Welcome to Season 3!

Welcome back to Practice GOOD podcast!  This episode is going to give you a sneak peek about what to expect this season and also share with you a little bit about what has been happening in our lives since Season 2.  Join us to get the inside scoop!  

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Season 3 Intro

Intro/Outro: [00:00:00] Welcome to Practice Good. The podcast that empowers change makers to give good and live good. Here is your host, Shiloh Karshima, social entrepreneur, corporate trainer, and former pastor. Join us as we explore the intersection of social impact and soul care!

Shiloh: [00:00:00] We are here it is, season three, finally of Practice. Good podcast. This is Shiloh, your host, and we're here a long time, too long and predominantly because we've been around the world and back and doing all kinds of stuff, and we're here. With a new season that I'm very excited about today.

I just wanna give you a quick overview of what to look forward to in this new season. And I also just wanna take a moment to give you guys a little background on why it's taken us so long to get season three out there and what we've been doing in the meantime. So first, let's talk about the podcast.

We've got some really, really, really cool things coming up for you guys this season. I am so excited. We've got some career coaching specifically for social impact leaders. We're gonna be talking to you guys also a little bit about [00:01:00] tools for advocacy and really what I call old tools and new tools.

Even though they aren't old and they aren't new, they're just good tools and not great. Tools. So we're gonna talk to you about some of the things that I think are really essential to doing advocacy work and advocating with our work and our social impact, but also some of the tools that we pick up that aren't so healthy.

Maybe it should be more healthy tools and not healthy tools. But I'm really excited about this because they've come to me and my husband with some really profound impacts and life lessons. So we're gonna share those together for you guys in season three. In addition to all kinds of things, we've, we're gonna do some, some advocating for change and avoiding burnout, which I'm excited.

We're gonna talk to you about nurturing helpers. So people in the helping profession, how do we care for them? How do we care for ourselves? How do we use psychology and therapy and ways of nurturing our being,, to allow us to do this work in the long run? We're also gonna talk about social impact, innovation, different [00:02:00] ways of creating innovation and making a difference in the world that aren't typically expected. We do talk about some other things that we don't normally talk about on this podcast, but I think they're really relevant. Some things around organizational culture, I really, truly have been convinced the longer I inhabit this planet, that social impact is not just about what we do externally outside the doors of our organization and our company.

It's not just about corporate social responsibility or the social impact bottom line of partnerships and fair trade relationships and the way that we do our processes and our programs, but it is also about how we impact the lives of our team. Our team are also our outcome, and I know it's not directly related to some people's mission and vision, but I truly believe that if we are going to make positive transformational change in this world, we are going to have to do so through considering our teams, our employees, our staff, to be [00:03:00] a central and integral part of that change being lived out, not just a means to an end, but actually using our vision and our mission to impact our teams internally. And I think the organizations that do that are gonna win more in the end. So we're gonna talk a little bit about that. We're gonna talk about things that affect that, like quiet quitting and working together and building diverse teams and inclusive teams. And, I'm really excited.

So we'll dig into that with some leaders, and you'll be able to see how they're doing it in their business and also, create some ideas for yourself, so that'll be fun. My husband and I also do a really cool episode for you guys this season. I'm really excited about with, some of our friends who also run a business together.

They're a wonderful couple that really dig into some of the nuances and craziness of like working with your spouse towards a bigger mission and vision.

What does that look like? How do we care for one another in and out of our differences, whether they be, , skill based or whether they be personality based or whether they be Ethnically or racially, whatever that may be, [00:04:00] we talk through those differences and it's a really, really fun episode.

We also talk to some experts in homelessness. We talk to some experts in social media, and I get to pull from a masterclass that we did in 2020. You are gonna get to learn from those in this season as well, which is super, super exciting.

We've got Alex Counts. He's a founder of the Grameen Foundation, which is an organization that raised funds for Mohammed Eunice, who, did Grameen Banking in India, which he started the microfinance, model for banking and being able to support people to escape this cycle of poverty through poverty alleviation.

