037: How Can The Average Person Have Impact? (Slingshot Stories)

For you to make an impact, you don't necessarily need to do something totally new or outside of your comfort zone. In fact,  you may have the greatest impact if you are using your unique gifts and operating out of what Ed refers to as your impact sweet spot. 

Show Links

Ed Gillentine:
EdGillentine.com
Instagram: @journey.to.impact

Slingshot Memphis
www.slingshotmemphis.org
LinkedIn
Instagram: @slingshotmemphis
Email: disrupt@slingshotmemphis.org

Transcript

00:00:00:01 - 00:00:29:02
Ed Gillentine
Welcome to Slingshot Stories, a series produced in collaboration with Journey to Impact and Slingshot Memphis. I'm Ed Gillentine and I'll be co-hosting along with my partner and impact Jared Barnett, the CEO of Slingshot Memphis. We've got another great topic today. How can the average person get involved in impact and poverty alleviation? And I really love this because in the book Journey to Impact, there's a chapter about finding your sweet spot, right?

00:00:29:06 - 00:00:55:09
Ed Gillentine
And I've always thought that every human being is on planet Earth for a reason, and we need to find our groove. Right. And so in the book, it talks about kind of like a Venn diagram, like nothing fancy. What are my passions? What are my skills and experiences and how do those fit together? And if I can find that sweet spot in the middle, that may be a good indicator of where I need to focus on impact.

00:00:55:09 - 00:01:09:19
Ed Gillentine
So when you think about how does the normal person get involved because guess what? We're not all Bill Gates, right? We can't be stroke and billion dollar checks. And so it's easy to say how how can I help talk about that for a minute, Jared. How can we get involved?

00:01:10:00 - 00:01:20:09
Jared Barnett
The starting point of this is, is finding that sweet spot, because I view that as the starting point of a personal return on investment for your your effort.

00:01:20:09 - 00:01:21:03
Ed Gillentine
I love that term.

00:01:21:14 - 00:01:33:09
Jared Barnett
If you're not focusing on that, you're being inefficient with what your talents and God given abilities are in a way that could be interpreted as kind of depriving others of those unique gifts and talents that you have.

00:01:33:10 - 00:01:47:12
Ed Gillentine
Yeah. I want to interject because I want to jump on that for a minute. If you've got a talent or a gift and you've got a reason, a purpose for being on planet Earth, which I believe almost always includes helping others. And you don't do it, that's a big problem.

00:01:47:22 - 00:02:06:00
Jared Barnett
Yeah, well, it could be something as simple from just not doing it or doing it otherwise. Right. So I. Great examples. My wife's a nurse. She could go and work at a soup kitchen all day and it would contribute. It would be helpful, but disproportionate to someone like me who gets really queasy with anything to do with medical stuff.

00:02:06:09 - 00:02:28:12
Jared Barnett
Right. She would add so much more value if she's using what her training and her experience around nursing to volunteer in a way that leverages that unique skill set right that now the value all of that hour or 3 hours that she spends is magnified versus doing it in just something that somebody else could do that doesn't have that unique passion or experience that she has.

00:02:28:12 - 00:02:44:21
Jared Barnett
And so I think that's just a as we think about how the average person gives if we think about how do we do it in a way that, again, leverages that sweet spot, you're already on that journey to a higher return on investment or a higher impact because you're doing it based on where you're most uniquely positioned to do so.

00:02:44:21 - 00:03:04:00
Ed Gillentine
And that's what I think you're talking about. Personal Return on investment. Soup kitchen is a fantastic impact, but for your wife, being a nurse in whatever specialty she's trained at is a higher impact. Is that sort of the concept?

00:03:04:01 - 00:03:12:01
Jared Barnett
Absolutely. And that's not just for nursing habits for each of us in those unique ways that were, you know, that our sweet spots come together. Yeah.

00:03:12:09 - 00:03:32:14
Ed Gillentine
So sort of take that personal drive idea and talk about specific ways that people can have impact within the ecosystem because so I'm thinking, you know, it's as simple as voting, right? Yeah, and it's as simple. We talked a lot about proximity. So so dove into that for a minute.

00:03:32:14 - 00:03:53:02
Jared Barnett
You know, again, going back to some of the things we talked about here, if we think about our contributions to poverty alleviation and impact, we want to think about what's the outcomes we want to achieve with our our own time or money or resources. And so as we think of that, that should help us think about where do we then spend our time.

