Summary:

"People who were not lacking in capability, but lacking an opportunity"

Artisans in the developing world have incredible, valuable skills, but limited access to global markets. From jewelry to baskets, and pottery to blankets, Melissa Sevy creates opportunities for artisans to flourish, providing jobs, fair pay work, and dignity. But it hasn't been easy. Along the way she faced difficulty, hardship, and brick walls. Yet, her resilient nature overcomes and helped her to be there to strengthen others.

About Our Guest:

Melissa Sevy specializes in helping artisans in the developing world gain access to global markets. She is the founder and Executive Director of Mabira Collective (formerly Musana), a nonprofit working with jewelry artisans in Uganda.

She also is the Co-founder of Fair Kind a for-profit social venture. Fair Kind is a social enterprise that sources handmade products from artisan groups around the world for corporate clients. 

Her newest company is Ethik Collective, platform that enables companies to source ethical handmade goods and materials from artisans around the world.

Useful Links:

Melissa Sevy is on Twiter.

Fair Kind supports local artisans and creates a positive impact. You can buy their beautiful products directly.

Mabira Collective creates a sustainable solution based in love and breaking the cycle of dependency by helping women develop as jewelry artisans and entrepreneurs.

Ethik offers ethical sourcing of all things handmade

Grit shares that achievement is found through focused persistence called grit.

Resilience Research Center has collaborated with local, national, and international institutions for more than 15 years to carry out innovative research that explores pathways to resilience across cultures. 

About Merit Leadership

Our Business Ethics classroom in a Box focuses on developing future leaders by developing ethical skills and tools in an easy-to-use course. Providing lesson plans, exercises, and assessments that help people succeed where good intentions fall short.

Pleasant Pictures Music

Join the Pleasant Pictures Music Club to get unlimited access to high-quality, royalty-free music for all of your projects. Use the discount code HOWTOHELP15 for 15% off your first year.

Hi, Melissa, are you there?

Hey.

Yeah.

Hey, how are you?

Good.

It's fun to think back on the whole tenure.

This is basically at the 10 year mark decade.

In retrospect,

There reaches the point where adults just reminisce

instead of talking about the future.

Okay.

I'm not at that point yet.

That's good.

I doubt you'll ever get to that point.

Let's hope not, I want somthing to look forward to.

Hi, I'm Aaron Miller, and this is How to Help

a podcast about having a life and career of meaning, virtue, and impact.

This is season one, episode six, Resilience, How to Help is sponsored

by Merit Leadership home of The Business Ethics Field Guide.

This is going to be an episode on how we keep going, even when, or

especially when things get hard.

We all want to do hard things, things that will make life better for ourselves.

And for those we love, but hard things mean setbacks,

disappointments, sometimes brick walls.

How do we keep going?

In spite of those things?

My guest for this episode is Melissa Seavey, who specializes in helping

artisans in the developing world, sell their products in the United States.

This is one of those ideas that when you first encounter, it seems obviously great.

After all travelers that come from wealthier countries, they see

these creations, blankets, baskets, pottery, jewelry, and the like,

and they immediately fall in love.

Their purchase instantly becomes a treasured keepsake.

So just import artisan and goods and they should sell like crazy.

Right.

Well, if you're familiar with this space, you've seen hundreds of these

businesses struggle to grow and eventually the vast majority of them fail.

It turns out selling artisan goods at scale means solving entirely new problems.

Only a handful of people in the entire world have really figured this out.

You see, it's one thing to help 20 artisans sell a thousand baskets.

It's entirely something else to assemble a thousand weavers to sell 65,000 baskets.

But Melissa has done that very thing and actually all just in a few months.

Here she is telling part of that story

one really interesting experience that we had a couple of

years ago, we were working with artisans across Rwanda who are basket weavers.

So we were working with about 10 cooperatives.

And one of, one of these cooperatives, it was a women's group.

That was way up in this really remote village.

We had to take motorcycles for like an hour on this dirt road.

That was like a cliff on one side.

And we get kind of the top of this remote mountain village to meet with

these artisans who, had a beautiful craft and, and they were really

talented weavers, but lacked market access even within their own country.

So we sat with them and we had a spec sheet with the specifics of

what we required for this order.

And it was a, it was a traditional basket design that they were used to.

We made it really clear , what we needed.

And so they said, okay, we'll charge you this much per basket.

And we had done our research to understand how much materials cost and

how much a good living wage would be.

