Empathy in Action: Melanie Sue Hicks on Philanthropy and Leadership

✈️ From global philanthropy to empowering emerging authors, Melanie Sue Hicks shares her extraordinary journey on The Water Trough. Tune in for a powerful discussion with Ed Drozda on resilience, service, and leadership! #GlobalImpact #ServiceAboveSelf #TransformativeJourney

Contact info for Melanie Sue Hicks:

Melaniesuehicks.com

Instagram: @MelanieSueHicks

LinkedIn: Melanie Sue Hicks, PhD

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Ed Drozda 0:10

Welcome to The Water Trough, where we can't make you drink, but we will make you think. My name is Ed Drozda, The Small Business Doctor, and I'm really excited you chose to join me here as we discuss topics that are important for small business folks just like you. If you're looking for ideas, inspiration, and possibility, you've come to the right place. Join us as we take steps to help you create the healthy business that you've always wanted. Good afternoon folks. This is Ed Drozda, The Small Business Doctor, and I wanna welcome you back to The Water Trough where I am joined today by Melanie Sue Hicks. Melanie is an author, speaker, and global philanthropist who's traveled the world studying resilience and human connection. Melanie serves as vice president of programs for the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce Leadership Foundation. She's the founder of the InPursuit Research Institute, a workplace think tank, and she's also the founder of Inked Elephant Publishing House, a nonprofit independent publisher. Melanie, welcome.

Melanie Sue Hicks 1:25

Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Ed Drozda 1:27

I'm delighted to have you here today, and sincerely appreciate it. Let me start by asking you if you could just tell us a bit about your journey, your story. Where have you come from and what's going on?

Melanie Sue Hicks 1:40

Sure, sure. So I have had the pleasure of a really unique and diverse kind of career path that is truly centralized in service, and growth, and human development. I started my career in public policy work, and particularly in education policy. It got me very, very interested in career pathways and the way that we interact with work as humans. We spend so much of our time at work and the idea of finding the right match of people with vocation and along the way I have a side passion of doing global philanthropy work. I've traveled all over the world, kind of getting elbows deep in hands on service work and in the process these two paths, while separate on paper, have really coalesced over the years to come together to provide a unique lens with which I get to understand, see, write, and teach about leadership. And what that means from a global lens, what that means from a service lens, what that means from a human resilience lens, and being able to blend that work into the leadership and development training that I do now.

Ed Drozda 2:51

How did you get started on the global philanthropy effort? That sounds like something that you'd have to be really filled with joy and passionate about, but where would you begin?

Melanie Sue Hicks 3:02

Yeah, so for me it started very, very young. I remember doing my first kind of neighborhood cleanup at a young age, like eight or nine years old. There was an empty lot in the back of the neighborhood where teenagers would go and I think drink beer and they would smash bottles, and I would go there and clean it up, clean up all the glass and make it a more safe area to ride your bike in as a kid. Then I did my first international travel trip with a little multi-state theater group, and we went down to Mexico and we went into some really impoverished neighborhoods. We lived with the families and helped to feed some of the folks there in those villages and along the way we would also entertain them with our little plays. None of us spoke Spanish, so they were all done as kind of miming, which was interesting to think about, but at that point I was probably 10 or 11 years old, and so it had been a part of me from a very young age, and when I got into my twenties and had a little more resources I was still working full time and building a fledgling career, but I got a lot of joy spending my PTO doing these kind of projects. I got really involved with a number of different nonprofits, and would travel with them. Anything from Habitat International to the Global Action Coalition and others that would do these international trips, and I would tag along, and then over time I started creating these opportunities for myself without having to have a group. People would contact me to do the trips, they would tell me about them or they would have a need. I've done site visits for nonprofits who would like to take other people, but I will go and scout out the needs or scout out the routes or whatever. So it's just been a really organic process for really my whole life. I'm 48 and I've been doing this work since I was about eight, so for 40 years maybe?

Ed Drozda 4:45

That's fascinating, and is this something that you do on an annual basis Well, you said during your time off, this is how you take holiday if you will.

