing these jobs. To making 25 or 30 an hour on a plat porm like field nation or grab it where not only do they get the money but benefit of having onis line reputation. If you do a good job on your task you get well. Get rated well and more clients. Yep. That reputational equity is something that white collar workingers are used to having through linkedin through employer reference checks and i think thats actually the future of job training in this country. So really interesting that story right now so youre working with the city of San Francisco. I actually think that one of the interesting ways to imagine this happening is mayors and cities actually really working to connect because you have to have you have to have the connecting organization as well. You said in your work in the developing economy if you often work with nonprofits because youve got to find a way to connect to the communities of workers that youre serving okay and they help you do that. And i think in this case having the Mayors Office involved in this may actually help bring more opportunities to the workers who are going through this i think thats really we can do things like first of all i think there should be incentives for every City Government to procure from social enterprises so procurement is very big i think lets talk a little bit about procurement so i think impact sourcing has a lot to do with procurement as i understand it. So your numbers are exactly so we have 12 trillion as procurement going on, and thats just the top thats just the top 2,000 companies, and when i did this, i did a task last year for the u. N. On ways to empower women around the world. I said to all of the governments in the room, you know, one thing you might do is just procure more from the women. Thats stop that hard a task. You guys in some developing countries governments are like 30 of the economy in terms of procurement and gods that are bought and sold so if you actually. The to work with to bring jobs to those without jobs that 2 or less a days workers or yowpght to bring jobs to women within that category, you can do that through procurement very, very powerful. [laughter] its so simple its like weve heard that whole saying teach a man to fish and eat them for a lifetime it should be a come invest 90 pbility of their paycheck into the family and the equipment. So so theres that but the best way help to someone is not a handout which is kind of a patronizing relationship saying look at me im im superior i can give you this poor person this money. But it is to engage with them on a level play field which is to buy something from him or o her when you purchase something from someone youre saying i value your contribution and im willing to pay you my Heart Disease earned money for what youre able to create. And i think it is an empowering relationship especially for low income women who are so often and so many ways told that theyre worthless. So one of the things that i read when you were talking about your journey how you got to coming up with this. Was this youre young. I think just high school, went to do some special semester teaching english in a very poor part of a very poor country in africa and thing that struck you and triggered by what you just said is people were really poor. But they were actually really talented. They were really hardworking. They were really people who if you gave them an opportunity, they qowld make the most of it. So it was theirs talent but it wasnt utilized how could i possibly create utilization. So thats i think was a very important part of the personal story of how you got to this place. [laughter] yeah. Well so my father is here in the audience, and i owe a lot to my fathers judgment education. That education letter. [laughter] would recite things like be like that can we have more allowance and he would be like my children, luxury is more ruthless than war that was one of his favorite lines roman poet. So i wish i could. I wish i could take the credit for that philosophy so my dad subscribed to beautiful new internationalist calendars that have paragraphs of people in developing countries that give you statistics about poforts and he would reminding us that we were here by an accident of birth. And that if it wrnght for that we might easily have been born in the slum in kenya or rural part of india and so you know we were always told you got lucky are bying being here not that youre a gift to the universe that youre doing quell in school et cetera because people many your boat would do better than you. And so thanks dad. Yep. But it really statistic with me, and i got the chance it was such an odd thing that happened i got a scholarship i was one of the nerdy first generation indian kids who applied for every scholarship at the Counselor Office and i knew that was only way to afford to go to school. So i got the scholarship from all places a Big Tobacco Company that is a big one. A big one i remember they sent a 10,000 check in the mail to my house and my mom opened it she said youre 10 check from the tobacco comean company and a scholarship for Community Service and i wanted to have an adventure and leave home. Broad Community Service so take it and go to africa. It was for work i had done in high school and it was a scholarship and i convinced committee far more educational for me to graduate early to go off to i found this program in ghana teaching english i love to say this was a saintly