iB Curriculum Guest Speaker: Taylor Conroy “Chew on a F*cking Rainbow”
We are thrilled to welcome Taylor Conroy, founder of Change Heroes, as our guest speaker at our iB Curriculum on Wednesday, February 13th. Taylor was generous enough to provide a preview of what to expect from his curriculum for your reading pleasure. Take it away, Taylor!
Ever chewed on cardboard?
No?
Well I bet you can imagine it… not exciting.
Thinking about chewing cardboard gives me the same excitement level as thinking about running a strictly for-profit company that has no social impact.
But that definitely wasn’t always the case. I remember running my real estate business that I started in 2006, and loving it. I had a blast putting together deals, hitting big goals, and growing our market share every month. When I think about it, the thing I loved more than anything in that business was creating something that didn’t exist before. Marketing my little creation so everyone in town knew who we were. My proudest moments were when people I had never met, knew who we were and what we did, and wanted to do business with us because they already thought we were the best.
Then, in 2009, stuff started to change. I had been putting 10% of my money aside to give to charity, and during 2008 that 10% of my income added up to a large sum of money. At the end of the year, wanting to make sure that charity money would go toward helping as many people as possible (and because I liked the thought of some adventure travel) I took a trip to Uganda and Kenya to look into a couple non-profits that I had heard good things about. We saw villages in rural Uganda full of beautiful people that, strictly because of where they were born, lacked any sort of opportunity whatsoever. 70% of them having AIDS. 60% of their children dying before the age of 5. It was devastating.
Then, we saw the schools. Where kids were learning not just about math and science, but about how to prevent diseases like AIDS, about finances, and gave them the one thing they wanted most, opportunity.
For the next 2 years I searched for where I fit into the world of charity. At first I wanted to go back to Africa and hold orphans or manually build schools. It didn’t take long to realize that wouldn’t be the best idea. Mainly because I am terrible at holding children (dropping orphans wouldn’t help matters over there) and I am about as handy as a 13 year old Korean school girl. So I kept thinking. Starting a non-profit sounded like the natural thing to do, until I remembered that I hate paperwork (having barely passed high school), and learned that there are already 1.5 million non-profits based in North America. Surely there was one already doing what I wanted to do.
I loved marketing, sales, finances and that my true art was in creating something that changed the way people thought. It was in combining that art with my new passion for philanthropic work that Change Heroes was born.
In a nutshell, Change Heroes enables anyone to build a school for 1000 children in Kenya by getting 33 friends to give $3.33 a day for 3 months. All of those coffee priced charges of $3.33 add up to $10,000 in the end, and build beautiful school houses that last for well over 20 years.
I remember the first time we did our financial projections for Change Heroes. On the far right of the page, the last number wasn’t the usual “Net Profit”. Nope. Beside the column for net profit was something way more interesting. Something that immediately put me back in Uganda for a moment where the seed of this idea came from. The far right column on our projections was “Impact”. Referring to the number of lives we would impact through our work.
You see, we don’t make a cent at Change Heroes unless we directly impact the lives of people in Kenya. Learning to combine my art, which is business, with my passion, which is impacting the lives of those in need, was the most profound learning I have experienced.
To bring it back to my chewing analogy. Social business is not only more exciting than chewing on cardboard. It is like chewing on a f*cking rainbow.
Can’t make the #iBCurriculum in person? Follow me @destroynormal and institute B @instituteb on Twitter using #iBCurriculum and join the conversation.
Taylor Conroy