Leila Janah & Marie Forleo: Fighting Global Poverty Through Technology

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Hey, it’s Marie Forleo and you are watching MarieTV, the place to be to create a business
and life you love. An idea that I hold close to my heart is the fact that talent is universal,
but opportunity is not. And we’ve recently begun working with Sama Group, an organization
whose mission is to fight global poverty through technology. If you’ve ever wondered what
part you might play in helping make the world a more equitable place, my guest today will
show you how.
Leila Janah is the founder and CEO of Sama Group, and an award winning social entrepreneur.
Prior to founding the Sama Group, Leila was a visiting scholar with the Stanford program
on global justice and Australian University National Center for Applied Philosophy and
Public Ethics. The concept of Sama, the root word for equality or fairness in many languages,
is the guiding principle behind the family of impact enterprises Janah founded and runs.
The first of these is SamaSource, an award winning nonprofit business that connects women
and youth living in poverty to microwork: computer based tasks that build skills and
generate life changing income, now part of the broader field of impact sourcing. SamaSource
has moved 20 thousand people over the poverty line and spun out a domestic program: SamaUSA.
In 2011 Leila cofounded SamaHope, a crowdfunding site for medical treatments in developing
countries. Janah’s work with Sama Group Enterprises has been featured widely in the
press, with features in publications including The New York Times, CNN, Forbes, and Fast
Company. She received a BA from Harvard and lives in San Francisco.
Leila, thank you so much for coming out to MarieTV. I really appreciate it.
It’s my great pleasure. I’m so happy to be here.
So we love you guys, we love working with the Sama Group, and I was wondering if you
can take us back to when you started or back to when you were in Mumbai and you started
to recognize that outsourcing was providing millions of jobs, yet it wasn’t reaching
the poorest populations. How did that experience inspire you and did that lead to the creation
of the Sama Group?
Sure. Well, at the time I was living in New York, actually, in the financial district.
I had just finished college and I had my first corporate job and I was working 24/7 and pulling
all nighters. And my manager, knowing that I had some foreign experience, said, “Why
don't we send you on this project to India?” So I was… I was basically thrown in head
first into a project working directly with the CEO of a big outsourcing company. And
this was the year that Thomas Friedman had written The World is Flat and the national
discourse on outsourcing was very negative and coming from a place of concern that Americans
were losing jobs overseas, that we were becoming less competitive. And so I, you know, being
someone interested in social justice was very reluctant to take on this project and even
though I’m of Indian origin I didn't really think it was a good thing that we were, you
know, partnering with these companies to lower our costs and shift jobs. So I came in with
that mindset. And one day in the call center that I was working in I met a young man who
came from Dharavi, which is south Asia’s largest slum where Slumdog Millionaire was
filmed and the kind of place where there are cholera outbreaks and children playing in
open sewers and just really horrible living conditions. They look almost post-apocalyptic.
It doesn't seem like anyone in twenty… 2005 or now 2015 could be living that way. And
so when it dawned on me that someone from that environment was capable of picking up
a phone and answering customer service questions for a woman in the UK, you know, about her
plane ticket, I realized that our understanding of poverty is very shallow, that there’s
a very large number of people around the world, people who we would consider to be living
in extreme poverty, making less than 2 dollars a day, unable to meet their basic human needs
for food, water, shelter, and education, who are capable of working in the new economy,
working in the digital economy. And that lightbulb is what inspired Sama, the idea that this
business model of outsourcing, which has created now billions of dollars and several billionaires,
that we could take some of those billions of dollars and… and shift the model so that
they went directly into the pockets of people we would otherwise consider charity cases,
like this young man. And that was the origin of the idea.
And so when you had that idea, take me from idea to then the first whether it was project
or you actually leaving your job and then making Sama real.