Melanie Sue Hicks 4:53

Yeah, pretty much. Obviously I do occasionally take a regular vacation that doesn't involve some strange land where there's no air conditioning or running water. I don't have a set schedule. I am very much a yes person when people ask me to go. If I can make arrangements to go, I do. Or if someone says you should volunteer for this, and I do a lot of local trips too It's not exclusively that I have to fly to another country. I've done volunteer work in places like Inner City Baltimore and in Atlanta, Georgia, and here in Colorado. And I sit on volunteer boards, in kind of a white collar service capacity versus hands-on dirt under your nails. So there's lots of different ways that I enjoy giving my time, and I feel like it is as selfish as it is selfless because I get so much out of it and it's a very fulfilling part of who I am. I don't have a set schedule on when I do these kind of trips afar, but when the opportunity is presented to me, I tend to say yes as much as I possibly can.

Ed Drozda 5:53

You said not only selfless but selfish. I often say to people, "Selfish is not a four-letter word." Um, you do have to look out for yourself. You have to get something back in return in order to fuel the ambition to keep doing something. And I imagine something like this could be consumptive. No?

Melanie Sue Hicks 6:17

Yeah, as I've developed friendships or romantic relationships, it is something I have to very much say. This is a part of who I am. You have to accept that I don't do as many kind of girl trips, vacations with my friends, or even trips with my family or with a potential partner or romantic partner or whatever. Unless they wanna go with me on a service trip I'm probably using most of my PTO to do these trips, and that is a sacrifice. It's just one that I choose very intentionally and the people who love me, love me for that, and we make other time. And occasionally they go with me.

Ed Drozda 6:46

That's really great. I admire what you're doing. Yeah sure, if you're looking from a romantic perspective, you've gotta find somebody that is on board because this is going to be something that you're gonna put out there. It's gonna be a priority in your life, but many are very grateful and fortunate because of it as well, obviously. And as a side note, we would all hope to know who the people in our lives are and that they would be precisely who they are, nothing more and nothing less.

Melanie Sue Hicks 7:18

Yeah. Yeah. I agree with that. I've always been blessed with a lot of supportive friends and family who didn't understand it at first, but now they just know me and they know that's a part of who I am, so.

Ed Drozda 7:29

That's Melanie. She's doing what she does.

Melanie Sue Hicks 7:35

Yeah. Yeah.

Ed Drozda 7:37

And you started a nonprofit publishing company.

Melanie Sue Hicks 7:41

I did.

Ed Drozda 7:42

Okay. It's obvious that you're a giver. You're an entrepreneur, but you're not one who's focused on revenue. You're focused on the actual heartfelt giving thing.

Melanie Sue Hicks 7:55

Yes.

Ed Drozda 7:55

So, tell us more about a nonprofit publishing company. I know what nonprofit is. I know what publishing companies are, but somehow I'm not putting the two together.

Melanie Sue Hicks 8:06

Sure. So I am not a complete unicorn. It is a more rare form of publishing, but there are others out there. It tends to be what we focus on, there's an educational component to it. And so it looks a little different based on the publishing house. So for Inked Elephant my passion is really, after studying the industry for more than a decade before I founded Inked Elephant, I was very disheartened to see how many really talented writers that just didn't have a presence in the literary industry, hadn't broken through the door yet were being left behind. As the industry had consolidated, the small publishers were being bought up by the big publishers and therefore there were doors closing all around. If you were a first time or a slightly emerging author, someone who hasn't really broken into a main space yet, or wasn't a social media influencer, or wasn't a celebrity of some sort what was popping up in their place was a lot of predatory publishing houses. Publishing houses that would try to charge people tens of thousands of dollars to put out a subpar publication that weren't really a part of the literary community, didn't have any of the standards and the quality standards that we strive to I didn't set out to found a publishing house. I set out to understand the industry and know who I could partner with as an author myself, and I didn't find it. So I decided I was gonna be of service to other people like me and give them a home We focused exclusively on first time and emerging authors with a real eye for works that have a social impact component to their story, with works that represent underrepresented voices beyond just first and emerging authors. Again, authors who might be overlooked in the mainstream, and we focus on nonfiction and poetry, two of the hardest genres to break into as a first and emerging author. And so my passion is to be more than a publisher. I meet personally with every author, whether or not their work can be accepted by us. I talk about why or why not. I will usher them through a process. I'll help them think of other alternatives, and the nonprofit part comes in because there is no overhead or salaries that are taken Every dollar from the books that do sell through our imprint goes directly back to promoting that library and helping to promote those authors and to put out really high quality books We are a member of IBPA, which is a quality standard, the Independent Book Publishers Association. We're a member of the American Books Sellers Association. Just these quality places that you can only be a part of if you are genuinely doing the top literary criteria of publications. And I want to offer that to voices that wouldn't otherwise be able to access those resources.