motivation but really motivated by a desire to have aned a advee so i show up thinking i would help all of these poor african children learn dplish, of course, my students who listen to voice of america and bbc radio and literally spoke like the Queen English so they could name u. S. Senators, they could talk about like bill clintons official state visit to africa they were more knowledgeable about Global Affairs than most of my high school classmates. Yet they were all from 2 a day or under families and it was a school for blind kids so panel you know hard enough getting an education. You know, in quest africa and panel you know doing that out of you know when you additionally have disability, and what struck me most about this community is that i have grown up u thinking my brother and i really were beneficiaries of the American Dream warm born here and both went to really Great Public School all of our lives we have scholarships and did lots of odd jobs to make ends meet so i had to assume that if you have the will and skill to work that you could make it and it never really dawned on me what life is look for the vast majority of the extremely talented people who happen to be born living in squaller and it means a life of in my mind you know a lot of avoidable suffering that should not happen in 2017. We have all of the means in the world to fix this problem it is a matter of distribution. Really. You say that clearly ig thats right a matter of distribution. It is a matter of controlling or affecting the distribution of resources and jobs and i completely agree. Told a human story i think it was or for this audience talk about a couple of the lives that you have affected it in africa. What is happened to workers as you have found them . And to their families and are these i assume youre tracking whether the benefits are sustain public meaning that they continue overtime. So well ill start at the may macro level and talk about data with member of the impact team here but one of the things i learned is i worked at world bank i used to work in the Development Research group a think tank that reports two people read you might be one of them. I read one of them. Confess here ive read them. And so you return all of this da it and one of the things i learned early on is if you want a credible approach to fighting poverty you have to have Credible Data around it and most object the data the better and were lucky enough to have incredible reare source who is has a book as well founder of the bank, pioneer of microfinance work to the world bank to come out with a Poverty Index it is really hard to measure Poverty Levels in places where they koangt have a cash economy so you have to go arranged to measure assets in the house and look at whether someone has a roof what kind of roof it is. What kind of floor they might have to ascertain what Poverty Level the family is living in. So we do that at the source we do Baseline Survey of all of our workers to understand what income level they have at point where they join us we do six month surveys you know yearly survey and then we look at what happens long after they leave us. Remarkably we see they move on average from 2. 0 a day to over 8 a day. And they stay at that higher income level even three years after they left the program. So it is a term permanent pass out of o poverty so supporting and we track what they spend their money on. You do. So we publish data incase you are curious ill be happy. The source. Org impact and we even do quarterly theres sort of like equivalent of Quarterly Investor calls we do quarterly learning calls to talk throughs and try to make sense of them and lastly, i think importantly in this space theres a new trend around impact auditing and control trial to really measuring in a same way to measure the new drug, by doing a controlled experiment we can now do that with Poverty Reduction programs. Which is incredibly important if you think about it youre subjecting people it a program which may or may not work and it is important to be responsible and be sure that your Program Works before you go and solicit grand funds so were in, we embarked on srt and did first third person audit results were published earlier this year and we did really well. Thats fantastic rs is t an effort to basically really look at effectiveness by take some time because youre basically comparing your intervention with a nonintervention trying to see intent to which it affect it is thing so go ahead. I was going to share a story i did the political thing where i didnt answer a question. So you were appealing to me the economist so National Stuff is greats but now a couple of human stories. Trying to be a good student here. [laughter] so i i share this story a lot because its just like kind of stranger than fiction i met a young man named ken in a slum in nying and one of the places that looks like a post who has seen allisyum earth developed into a slum and underway right now, but that was another subject. [laughter] but the saddest thing about this movie actually incidentally is that both slum scene and rich people scenes were both filmed in modern day mexico city so think about that. So he really looks like a scene out of one of these movies. It is a place where you see open sewer and beautiful young Young Children playing outside sewers preem dying of tbux tuberculosis and in this slum there are 800 to a Million People living and one of them