And what, incredible interview we had, we interview Rooshi Roy, she's the CEO of, Aavrani. She's a co-founder and she uses skincare products with organic, ingredients to also. Celebrate and cherish her Indian heritage and all Asian women who aren't often [00:05:00] in the Hollywood spotlight.

And she really uses this as an opportunity to highlight. Skincare and wellness practices that have been used throughout her history and heritage, which I absolutely love. So you're gonna get to hear from her and you're gonna be inspired by her. And there's so many more, literally, so many more I cannot wait for you guys to meet.

We also talk about an incredible book that I love called Strong like Water, and the differences in being strong situationally versus Moving and flowing and being fluid in and out of season. This is going to be an awesome season and there's so much more I just went through even part of it with you guys, I know you will love to get these notifications that just say, Hey, we're about to drop a new episode and you're not gonna wanna miss this. It's gonna impact not only your social impact bottom line, but also your ability to stay in this work long-term and do it with a fresh, healthy, and new tools perspective. 

But we can't start this season without a [00:06:00] little bit of backstory about William and Shiloh, Karshima, Tersoo and Seember.. What are we doing these days and what have we been up to?

The last time we spoke, we were living in Nigeria. My husband is Nigerian. As you guys know. If you haven't met us yet or you're not quite sure what all this is about, go to episode one of season one. Learn a little bit more about us and you can even scroll through and search for some of the ones with that.

William and I did together some of those episodes. We'll tell you more about our work in Nigeria. We have a social enterprise. We have a for-profit that does several different things now, and it's been a lot of updates since we talked to you guys last. We have a steam cleaning company where we do cars, houses, hotels, restaurants, office buildings.

We also have a restaurant. That has kind of a side cafe slash coffee shop. We also have a barber shop and we have a spa. And this spa does everything from manicures and pedicures and massages. And our sole goal of this work is to be able to create [00:07:00] jobs at a living wage for people long-term sustainable, long-term income generating jobs where people are treated with integrity in solidarity and as what we call the Imago Dei, the image of God. So that is huge for us. We have roughly 40 employees there now. Once we created that, a lot of people were asking, how did you do this? What are you doing? How are you succeeding? And also treating your employees well. I know that's a crazy concept, but it's very real in certain parts of the world, and so we decided we wanted to train more business owners, more entrepreneurs, to be able to lead with integrity, to be able to grow their financial bottom line so that they can impact their community and also realize that the work that they're doing through for-profit business is also changing their community, and they can use that to impact their community. So we use entrepreneurship as a poverty alleviation tool. 

Last year in 2022, we trained 19 entrepreneurs to start and grow their [00:08:00] businesses. This year we have 23 in our program, and we're super excited. We train them twice a month. They have homework, they have practicums, they have groups, they have, group facilitators. They have local and international mentors that pour into them. And it has been such a joy for us to get to know them. 

We have different entrepreneurs from all different backgrounds. We have fashion designers, which are tailors and seamstress. We have people doing baked goods, people doing skincare. We have , logistics company. We have someone sell who sells books, a book seller. The variety of small businesses that we have are just expansive. So these are people usually selling in the marketplace, and we are helping them take their business just from a sustainability place all the way to like growing with employees and considering their business as a form of leadership and change in the community. 

So we love what we do. These two things combined, fund one another, they help one another, and we just kind of create this sustainability loop. So that's what we've been doing in Nigeria. We live there for just about a [00:09:00] year, and roughly in about mid July, it was actually early August we received some calls. We were out of the country at the time. Received some calls that. There was a terrorist group that had come to our town. T hey had bombed a local prison and escaped over a thousand prisoners who kind of laid low for a few weeks, and then they began to set up camps around the city.

They attacked the president's convoy, threatening to kidnap the president and take over the country. , They killed multiple military, so schools shut down completely until it was safe, and we just had to make kind of an on the spot decision. Was this healthy or good or safe for our children as well.

We decided to emergency flight myself and the kids back to Florida. While my husband went back to Nigeria and oh my gosh, walking away, in that airport was probably one of the hardest moments of our life as a family. At that time it was August, the kids and I flew home with one suitcase and they lost our suitcase along the way.