It took about 2 years. I mentioned the idea to my boss and as a tribute to that firm,
you know, he really believed in personal development and he knew that this was my passion. So he
said, “I think we should fund you to do more research on this idea and maybe it’ll
benefit the firm in some way.” So our company actually gave me, like, a thousand dollar
travel stipend to go and do some more research on this in Africa. And my idea was to take
the outsourcing model and figure out how we could turn it into a social enterprise, much
like if people are familiar with microfinance, much like Muhammad Yunus did with the banking
industry. He thought, “Here’s this great industry that’s provided access to capital
for billions of people globally but has left out the poor,” and he adapted the model
to fit the needs of the poor. So I thought maybe we could do something similar with outsourcing.
And from that moment in… in late 2005, I started working on a business plan on my nights
and weekends to start a company that would only hire people like that young man I met
at the call center. So the threshold for new workers would be, of course, you have to want
to work hard and be capable and have basic skills like reading and writing English. So
high school graduates. But you also have to come from a very poor background, and we would
actually screen out people who came from wealthier backgrounds who might otherwise get a job.
So I worked on the business plan for about a year and a half and I submitted it to a
competition online in the Netherlands for this new category of social venture. And lo
and behold they sent me an email several months later saying, “Congratulations. You’ve
made it to the semifinals. Come to Amsterdam.” And I had kind of forgotten at that point
that I’d even sent this out. It was really a pipedream. And… and I went to Amsterdam
and they gave me I think it was the first runner up prize, so I had, like, 25 thousand
dollars that they gave me. And that was enough to convince me that I could quit my job and
survive for long enough to do this. And it wasn’t easy. My parents don't make much
money, I’ve loaned money to my parents in the past, I don't come from a wealthy family,
I still am paying off my undergraduate student loans at the age of 32. So it was a pretty
big decision for me to do that, but it just gave me that… that push. And I had a lot
of friends who were willing to, you know, let me sleep on their couches and such for
a while.
And what did you do with that first 25 thousand? Like, how did you figure out what you wanted
to spend that on? I know you had your business plan, but it was like do I need to hire someone
first? How did you… what did you do with that money?
So I realized that it wasn’t going to be very much money to hire anyone, even back
in 2008, the year that I ended up launching the business. So my first step was to go to
Kenya where I knew I wanted to launch based on demographics. Kenya is a former British
colony, much like India, that has a large youth population that is both somewhat educated
and dramatically unemployed. So you will find young people living in the slums who can read
and write English, who’ve gone to a rural school, and, you know, paid their school fees
their whole life and really wanna work hard but are… just happen to have drawn the…
the wrong ticket in life’s birth lottery and happened to be living in a slum. So looking
at the demographic trends across sub-saharan Africa, the world’s poorest continent where
we thought we could make the biggest difference, I identified Kenya and I used part of the
money to go there initially, stay in the cheapest hotel I could find, and interview local entrepreneurs
who could partner with me. And my idea was I saw all of these internet cafes around the
world in low income areas and I thought, “What if I could convince the internet cafe owners
to make part of their business an outsourcing business? What if I could convince them to
hire local youth, use their computers, and complete small projects?” And initially
my first instinct was data entry. Something very simple. I had a lot of friends who were
entrepreneurs or involved in startups in Silicon Valley that needed basic data processing like,
you know, we’ve collected all these receipts and we need them scanned and entered into
a spreadsheet, that sort of thing.
Yeah.
And so it’s straightforward enough that I could actually be the person to secure the
work and do the quality assurance. So the first money I spent going to Kenya, identifying
that partner. I came back to the US, I rented a tiny office space, I paid myself 400 dollars
a month for the first 9 months or so of the operation until I literally could not do that
anymore and… and then I got to work. So I spent the money also on software. I found
a software platform that would let me load these projects and manage them myself, and
then I went around to every entrepreneur I knew who might need these types of services,
I made a brochure on my Mac, printed it out at Kinko’s…
Yes!
...and I got our first contract in September of 2008, which is the month we started officially
the business. A friend of mine who is running a large nonprofit in the Bay Area said, “We
have this project for blind readers.” He operates the largest online library for blind
readers called BookShare.org and it’s an audio library. And so he had a need for people
to review transcripts of books to make them really perfect before he put them into his
audio software. And so we loved the idea of working with a social venture and having our
first project be, you know, be beneficial for… for disabled people around the world.