used to be ken, and i met him at outside of his home in the slum just after he started working for the source. And there was an open sewer and beautiful daughter playing right next to the sues we are. He was living in a mud walled hut with a tin roof a tiny room to cook an carrots steeled to cook had is a major problem gives kids asthma and other problems. He told me that regularly his home would be broken into and all of his belongings would be stolessen he showed me the bathroom he went to and told me he was afraid to go to bathroom because he could get mugged or attacked it was very dangerous and then ken told me most crazy thing this man if you met him wearing business suit never guess his background he speaks beautiful english. Hes extremely charismatic showed up early for our meeting you know just professional presence. You would never manage imagine he came from this background and he had gotten at admitted on ful scholarship and had graduatessed from that boarding school. By the way, before he got selected, he had been orphaned and been orphan his mother and 7 died of tuberculosis so you have this guy managed against every odd that the universe could throw at you, to graduate from one of the best schools to think okay great now hes going to get a job and change traject is rei of his family xepght theres 70 youth unemployment. No jobs. No jobs especially not for a kid from a slum. And so he finishes his high school, and he goes back to the slum. So often we think education is the answer but if theres no jobs after education then whats the point but almost in some ways worse because people are aware of what theyre missing. So ken moves back to slum only job he could get was selling this local moon shine and he told me to took me to where they brew it and these guys i met another brewing this moon shine who had a degree in i. T. From western kenya university. And he was forced to life in slum because again theres no jobs so here are these talented young people with so much to offer who are so motivated literally drudges up like sewer water to brew who are reask moon shine and mix it with kerosene people drink it to forget themselves. Its like sniffing glue. So these guys are selling this on the side of the road meanwhile typical idea of someone who is selling this stuff is theres no way to have a real job we would never panel someone selling moon shine in a slum is someone who could be capable of doing work for google, and yet thats exactly what happens. Exactly what happens. Ken gets into a feeder program, its a Computer Training Program in the slum. Quickly does well gets hired to the data entry does well at that gets promoted and finally ill fast forward, last year in december, i went to beirut because he launched a Training Program with the World Food Program to train Syrian Refugees in digital work skills, and ken had taken his had first flight out of the country. To be the leader of the project. So now ken has trained over 500 people and digital work skills all the way to lebanon he didnt like the food, though, he told me an he moved out of the slum he had a daughter and amazing school. He literally looks like a dirveght person and thats whats possible when we give work when you give work and find a way to take this talent and give work and using all of the the Wonderful Technology an employers to use technology to link to. So were going to run u out of time and i want the to get to a couple of other areas i think we all would really benefit from optioning bit more about your own business molds. So its a nonprofit like the source and opening new training thing in beirut you have a very rst you have impact assessment. So you have a budget. How do you finance the operation and why is it a nonprofit you know you could have made it a core or fore profit so tell me a little bit about the Financial Model and then relate are it to that. Its sustainability. Do you think it is on a court you choir about the financial molds Going Forward . Do you need to tweak it in some way . So ill start by saying that we have a problem in the u. S. Which i think is where still very unevolved when had it comes to business moldses we have on the one hand profit maximizing corporations. And then on the other hand, charities and what we think about when we think about two models is make money whatever we can do employing slaving literally things that Companies Big Companies Still do. And then maybe well donate money at the end of the day over here to this charity mold where you have these nonprofits which are really ill equipped to handle big problems and require on grant and donation thats traditional idea of business and charity but really most of the interesting social and Environmental Impact work is happening in the middle. In this new space of social business. And B Corporation lives in that space a lot of earned revenue nonprofits live in that space. Personned revenue and nonprofittings getting stream of revenue from Business Operations that support the mission and so many amazing one we have dlan city street here in the city and Home Boy Industries in los angeles Old School Cafe in the bay view. Is that what you are. Would you with say youre an owned revenue earned revenue and earned revenue going back and sustaining and building this operation. So wheaf done is we actually the p and l of each of our program so donors know theyre not subsidizing for microsoflt or google that donor revenue is towards