And so we [00:10:00] literally came home with not even toothbrushes, not even clothes on our back. I mean, we had clothes on our back. We didn't have any additional clothes and we had no place to stay. Luckily, we have so many family and friends that just helped us out for, the first few months until we really got a place and got the kids in school and just kind of created life again here.

So I have been working remotely with our team in Nigeria. My husband comes and goes about every six weeks, to either place. At that time, we didn't know when we would see him again. It was the beginning of August and we had planned for him to come out, for Christmas. But it just seemed like such a far stretch with little ones that we, got him a ticket in October and just flew him out quickly.

We really felt like the kids needed to see him, so we got to see him once in about six months at that time. And after that, we've just been blessed to be able to buy his plane tickets all throughout the year so he is able to come every six weeks. So that's kind of been our crazy life. A lot of people ask us, how do you do [00:11:00] this?

Like, I couldn't imagine you're apart so much. Like the kids don't get to see their dad often and you don't get to do the work that you wanna do. Like how do you guys do this? And. We're just like, you know, there's military families in the US that do this longer than we do. When we have the date on the calendar for when he is coming back after that, it's pretty easy.

It's like when we know there's a date, we're like, okay, we can do this. But if we don't know when we'll see him again. That's the hard part. But we've been living this unique, out of the ordinary life and , it's been good for us. Some people have asked me, why do you guys keep doing what you're doing?

You've been through so much, you've been through so much trauma, you probably need therapy. All these things. And I just remember thinking, what is wrong with us? Like, can we not just stop, like do we have a problem? Are we addicted to, you know, helping people? Like what's our motivation? And really just doing some self-reflection and then, Our program manager actually was driving with William one day.

They were in the small car and, they were driving over some potholes on the dirt roads, trying to [00:12:00] get back to one of our entrepreneur's houses just to kind of observe their work and, their home and where they live. And the car kind of is jumping over these potholes and our program manager said to William, Why do you guys do what you do?

I don't understand. Like you, you do so much sacrifice, like it's affected your family so much. This is so hard. Like I just don't understand why you guys, how do you keep doing this? Why do you keep doing this? And William looks at her and he says, that's like asking us how do you breathe? And I remember he told me that story and I was like, that is exactly what explains it best?

Like I can't explain it any better. Like is there an addiction? I don't think so. I guess if, you know, if we have the ability to bring heaven to earth, which the Bible says we do pray, you know God, your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven, meaning God's will, his will is for all people to be reconciled to himself and to others.

And if we. Truly believe that that is possible. Then when it happens, it is heaven. [00:13:00] Heaven is not just there, and then one day that we go there. But it's also here and now. And I truly believe when I walk into the doors of our nonprofit and our for-profit in Nigeria, I look at every single one of my friends and my sisters and my brothers there, and I hug them.

And we do a little Nigerian dance, and all I can think is like, this is heaven. You know, I guess I'm addicted to heaven then. I guess this is just how we breathe and so we have this unique life. It's very different. I'm back here running things, keeping the kids safe and stable and alive, and also writing curriculum and teaching, zooming in and, coordinating mentors and trips and all these things, and we're doing the best we can with what we've got, but that's where we are today. That's why it's taken me so long to get back to you guys. But I'm excited about season three because in season three I'm taking some of the stuff that I wasn't able to publish for you guys in 2020.

I'm pulling together some new interviews. I'm also sharing with you guys, some things that I've been [00:14:00] learning, some things that, God's been pouring into me, some books that I've been reading. And then I also take some time just to banter back and forth with William cuz it's always fun to get his perspective on stuff.

I hope you guys have fun this season. I know you will follow us, share with friends every time you do that it helps us to get the word out and allows us to keep doing this work. So glad to have you guys this season. Cannot wait and make sure every Thursday morning you jump onto your iTunes podcast and you get a little bit of practice good in your day.

Intro/Outro: Thank you for tuning in.

We hope this episode has given you some valuable insights and inspiration for your social impact journey. If you enjoyed the show, let us know, follow and leave a review, [00:27:00] and don't forget to share the fun with your friends and followers. Now go out there and create some positive change!