When I returned to New York City, the job market seemed to be a bit better than it had been on the west coast. I received several part-time gigs that allowed me to regain somewhat of a sense of normalcy. After previously hitting rock bottom, this is something that cannot be underestimated. Though poverty is primarily considered to entail possessing a lack of tangible material goods, I discovered that it is just as much a state of mind, and that this psychological barrier is extremely difficult to break through. When it pulls you down and becomes part of your identity -- when everything you do on a day-to-day basis reminds you of it -- it’s unbelievably hard to envision yourself ever rising above it again.
Slowly but surely, I began to overcome the feeling that I was hopeless. Life started to feel meaningful again. I actually began to feel truly fortunate, because even though I had been through many tough life experiences in the past, and nothing had even come close to this crash and burn -- I was somehow still digging my way out of it. The experience of having your business fail for the first time is similar in some ways to the first time you get your heart broken. You never believe in a million years that it will happen to you, and when it does, it leaves you in a period of extreme shock; feeling as if you no longer have an identity. You wonder if you’ll ever be able to get yourself to become vulnerable and optimistic enough to try again, considering how blindly you believed in it the last time -- and how much harder that made your fall. If you had put all of your chips into this venture, add in the instability of losing your basic survival necessities such as food, shelter, and the ability to partake in any type of social activities with friends, and it can become harsh. Add this to a lack of other job opportunities during a recession, being in a city without any strong connections, and throw in some major issues with relatives for good measure -- and it can feel as if your entire world has fallen apart. But the great thing is that as human beings, when we heal from a trauma, the scar tissue that seals the wound becomes even tougher than what was there before it. Though this scar tissue will forever remain as a reminder of a deep pain that shook us to our core, it also represents a symbol of the strength and resilience we showed in not allowing it to break us. Deep down, I knew that it was only a matter of time before I would try to bring my vision to life again. Except now, I was cut out of steel. Not many things could ever be much more challenging than what I’d already gone through, and so I was no longer afraid of failure. Even though it felt as if I’d lost practically everything, I was still alive; and --I was still in good health. Next time, I’d do it right.
After some time went by, as chance would have it, I happened to stumble upon the social entrepreneurship industry. I had previously not even known that it existed. I began discovering organizations that were using business principles to address large-scale social issues such as poverty, human rights, the environment, and many other causes as well -- in a financially sustainable way. Right away, I felt that this was the long lost field that I had been searching for all along. For awhile, I’d kept the big idea I had regarding global poverty alleviation on the back burner, because I was scared that people would think I was crazy for even believing it was possible. At the time, I thought perhaps I was not ready for it.
A turning point occurred when I met Kanika Gupta, the Founder of The Social Journal (SoJo). I learned about how her previous initiative, Nukoko, was able to provide educational opportunities and school supplies for hundreds of girls in the villages of Togo. Despite the fact that she was chronologically younger than I was, I knew that she was one of the brightest and most accomplished people I’d ever met (among many other awards, she would go on to be named one of Canada’s Top 100 Most Powerful Women by the Women’s Executive Network a year later). After reading a few of my writings, she asked if I’d be interested in writing for The Social Journal. Looking back on it now, this was such a major morale boost that it helped bring me back to life. She is one of the rare people who believed in me at a time when I did not believe in myself, and for that I will be forever grateful. A little hope is a powerful thing; and this led me to begin voraciously consuming any information I could find related to social entrepreneurship like it was oxygen. Through this process, I stumbled upon the work One Acre Fund had been doing in Kenya, helping thousands upon thousands of farmers rise out of poverty. I knew that it was time to unleash my idea out into the world. It was time to take flight once again.
The idea needed a name, and so I called it Project Free World. The word “free” in Project Free World is an acronym that stands for food, rights, education and environment. Without access to any one of these four, a person is not truly free. These four main elements -- food, rights, education, and a healthy, clean, safe, peaceful environment -- represent the basic foundation upon which human beings can create a dignified life. Though there are many other sub-elements that can fall within one of these categories, I chose to focus on these four in an effort to unify the masses, and minimize the philosophical polarization that prevents meaningful action from taking place. Obviously, different people will have different beliefs about which particular sub-areas of development are necessities versus luxuries. However, there is a large enough critical mass of people that believe in these four that it was determined that this would make for a great starting point.