And so we knew how much would be a good price.

And so they proposed their price and we were like, That's way too low.

We bartered up with them , and I remember they just laughed.

We're just on this, this little hillside and they just thought it was so funny

that these foreigners were bartering up.

I'm sure they were like, you don't get how this goes to you.

This experience was years in the making.

Melissa got her start by managing a summer program for American

college students and Uganda.

The group was working on various development projects.

The kind that.

Often do more for the students than they do for the people that they're helping.

Melissa has such a great way of describing what that first

time in Africa did for her.

I loved about that first experience was getting to break some of

the Western stereotypes of Africa, I think just from media and whatever, wondering

if like, is this going to be safe and, you know, and, and also kind of the.

The type of messaging that we get from global, NGOs often that portrays

sadness or, or this kind of stuff.

And just really getting to experience people in 3d and just seeing what a rich

culture, a very celebratory culture.

And, and then I think on the other side of the coin, often I hear

people and, and this is especially happened as the years have gone on.

And I've been able to spend a lot of time abroad.

People will go on a short trip to a place and say, the people were just

so poor, but they were so happy.

And that too, I think it's such an oversimplification of humans that,

and getting to stay for that four months and getting to understand

the complexities of poverty.

And seeing really capable people who in other scenarios would be able to

thrive that they were not lacking in capability, but lacking an opportunity

and really seeing the complexities there.

Seeing people in 3d is a phrase I plan to use on a regular basis.

It's such a great metaphor.

When most of us look at the big problems facing the world, we

just see them in two dimensions.

But real people live in the middle of these challenges.

And if you don't understand the people with their personalities and

idiosyncrasies, you don't really understand the problems they're facing.

Being there makes all the difference.

Coming to know these women made Melissa want to help them.

So she in her companions had the idea of selling Ugandan jewelry

back in the United States.

Now origin stories like this become something like mythology over time,

they're meant to inspire and amaze us almost like a pivotal moment

in a movie that starts our hero on his or her path in real life.

Most of these stories are fake.

They have elements of truth for sure, but the gritty details tend

to get polished away over time.

Melissa has told her origin story a lot, and I love that she keeps a

more realistic perspective on it.

Listen to how she explains why they chose jewelry.

As a business to help these

. Melissa Sevy: The original idea was

wonderful women that we got close to and thinking, how can we create something so

they can have jobs on an ongoing basis.

Now, where did the idea of jewelry come from?

I wish that I could say that it was from market research and

testing, but it was none of that.

It literally was that we saw jewelry and we're like, Ooh.

I like the jewelry here, let's start a jewelry organization.

And so, and that had consequences.

You know, we, it's kind of like we knew our, our social issue,

but we did not know the model.

We didn't, we didn't go deep on understanding what model we

were going to use to sustain.

When I talked to people that are thinking about starting a nonprofit or

a social enterprise, making sure that they put as much emphasis on their

sustainability model, their business model, as they do on the social

issue that they're working to solve.

And that's something we did not do from the beginning.

This is where we get to the heart of this episode.

When I decided I wanted to interview Melissa, it was largely

because of this part of her.

She's an incredibly resilient person.

I wanted to understand how she kept going.

Despite a lot of discouraging times, passion doesn't pay for groceries.

So if you're not making enough for basic necessities, how in

the world do you keep going?

There's a lot of fascinating research into resilience.

The concept has been popularized through media, including books like grit by Dr.

Angela Duckworth.

I highly recommend that one.

Another great resource that I've found is the Resilience

Research Center at Dalhousie university in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

There, Dr.

Michael Ungar has written a manual for designing programs that build resilience

in children, youth, and families.

I've linked to it in the description for this episode.

Dr.

Ungar explains that resilience happens through three processes.

The first is recovery, basically, as we're knocked off balance by hard

circumstances, one way that we show resilience is by getting back on our feet.

Something that Melissa seems to be very good at.

I asked Melissa what motivated her to keep going when things were so hard,

really the first few years, myself and my two co-founders.

We're actually pouring quite a bit of money into it.

So I remember, and we had all come back and were doing full-time school or jobs.

And so we would get on a call once a month and say, okay, we didn't

make the sales we needed to, and it's time to pay our artisans.

So who's got.

A few hundred dollars.

And that went on for the first couple of years.

During that time, we generally, we were able to pay our artisans and

sometimes it was pretty skinny.

We'd take out a loan over in Uganda to be able to pay them and then do a pop-up

sale here to be able to pay for that.

