This Social Impact Model Actually Works (And It's Disrupting Everything)

Steven Clarke's mother died broke.

But before she left, she whispered something that would dismantle billion-dollar industries: "Always give first."

Impossible advice from a woman who had nothing to give.

Today, that death-bed wisdom is feeding millions, housing the homeless, and proving that the most revolutionary business models don't come from Harvard MBA programs they come from the brutal classroom of poverty.

Steven isn't building another charity. He's not launching another "social good" startup that sounds nice but changes nothing.

He's weaponizing his mother's final lesson into the first social impact model that actually works. The first system where everyone wins more than they contribute. The first blueprint that makes solving world hunger more profitable than ignoring it.

Governments have failed. Charities have failed. Billionaire philanthropists have failed.

But a kid who grew up eating scraps just cracked the code they all missed.

This conversation will shatter everything you think you know about business, impact, and what's actually possible when you stop trying to get rich and start trying to give first.

Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction and Welcome
00:45 Stephen Clarke's Vision for the Future
01:36 Focusing on North America
02:51 Addressing Global Issues
03:15 The Food Industry and Waste
04:06 Innovative Solutions for Social Issues
07:12 The Model Explained
10:25 Collaboration and Sustainability
15:50 Overcoming Challenges
17:55 How to Get Involved
20:48 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

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Transcript

Vision 5–10 Years Ahead: Building the Largest For-Profit Social Enterprise

Baz Porter 0:01

Well, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of Rise from the Ashes. This is part two, and I'm joined again by Stephen Clarke. He's a magnificent freedom fighter for people who need hope in their world. He's been through a journey himself from entrepreneurship to success. But now you guys, others in creating a freedom lifestyle, not just for themselves, but for their communities. Steve, thank you very much for joining me again. I love your stories, love your energy, who you are, what you actually stand for.

Stephen Clarke 0:36

It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you again.

Why North America Must Come First in Solving Hunger & Homelessness

Baz Porter 0:39

We spoke before about your journey and how you got here. I want to go into now you've built the model and it's been trial by fire, learning, gravitating towards what you truly want for other people and also yourself. What is the vision for you, the personal aspect as a company in five to ten years' time?

Beyond Hunger: Tackling Domestic Violence, Mental Health & Systemic Gaps

Stephen Clarke 1:07

Happy to answer that. We've got it pretty mapped out. We're as I became a creative business strategist in the advertising world, and I was pretty good at that, and I've just can continued that and I realized the importance of strategy. So we've got it mapped out, obviously, as we know it's going to change and alter, and as we pivot in course correct. But yeah, we're going to this now, we've proven the concept, we've we've tweaked it to the point where it works and it's going to make a huge impact in the world. And that's what we want. Right now we're really focused on North America. We found out in a lot of our data that a lot of charities, in fact, the majority of charities in North America don't necessarily do anything in North America. Some of the largest food charities don't feed anybody in North America. And we seem to really be, and I know it's a it's always been that at the U.S. since I was little in growing up, the U.S. is always helping somebody and doing something. But I think that is caught in up to them. That whole mindset about it's almost like they put other people first. And that what is what makes them so dominant in the world. But I think now, through my model, I think we're putting ourselves first. We're making sure that North Americans, we don't do anything. We have some global programs right now, but our programs don't do anything without starting here first. So we feed kids here first. We're taking people off the street here first. And then with the balance of what we do in our model, we can do programs in Nigeria and India, Kenya. So we can do other programs, but not only by doing them here first. So the answer to your question is we intend to, over the next four or five years, be a publicly traded company, take this global, and really become, not that this is a goal necessarily, but we plan on becoming the largest for-profit social enterprise in the world and changing other industries as well. The food industry, for example, we talked about feeding children. But the reality is that, and I've had this conversation with many, because many people would tell you today that we have a shortage of food, which is why people go hungry. That's not true. We have enough food in the world. If you take away all the food, you took all the food that we manufacture. I was having this conversation with the connection with Elon Musk. Take away all the food that you took all the food we consume for manufacturing, then throw 40% in the garbage. Because that's what ends up going into the garbage. But if you didn't have that, you'd have enough food to feed everybody in the world. So we need to cut down on waste, which is one of the things that we plan on doing. We want to actually be providing food that's been recycled. So our model can keep just keep going with other areas. So I think that the reality is there's never, there's always going to be a need for what we do, but we will also, we will always be innovative and looking for other things and other ways to do things. And certainly we are not. A lot of people pigeonhole us and say we're about hunger and homelessness, but we're not. Our models partner up with everybody. So at the end of the day, when we do our measurable impact reports, it's going to be quite an eye-opener to many because we'll be involved in domestic violence and diabetes and cancer and all these other ones that we'll be able to partner up with and grow together to solve the problems.