And… and he was willing to give us a… a 30 thousand dollar contract to start. And…
and so I personally guaranteed him in the meeting that I would… I would take personal
responsibility for the quality of the work, which meant many, many late nights, you know,
poring through transcripts of audio books for middle school aged kids. And… and that’s
kind of what got us on our way. And the next year we ended up doing about 200 thousand
dollars in sales revenue from those types of projects all initially secured by me and
then I found someone on Craigslist to help me with sales who remains a friend.
How incredible is that? You’re just such an inspiration. I love this story and I haven’t…
I’ve done so much research and I love what you do and I haven’t heard that, so genius.
Talk to us about impact sourcing. What it means and why it’s important.
I’m so glad that you brought that up, Marie. Impact sourcing is a new term that refers
to making sourcing decisions in your business, or at least part of them, based around social
impact in addition to quality. So the idea is, you know, we have all of these problems
around the world, global poverty and domestic poverty being one of them. One way to solve
those problems is to deliberately work with enterprises that have a social or environmental
mission. And thus you can use the… the budget that you have allocated in your business to
address these social problems rather than trying to maximize your profit and then donating
it at the end to a charity. And this is a way of thinking that actually has a long history
here in the United States. One of my favorite examples is Goodwill Industries. Most people
think of Goodwill as a nice charity and they donate their clothes. Goodwill actually earns
3 billion dollars globally in store revenue from all of their stores globally. And all
of that store revenue comes from employing marginalized people in the store in addition
to recycling donated clothing. And Goodwill also offers services for offices that want
to… that want to move and have a large number of items they need picked up and recycled,
or I think they also offer setup services for corporate events. So if you are the procurement
manager in a company or you’re running an event, you have a choice as to what vendors
you choose. And the idea of impact sourcing is that you… you deliberately choose vendors,
and maybe not for everything that you, you know, need to source, but maybe for some percentage
of your sourcing needs, that have an overt social mission. And the other idea of impact
sourcing is that you needn’t compromise on quality to have that social impact. So
I was just on a panel yesterday with the CEO of Glass Door, which is a technology company
that lets employees rate their employers and provide more transparency in the workplace.
They now have about 600 employees. And I met him just before the panel, 30 minutes before,
and he said, “I had no idea that SamaSource was a nonprofit.” I was telling him about
some of the fundraising challenges I had. And he was kind of blown away and he said,
“We’ve been working with you…” they now have about 85 workers who are SamaSource
workers globally. He said, “We’ve been working with you for over a year and nobody
on my team ever said, ‘These guys are a nonprofit.’ I just thought you were the
best quality service we could find.” And so… so that’s a wonderful story and I
do wanna tell people we’re a nonprofit because I think it helps them understand that if we
do ever make a profit on this kind of work it will all be reinvested in our work and
none of us are doing this for personal gain. We can’t, by law. And I think the model
of impact sourcing that’s so interesting is that by hiring SamaSource, Glass Door is
directly contributing to the same kind of poverty alleviation that we would normally
be paying for with aid or charitable dollars. So, you know, in the prior model, Americans
work hard, we get taxed, some percentage of our income through that tax goes to USAID,
our agency for international development, and then that organization hires people to
administer programs overseas that theoretically help the people that we’re helping on this
project.
Theoretically.
Theoretically. Right? Exactly.
And, you know, and I think these agencies do a lot of good but I think it’s really
interesting to imagine other ways of addressing that same population and if we can marshall
the capital that’s available to us in the private sector, we have so much more resource
to tackle these problems.
The thing I love about impact sourcing, you know, I hadn’t heard that turn of phrase
before, but through my lens it’s bringing consciousness and a sense of intention to
every aspect of your business and looking at how every piece of what you do can touch
another human soul in a positive way beyond the traditional ways that we’re thinking
of it. And that’s why I’m so not only inspired by what you guys do, but I love that
we’re working together now and I can’t wait to do more with you because it is, it’s
using the power of entrepreneurship and thinking about how do we tackle these global issues
in a really smart, effective way not just in the developing world but here in the United
States as well. One of the things that I love is the strong focus you have on outcomes.