But then also we didn't pay ourselves the first several years

I was putting in full-time work.

And so I had a plethora of.

Side hustles actually, during that time, which ranged from there was,

there was a time where I was teaching dance to girls in my neighborhood.

I put out an ad to run people's dogs for money, and I was giving

plasma to pay for groceries.

And at that point I had a graduate degree and I was in my late twenties

and it was really humiliating.

And so there was a, there was a lot going on there, um, trying to keep a float.

So we were not taking salaries on the U S side.

Something that I have learned is part of sustainability is sustaining

the people working on it because we were so close to burnout because

we just, we had the passion, but.

It was a struggle to pay for groceries.

So figuring out a more sustainable model, like it wasn't just for fun

or to show people that we could grow.

It was like, so that we could eat.

So, I mean, talk about that for a minute, if that's

okay, because that's when a lot, that's when most people just quit.

I mean, like keeping Musana going during a time when you're literally giving

away, you know, your plasma just to eat.

I mean, what, like what in the world kept you going thinking, man, I have to stick.

I have to stay with us instead of just saying, Hey, we made our best effort.

It's time to move on.

Yeah.

I mean, sometimes I do wonder, you know, people say like you just persevered and

sometimes I'm like, or I was just dumb.

I dunno.

And I had people along the way that said you are stupid for starting this.

You should make your money first.

And then later in life, Do your social good.

And you know, I started questioning starting something young, but you know,

I knew these women and I knew their kids.

And I'd been to their homes.

And so that probably was, they felt like family.

And I, I felt like, okay, we have, we've brought them into this.

We've promised a lot.

And just so often in our town of Lou Ghazi, there's a lot of broken promises

from politicians, from people coming in, you know, visiting for a little

bit and saying, oh, we're going to come back and build you a school.

And they never come back.

And so I think I'd seen a lot of broken promises.

We'd even.

I remember when we talked with a group of women during the course of the summer,

in this kind of remote area of Uganda.

And they had said, I can't remember what we had, you know, we said we

wanted to come back and they said, you don't need to promise that people

tell us things like that all the time.

And they were referring to both, you know, their local leaders.

And so they're like, don't promise.

And so, yeah, I didn't want to be another broken promise.

Doctor Ungar explains that an essential ingredient and

resilience is a sense of belonging coupled with a responsibility for others.

He says "knowing that our lives matter to others and feeling a

sense of connection because of it is a powerful force for thriving."

When our lives are full of challenges and our wellbeing is threatened.

In a nutshell, that seems to be what kept Melissa going when

she was walking dogs and selling plasma and to make it all work.

If it had just been about her and a personal goal or dream that she

was pursuing, it wouldn't have provided the same motivation, but

there was no way Musana could keep going under those circumstances.

According to Dr.

Ungar, recovery can only last for so long.

If things keep on being hard, resilience has to come from some other way.

The second way it can come is through adaptation.

This is when we change ourselves and our behaviors to accommodate

the difficult circumstances.

It's not about overcoming, what's hard.

It's about adapting.

So it's no longer hard.

Now for a word from our sponsor.

Do you teach ethics to others?

Whether it's at a university school company or agency, if so, you know

how hard it can be to find engaging and useful materials for your class.

At Merit Leadership, we have decades of award-winning experience

teaching ethics and top programs.

Our ethics classroom offers complete lesson plans, videos, exercises, and

assessments, all in an online resource.

That's easy to use.

You can pick just what you need or even teach an entire course.

Everything we do focuses on developing ethical skills.

That help people succeed where good intentions alone fall short.

To learn more about The Business Ethics Field guide and our classroom in a box.

Check the show notes for a link or visit Meritleadership.com.

In the early years, the Musana team did make one big change by helping

artisans begin to make jewelry that better fit American tastes.

Styles can vary widely across the world,

and what Musana had been producing for Ugandans didn't have the wide appeal

in the U S that they thought it would.

That one adaptation improved things somewhat, but it still wasn't quite

enough to make ends meet for the founders.

And that's when they had a fantastic idea.

Listen to how Melissa and her partner, Linden Baker figured

out a new way to operate.

We had been, we were probably six years, six, seven

years into Musana and had really got to know the plight of artisans.

And in fact, artisan craft is the second largest employer of

people in the developing world.

Second, only to agriculture.

Wow.

So hundreds of millions of people engaged in traditional handcraft.

That's very often like a cultural preservation.