Ed Drozda 10:59

You said specifically nonfiction and poetry with a social impact. Did I get that right?

Melanie Sue Hicks 11:07

Yeah. I give a broad definition to the social impact I don't think a good fit for our label is a story that is just about someone's life unless it can be teaching someone who might be going through a similar process. So for example, we published a book on a woman's journey of healing from unintended childlessness. We published a journey about getting out the vote in some jaded African American communities where they feel like their vote doesn't matter or they've had a lot of instances of voter repression and kind of a call to action to those folks to keep striving, to keep letting their voice be heard We have one book in the pipeline that comes out in a couple of weeks. It's a poetry book, a beautiful one about escaping domestic violence. We have another in the pipeline for 2027 hopefully, that is all about the professionalization of governmental affairs and how important that is to business. The idea of understanding how policy can make or break your business is the focus of that, that it's not just all, you know, backroom cigar smoking There's strategy behind it and there's importance and all of that. So like I said, the definition of social impact is very broad, it's not just a biography of someone's life. It can be a storytelling, but also have an impact to someone else who might be experiencing a similar situation or a call to action, to a community or a profession.

Ed Drozda 12:29

I imagine that if you yourself are vetting the books that are being proposed, you must be applying your own giving experience. Looking for folks who are writing with the intent of giving, not of telling so much. Is that...

Melanie Sue Hicks 12:47

yeah, yeah, that's a great way to put that I think that we naturally impose the lenses of our human experience on what we have authority to do In this way, I'm surely more drawn to stories that I can really resonate with their impact, whether or not they're my community or not. Obviously, I am not an African American, from those communities that are worried about voting, but I very deeply resonated with this idea of feeling so jaded that they don't feel seen or don't feel like their voice has an impact. And so that calling is what I see as the service that those words could provide to someone else That is why that book was so interesting to me and why we wanted to be the publisher of that book.

Ed Drozda 13:35

It's interesting you mentioned that. It reminds me of a book I read a long time ago. It was called Black Like Me.

Melanie Sue Hicks 13:43

I've never read it, but I've heard...

Ed Drozda 13:44

This book was a life experience of a white man who, it's been a long time, I believe he took injections of melanin, which darkened his skin, and then he went into the South. He was a northerner, went to the south under the guise of being a black man, and wrote of his experiences, how he was treated at a time when the division was horrible And it's been a long time since I read the story, but I remember generally, it was meant to be a reminder to people about how blind we are. With the color wheel, how it, you know, it just totally... and to this day it resonates, sadly. I mean, it shouldn't, but it does.

Melanie Sue Hicks 14:33

I know.

Ed Drozda 14:34

And I know I'm going off on a tangent here, but when you mentioned that, I couldn't help but to think of that. It was something that really struck me. I was relatively young when I read it. It would've been a book for your publishing company, I imagine. Yeah, it would've been, that would've been a good story for us. Yeah. I'm getting the impression it would've worked for you. Awesome. Maybe you can republish. There you go. If you need, you need a version two. There you go. So, your journey has been very much outboard. There's a lot of people that I've met who have a similar interest, but they always ask themselves, is it enough for me to be focused on others and still be able to survive? And yes, I'm referring to the money, but I really don't want to be referring to that. I know it's more than money, but there are people who have a serious interest in going down a path like yours, but they're afraid that it is just not viable in the present time. Can you comment on that?