training and programs that are r d and supporting really very clear social mission octaves are business and source is now profitable off earned revenue so all of the operations arranged that business are entirely covered by the revenue we earn from those contracts and we hit that milestone last year after eight years of operations. So if [applause] thank you. See so many this lens of taking some money and philanthropic money from donors and earning revenue whats the sort of breakdown over all of the whole s murks a source . Well we have about a 16 million budget, 15, to 16 million and majority of that is in our source program. Its the earned revenue business. A small percentage i hope that imroas trying to now work with City Governments around country to get them to sign on. Prchls so they would sign on and basically boy a support the training. Exactly to give or buy a license. [laughter] uhuh had you, and were actually thinking about business molgtz so we took our first Equity Investment as a nonprofit we own a subsidiary our work center is in the country that we operate in kenya that work center is a fore profit business that we basically own as a nonprofit and we sold ebbet in that business to a european Impact Investor actually a foundation that is looking to make Impact Investment so all of these new really new hybrid moldses and what i think is exciting is that used to be that foundation used to have the people that ran the finances for the tongses were entirely divorced from the mission people. So you would have foundations literally invests in like Tobacco Companies and all of these things that are like creating very problems but then nonprofit side of the foundation is trying to solve is makes no sense so really what we need to see is converge and investments are in businesses that not only avoid doing bad but actually proactively do good, and i have a great example of this. I just got off the phone yesterday with a person from Conservation International one of the leading organizations theyre now investing in companies that build sustain public business moldses arranged protecting wild assets. So for example, enxas like runa tea company that sourcing i think from the amazon and ecuador a rare groapt and moldses that show local people that they can make more money preserving tree that creates a a potentially profit public ingredient than by cutting it down and selling that land to a cattle farmer. Uhhuh. So let me ask question then of a little bit about your other company because the other company you found is a fore profit so why did you choose that molds and do you have are there any links between them are they totally separate . For ventures . As you can tell i have a sickness for starting things. And so when i had idea i first went to board of source i was like okay i know youre going to think this is crazy but i have a new idea, and i had come across this really amazing ingredient in northern uganda a rare type of shape. Related to ingredient that triggered my question was thinking about what you said about you have a real asset that you can protect and actually monetize. Soy love going to local market when is i travel and i love finding out what local people are using it is hair loom variety of shay butter and sad they have that because they use this product. Of course i wanted to get my hands on it and i go to get it and i find out this nut only grows wild on trees that take 20 years to mature. And those trees only grow in northern youre uganda what an amazing story how come no one has marketed this as a luxury item before i go back to go back looking at chanel skin creams and i love like one of the women in my life early on told me like if youre broke invest in your face. You have only one face so buy the expensive skin scream. You go through those like everything out there. So usually one is looking pretty retched so youre like an easy target. Thats an easy target so im like coming off this flight from uganda i wish to fly through amsterdam i get duty free and im looking at skin cream and i looked at ingredient label to see what is in here, and you know, its things like red number 5 yellow number 7, all kind of horrifically toxic ingredients and you realized many of the things are known carcinogens aloud in 200 ounce a skin cream not going to Women Owned Enterprises or that support women in the supply chain but going to the man. And for products that that dont even, you know, not only do they not do good things for us but they dont do anything for the world or environment and for jobs so i thought maybe an interesting opportunity to build a source like molds in the luxury space. Okay. In luxury you have typically enormous Gross Margins often it is women who are doing purchasing, very few of these products actually benefit women. Either in supply chain or as owners web and yet women are doing pupgd i thought why not build a source like random category so i talk to my board about it fine do it. Raise extra money for it. Not here. Do it on the side and i decided to dont a third of my personal shares in the nonprofit to the source. If you have ever an exit it will do it and set it up through the B Corporation registration process. So it will be a fore profit. Idea is at the time question started source i was agnostic as to structure i wanted to build a company qhiewz primary mission to move people out of poverty the way we structured it was incidental and at the time nawnl p [inaudible conversations] so i think now this is the most rich and exciting space is this in between what muhammad calls social business. Nonloss and nondividend company ies he argues when you are freed from the profit motive of your investors but at the same time constrained you need a rest revenue way thats where a lot of powerful innovation can happen and manage if we have social enterprise prisons in this country instead of fore profit prisons that we have and imagine if we ran so many i think its i think its easy to criticize government run program and bureaucratic but social enterprises eliminate that bureaucracy at the same time dont have i think the pressure to deliver profits which can be at odds with as you said governments can procure from such companies so actually ideal thing some of these may be a goth mission and Government Mission of a mayor to basically have some reTraining Programs to try to get works skilled and out of the est that a Public Mission with a may be some public dollars. But they cant really necessarily do it well. So thats why they can then turn to a source or a school to try to help them so i think combining procure. Or policy dollars with these institutions is for powerful so open up to questions in five minutes so im like ton was questions to still ask. I think im going to end with, we talked about lux me and women and it is case that there have been a lot of stories lately horrifying stories really about whats happened to women in Tech Community. Really, now they are first world problems. Okay, theyre not and i know one of your comments and i agree with it is, you know, question of to choir about thinking about feminist and first world issue its a global issue. And some of the problems for women many of the problems for women are much more extreme when you also combine heavy, heavy disadvantage, and so the point is, in your own personal story, where u youve been amazingly with successful you have really good links with the Tech Community youre entrepreneur youre raising projects from Companies Like google, have you encountered a thing to deal with . Are there role moldses who have helped you . Are there are there mentors who have helped you. How have you managed in what sounds like a hostile climate to have this success. It can be and i find form of sexism that i poipped most problematic is actually paternalism i cant are tell you how many times people have said that is so sweet is that your fulltime job somebody asked me i was like are you kid or like oh, at a conference where i was like speaking like featured speaker who are you here with assuming that i was somebodys like wife or girlfriend, so it is that time that constant isly undermines your sense of confidence especially when you get that right before you go on stage. [laughter] and so ultimately problem that people are facing is similar to women in tech space we dont krot finance resources. That is the biggest issue. You know you want to solve the problem look at where money is going and who it is coming from, and i think thats thats really at a different scale but it is same issue everywhere. When i think about role moldses, one of the poem that inspired me to do this work is as a woman one woman named pria started Amazing Organization called world of good first of her kiewnd she is realized what she would travel to developing country and see women who made these products like bracelet and rugs, pillows that you might see at nordstrom selling for 200 and women no make them ten cents that have and she realized what if i created a retail brabd p brand and bought them and retail them as a fair trades kind of molds so she built first fair trade brand for those goods, and she sold at whole foods and san ford bookstore she was a force of nature and you could not say no to this woman and i saw her speak with amazing tack about starting her company if you have 40 employees i decided that i would eventually quit my job and do this fulltime. And her company then became profitable. She sold world god to ebay and first online fair trade retailer of goods and other thing that was amaze is as a woman, the single come she decided she was going to have a family and she went about it in an amazing way. She went and had two kids on her own. And i had dinner with her month before she tragically passed away and she told me you know lyla were so often told as women that we need to have this like perfect partner and we need to have a family that looks a certain way that should be plan a and Everything Else is plan b. Well she said screw that. This is my plan a. Plan a is life im living now with an amazing fulfilling career this doing work that benefits other people. And to me thats more important than having a picture perfect, you know, white picket fence existence in the suburbs, and i sat thering loo at her looking at her beautiful kids what she built i thought yeah thats the way to do it. Luckily she has a Strong Family her kids went to her brother, but she inspired so many of us in our space and she had the doggedness of the most, you know of like a Mark Zuckerberg but applying that same passion and wort strength that needs more leaders like that. I think you reminding me a lot about pria both hen and lyla went through a venture competition at uc berkeley at the high school which is once dean there and i would say among the accomplishments of my being dean one of the things im most proud of is starting this up. Weve