Baz Porter 4:47

Domestic violence is so key at the moment and so powerful. Darcia, I interviewed Garcia, Gapi Garcia on the podcast not long ago. Incredible story. And these stories are rocking the foundations of what we know to be normality. And one of the things that I love about you and what you do is you challenge the norm, the normal mind state or the normal mindsets of people going, what if this was possible? Bringing it back home.

Stephen Clarke 5:18

Yeah, for sure. Absolutely, bad. Look at mental health right now. It's just gone through the wolf. And we have to come up with new creative ways in which the, especially the younger people, which it's really affecting. There's got to be other ways instead of sitting them down and talking to them. We've got to come up with some more creative ways that they will relate to. And as a result of that, they'll it will help them with what they're dealing with. So we're doing a couple of really interesting things right now. But our our main thing right now, over the next three, four years, is to do what we're doing, continue with that, probably be able to solve one of the problems. It's not like there's 20 million people homeless in North America, better a million, versus the 50 million who go hungry. We could certainly look to eradicate some of the causes, but as we and as we grow, somebody asked me this and I was being interviewed, and they said, What happens when you eradicate homelessness? Your model will just be over. If you were paying me 4870 a month to end hunger and homelessness, and we ended one of them, if I called you and said, Hey, congratulations, thank you for your help, we've ended homelessness. Now we're going to take on mental health, would you say, oh no, I'm not going to continue to pay the 4870 to get all the perks that you get? And she laughed. She said, What is stupid questions? Who's her who asked it? I'm like, it'll watch it the stupid question, but the reality is no, this is a model that will continue to go on and on and just tackle new causes if we're fortunate enough to eradicate some of the ones that we were talking about now.

Baz Porter 6:48

What I love about this as well, the model itself, I know the model, it actually exposes deeper layers of challenges and problems in society. But it in the process of that also solves them. So it's covering up or covering all the nuances and the gaps that other models have missed, other than being a position we are currently as a society and as a world. So Steven, people are going to be asking, what's the model talk? Can you tell people how what that model is and what does it actually do for people?

Why Governments Can’t Solve Homelessness Alone

Sustainability in Charity: Why One-Time Donations Don’t Work

Collaboration Over Competition: Ending Scarcity Thinking

Stephen Clarke 7:22

Sure. The model is really simple. It's just comprised of three parts. And this model was derived after took a couple of years to get all the data, the research. As many of you out there will be asking, and you probably asked us many times, why are there this many hungry? Why are the people living in the streets? Why? And many will pin it on the government and say it's their fault and all that. I'm going to tell you something right now. The government is not going to solve the problems. The government will do what they do. That's okay, knocking the government, but we need to step up. It's our job to do this. In my model, based on all the data, I realized that the solution was three components. We had to provide a model that gave full transparency. People need to know where their money's going and the actual impact it's having. That's the only way to create longevity in this whole giving space, whether you're a for-profit or nonprofit. That's what people are want to know and quite frankly, starting to demand. And if that doesn't isn't going to happen, then there's going to be there's already fallout from it. So that's the first thing. Second thing is you need to create sustainability. I talked to so many people, especially stars who create some interesting models. And on the surface, they think that's pretty cool. The problem is they're not sustainable. They do that. I was just asking somebody the other day. You did this great program and provided all these meals and it cost you all this money, and so the money's gone now? Yeah. And the meals have been consumed? Yeah. So what do they eat now? And it was whoa. You could see that it hadn't really been thought of. So we got to create sustainability. The only way to trick true sustainability, I talked about this before. Make sure you build a model where everybody wins more than they put in. That's it. When AC Nielsen looked at our model, we asked them to give us longevity of our model. How long will people pay us 4870 a month to continue doing what we do? And they didn't have anything to compare to, but what they did come back and said, listen, we've all looked at it, we've done what we can, we could, but our answer is minimum 10 years. Because why would they stop? And the funny thing is in our focus groups, 19-year-old kids, no 19-year-old kids are going to do nothing forever. When we ask them if they do it forever, the response was, why would we stop? So just make sure sustainability where everybody wins more than they put in. And you're giving these people far greater value than what they're providing. Even though, for the most part, these people do this because they want to do good, instinctively, as we talked about this before, everybody's got that DNA of what's in this for me. Why not just address it? We have. So we created sustainability. And then the last part of our model is very important is collaboration. We're stronger together. Everybody knows that. There's no doubt. But if you're in an industry where being isolated is in your favor because you're not competing, you're competing with everybody in your industry about for grants or donors, you don't want to do that. So working together is not an answer. And they don't do that. So that is the basis of which every single model that we create, every company that we launch is all around those three things. They must have those three things. So that's the model. When we're here, it's called the model. That's it.