Project Free World’s ultimate mission is to facilitate the creation of collaborative grassroots projects to provide the proper food, rights, education and environment to every person on the planet. It aims to leverage the power of the internet and other technologies to crowdsolve these issues, by bringing together the people who want to empower others, the people who want to be empowered, and the ideas and organizations that have already been proven effective on a small scale in various regions. For example, there is an organization called LivelyHoods that operates in Nairobi, Kenya, which has created a financially sustainable way of creating jobs for youth that live in an urban slum environment. I’ve presented Project Free World numerous times, in rooms full of people; and every time, I ask: “By a show of hands, who here has heard of LivelyHoods before?” Since they are a small organization operating on the other side of the globe from the United States, rarely has a hand ever gone up. If so many of the people involved in the realms of social entrepreneurship, tech, and startup investing have never heard of LivelyHoods, chances are, the people most in need of information like this haven’t heard of it either. The problem is: This is the type of organization that billions of people should know about. If their model works for alleviating poverty in Nairobi, chances are, there are people who should know about this idea in Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro, and Cairo, and Manila, and every other city around the world where an urban slum exists.
Through the years, I’ve discovered lots of organizations like LivelyHoods that are doing great work on a small scale in one particular region of the world or another. While they are changing many lives through their efforts, it can become a major challenge for a small social enterprise to scale up or expand at the level necessary to serve all of the people worldwide who could use their services. This is an extremely tall order for any single organization to meet. The larger an organization gets, the less innovative it often becomes, and the more resources get stuck in the bureaucratic wasteland. As such, a primary goal of Project Free World is to make it easy for people to utilize an online platform to search for others in their local area with similar passions and complementary skill sets, in order to be able to discover and replicate the most effective models in their own regions. Rather than waiting for one organization to become large enough to address a need on a global scale (which shifts constantly and is slightly different in each region), a much more effective method would be to document all of the best practices online, in order to allow grassroots movements to form in a decentralized fashion.
We often think about attempting to solve global problems in terms of having a limited budget or resources; and I believe this has severely limited our thinking. An alternate approach is to identify potential solut
ions first, without allowing perceived resource constraints to limit our creative problem solving abilities -- and then find a way to bring together the necessary resources second. When united as a whole, humanity has no limits on time, money, resources, or workforce potential. It’s not a lack of money or resources that are truly the problem. The only limits we have are our fears, our apathy, our hatred, our breakdowns in communication, and most importantly -- our reluctance to collaborate on a scale larger than we’ve ever seen before.
Along with a group of volunteers, I began building the Project Free World platform online. The initial momentum was moving fast, and we made some great headway. Though it was only the beginning, the website showed a map of the world with metric scores ranging from 0--100 (unstable to stable) for different issues, highlighting which regions were in the most critical conditions. On the Act page, the site displayed some of the most innovative organizations and tools for users to access; in order to give them the ability to get involved in social good at any level of engagement they were interested in. Users would be able to donate to nonprofits, learn new skills, volunteer, discover new organizations to research and replicate, start a grassroots movement, and more.
After the initial wave of interest, as time passed, it became a major challenge to continue building out all of the necessary features to make the site interactive and take it to the next level, while utilizing a minimal budget and 100% volunteer staff. I’m certainly not a world-class web developer, and the volunteers on board who were experts had full-time jobs that consumed much of their time. As I spoke about earlier in chapter five, I discovered that unproven early stage ventures are the toughest to get funding for, and I was hitting dead ends in every direction. If I were to try to build it up all by myself, with my minimal knowledge of coding, I estimated that it would likely take an additional five years or longer -- and determined that there had to be a more efficient option than this. Price quotes from freelancers to build out the next set of features ranged in the neighborhood of $40,000, which was way out of my price range. I then had the misfortune of tearing two ligaments in my ankle, and I didn’t have health insurance. For several weeks, I found myself hopping around on one leg anytime I needed to get something to eat or go to the bathroom. It’d been a rough few years.
Though things had once again hit a relative low point, I was determined to try another route. Two options that came to mind were: Finding a technical co-founder who was as passionate about this idea as I was to bring on board, or merging with a larger organization with a similar mission that had the budget and team necessary to get this idea off the ground. After discussing the idea with numerous likeminded organizations, it seemed as if none were willing or able to take it on. The only option I had left for making this website happen was finding a technical co-founder. I’d met hundreds of people at different hackathons, meetups, and other tech events, but I’d had no luck. Coding was not my area of expertise, but I’d picked up a bizarre amount of knowledge through the years about social change, organizational psychology, personal development, creativity and innovation management, leadership, marketing, branding, and storytelling. I decided that I would focus on what I was good at -- writing about what I knew -- and utilizing social media channels to cast as wide a net as possible. Blogging was something I did not need any money or anyone’s permission to do, and I could do it even on days where my ankle pain was too strong to go anywhere. My blog was named: Uncommon Sense for 21st Century Living (www.uncommonsense.is).