built it out with new partners i have a new partner in beirut, and so interesting thing about that story, of course, is that oftentimes one thinks of men stores or role models someone who is generationally dirchts in this case pria has been a inspirational molds of people of her generation and its just a lovely story. I will just end with, you know, one of the things that did come up over and over again in the work we did for the u. N. On how to empower women was the importance of models that you can sort of see a pathway. You could see okay, i can do this. And that plus also this impose to your paternalism, the expectations people carry around les pals about women. So youre in a room and theyre going to be paternalistic and because youre a woman and theyre not true. Anyway fascinating face nateing story i have to give up my right of answering questions now to give it to the audience. So we already have some questions lined up right there. If you have a question please make your way up to the mic. We have our first question here. Tiva and international, and the peace corps. That has been doing a lot of Small Enterprise Development for Development Success and for 50 years. Im so glad and coordinated with a lot of them i have johnny price from kiva zip and did a Facebook Live in the office recently and and what we try to do with partners is basically help them implement similar sourcing programs we have a group that we law firmed called advisory sources to help them build Sustainable Business moldses around digital work and piloting a cool program thats like a again ill be accused of being too broad, but we we highlighted this molds where we teach people how to be digital freelance percent on upwork like ebay for services it is a huge marketplace where you can sell your services as translator or proofreader or Administrative Assistant amazing opportunity for someone who happens to live in a poor place but skill to do this kind of work. So we just highlighted a verse of this where weve created a coworkinging space to come to get this training and then they start paying wonings theyve done train egg and start earning money and paying to use the space. Okay. And that can if you think about it at a unit level profitable so entrepreneur running a small Coworking Center as long as people are earning money by going to center then they can pay to use the space and this model can be powerful in migrant communities, iting be powerful in in parts of the world where we dont have bandwidth and another big womens agenda to do Something Like that. Poverty researchers will divide poor into the hard core poor and transitional poor at the hard core poor i think the population you dont deal with. The generational poor and then you know you have the population that i think youre dealing with. So that means government is left. The very inefficient government is left with a hard core. Is there any thoughts on because nobody talks about how inefficient government. I worked for cnf trillion Dollar Agency doesnt come close to anywhere what is happen hadding with the Public Sector . Can you talk about anything that is being done . Because theyre ones that are dealing with deep poor. Im so glads you bring that point up. We i talk about this in the book but we have been working for many years in our Poor Community in arkansas in the Mississippi River delta and population there is what you would call hard core poor. Intergenerational poverty, and generational trauma which by the way never gets tacked about if your an ancestors saw horrific things happening it is hard to panel this community can bounce back from that. And so in this area, i mean it was a fight to get anything done. We couldnt get high Speed Internet to this community. I have better internght in center than i do in america in arkansas. We had very big challenges withly the city rates people would come in speaking far worse english than our workers in nyerobi and we dont have bupght to sustain this program responsibly. And in order to make it work in this community we would need a massive investment in infrastructure in educational opportunities, in a range of Different Things and part of the problem in some of these rule far flung commons is no money to sustain them. If you live in port in new york city, yes it successes but there are tons of agencies other resources and a lot of wealth around you thats creating institutions that can lift you up. No one is investing in duma sar so a tragic situation to transport to local agencies i would say our learning from that is maybe a few things one is that i think we have a tremendous infrastructure problem in this country and we dont admit that enough. We cant be you know a developed nation and competitive with other krpghts that are investing massively in like you know Stem Education we dont have internet in many parts of the country. Because was way we decided i think to distribute access a second piece of this is i really think prop curing through social emphasize but mandates and even corporations could get tax breaks for hiring marginalized people we might see a change maybe for every incarcerated person you hired by the way is not a person going back to prison therefore saving me the taxpayer, the 200 grand a year it cost to keep intun in prison that should be a tax break but insent vising hire aping create jobs among these people. Covelet incentives to bring a company into a new city have have no