What are some of the most important metrics you guys track through your work? And I know
that’s not an easy thing to do. And how do you do it?
I’m so glad that you asked that because I think one of the challenges that the nonprofit
sector faces is the perception that we’re not efficient. And coming from the private
sector myself I also had that bias when I came in. I saw lots of aid organizations on
the ground in Africa and Asia and I was always the person to eyeroll and think, “Wow, if
this were done by the private sector it would be so much more efficient.” I think part
of the challenge is that in the private sector we have this unifying measure of success,
which is profit measured in dollars. And everybody agrees that that’s a measure of success
and we can, you know, we have accounting standards for reporting it and we can look at a company’s
PNL and we can look at their, you know, their filed statements and understand how successful
that company is. In the social sector we lack, unfortunately, such a unifying metric. You
know, if you’re working in animal care or animal services, you’re measuring, you know,
the cost of… of saving an animal’s life. Right? The cost of spaying and neutering animals
so more don't get created that we then have to euthanize later. Right? I mean, so that’s
one set of metrics. If you’re working in the environmental arena you might be looking
at the long run impact of your program on something like climate change or, you know,
forestry. So there are so many different metrics that it’s very difficult for a donor to
determine impact. It’s always like comparing apples to oranges to pineapples. And… and
this is a very deep problem. That said, we have relied for too long on what we call in
the nonprofit sector, the tyranny of overhead as a measure of nonprofit effectiveness. So
we shouldn’t use the challenge of measuring impact across these different sectors as an
excuse to look at the easiest thing, which is what percentage of my gift goes to fundraising
and marketing versus program related expense, which is typically how impact is seen. And
that measure really starves nonprofits of the agency and capital they need to produce
good outcomes. So I’m a huge fan of this new movement, Peter Singer calls it effective
altruism, many people just call it, you know, strategic giving or venture philanthropy.
This new movement around thinking about impact in terms of outcomes for dollars spent. Just
like we would in, say, clinical drug trials. We would think, “Ok, if you’ve got a new
drug that’s, you know, being tested for fighting diabetes. We wanna look at, you know,
how much it costs to purchase the drug versus what kind of outcome you have on people who
have diabetes. And, of course, the outcomes are gonna be different depending on what the
drug intervention is, but you don't really care how the drug company is spending their
money to produce the intended effect. You care about dollars in versus total impact
out. So with that lens, we in our field being focused on poverty alleviation decided to
form an organization that would measure how many people we moved over the poverty line
and by how much and at what rough cost to donors, you know, per person impacted. And
so now 7 years in we can say that internationally we’ve moved 7 thousand people… actually,
right now it’s like 6,974. Something like that. But roughly 7 thousand people from a
baseline income of less than 2 dollars a day to 3 years after starting our program a baseline
income of 4 times that.
Wow.
And we can then track the investments that those people are making with that additional
income in households expenditures like education, like health care for their children, we see
a lot of improved, you know, consumption in terms of food. Our workers literally start
buying more protein for the first time and fresh vegetables. So you can then track that
4x income increase across all of these other indicators in terms of quality of life. But
we’re really focused on reporting outcomes. And we tell people, “You can look at how
much we spend on fundraising or travel or any number of things, but that’s not gonna
give you a good sense of whether we’re effective at what we do, which is moving people out
of poverty.” And I will mention to your viewers that there’s a great website called
GiveWell.org that helps people understand where their gifts could be most effective.
They don't have the capacity to evaluate every organization, but that lens, that way of thinking,
for, you know, any smart person who’s looking at making a charitable donation, that lens
that they use could be applied to their giving. And a few questions asked of the non profit
that they might wanna give to could probably yield answers as to how those nonprofits view
outcome tracking.
