Foundry Conversations Podcast Episode 1: Introducing Your Hosts
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Episode #1: Introduction to your hosts: Daniela, Neel and Daisy
Welcome to the Foundry Conversations Podcast! In this episode, you’ll meet your podcast hosts as they ask each other the questions each guest will answer. Listen in to discover what motivates Neel to work with design and innovation in the clean energy space, why Daniela is passionate about entrepreneurship in Africa, and what Daisy has learned about mental health from her community partners.
Listen here:
What is Foundry Conversations?
Foundry Conversations is an initiative created by members of The Foundry at Acumen Academy. We chat with leaders like you who are tackling the world’s toughest challenges. Together, we explore the most critical issues in their communities, how they navigate this complex moment in time, and what moral leadership means to them. You’ll get an inspiring glimpse of their vision for a better world, and practical ideas for creating the change that matters most to you.
Transcript: English
Neel Sorry, what were you saying?
Daniela I guess I was asking about the giggling… here we go
[Music]
Neel Welcome to Foundry Conversations. This podcast is brought to you by a global community of builders and innovators committed to a meaningful, positive impact.
Daisy We chat with leaders around the globe like you who are tackling the world’s toughest challenges.
Daniela In this space, you’ll hear guests share about the most critical issues in their communities, how they navigate this complex moment in time, and what moral leadership means to them.
Neel My name is Neel, and I’m calling in from Copenhagen, Denmark. I’m currently working in the space of clean energy, primarily pursuing research and design explorations to enable a better everyday life at home for the many people primarily living in emerging economies. I primarily work as a solar strategy lead at Space 10.
Daniela My name is Daniela, and I’m calling in from Nairobi, Kenya. I’m currently in transition towards tech entrepreneurship in Africa.
Daisy And I’m Daisy Rosales. I’m calling in from San Jose, California. I work in the space of global mental health as the co-founder of an organization that partners with local community organizations to design mental health initiatives.
Daniela So first question for everyone here. Tell us about the space you work in, what is the biggest problem you’re tackling and what innovations do you see?
Daisy One of the biggest problems we’re seeing is that at any given time, two in five people are struggling with some kind of mental health challenge. And so it’s a very big problem. And the solutions we’re looking at are going beyond sort of traditional medicalized treatment. As an innovation, working with community leaders and organizations to design contextualized care that speaks directly to the pain points that they’re seeing.
Neel Half a billion people, which is half of the planet that has little or no access to energy at home. And what I mean by unreliable energy access is that even if you have a grid connection in your household, you don’t necessarily get electricity when you need it. So there’s a lot of innovations that are taking place, and I think there’s a lot more that needs to be done. But I think it’s key that we focus on clean energy solutions that are affordable as well.
Daniela I’m actually looking at starting up in Nairobi. We are currently exploring a solution that is driven by technology, and there are tons of problems that we can see around. For example, we’ve seen the digitalization of small businesses, the boom of e-commerce in Africa, the need for financial education and so many other problems. I’ve been exploring about five ideas in the last three weeks, so it’s really exciting to keep on shifting and see what we are landing on. But what we know for sure is that Africa is not bare of many ideas and great potential unicorns.
Daisy These are big challenges. So we wanted to ask what’s your why. What or who inspires you to get up and do this work every day?
Neel My why, I think, is something that emerges from work as well. So I was fortunate enough to travel quite a bit to just understand the conversation on energy. Being a solar engineer, I wanted to see the applications of that and how we could use that to get electricity to 300 million people that didn’t have electricity in India when I was living there, and I was fortunate enough to travel in over 200 villages where we try to understand people’s experiences in terms of accessing energy and their struggles.
We talked to policymakers, entrepreneurs, engineers, innovators, people across the spectrum. But I think what gets me up and inspires me every day is stories from people’s frustration that puts a lot of problems on my plate that gets me going and brings me hope that there are a lot more things that we can do to make people’s lives a little better.
Daniela My reason for going into entrepreneurship for the second time is really around empowering people to see their potential. There’s so many ways in which you can do that and looking at different entrepreneurs and how they struggle at the beginning and how they are able to bring together the right people to support their ideas and how they’re working on such large problems around them. Those are the kind of people that really inspire me.
Daisy I would say that for me, I’m passionate about mental health and wellbeing because it seeks to capture this question of not only the absence of human illness but the presence of human flourishing. And so when we work with these community leaders and organizations, they inspire me to continue to expand my definitions of what it means to live well, to live meaningfully. And so to kind of build on this imagination of creativity, of bringing resources to people that you both have mentioned. I think making sure that everyone has the opportunity to flourish.
Neel What’s also important to remember is that everything in the social space is not hunk-dory and rosy. And we’re all dealing with a lot of challenges. So our next question is what is one challenge that you’re currently facing as a leader? And how are you navigating and wrestling with that?
Daniela My take on that is a struggle to understand whether I should build an impact business or a traditional business. And I’ve been kind of inspired by the principle of moral leadership around holding values in tension. I feel this tension is actually kind of possible with me thinking combining the two — right? — the impact and business into one thing that we can call “returns-driven impact business”. I feel like that is possible, and that does exist.