requirements that that Company Actually hire low income people from that city. Which to me is ridiculous it is my taxpayer dollarss are going to subsidize a Company Moving into my city they should have obligation around hiring people io ayeaye deally so tax dollars arent used to, you know, pay for various Government Services they may benefit from. I think this is starting to happen there are prals like wage subsidy and some more progressive city but it certainly happening at, you know, one fraction of one percent of the scale that it could be. To get that population back into society and the workforce rather than recidivism. Thats where im optimistic that state, local and federal dollars will be employed. Is tremendously wasteful. The only people benefiting are private prisons. Prisons themselves. My name is drawn them all. Thank you for speaking. I want to know how their adapting their model to adapt to the refugee worker. And i mean when their on the move country to country and have unstable home lives. We started looking at refugees and 2009 and we ended up looking at through care. Its a large humanitarian agency and they serve refugee camps and manage the infrastructure there. The biggest challenge is technically its illegal to hire refugees in many countries. There seanez competed with locals for jobs. Thats the first obstacle. You have this huge obstacle people that cant leave the camper work is solely dependent on food rations and other forms of eight. Its a recipe for disaster. Became a big recruiting ground and its no surprise because people are sitting there living in squalor with nothing to do. I think a few things can happen. People are urging reform for refugee work rights and saying you have a right to work. There are temporary Work Programs been piloted that are exciting. Also equipping refugees with skills that are portable. These are skills you can take with you and apply wherever you happen to be. Weve tried to implement our school, we have an online Training Program a different refugee tape to be able to find work is very promising. That sector is exploding. Many people are fairly well educated and left behind good jobs at home. Some of the refugee organizations to be able to do that you have to be able to have the equipment in the broadband. You have to have the environment so you working in partnership . One thing that broke my heart as i first went there they said the nerve region Refuge Council and that young people who finished high school its a oneroom thing and its very depressing. People live there and graduated from high school and then started taking Online University courses with satellite internet. When i read that report said thats where we have to do our training so there is internet locations there. So there is some red tape. Have time for three more questions. Just go in order. Good evening i have three questions. My question is how does someone from outside committed find individuals who have skills . Is it something you have to do on a largescale basis because training for jobs is essential and how do you get these products that have Quality Ingredients to get what people want to buy . A start with the quality piece. We have a lab in new jersey thats like a certification away send Raw Materials to the. One thing that ive learned as a social mission will not sell the product. The efficacy and unique selling proposition will sell the product the social mission can be a nice addon. We dig clinical testing and i sell the product gun qvc which is very surreal. We show before and after photos. Like by the way its made by low income women in your supporting fair trade practices. The best thing to do in these communities is to find those that are successful in recruiting low income table. Youre doing different training but you dont have a way of connecting people. So we committed say we can be that provider of work if we can have influence over the computer training. So we did that and they have this beautiful Training Facility and were hungry for curriculum that would lead to a job at the end. So often theres an ecosystem that you can plug into without reinventing the wheel. Scalability always comes up. The curriculum is something that can be scaled. If you find the right partners all over the place. We had 50000 people enrolled online curriculum from india and the philippines and i think its like 65 countries. We had a report from a father who works in development in ethiopia and he use that to heck together digital Training Course for some molly refugee women. Hes training and setting them up in the curriculum is available for free. So if you want to start a Computer Training Program in ethiopia, please do. As more jobs are taken by machinery and technology that we create, do you think of World Economy can create new jobs to create those that have been lo lost . What you think the government can do to help businesses that are creating jobs in this area . Thats a good question. I will say that labor economist are quite divided on ai. I spent some times with these economy who are little bit pessimistic about it but they have adjusted a little bit its hard speaking with an economist. We cant throughout the random ideas as fast. Its all good. So the jury is out, talk to people in Machine Learning at Client Companies in a company at facebook who works on facebook messenger. I was talking to him about the chat box which is emerging. Of these gonna take over all the