Speaking of outcomes, one of the things that made myself and everyone on our team cry was
a beautiful video that you guys have of a young woman named Martha. And numbers are
awesome and as businesspeople and entrepreneurs and creatives, it’s… it’s something
we need to pay attention to. But for us and for me, you know, I love the stories and I
think we all do and loving the ability to see even one individual’s life completely
transformed by the dignity of work and the possibility of independence in creating a
better life for himself or herself. Are there any stories, I know Martha is a favorite,
we’ll put a link to that below, whether you wanna tell Martha’s story or any other
story. You’ve done so much work in the field and seen so many lives change. Anyone come
to mind?
Sure. Well, I can give a refresh on the Martha story.
Sure.
We produced that video back in 2012 for a gala that we ran, 2012 or 2013. And Martha
came to us, she was a young woman living in an orphanage in Nairobi run by an amazing
Catholic charity in the slums. And she had been orphaned at age 10 and then moved to
this orphanage and at age 18 as is common both in the developing world and even here
in the US if we look at the foster care program, kids at age 18 age out of the system. And
yet if you have no job training, no family members to support you, no, you know, emotional
infrastructure of any kind, and, in addition to that, many of these youth have trauma,
as Martha did, from just any number of things that can happen to you in that vulnerable
situation, how could you possibly be expected to make a living for yourself? And Martha
was reported to us, her orphanage actually had a partnership with one of our recruiting
centers. And so we heard from the recruiting center that the sisters at her orphanage said
that Martha was routinely the top student, she was extremely bright, she was very humble,
and she was the kind of person in the background helping all of the other young girls in her
orphanage succeed. And so they took a real shining to her at our recruiting center and
even though I think she lacked some of our criteria, she had her… I think she had some
difficulties with high school, she ended up getting recruited to join a SamaSource center.
And then after she got her first job she was able over time to move out of the slum that
she was living in, to escape the reality for many women in urban African environments that
don't have a lot of money, which is getting involved in prostitution out of absolute necessity
because it’s the only way that they might make an income and sustain themselves. So
she… she told us that that was really her only other choice was to go on the streets.
She got this job, she… when we first met her would only wear baggy clothes and look
at her feet and she had, I think, internalized this… this message that a lot of people
from very poor backgrounds feel which is that I don't… I don't really belong, I don't
have any value to add in the world, I’m a nobody. Now I just saw her 2 and a half
weeks ago in Nairobi. She stopped working for SamaSource about a year ago and she got
a job working as a customer service rep for a local travel company in Kenya. And she was
just beaming with pride because they love her so much that she started getting involved
in social media, she’s a very beautiful young woman and she’s finally able… I
think she feels so much pride in being able to buy clothing that fits her and do her hair
and she was wearing makeup when I met her and she was extremely poised and she told
me that she really wants to get more involved in media and marketing for that industry,
for the travel industry. And the idea that a young girl from a slum, you know, who would
be continuing to toil away in that slum, you know, doing some kind of informal labor at
best, the idea that she is now this poised, mature woman living outside of the slum who
really has come into her own, I mean, that’s what we’re all about. And Martha now serves
as an inspiration to our other workers, we have about 700 active workers in east Africa
and Asia alone. And many of them have heard her story because we play the video for our
workers as well to show them that they might also have an outcome like Martha, and it's
just incredible. So I think there’s a… a psychological ripple effect that comes with
the dignity of work and with other people observing that in her community and seeing
what’s possible, that those girls don't have to go into prostitution, that there are
other paths. And… and I think so much of what we offer is just hope, hope that there’s
a better future.
And a lot of that hope needs to come right here in the US. And that was another reason
why we were so thrilled to find you guys. On our team it’s always been an internal
discussion. You know, where do we want to start to channel things and our resources
of how we can make a bigger impact? And I was so thrilled to know that you guys also
do work here in the US. You want to tell us about that?
Sure. And I think for us the story is coming at a good time because with the presidential
debates happening, I think there’s a lot of concern about threats from afar, from outside
of the US, whether they’re foreign workers or whether they’re immigrants, illegal or
legal immigrants, and I think the important thing to consider is that at the end of the
day we’re all human beings, whether we live in Timbuktu or Tennessee, and for us we…
we think we have as much of a moral duty to people here as we do to people overseas. And
we also think it’s not an either or. It’s not like because we’re helping someone in
Kenya we can’t also help someone here.