That's been passed down from generation to generation.

So very highly skilled artisan craft, and yet lacking access

to the Western consumer market.

And so understanding that situation, we started thinking broader and

thinking, how can we connect groups like Musana, to, to the Western market?

And out of that was born the concept of Fair Kind, where we, uh, started

in the corporate gifting space.

And so, especially cause we're working, working with artisans, everything

is handmade, it can be modified and created specifically for a company

with their logo and their colors.

Um, we launched into that space.

And also understanding.

And again, this is kind of what I was touching on earlier that we need to

think about the market dynamics and what's happened over the past decade is

companies are wanting a social cause, this kind of provided a unique way that

we could approach companies and say, Hey, you can be engaged in doing real

social good, and providing people jobs, fair pay work, dignity in their work,

and you don't have to donate anything.

You're purchasing product, using a budget you already have for gifting,

but making a more ethical choice.

And yeah.

And so we actually found a really, we found a really interesting market niche

as we worked together with them and they're able to have this great social

story to tell with their products, their customers love it and excited,

and it makes them more excited about the company that they're buying from.

Understanding market dynamics, harnessing those for social good.

For adaptation to create resilience.

It needs to be a change that is sustainable.

It means changing yourself for your approach in a way that circumstances

support, instead of undermine the way you heard, Melissa just described the pivot

to Fair Kind, corporate gifting and more artisans and groups made it sound like

it was an obvious success, but that's not how new ideas look when they first appear.

They're exciting, but they're unproven, Melissa and Linden had to try it out.

And that's when they came into their first big order.

This is a great story.

Okay.

Well, this is kind of a funny story as well, and this is

definitely laying my cards all out.

If it can help anybody take the jump, but then great.

So I had been in Uganda working on a project with Musana and it

was coming up on the national elections and that typically could

be kind of a crazy time there.

It was looking like we would possibly have to stay indoors for a couple of

days in case there were riots and such.

And so I had some friends that I knew from home that were living in Rwanda

and they were always saying, well, though, you're so close, you know,

the next country over, come visit us.

And so I thought, oh, I don't want to spend two days inside

all go visit my friends down.

And Rhonda and I, I was going down there and I said, Hey, could you introduce

me to some basket weaving groups?

I just like, I'd seen Rwandan baskets.

They're beautiful.

My friend that lived there, he connected me to an artisan and group,

and I met with them and saw their beautiful craft and, and it was great.

And I brought a few samples home without a plan in mind.

Well, just.

A couple weeks after getting home, a friend of mine contacted me and said,

and he worked for a large company and he said he does musalla do baskets.

And that was like, yeah.

We started engaging in a conversation with this company.

And we met with this company actually for several weeks and the day they signed

the contract to do this large order of it turned out to be 50,000 baskets.

We set.

They said, okay, all of our executives assigned it.

Um, can you send us your EIN number and your, your company information?

We said, yeah, hold on.

And we went to our office and registered Fair Kind as a

business and sent them our EIN.

And we were like, I hope that they can't detect that this was a company

that was started 30 minutes ago.

Yeah.

Thank heavens they didn't go look right.

Yeah.

Fair Kind as you can tell has worked out really well.

It was an effective adaptation in the language of Dr.

Ungar.

Here's another beautiful story of one of their more recent projects.

Yeah, we have now probably worked with around 2,500 artisans

and some of my favorite experiences so far has been opportunities to

work with less established groups and really build their capacity.

And just earlier this year, we did a large order of handmade wool

dryer balls from Nepal that was made by a women's group there.

And then we worked with a shelter.

Several of my colleagues had, had worked with a shelter for women and girls that

have come out of sex trafficking and they have a tailoring training program.

As the girls are preparing to.

You know, leave the shelter and go back into their communities to be

able to have, have a source of income.

In the past, they've just gone out into their villages and bend

the, the town scenes seems stress.

Well, we were able to work with this shelter.

They have never exported a product before, and we were working with their sewing

graduates in five villages that were sewing these bags, they would all come

on buses to the, the main point in, in Katmandu where we do quality control.

I actually went there with a one-way ticket and I said, okay,

can't leave until we are able to produce 10,000 bags per week.

Wow.

And yeah, and so that was the goal.

And so it took six weeks and we were able to hit

that and they were high quality.

And now this group, and, and actually in addition to paying all of the

artisans that, that sewed the bags we put in, uh, A portion of the price

to go towards the shelter itself.