Customer Service jobs. He said we need to create so much Training Data. So i think the future is in figuring out how your role will interact with the computer and how you can make the most of that. When i started out doing this work were doing data entry. Were doing things like converting pdf files into text files. That can be done by software at a High Accuracy level so as we have grown the business weve evolved in tandem with how technology is evolving. Best estimate ive heard is that the singularity for the moment in which computer intelligence will happen in like 2044. Ab has adjusted it at that point all bets are off. But though still quite a need. The other thing that i think we should be aware of is that we choose the Economic System that we live in. These are not natural laws of physics. We decide how to structure the Economic System. Theres a time in this country when we decided we are going to invest in job creation to do all sorts of things. We had people who are paid by the government to record oral histories in the south. There what archives and beautiful spirituals sung in black churches in the south. Someone got paid to record them because we thought it was important to preserve the cultural legacy of the south. We could choose to invest in. We could choose to fund farmers markets. Theres so many things we could find with the surplus that machines can create. It we dont have to do this manual labor a machines can do it for us bill gates has proposed a robot tax, we can tax the gains made by these algorithms and invest that in things that were not in the Economic System. So i am optimistic. I think it will take the will to reform our Economic System. Those who worry about it thank everything you say is absolutely true but i sometimes get involved in technology and im thinking how slow Society Moves to redesign its institutions and policies and social contract. So were like falling behind in addressing new organizational structures its whipping forward. I feel like i have the unpopular question. I hope its not taken the wrong way. I wondered how you help the participants to turn their initial training and first jobs into sustainable and meaningful careers. How do you know that theyre not taken advantage by the wrong people. Is a very important good question question. In your answer that many times in your work and statements the notion of a living wage. Lets related to this because youre basically training people but you want them to end up with a living wage. Thats a good question. Two things. We have to make sure we are paying living wages and we know how to calculate the were not coming up with that ourselves. Luckily motto was pioneered called the fair wage guide. She put together a group of academics at berkeley and around the country to understand the cost of living in urban and rural areas in every country in the world. And to publish a neutral guy to people to understand what a living wage should be in that region. We use that as the floor. At the very lowest we have to pay living wages to our workers and in addition we partner with many different nonprofits and were looking on providing microloans and food onsite, transportation. We are extremely highly rated by our workforce. One of the ways you can guard against the pressure to pay as little as possible is to actually publish and measure unit promoter score. This is used in the Consumer Tech world. The best measure of how well a is doing is this is usually never done as a social sector. Youre actually asking your beneficiaries to redo to good job a good service so we actually do this on our site. The second thing is the knowledge economy is fundamentally different from basic manufacturing. When you are working in front of a computer and using the internet and exposed to marketplaces and the idea of building an online reputation and we force our workers to get bank accounts, your life dramatically changes. Weve been have workers google things like what they should be making and rossi average salary for someone in nairobi. It window occurred to them to do that. I think theres a fundamental shift that happens and thankfully the data really corroborates that. If you look at the trajectory of our workers youll find that they tend to stay out of poverty and pretty dramatically so long after they leave. Im left with the question that we come in for tradition. Figures of the question because you already done it. What is your 62nd idea on how to make the word of a better place. I think we know your idea but i think you have more than one. Probably your staff is going on no. But you have new ideas . I think youre making the world a better place. I think were soft and frustrated by what we see in the media that we forget that we vote with their dollars every time sent leaves or baking company were choosing the world who want to live in with the products we buy. Those companies are soon choosing this sort of world we want to live in. If we can influence how that happens we can change the world. In south africa during the span of three years the u. K. Reduced imports of textiles by 35 because consumer said we cannot agree with this unethical regime and we will not buy from it until they change. The top of that empire. So we absolutely have the power to vote every second. The more we do that as consumers the better world we live in. What a cell think this inspirational powerhouse. 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