Yes.
And I think that’s a traditional dichotomy. “Oh, there are international poverty groups
and international charities and then there are domestic groups.” And I think so often
the strategies that we employ to fight poverty overseas have equal application here. So we
kind of think of ourselves as… as sort of transnational in that way. And our work here
started a couple of years ago. It was actually inspired by negative feedback we’d received
from a guy in Ohio who saw an ad that we’d run on Hulu, the web TV service, and the ad
featured a refugee, who we’re still in touch with, who was doing work for us from a refugee
camp. And this is one of the most destitute camps I’ve ever seen. It’s the Dadaab
refugee camp on the border of Somalia, about 800 thousand people. So we really thought
that this would be non controversial, that nobody would think these refugees are stealing
our jobs and we should be really concerned about it, especially because the nature of
the work that he was doing. It was very basic. But this guy from Ohio wrote in and told me
that I was ruining America and that I should be ashamed of myself for calling myself a
nonprofit… calling our organization a nonprofit. And it came at a time that was a very tough
time for me. I was really in debt from Sama. Started it as a nonprofit so I have no equity
in it, I’m never gonna get rich out of this, and it really demoralized me. And I initially,
you know, wrote this email that was… that shut him down. And then I didn't send the
email and the next morning I woke up and I read it again and I just Googled unemployment
in Ohio. And it turned out that this guy was from a community that had just had a huge
set of factory closures and unemployment was soaring and people there had no hope. And
so he was coming from a place of hopelessness and desperation and I think that’s where
so many of these fears are bubbling up. I mean, people aren’t being mean or angry
because they wanna be. They’re… they’re scared. They’re deeply scared and we have
to address that. Especially if we’re gonna be working overseas, we have to address that
at home. And so instead I wrote back and I asked him if he had ideas and that kernel
led us to start our US program 2 years later, which is called SamaSchool. And we started
with a model of adapting what we had overseas, which is we know how to train low income people
to be successful in the digital economy in fields like data entry, social media, and
a number of different things that you can do online without being co-located with the
business…
Yes.
...that’s giving the work. So we realized that there was a unique opportunity in the
US because we now have all of these new platforms where you can exchange your services online.
There’s a website called UpWork.
Yes.
It used to be oDesk and eLance.
Yes.
And UpWork has paid out billions of dollars to… actually, just over a billion dollars,
to contractors in the last 7 or 8 years and it is a fast growing marketplace. Whether
you look at UpWork or you look at even offline market places or market places for offline
work that are mediated online like TaskRabbit or Care.com if you’re looking for a babysitter
or an elder care specialist. I mean, there… the number of these sites has just exploded.
And the digital economy is not something that our job training infrastructure in the US
is prepared to handle. I was even listening to the Republican debate last night and there
was a lot of concern about jobs but nobody was talking about the threat to jobs from
automation and technology and the way we can mitigate that by training people to succeed
in the new economy. And not just training people to write code, but training people
to think first about applying online for a job or putting up a profile and how to navigate
that to get the most bang for their buck.
And how to market and sell themselves online in an effective way. I mean, it… it’s
something that we talk about a lot in our company because we’re a virtual company
and often times the folks that we hire we’ve never met before and you have to be able to
represent yourself and interact and put your best foot forward online in a way that makes
sense now.
Absolutely. And you guys would probably be a great case study and the kind of company
that would hire a SamaSchool graduate in the USA.
Absolutely.
We have a woman, I’ll just tell you one story about one of our sites. So we… we
started in California and then we got funding to expand to different pilot sites around
the country and we just got funded to expand into New York City with the Robin Hood Foundation.
Congratulations!
This quarter. So we’ll be… we’ll be your neighbors soon.
That’s awesome.
And one of the sites that we piloted, which is one of the hardest places I’ve ever seen
in the US to work is Dumas, Arkansas. It’s a little town in the Mississippi River Delta
Region of Arkansas and it is an extremely challenging place to do anti-poverty work.