And so that one order was able to provide funding to sustain the shelter

for a year, which houses 100 girls.

That's amazing,

Yeah.

And so, and now they have this capacity to create bags.

And so we're looking for other ways that big create conference bags and,

and they can screen print on them.

And so.

Again, giving companies a choice to say, Hey, we have to

buy bags for our conference.

Anyways, might as well make an ethical choice and source these bags

that have more of a, a meaning and communicate that to our audience.

This story tells us about the third path to

resilience it's described by Dr.

Ungar.

It happens through transformation instead of recovering to keep going, we're

adapting to better meet our circumstances.

We become more resilient by changing the conditions around us.

That's what Melissa is doing now.

In fact, she's helping entire organizations change in a way that lasts.

At the time of our interview.

I caught Melissa at the cusp of a new venture.

The idea is fascinating, but when you listen, look for the three

paths to resilience, recovery, adaptation, and transformation.

They're all in this next moment of our interview.

Yeah.

So I'm kind of going even more narrow.

So with Fair Kind, we've been doing primarily our messaging is a

corporate gifting and I'm looking to do solely ethical sourcing.

And so that's not a super established phrase, but I want to make it one.

What, what really excites me is this greater message that goes beyond what

I'm able to do with the, the rise again, in the past decade, really of.

CSR corporate social responsibility.

A lot of it has been companies will make their money and then

donate some of it to charity.

And what ethical sourcing is doing is saying, Hey, look at what

you're purchasing and think about how you can make more ethical

choices in your purchasing.

And that in itself creates more embedded impact, you know, impact that.

At that grows as your company grows, that's not an afterthought.

That's not disconnected from what you're doing.

That's embedded in what you're doing.

I, I really think that if every company could even be like 1% more ethical in

their sourcing, that could move the dial on poverty and opportunity for

people around the world, because so much of what we're sourcing is coming

from societies that are underdeveloped.

I love it.

It's a fantastic idea.

I'm excited to see where you take it.

Me too, here goes nothing.

That's right.

I mean, so that last thing you said here goes nothing that feels

like, I mean, in the years that I've known you for a long time now.

Yeah.

I mean, that seems to be your instinctive reaction to these

things here goes nothing, right?

Yeah.

You know, I, I find that.

That comes from a place of privilege because, you know, even

in my, what I can call my poor years where I was doing plasma and

running dogs to pay for groceries.

I know, I have never experienced true poverty.

Like I always had safety nets.

I had family that could help me.

And that did help me.

I even at one point sold my sewing machine to my parents,

so that could pay for groceries.

And I now have a sewing machine again that I bought.

Oh, that's great.

But it's been really cool to see.

And particularly with our artisans in Uganda, who now, some of them I've known

for a decade, seeing them as they come out of kind of the shroud of poverty.

Being able to think creatively and being able to be less risk averse.

And, and actually this played out in the beginning with when we started

Musan we had this idea that it would just be kind of a rotating door that

people would come in for a couple of years, get on their feet and then

rotate out, start their own businesses.

And we'd have new people come in, but we realized that they were scared to death.

After just a couple of years of stability to have to go back to instability.

But as women have gained confidence and had that stability for a few years,

we see them start to take risks of starting their own businesses on their

own and, and being able to, to be creative because they're not worried

about putting food on the table.

And so that's kind of all woven together, opportunity and creativity.

You can tell why I admire Melissa so much.

Isn't that a powerful insight that creativity and

opportunity come hand in hand.

Our moments of resilience shape us, and they prepare us to do

harder things, but they necessarily come from tough experiences.

I asked Melissa to tell me about one of her toughest

failures of the last 10 years.

I remember this was a few years in with.

With Musan.

We did a couple of years of fundraising galas.

These were huge productions.

Actually.

We were, we had 30 volunteers that we were managing, and so we kind

of made them a really big deal.

And for both times we flew out one of our artisans to speak.

And so they turned out to you.

Really wonderful productions, but it really like took over my life.

And several of us that were working on it for like six months and we just put

our heart and soul, we weren't sleeping.

We were, you know, we were getting the media involved in all this.

And I remember after the second year, We had a fundraising goal and it was big.

It was, you know, like a hundred thousand dollars and we're like, then

we can build our workshop in Uganda and we can have some money in the bank

too, to be able to invest in strategy.

And at the end of the night, and it was this.

Beautiful night.

We had one of our artisans.

That's HIV positive.