Melanie Sue Hicks 15:44

Yeah, I think that money is a very personal decision, right? How we prioritize our lives and our spending is a very personal, very goal-driven, hopefully or sometimes not, it's very cavalier depending on the person, and I think that every great life story happens when we follow what is our true heart. And if our true heart is stability, and it may look so cool to see someone doing service work, or following a passion or whatever, but our true soul says we need stability as the way to really feel content that's okay. It's not meant for everyone. It's perfectly fine. Then there are people like me who don't need those kind of patterns and stability. I'm really comfortable in chaos. I'm really comfortable with a minimalist lifestyle in order to have a more robust bank account of experience than a bank account of physical things or physical dollars. That's okay, and that's good for me. I think there's no judgment on how, I think it benefits everyone to find a way to give back in whatever capacity they can. Right? And if that means locally, one day, every six months, you just go and volunteer somewhere, great. If it means a weekly thing, if it means giving money to a particular charity and showing up at their gala because you think they're doing great work even though you don't do that work, that's okay too There are great ways to get involved in the things and the places that we're passionate about. My only thing I ever say to folks is to find something that you're passionate about outside of your kind of nine to five. It's great if you love your job. Kudos, I do as well. But also there is a rich depth of self-discovery in service work of whatever kind. I encourage people to just go do that in whatever capacity, and if you are brave enough, and if you are in the right circumstance, and if you have the ability to be risk tolerant, and you can do something bigger or more grand, then that is wonderful too. But you don't have to feel bad if that's not your path. And by proxy of that, I dealt with a lot of naysayers when I was young and everyone else was building wealth and putting money towards their retirement and doing all these things, and suddenly I was gone to Sierra Leone for two weeks to help women get out of sex trafficking. People were like, what are you crazy? You need to be settling down! I've owned cars, I own a home, I have a retirement account. I am not sacrificing so much that I am living in some kind of transitional situation. And yet I could be in a very different place if I had made other choices, but I don't regret that at all.

Ed Drozda 18:24

Sierra Leone and helping women who have been exposed to sex trafficking. What, how, do you emotionally handle that? Aside from the fact that your help has to make you feel better, that you're helping, makes you feel better, how do you hold up? I mean, these are horrific circumstances.

Melanie Sue Hicks 18:54

Yeah, that's a great question. I think that for me, knowing that I can be a part of a solution that can change generations of women's lives by being exposed to a solution that they they didn't have access to prior is the saving grace. Even when you become incredibly entrenched in something that is so very highly traumatic. Sierra Leone specifically I work with an organization, I sit on their board called Unsilenced Voices. They have an in-country staff who works with women. They pull them out of brothels and other kind of trauma situations, and they help to get them into school and into secure housing and off the streets and out of these very dangerous situations, and out of the sex trade and give them hope and give them options and give them training so they can get jobs. A lot of jobs in these rural areas in Africa are very much self-imposed Women make and then sell clothes, or braid hair. It's very service oriented, because there is not a lot of job opportunity for women, even if they're educated, much less if you are uneducated. So we try to get them into trades and we do these things and there's a fantastic in-country staff that handles the actual work of that day in and day out. And then we get the privilege of going every couple of years and bearing witness to that, and working with the staff to make their processes easier and better, and then getting to meet these incredible women and see how far they've come once they go through our program, which is about three years long. They come out on the other side and it's incredible.

Ed Drozda 20:33

You actually have a chance to develop relationships with some of these folks.

Melanie Sue Hicks 20:37

Yeah. Yeah, I have a WhatsApp group chat and we get pictures from them almost every day. Somebody's doing this, someone graduated, this is their graduation project, whatever they made, or we had a gathering for a holiday they'll send us a group picture, somebody had a baby, and they'll send a picture. So yeah, we're in regular communication with these women. They're part of our family now.

Ed Drozda 21:00

So the emotional pain that you experience is offset heavily by the joy of the knowing, the getting to know, and being able to support these people.

Melanie Sue Hicks 21:16

Absolutely. A hundred percent. A hundred percent.

Ed Drozda 21:19

I gotta say kudos to you. It has to be incredibly challenging to do. And if you weren't driven immensely it wouldn't be possible, I imagine.

Melanie Sue Hicks 21:31

Yeah. I do think it takes a special kind of heart and a special type of resilience to be able to leave behind what is a very privileged, comfy American life, and go over and not to be a savior. That is sometimes a criticism of global philanthropy, that as westerners we go over and we just force on another culture what is our norms and that doesn't necessarily work for them And so for me I'm very, very particular about where I give my time, that I am giving it to stand alongside people that live and work in that environment every single day. So our Sierra Leone staff and say, you tell me where you want me, where can I be of service to you, you do this day in and day out. That is how these lasting relationships form and that's how real impact happens is when we don't try to impose our norms on them. But I also feel incredibly blessed and humbled by the opportunity to do these things to be able to fly over to these countries and take a 40 hour journey between planes, trains, and automobiles. To get to these villages and be able to have these interactions is just incredibly rewarding for me and also incredibly humbling.

Ed Drozda 22:45

It's not only humbling I am sure, but it's also requires a lot of humility, you know inherent and then it's further piled on, I would imagine, yeah?

Melanie Sue Hicks 22:58

Yeah. Yeah, that's accurate. That's accurate.