There are a number of organizations that have worked in the Delta for years and have tried
to reduce the endemic poverty in the region, but because of a number of things from the
decline in our agricultural production as a country to the legacy of slavery and racial
injustice that continues in that region, there’s a pocket of poverty there that has been really
hard to tackle. And we started there working with people who were in many ways more similar
to our African workforce than anything I’ve seen in the US in terms of their skill level
and workforce readiness. They had very few skills and very little access to technology.
Many of them had never used a computer outside of our one recruiting partner. Most of them
had had jobs working at places like gas stations or the local McDonalds. There were no, you
know, white collar jobs available. So my favorite story is of a woman named Stacy, who’s a
single mom, who was a gas station attendant part time for 3 years before she found Sama.
And we got her into our training, it’s a 10 week boot camp. It’s designed for people
who have existing care commitments at home or existing jobs. So it’s night… it’s
a night and weekend program. And it’s designed to be fast and to get you making money as
soon as possible. So she stuck with it, she finished the program, and now she’s making
several thousand dollars a month as a customer service rep and she found the job… or, I
should say. Not customer service. Social media marketing. She… she found the job through
UpWork after going through our training. And so she is managing social media accounts for
different companies, small businesses around the country. She loves the work. She’s very
outgoing and well spoken due to her, you know, gas station training. She had talked to a
lot of people and she’s personable. And so you think about that and you think, “Wow,
how many people around the country are sitting at home hopeless because they haven’t had
success in the traditional job market who might well be able to earn a living through
this kind of an approach. And Stacy is a perfect example of that and I think… I think there
are millions of Americans who could benefit from this kind of program.
I agree 100%. One question I have for you, it’s something that will keep me up at night.
I’ll read articles online, I’ll watch videos, I’ll read books and my heart breaks
and I live here in New York City, I spend time in Los Angeles, and I feel so blessed
to be able to be exposed to things that I never dreamed were possible. I grew up in
New Jersey and did not come from a lot of money either, and so I find myself sometimes
going like, “Woah, what have I created? This is amazing, I’m so grateful for it.
But there’s so many millions, billions, of people that have so little.” How do you
manage the emotional part of what you do as a leader, seeing the extremes of humanity?
Oh, God. It is so overwhelming and I think one of the refreshing things about what you
just said is that it still bothers you.
All the time.
Because I think it’s so easy to develop a callous layer over our hearts to be able
to deal with that more easily. And there’s this great quote by an amazing writer name
Arundhati Roy about how the trick of remaining human as you progress through life is to always
get upset when you see injustice and for it to always affect you and for you to be, you
know, emotionally… in a bit of emotional turmoil when you see it. And that just confirms
that you’re still human.
Yes.
And… and it’s so important for us to continue that because as we progress and, you know,
in the case of Sama, I had no idea that we would even be around as a… I thought it
was just gonna be me with Steve Muthei, my guy, my internet cafe guy in Kenya, the guy
I hired off of Craigslist, Jess McCarter, to do our initial sales, and I just had never
imagined that we would get to the scale that we are now. And so for me the trick is to
continue to be upset because that… that fuels so much of our programming and I think
without empathy, without a feeling of solidarity with the people we’re trying to help, we,
you know, we lose the most important thing in guiding our decisions, which is… which
is human empathy. It’s been a huge struggle for me, that said. I mean, I… I have been
engaged before, I’ve had a lot of personal turmoil as a result I think of committing
myself so fully to this work, and it’s very difficult for a partner to… and I have so
much respect for people who’ve been my partners. It’s so hard to support someone who’s
constantly, like, up and going to rural Uganda and without a clear return date.
Yeah.
Or having to cancel things at the last minute to go and fundraise. But I think there too,
that empathy really helps. And I feel very lucky, I think the only thing that can sustain,
you know, people who are in this kind of field is having a really strong network of supportive
friends and family around them who… who get it and who can listen to the stories and
who can, you know, sit there when I'm crying on the phone about having checked in with
Martha and I’m so depressed that I can’t do more for her.
Yeah.