Daisy Yeah. I think that’s a huge question, Daniela. And perhaps along those lines, I think that we as leaders in the social sector frequently are between responding to immediate crises and also building towards a long-term vision. And depending on your orientation, whether short or long term, it can really kind of drive your strategy, your behavior, your attitude, your perspective, and given the fact that we’ve all walked through so far in this terrible pandemic, it’s really easy to be wanting to respond to the short term crises that are right in front of us.
And so the challenge is to keep that long-term vision as well, of asking, who do we want to be during this time and who do we want to be in the future when our realities change?
Neel One challenge that I’m certainly facing as a leader is trying to keep the balance between bringing more energy access to people, and that means people will start consuming more energy. That means more carbon emissions, irrespective of whether it’s coming from a clean energy source or not. This means more products. So I think the whole conversation around sustainability and circularity is a fairly challenging one. So how do we address that? How do we make sure that things last longer are repairable or easy to fix and don’t create more waste and trash?
Daniela I want to continue on the challenging questions with the following question, what is one of your biggest failures so far in life and what did you learn from it?
Daisy I feel like I can identify moments when I thought something was going to go a certain way and it didn’t, and I didn’t let go. I think that’s something I’m learning to change about myself, when that controlling part of me really wants to hold on to things rather than release them.
I think one example is I thought I wanted to become a public school teacher here in the United States when I was younger and really laser-focused on that through my college years and even the years following in my work. And I would say that I laser focused maybe a little bit too soon. And then it took me a while to let it go when I realized that my passions were leading me somewhere else.
Neel Yes, I couldn’t agree more. I think one learns from failures the most, and I think I’m glad that I’ve failed a lot in the past and try to hopefully learn from that as well. One anecdote that comes to mind is we were trying to build a product in the Energy Access web, and the conversation around moving from a little kerosene lamp to something like a solar lantern was a decade old one. It was frustrating. We wanted to start building and designing solutions that cater to larger needs, but while trying to design for that, we overlooked at a certain point that there were people that still didn’t have, they still didn’t make the shift from kerosene lamps to even a lantern. So that failure helped us learn and help us tweak our solution to accommodate the product to work for more than just people that have a certain level of energy access. And it kind of tried to bring in everyone in the picture as well.
Daniela Yeah. I want to take you back on my entrepreneurship journey in India. It was an ethic solution that I kept on going at it for, like, four years, and I feel like the biggest failure with that was that I didn’t drop it early enough, not necessarily the entire business, but the current model that we were working on. So like not knowing when to quit because you believe on it so much and you put your hard work and emotions and all your resources and your faith into it.
Now I know that for the future. And I think this is what I’m practicing today in my journey for entrepreneurship is I’m going to quit ideas if there are more reasons why it wouldn’t work, if there are more people telling me that it wouldn’t work if I go out there to the market and I test it with simple, low cost products, and I see it doesn’t work. I’m going to move very quickly.
Daisy Yeah. These are such interesting lessons, too, from our various failures. Along the lines of what does and doesn’t work. What are some glimpses of impact or meaning that you are deriving from the work that you are doing? So can you tell us a quick story that reflects the impact of the work you do?
Neel One story that would probably help reflect what I have been doing and how impact translates there, is again, designing energy access solutions. I think I talked about the energy ladder. I think we all have different energy needs. The challenges, largely in the social entrepreneurship space, is that we often are restricted with budgets because we’re working with smaller teams and we are unknown entrepreneurs, and we don’t necessarily have big capital or big networks to be able to enable that. And we make the compromise on designing solutions that are just cheap and aren’t necessarily of the best quality.
So I think one thing that we can change, and this is what I’m trying to do with some of the work that I’m doing today, is bridge the gap. So if the energy access space, for example, didn’t start by just building a lantern but built a system that could grow as people’s income levels and their reach and their demand and their needs, dreams and aspirations grew, the system could grow with them. And if we could design for systems to be a little more organic, I think that’s how impact in what we do today is trying to change things the way they’ve been.
Daniela I want to take you — because it’s a story question — I want to take you back to the work I’ve been doing within SME Finance for African entrepreneurs. So Kevin is actually running a cheese manufacturing small business in Nairobi. And one of the biggest problems that Kevin used to have and has as a small business is working capital. So he’s really not getting that consistent money on a month on month. So he’s struggling to pay his rent, struggling to pay his five employees, and kind of take that cheese to the market and his artisans.
So one of the things that was really fulfilling for me in my work was that within the product that we set up as an MVP, we already saw that Kevin’s business is impacted positively because we created a referral and matching service for SME funders in Africa. And as part of this service, Kevin received his $3,000 that would allow him to be able to cover those costs to run his business until revenue comes in. And I feel like this is a good example of how just companies that don’t necessarily give funding can actually support entrepreneurs to find out about funders and educate them and help them understand what are the challenges and the terms that they would receive from the funders and whether they are right for their businesses.