Ed Drozda 23:01

The ability to be able to integrate effectively so as not to be seen as some snooty, privileged one, to be seen basically as a person, not from where she came.

Melanie Sue Hicks 23:17

That's right.

Ed Drozda 23:18

But who she is.

Melanie Sue Hicks 23:20

Right.

Ed Drozda 23:21

That really makes all the difference for these folks. Yes?

Melanie Sue Hicks 23:25

Yeah. You know, I go into it, my mindset is always, what can I learn?

Ed Drozda 23:30

Mm-hmm.

Melanie Sue Hicks 23:31

We like to think that we have all the best stuff just because we're economically advantaged as a country. And quite honestly, the lessons of grace and resilience and human spirit that I have learned, I was in Nepal in 2023, I trekked through the Chuan Valley jungles to get to some villages there to do a site assessment, basically for how a nonprofit back in America could raise funds to help. And one of the greatest stories, one of my favorite experiences there was, I met with a group of women who built an outdoor group kitchen, one cinder block at a time, and they lived in an area that cars do not reach. So they trekked these things up the mountains on yaks and by hand until it was built, and it's now a beautiful space. It's a cinder block outdoor community space with an outdoor kitchen, and they cook communal meals and they eat, sitting picnic style, on the floor, but with mats, and it's covered from the weather and it's beautiful The women built it all themselves. They just basically said we don't wanna be separated in our homes when it comes to eating and sharing life, and this is what they decided to do. They waited a few years for the men to do it for 'em, and they didn't do it, so the women said, well, we'll just do it ourselves. And so they did. It was the most women empowered thing I could possibly and ironically, the wonderful nonprofit who sent me really thought that the mission would be that I would connect with women and get a list of things that they really needed and how can we help them. And what I came back with is, they're doing great and they could teach us a lot about how to organize, how to collaborate, how to bring folks together. It was really eye-opening and again, humbling to be reminded that they were happy to share it, and I was a happy student to learn it, and we don't need to teach them anything.

Ed Drozda 25:22

Wow. That's fantastic. You're so experience rich. So many of us lack experience like that. We have different expectations or experience, but these kinds of very fundamental experiences are profoundly impactful, I'm sure. Just to hear you tell them is really inspirational. Wow.

Melanie Sue Hicks 25:46

Yeah. Thanks. I've had my fair share of personal ups and downs in my back home life and my version of my own healing and my own resilience comes from giving to others because there is a relativeness to getting out of our own head and getting out of our own space and getting out of our own circumstances that reminds us that the world is bigger than we are, that there are people who have greater needs than we do. It reminds us to be grateful for what we do have. It reminds us how to look for inspiration in those who have even less than we might, say in a physical sense or less access to resources. For example, therapy or a friend network or school or whatever those resources are. And when you get out of your bubble and you go to these other places and you're reminded of just how lucky we are, it's hard to come back and not feel a sense of relative healing, you know? And it's not the end all be all, but it certainly is a good reminder. My friends call it running, but I tend to hop on a plane anytime something is a little hard in my life and go and serve somewhere else because I come back with such better perspective on how to address and move forward in my own life.

Ed Drozda 27:04

Yeah, I can see where people might think of that as running, as in running away from something. But you said it earlier, it's really important to note, you know yourself so well, and you know exactly what you need to make yourself stronger and better. Running? Nah. I see exactly what you're saying. It might appear that way to other people, and for some people, it probably would be running away. For you, if it's running at all, it's running towards the answers, I'd say.

Melanie Sue Hicks 27:42

Oh, that's a great question. I think the number one thing is a repeat of what we've said, which is go find something that just lights you up and give your time to it. And don't worry about any stigma involved in it. Don't worry about any time commitment or financial commitment. Do what feels right to you. Don't worry about anybody else and make the world a better place. One tiny act at a time.

Ed Drozda 28:08

Thank you very much, Melanie. I really appreciate you being here today. Thank you for that.

Melanie Sue Hicks 28:13

Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it too.

Ed Drozda 28:16

Folks, this is Ed Drozda, The Small Business Doctor. Here at the Water Trough I have been very fortunate to have Melanie Sue Hicks on as a guest, and you can certainly hear from the conversation how inspiring her journey is and continues to be. I am both humbled and inspired by this conversation. I hope that in some way you feel the same. As always, here at The Water Trough, I wanna wish you a healthy business. Until next time, thank you.