Then, something unexpected happened. I joined a site called Quora (a forum for questions, answers, and blogging) -- and the very first answer I wrote went viral. It amassed over 200,000 views and 5,000 upvotes, which ranked it among the top 100 most popular answers in the site’s history. Since Quora was ranked in the top 500 most visited sites on the internet, it seemed that I was on to something. I started reposting my blog articles from Uncommon Sense onto the site, and it became the #2 most followed blog on the site. My views exploded, eclipsing the 1.5 million mark, and I was awarded with the designation as a Top Writer on the site. My writings started getting distributed in different publications, my social media following jumped significantly, and I began to get paid writing gigs. I started to realize that if I really wanted to get the Project Free World website concept built as fast as possible, the best thing I could do would be to release it for free to the general public, and get as many eyeballs on it as possible. As such, at the time of the publishing of this book, I have released all of the wireframes and sketches for all to have access to on my blog (www.uncommonsense.is/projectfreeworld). Note that the original version can still be viewed at the Project Free World main site (www.projectfreeworld.org).
Releasing control of this project that I care so much about was not easy to do, but I realize that it is necessary for several reasons. Though I may have been able to advance this website and concept to a certain point thus far, this vision is much bigger than me. Reducing the suffering for the people of the world is much more important to me than being able to profit and purchase luxury items from my ideas. If there is someone reading this right now who is a more skilled web developer than I am, with more resources, who can do a better job of implementing the next steps, I want to give them the option to take these ideas and build upon them. When we collectively create so much competitive waste in the social good realm, ultimately, it is the most vulnerable people who suffer as a result.
If we are to move into a new paradigm where collaboration takes precedence over competition, I’d like to take this important first step, and lead by example. If someone else is able to execute this idea, I do not expect to earn a dime off of it. In fact, I want you to contact me if you’ve taken this idea and run with it, and I will do everything in my power to direct people towards it. Even if I don’t end up spearheading the next phases of the web development, my personal mission remains unchanged. I will continue to focus on serving this mission using the methods that produce the greatest impact at any given time. If that means creating an idea, and sharing it through my writing, then so be it. If that means focusing on launching community projects on the ground while someone else handles the website, so be it. If we truly want to create a better world, and fix the problems that oppress our entire species as a whole, the best thing we can do is to begin to recognize societal needs, and start filling them, even if there is no financial gain involved for ourselves personally. Instead, the personal gains will arise in the form of being part of the rebuilding of a much needed sense of community -- which is something that money can’t buy. By working towards the continued development of these types of initiatives, and laying the groundwork for groups to form around these ideas, it is my intention to enable others to be able to get involved in making a difference at their own level of comfort, without having to face many of the challenges I had to go through along the way.
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Crowdfunding for Cities
It’s time for us to collectively begin the transition into a paradigm of true abundance. Over the past few decades, we’ve begun associating the word “abundance” with images of money falling out of the sky. The type of abundance I’m talking about doesn’t involve all of us making it rain dollar bills everywhere we go. It’s not about luxury items; it’s not about putting on a show displaying how much better we are than everyone else; and it’s not about making excessive purchases that no longer excite us a week later. It’s not about us all becoming flashy millionaires and billionaires. In fact, a 2010 study by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton showed that once a person’s income level goes beyond a certain threshold ($75,000 annually in the U.S.), additional increases in income do not correlate with higher levels of happiness and satisfaction with life.
The form of abundance that will set us free is one in which we understand that there is enough for everyone, and act accordingly. We have been programmed to do anything and everything we can to maximize profits at all cost, when what we really want is to maximize happiness. It’s imp
ortant to acknowledge that these two goals are not the same, and can contradict one another. Consider these words from Robert F. Kennedy:
“Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product… counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors, and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry, or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate, or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning… it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”
You see, our cravings for excessive consumption are really just a restless chase in pursuit of something much deeper. What we’re really seeking is a stronger connection with others, and a more powerful connection with life itself. What we’re really seeking is the sensation that the limited time we have on this earth is being spent in the most meaningful way; deeply immersed in rich, liberating experiences that remind us of what it really feels like to be fully alive. Becoming the creators of meaningful experiences that benefit others and ourselves has the potential to bring us much more joy and satisfaction with life than plain old consumption. When we seek to acquire and hoard vain material goods, it’s often a very showy, individualized endeavor that’s disconnected from others. Alternatively, when we create meaningful experiences that involve other people, we create a dynamic whereby our success and joy becomes intertwined with other living beings. This creates the long-lost sense of connection that we are looking for, and this is something that we all have the potential to be a part of.
It's All My Fault: How I Messed Up the World, and Why I Need Your Help to Fix It Page 11