That's this woman that has this incredible story.

And she spoke from the heart and people were in tears and it was just,

you know, everything was beautiful.

The food was wonderful.

And at the end of the night, we looked at our fundraising and

it was about a quarter of that.

And especially when we took out expenses and that night, and I was talking to my

dad and I just started balling and he was like, but Melissa, You know, you had a

hundred people here that had an incredible experience that were moved and touched.

And I remember saying, dad, I am not in the business of inspiring

people, I'm trying to put food on the table for my women in Uganda.

I'm not trying to give people warm fuzzies.

I'm trying to create a sustainable organization.

And that helped us to really pivot and think we've got to get

really serious about strategy.

We'll finish with this last story and this one, isn't actually

about Melissa, but it's an experience that she had this precious to her.

Funny enough though.

It's another story about resilience.

It's about two women jewelry artisans and Uganda named Eve and sissy.

Imagine being relive a moment from the last 10 years.

What moment would it be?

This was a really beautiful moment that sticks in my memory.

And I think stuck in my memory, especially through some of those more challenging

years, two years into Musana I was supposed to be there for a month, checking

on a project and ended up extending my flight out and staying for eight months.

Broke up with my boyfriend over the phone said I'm not coming home.

I had to have my parents come and move me out of my apartment

because I had not prepared.

I had not planned on staying that long, but during that time we were

able to stay and see that this was something that was worth growing.

One of our artisans, who in 2009, when we started her name was Eve, she would

come and wash clothes for our group.

She was very shy.

She wouldn't really look you in the eye.

She didn't speak any English.

So we didn't, we didn't really verbally communicate a lot, but she

was just around our house a lot, and we really enjoyed having her,

but I came back two years later.

And as she'd been in Musana for two years, she could speak English.

She was just this.

Bright force to be reckoned with very, very funny.

She, they call her like the Malala, which means the crazy one.

She's like the life of the party among our cohort.

I remember at one point we had a new artisan and coming to the

moose on a team and as was custom, everybody would sit in a circle.

And introduce themselves to each other.

And I remember I was sitting next to Eve and when it got to sissy, the new

girl, she just started crying and she was speaking in the local language.

So I asked Eve what she was saying, and he told me she's, she's saying that.

Life's been so difficult that her husband left her with two small children

before this, her work was carrying large vats of water for eight hours a day.

She just said life's been really hard.

And I just remember Eve turned to me and with a very reflective tone, she

said, I remember I remember feeling like her and, and, you know, I

remembered Eve in that time as well.

And then Eve went over and said something to sissy.

And when she came back, I asked her what she told her.

And in essence, she had said, girl, you have no reason to cry anymore.

You're with us.

You're going to be just fine.

That moment of seeing kind of full circle, what can happen in the life of

someone to given a little opportunity.

That's the moment that I reflect on a lot.

This story is why this all matters.

If we have no other reason to be more resilient, it can just be that

we're there to strengthen others.

Dr.

Ungar says that resilience is as much about what we have as what we think.

And so I hope this episode has provided some new ways to think about

the problems that you're tackling.

So take courage and know that you're not alone.

You can do it many.

Thanks to Melissa Sevy for sharing her hard-earned wisdom and experiences.

If you're interested in any of the products that are produced

by her artisans, you can find them linked in the show notes.

Also they're links for you to learn more about how your business can find

gifts and other products with an impact.

If you enjoy how to help, please take a moment to give us a positive

review in your podcast app.

It really helps us to reach more listeners.

Also be sure to subscribe so you can get future episodes automatically.

Our next episode is all about creativity.

And often misunderstood ability.

I'm really excited about this episode.

Our expert guide will be Andrew Maxfield, who among other things is a choral

composer and author and an entrepreneur.

He's also one of the most deliberately creative people that I know.

I promise that you'll end up with all kinds of practical advice

on how to be more creative, to stay up to date with How to Help.

I recommend our weekly newsletter, each email highlights, high impact

organizations, and shares a thought on how you can have more meaning in your work.

You can find it @how-two-help.com.

We're grateful as always to Merit Leadership who sponsors our podcast

and our production team, which included Cyndi Hall, Travis Stevenson,

yours truly, and Eric Robertson, who did the editing and the music.

Our music comes from the Pleasant Pictures, music club.

If you want to use their music in your projects, you can find a link

and a discount code in the show notes.

Finally, as always.

Thank you so much for listening.

I am Aaron Miller and this has been How to Help.