00:03:53:02 - 00:04:20:21
Jared Barnett
So if I'm fantastic at working with people and engaging with people and have a skill set there, my contribution might be better suited around volunteering and engaging with people and galvanizing other people to be a part of something that is effective. If I'm phenomenal at making money, right? Yeah. Well, how do I use that talent to contribute? Right, so I can make the money, but maybe I'm not the best at how to allocate that money because I'm not close enough to this situation.

00:04:20:21 - 00:04:44:07
Jared Barnett
I don't have that proximity. So who can I find that knows that and can help make sure that if I'm creating money and I want to contribute that to poverty alleviation, that I'm doing that in a way that's creating the most impact for the money that I'm contributing. And that could be $5. That could be $500,000, right? That the amount doesn't matter as much as the impact, you know, that it's creating relative to the amount.

00:04:44:17 - 00:05:06:23
Jared Barnett
And so that's, I think, kind of where we can get going. And so that could be, again, you know, volunteering, but volunteering in a way that leverages your unique skills. Yeah, right. My experience has been when you do that more consistently, you see a lot greater impact. And when you do that once a year or haphazardly, right. So a good example of something like this is we're working on raising called Light Memphis.

00:05:06:23 - 00:05:29:04
Jared Barnett
They do entrepreneurial related programing and help the the young adults they work with, create entrepreneur ideas and go through this process to try and convert as it is. If you're a good entrepreneur, that's an awesome fit, right? If you're not there, that's maybe not something you should do. But but that consistency is what really helps as well when it comes to something like volunteering or even with something like investing.

00:05:29:04 - 00:05:49:04
Jared Barnett
And I use the term investing because I and adamant that we should think about philanthropy an impact with an investment mindset. Right. We want to produce something without investment. And so you won't hear me say the word donor or charity or things, because I think that it minimizes the importance of of how we would give financial resources on a percent agree.

00:05:49:09 - 00:06:07:13
Jared Barnett
And so, you know in addition to you know, volunteering, in addition to investing, I think there's a huge piece around this community aspect of it. So how do we get others aware? How do we involve others? And invite others to be a part of this because one individual isn't going to solve poverty, right? That's not going to happen.

00:06:07:13 - 00:06:28:10
Jared Barnett
It's too many issues, too interconnected. But if we get enough people who are participating and are doing it with this personal ROI mindset, a return on investment mindset, we have the ability to kind of galvanize all of that skill, talent, experience resources in a way that's so much more impactful than everyone working in a silo individually.

00:06:28:14 - 00:06:58:11
Ed Gillentine
I like how you put that in. It triggered something. Two things, actually. In my work in Ethiopia, it actually got started because I was asked to come down there in a capacity of a business background and deal with the government. So we started working with at risk children, street kids and so at the time there were four or 5 million orphans in the country of Ethiopia, which at the time was about 85 million, is a big, big percentage, primarily from the AIDS epidemic.

00:06:58:11 - 00:07:27:07
Ed Gillentine
That just more pandemic I whatever is above pandemic that just devastated Africa. And so there were, I believe, a quarter of a million maybe street kids in Addis Ababa alone. And so we were working with these kids, and the first time I got to go down there, I thought, well, I'll get to go help these kids. And so I think in my context, right, my proximity, I can go down and help a Mam at the basketball court and play hoops with some, some kids and I can give them a hug and high five.

00:07:27:07 - 00:07:50:11
Ed Gillentine
Right. But in the Ethiopian context of street children, a male in proximity terrified them because those were the ones that were getting them into sweatshops and beating them and all these things and I realized very quickly, I was called cross-cultural, by the way, this was really hard for my wife because she was a very accomplished primary schoolteacher. And so she was expecting to be able to go down there and really help.

00:07:50:18 - 00:08:14:11
Ed Gillentine
So I learned really quickly cross-cultural, severe trauma. And mostly the trauma came from males, right? And so I couldn't go help them because I was causing more challenges. But then I was able to go help as a suit, I call it as a and I literally I put my tie and my suit on. I went to the government officials and started talking to them.

00:08:14:15 - 00:08:35:20
Ed Gillentine
And I was able to use my skill right and my passion to help street kids. So if you ask me what do you passion about, I'll tell you I'm passionate about at risk children around the globe. And if you were to ask me, would you ever go, like, do you know, weeklong camps with them? No, I don't. But that's because I feel like I stumble.

00:08:35:20 - 00:08:46:04
Ed Gillentine
I wish I could say I did it strategically, but I stumbled into my group, and that was one of the things that made me think about as I was writing the book. How do you get there? And a part of that is your skills.