Partner Criteria: How to Build Win-Win Social Impact Alliances

Baz Porter 11:08

I love that. The quote the white P you look at the world and the markets, the abundance side of it, is you're not coming from a place of scarcity, you're creating sustainability by going, we want to work with this? Let's work together. So there isn't scarcity in the world. One of the things that I noticed with entrepreneurship going into the very, very green is everyone was competing against each other. There was no colla true collaboration and actual conversation going, how can we truly work together to raise each other up congruently at the same time? And that's why I think one of one of the reasons of many that your business model works on every level, quite frankly, I think this should be adopted into all business models to change the future of course correct everything that has happened in the past 100 years. Because it has the potential, I believe, fully to do that. When you're collaborating with people, you have certain criteria in order for them to partner with them and understand how they're going to work together. What's the criteria you're looking for? On on average, only the specifics.

Stephen Clarke 12:24

When we're looking to collaborate with people, we want to ensure that we can grow together. That's extremely important. We need to obviously understand what they're looking for and can we deliver that through our model if we work together? And that those are the really key things that we look for. And quite frankly, based on the model we built, it's actually quite easy for us to grow together. Because we built so many different programs. The model's the model, but then we create these programs, or it's sometimes companies, where we make sure. And the first one is into the giving space. That's the one we wanted recognition. So imagine going into their space and say, hey guys, if we partner, for example, do we show volunteers legally? There's 80 million volunteers in North America, it can't legally be compensated based on government regulations, but we're a for-profit. So we don't fall under that category. Give us your volunteers, let them do our program, getting us members and what we do with the hunger and homelessness, and we can show you how your charity will actually make more money, and then we can legally incentivize your volunteers because we're not governed the same way you are. So that becomes a real win-wing and also helps the charities because we're also allowing them to not have to deal with that transparency so much because we're giving them the money. So because we know they do good. Charities do good, they employ a lot of people, and that's a good thing. Employing people is always a good thing, helps the economy and everything else. But there a lot of the money's just not going to where people want it to go, and that's been the knock on the charity and the charity model.

Change Resistance: Why Traditional Charities Push Back

Baz Porter 14:03

Well, you mentioned the economy there, it's changed so much for amount of reasons, many reasons in the last 10 years. What's the main trend with people coming toward you and the biggest questions that you get asked when present you present them with this? Yeah.

Stephen Clarke 14:20

First of all, change is difficult. So you have to, we knew we had to prove it to them. And we've got our own strategically pretty good. So we go and we go to a charity and say this is the way we can do it. And the reality is that based on that model that I just explained, and that's in PDT model, purpose-driven transformations, we know we're going in every city in North America with that model. So if they don't want to partner with us, and some of them don't, we still have that. It doesn't really matter to us. We've made sure that we built that in because if they don't, we're going to get their volunteers anyway. Because why wouldn't a volunteer do a program where he or she can get compensated for doing it and still raise money for their charity of choice?

Baz Porter 15:09

Yeah.