You know, who can sit there and console me. And… and at some level I think faith also
helps. I’ve been really impressed with Pope Francis and I’m not a lapsed Catholic because
I never was a Catholic, but my father grew up Jesuit and went to Catholic school and
raised us with those kinds of values and… and I really think that faith in those times
of turmoil can be an anchor for us and it’s so inspiring to have a moral leader like Pope
Francis who’s willing to be bold and talk about poverty and the importance of caring
for our fellow human being as the highest calling.
Yeah, I… my heart always breaks open any time I watch the news and I start to see,
from faith based communities, the opening up and the inclusion of everyone, and I’m
just… I sit there and I do my Jersey fist pump and I get so excited. Speaking of family,
you know, there was a bit that you said about the best advice that you’d ever received
when your parents fresh from India were signing their first mortgage here in the US and they
were nervous. And your grandmother, a Belgian who hitchhiked around the world before meeting
your grandfather in Calcutta, she told them, “Don't worry so much. Trust the world. It’s
a vast, beautiful, wondrous place.” How does this notion serve you today? How does
it impact who you are and how you show up?
My grandmother, Crissann, was just the most amazing character even just in terms of her
style with these grand caftans she would wear. And I think what impressed me most about her
was that as a young woman coming out of World War II, they had to… they had to flee Belgium
when the Nazis came, that she could still retain her sense of openness and possibility
and… and a positive lens on humanity. And I think it is so easy to be cynical. The temptation
is always there to see the worst in the people around us and to assume that their intentions
are the worst, and I fall into that trap all the time. And I think her lesson is really
that, you know, we have a choice to either trust the world or to hole ourselves in and
to assume that everyone else is out to get us. And those decisions that are fear based,
that are based on that idea that everyone is out to get us and we need to hunker down
and protect ourselves against this horrible world, I… I think that never leads us to
a good outcome. And I feel like the most incredible movements in history and the smallest acts
of kindness every day that make us feel better about ourselves and that build a better world
are grounded in that sense of positivity and optimism about human nature. And… and I
really do think that’s choice. I don't think there are facts that prove one way or the
other that humans are inherently bad or humans are inherently good or humans are inherently
untrustworthy or trustworthy. We are all of those things. Right?
Yes, absolutely.
And we have to wrestle with it. And I think… I think if we choose every morning when we
wake up to see the positive, to trust the world, even if traumatic things happen, even
if we witness, you know, tragedy in front of us, as so many people do, that optimism
is ultimately what’s gonna guide us through life. You know? And I think it’s the only
way to leave a better world than the one that we were born into.
If anyone wants to get involved with Sama, tell us where we should go and what… because
our audience is full of enthusiastic action takers, which I love. So where would you direct
people and what can they do to get involved with you?
Great. Well, first of all, we’re spreading the word about SamaSchool. Our goal is to
enroll 10 thousand students by the end of the year. It’s a free online work program.
So if anyone that you know is looking for work, struggling with unemployment, looking
just to boost their skills and figure out how to make the most of the online economy,
SamaSchool.org is a great place to start. And then I will mention 2 other things. We
have a crowdfunding site for medical treatments that raises money for people who can’t afford
basic medical treatments, both domestically and abroad. And so if you’re passionate
about providing healthcare you can make a direct donation and 100% of the gift goes
to one of our doctors to perform lifesaving medical treatment. And then as a donor you
get a report back on exactly where your money went. And, lastly, if you’re more interested
in larger strategic philanthropy, we are raising a new investment in Sama to expand our work
domestically and overseas on the job creation front. And we’re doing it through a loan
called a program related investment that donors can be part of. And so if they’re interested
in… in participating in that you can go to our website at SamaGroup.co and leave us
a message or email us at Info@SamaGroup.co.
Leila, thank you so much. This was such a beautiful conversation. You are an incredible
human being. I’m so thrilled that we’re connected and I can’t wait to work with
you for years and years and years to come. Thank you.
Likewise, thank you so much.
Now Leila and I would love to hear from you. From everything we discussed today, what was
the most significant thing that you’re taking away and why? As always, the best discussions
happen after the episode, so go on over to MarieForleo.com and leave a comment now.
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