00:08:46:10 - 00:09:05:21
Jared Barnett
I want to add to add. So you hit the term proximity. And I think that that's incredibly important. And the work that I've done and the work that Slingshot has done, there's so much value in proximity and being closer and in the situation you brought up, you went with, you know, the intent and the desire to go do something and you had kind of your your sweet spot you to figure it out.

00:09:06:10 - 00:09:24:16
Jared Barnett
But it didn't work the first time you were there, like in what you thought would be the solution. And so when we are proximate and in the environment and trying to understand that, we then gain enough information to understand even further how can we apply our unique skills and experience in a way that produces the outcomes that we want?

00:09:24:23 - 00:09:38:05
Jared Barnett
Right. So it's that's another piece, I think, to this puzzle. I think about how does the average person contribute to to poverty alleviation. There's an element of proximity and understanding that really will help magnify everything else. We've already talked about.

00:09:38:08 - 00:09:58:12
Ed Gillentine
And I'm going to I'm going to sort of make a little bit of a tangent before we wrap this up. We've been talking a lot about gathering data and metrics. Look, it doesn't have to be a spreadsheet and door to door surveys, right? What we just talked about me going to Ethiopia, the things that you've experience that is gathering data, processing it and tweaking the approach.

00:09:58:19 - 00:10:18:22
Ed Gillentine
Right. And so and I want to go back to something that you you mentioned really briefly earlier about skills and skill sets. You mentioned making money. We all know people that can make money in their sleep. It's it's just a gift. Right. I want to encourage anybody that's listening that either is a money maker or knows it's a money maker.

00:10:19:16 - 00:10:43:07
Ed Gillentine
You're critical to the puzzle. You're critical to the to the ecosystem. And don't feel guilty because you don't go and help at risk street kids in Ethiopia by feeding them or holding them in their lap, in your lap or playing games with them. Don't feel guilty when you know, intrinsically I can make lots of money and funnel it to good organizations.

00:10:43:07 - 00:11:09:23
Ed Gillentine
And here's the connection with Slingshot, I believe is the greater the the the greater these impact studies and the broader they go, the more diversified the portfolio. You are an organization and there's lots more like Slingshot Y'all, an organization where moneymakers can say, I love those guys because I can do what I'm made to do my sweet spot and I know my dollars are getting maximum maximum returns.

00:11:09:23 - 00:11:10:13
Ed Gillentine
That makes sense.

00:11:10:13 - 00:11:27:04
Jared Barnett
It does. I think a great analogy, if building on that is the concept of like a team sport. Right. Right. Where, you know, you have players that have to play different roles. If everybody in your team was only, let's say basketball was only a scorer, well, one, then it wouldn't coexist because they wouldn't get the ball enough and get enough shots.

00:11:27:04 - 00:11:33:12
Jared Barnett
But to your defense would be horrendous. Right. And doesn't matter how many points you score if you can't stop the other team, at least in my mindset, defense wins championships.

00:11:33:12 - 00:11:34:19
Ed Gillentine
Well, old school, but we can go with that.

00:11:35:05 - 00:11:55:05
Jared Barnett
And so what I think is important is how do you create this, you know, as a community, right? We all have as a in Memphis and in other communities, we all have different skill sets. So how do we leverage those in a way that we're each doing those as effectively as possible? And it's that combination of roles and fighting poverty that's needed.

00:11:55:10 - 00:12:17:03
Jared Barnett
And as a individual, all right, if I'm bringing my sweet spot to the game, if I'm proximate and understanding it and I'm focusing on the outcomes that I'm creating so that I'm providing the greatest return on investment of my contribution, if we each did that, it would be a massive transformation for how we, you know, poverty alleviation occurs.

00:12:17:06 - 00:12:41:04
Ed Gillentine
Catalytic in my mind, where the sum is greater than the outcome is as great in the sum of its parts. I want to wrap up with this. You said earlier a single person's not going to alleviate not going to move the needle in poverty because it's so complex and it's so nuanced. And you have to know so much, but without everybody doing their part, it's going to fail.

00:12:41:10 - 00:13:02:16
Ed Gillentine
And so what I want to leave everyone with, if there's a takeaway, let's go back to sort of the point even of this podcast series is get off the bench. You can't do it by yourself, but we can't do it without you and we can't do it without you being in your sweet spot. So everybody's on planet Earth for a reason.

00:13:02:21 - 00:13:06:07
Ed Gillentine
Find your sweet spot. Get off the bench and get in the game.