Incentivizing Volunteers: A Legal For-Profit Workaround

Stephen Clarke 15:09

We don't really need it. I built that. I remember being asked originally when I built it, and people were saying, What happens if all the charities say no? I'm like, that will be their loss, not ours. We don't need to say yes because we know the volunteers will, because now they can be compensated and still raise money for their charity of choice. Why would they say no? I think that you have to again take into account all those things when you're building these and saying, I'm not going to be derailed by one particular group or whatever that's going to stop me from doing what I know needs to be done. And you just build those things in and anticipate them. And I think one of the one of the strengths of me in the past is I always look for what could go wrong. So what could go wrong? And I say to myself, what could go wrong? Sometimes there's 40 different things. I'm looking and saying, okay, then what can I do about that? And one of these was we used to build exhibits for trade shows and shipping them all over the world. What can go wrong? Okay, so we used to have other companies in the other cities, all of them we were coming and letting them know just in case we needed something or something happened in the trucking or whatever. I used to have everything covered. So I got early training on that. So I remember when we were building the model in our app, people said, Why do you have two charities listed? I said, Because in some cases, CEOs of charities are going to tell me to go to L. And I'm going to tell them, okay, I'm not going to do that. What I am going to do is I'm going to build this model. So when your volunteers come, because they're going to hear about people winning free travel and all the other stuff because they're volunteering. When that happens, we're going to. And then we're going to say to them, now, this money has to go back to your charity of choice or your charities of choice. You can pick two. So, Mr. CEO, we're going to get your volunteers anyway, but you might only get half of what they raise because they could pick another one. Unless you're the one educating them on it. And then you'll tell them it's just to pick this one. So little things like that are created because what could go wrong? That could go wrong. How do you diffuse that? How do you overcome that? This is how we do it. So little things like that are things that we've done that in not to not to get and just tell somebody we want they want to deal with you, really. Just to say, guys, we're all going to win on this deal. So you can either accept that or not, but if you choose not to, you're going to get it anyway. Stuff. You know, your choice.

Baz Porter 17:50

Yeah, I love that. We've all got networks. Other people have networks of networks. If someone works for invest, if someone wants to be a part of this, how to go about it? How do they get out hold of you? Do they reach out to you directly, or is particular way you like them to have a conversation with you?

Why Everyone Wins in This Model (Including Investors)

Stephen Clarke 18:08

Mostly for me, as you already said originally in the first part of this, LinkedIn is I'm on LinkedIn every day. I post every single day. I like the LinkedIn community a lot. So that's usually the best place to get a hold of me. And my contact information is on my LinkedIn profile where they can email me or send me a text, assert me WhatsApp or whatever. There's lots of opportunities, investment side. We're in the process right now of doing some pretty incredible things. We're for the most part self-funded, but we are looking to raise some money. But more importantly, we're about to build one of the largest, certainly the newest social media platforms that there is that's coming in G1 of next year. And everybody will be able to get involved, to be able to get involved with at no charges to be involved in the whole community and global community of doing good, or to be able to get involved and become a member of that. And being a member has its perks, real big perks. We made sure. In fact, we really made sure that people who participated were really going to win, as well as getting quarterly reports on the impact that we're having and monthly newsletters and all the different things, and going to have some fun stuff. We did not build this to make money. It's a for-profit, but that's not the reason. We knew we were going to make money because everybody's got to win, including us. We also have some pretty ambitious goals of new housing projects and things like that that we want to build ourselves. But I think that this is a this is something where we need everybody to come together. And we will eventually, you know, it might might not be until we go public and everybody knows about it and then they can invest that way. But we're going to we're going to get a large part of the population because it's the right thing to do. The model is built so that everybody wins. And so why wouldn't you want to do that and help our in North America, Canada, and the United States help our countries at the same time and the people so that we can have some of these things that we all believe everybody should be afforded food and and shelter and all those different things that should be the bare minimum that's not being provided right now. And we have to take control of that. We can't rely on the government because things like affordable housing, which we don't believe in, quite frankly. We believe in subsidized housing. And that's how we're going to solve it. Not through affordable housing. And so there's ways that we that you can do it. But back to your question, that's really the best way. And I'm sure you'll put websites and things like that where they can go and see more about companies that we're launching right now. It's really exciting.

Baz Porter 20:45

All the information will be in the in the descriptions below. This will be on all the platforms, usual Apple, Spotify. So Stephen, I want to thank you for your time, your love, and your patience, and your energy for what you do. And thank you in the world spending the time with me today. I know you're busy. I know you have a busy schedule. So for my audience, thank you very much for joining me. Please share the message. Reach out to Stephen, have a conversation with him. If you come through me, say I said hello. Nothing in it from my voice, nothing in it from my side, just a quick hello from me. For myself. Thank you for being here. Share the message. Remember you are the miracle. Talk to you soon.