Daisy These are such moving and interesting stories of impact and also imagination. I would say for us, a single story is about a kid I’ll call Miguel. Miguel attends the program that we work with in Quito, in Ecuador, in South America. A couple of years ago, Miguel was at home and when his dad was about to walk in the door, he was murdered by a gang in front of the family at the door. And because of the prevalence of domestic violence, Miguel’s mother was afraid of being framed for it.
And so she ran off. And so Miguel and his cousin tried to basically hold his dad until he passed away. And it’s these kind of everyday horrors that many of our partners in their communities face. But what they’re also doing is they’re showing up for kids like Miguel. And so what we’re doing is supporting them in that process of — how do you care for people who walk through these unspeakable things? And how do we cultivate that internal resource so that they can rise back up after an incident like that?
Neel That’s a powerful story.
Let’s do a quick round of faster, rapid fire questions. I think this is where we put everyone on the spot. So here goes the first one. What’s one value that you care about the most?
Daniela Curiosity. Is it a value? Well, it is for me.
Daisy For me, I would say courage.
Neel For me, I would say trust.
Daniela What have you found consistently most inspiring in your work and life?
Daisy The power of stories to heal people.
Neel What I found consistently most inspiring is people solving their own problems. I think people that work with the least amount of resources solve their problems with the most frugal intentions as well.
Daniela What’s most inspiring for me is that people have the resilience to keep on coming back, to keep on returning to the post-COVID world, making their business work again, making their life shape up.
Daisy So complete following sentence: Communities are amazing because…
Neel They’re pretty content very often with what they have and they’re not stuck in the run of the mill life that a lot of us can be in cities.
Daniela Communities are amazing because you have people just like you who are ready to listen.
Daisy I would say communities are amazing because they multiply the abilities and capacities of individuals in that collaborative process.
Neel One cartoon character that you love the most.
Daniela Jerry
Daniela I literally can’t answer this question. Oh, gosh, can I say Snoopy?
Neel Yeah, I’m going to say Calvin because he’s curious and imaginative and has created this beautiful, chaotic, crazy, amazing world as a kid. And I love that.
Daniela How about someone who inspires you?
Daisy Someone who inspires me maybe outside of my work is one of my friends whose name is Jihye. She is just one of the most amazing people who has accompanied me through lots of ups and downs.
Neel Someone who inspires me is a friend I made in Bangladesh. This is a person that works with an NGO called BRAC, and they work primarily in primary education, and they have formed about 10,000 different schools and worked in tandem with the government in those different regions. And these are far flung areas to create a curriculum and also train teachers to be able to impart education that’s really high quality in comparison to what someone would receive in a city like Dhaka.
Daniela Awesome. Someone who inspires me is actually Jacqueline [Novogratz]. She’s been a role model of mine for so many years now, and I feel the reason why she keeps on inspiring me is because she brought this holding values in tension principle that I feel encompasses a lot of my challenges right now.
Daisy All right. Next question. Success is…
Neel Something that you don’t need to talk about too much because it just works.
Daniela Aren’t we supposed to do one word? (laughs) Success is collaboration and friendship.
Daisy I would say success is living in alignment with your values
Neel I’m most proud of…
Daniela I’m most proud of having the courage to go across continents and still find my home.
Daisy I’m most proud of my ability to make a friend.
Neel I’m going to kind of combine the two and also build off that. I think I’m also most proud of the fact that I find inspiration and energy in community and people.
Daniela Amazing. Awesome. So now that you know more about us, we also look forward to knowing more about you listeners.
Daisy So tell us whose voice you want to hear on this podcast and send your questions and comments to foundryconversations@gmail.com.
[Music]
The music for Foundry Conversations was composed by Amadeus Foundation and recorded by Amadeus String Youth Orchestra in Beijo, Colombia. Amadeus cultivates the emotional intelligence of children and young people at high social risk through music addressing their need for social inclusiveness.
Do you want to listen more Foundry Conversations? Click on the following links to meet more Foundry members and their work to build they are doing to build a more just, inclusive and sustainable world:
- Episode 2: Platforms for Activism with Irene Milleiro.
- Episode 3: Mental Health Care in India with Rashi Vidyasagar.
- Episode 4: Stories of Sexual, Reproductive and Health Rights in Bangladesh with Syeda Samara Mortada.
- Episode 5: Launching African Creatives with Chidi Nwaogu.
- Episode 6: A Social Media Platform for Voices Unheard with Vijay Sai Pratap.
- Episode 7: A Transformative Youth Orchestra in Colombia with Daniela Ocampo.
About Acumen Academy:
Acumen Academy is the world’s school for social change. Our mission is to unleash a new generation of social innovators and leaders with the character and competence to build a more just, inclusive and sustainable world. Blending the best of online and offline learning, we offer anyone, anywhere access to the practical tools, practices, resources and supportive community they need to achieve positive social change. With more than 800 Fellows and 500,000 course takers in 193 countries, the Acumen Academy community represents a new generation of social innovators and leaders committed to doing what’s right in a world that loves easy.
Learn more at www.acumenacademy.org and on social media @AcumenAcademy.
