On Time Traveling & Life Long Learning
Interview with Michele Fino| Chief Marketing Officer, DoSomething.org
What superpower would you want?
I’d want to be able to travel back in time. You could do a lot if you could go back in time. You would know a lot and you could determine if you would want to change something. For example, I wouldn’t mind having more power to affect the results of the election. I wouldn’t mind having the numbers to that billion-dollar Powerball that happened around six months ago.
Where are you from?
There are so many different ways to answer that question, and sometimes it’s a loaded question.
I’ve been living here in New York since 2003, so you could argue I’m now a New Yorker. However, sometimes the question means “where did you grow up,” because not many people you meet in New York grew up in New York. To that question, I would say Michigan, because that’s where I grew up and that’s where my family still is.
This question can get tricky, because people tend to want to know where I’m from because I’m Asian. I was born in Korea, but came to the U.S. when I was four months old, however I don’t remember Korea, I don’t speak any Korean, and I became a U.S. citizen when I was four, which I remember because I remember my dress had the giraffe on it.
So yeah, there are three answers for me to that question “where are you from”.
Share a moment in your life that made you passionate about making the world a better place.
There were two. The first was about 10 years ago when I first learned about Do Something. I heard then-CEO Nancy Lublin speak on a panel about building a movement of young people doing good, so that when they grow up it becomes second nature. At the time, I was working on American Idol on a fundraising telethon called Idol Gives Back. While Nancy was speaking, I was thinking that all these people will be watching the Idol Gives Back telecast and all we’re doing is asking them for money. Is there something else that we could do for people that don’t have disposable income so that they can do something too?
I approached Nancy after she spoke with this idea and she said “I love it, let’s do it”. We ultimately weren’t able to get buy-in on the American Idol side and the idea died, but it created this relationship between me and Nancy and Do Something. I was on the Marketing Advisory Board for five years and my husband joined the Tech Advisory Board at Do Something.
The second one was when I became a parent (my kids are eight and six). There are three phases of parenting as it relates to the children. There is the baby phase, where they are literally just blobs and they depend on you for food, butt wiping and all that stuff. Then there is the phase that my kids are in now, which I call the “kids phase”, where they are basically fully capable functioning humans — they can get food, they have their own Netflix login, they know not to run into traffic. As kids, they don’t have phones yet and they don’t have a computer, which means that my husband and I, as their parents, are their first source of information. They don’t hear about Hurricane Harvey, they hear about it through us if we tell them about it. They didn’t know who won the election, we told them. Once they can read it’s a totally different world. But for now, we’re still their filter and their primary source of information. As soon as you give a kid his or her own phone, that changes. You are no longer your children’s primary source of information, and that’s scary.
Success as a parent means knowing that you raised good people. Being part of DoSomething.org ensures that I work on making the next generation better than mine.
What sparked your interest and passion to get involved with DoSomething.org and lead as its CMO?
This is going to sound crazy cheesy, but the final push to make the move and join Do Something was Friday, May 13th 2016 when I saw Hamilton for the first time.
In my opinion, Hamilton is the best form of any kind of art that I’ve ever experienced. The interesting thing about it is all of the tactile stuff — the lyrics, the music, the acting, the set and the costumes — are all amazing, but then you connect so deeply to it because it’s in some ways so familiar. Everybody learned American history in school, but then we all forgot it. Most of us don’t know the facts of 1776 through 1802. We learned it at some point, in black and white, in a textbook. At some point, deep in your conscience or subconscious, you will recognize, but nobody contextualized it this way, so that’s what’s so fascinating about it to me.
What I learned from Hamilton is that you have to do something during your short life span that actually makes the next generation better, or else why are we here? Two weeks after I saw Hamilton I turned 40 and it was right around then that I saw a tweet from DoSomething saying they were looking for a CMO and the rest is history.
It’s not just about being a parent and raising my Small Finos, but if I can be in a position where I’m making the next generation of young people better, that’s it. If I do get hit by a bus tomorrow or if I do live until I’m ninety nine, it’s okay, because I dedicated this part of my life and all of my resources into this one singular focus.
Patrons of Progress is all about showcasing people who are using their influence for good. What does “doing good” mean to you.
The short answer: doing good means never stop learning. Learn about the world, learn about people and cultures that are different than yours. If you’re 41 and you’ve never met someone who is Muslim and wears a Hijab, it doesn’t mean that you never should. Perhaps challenge yourself to learn what being a Muslim American is like or learn about Ramadan.
A generation ago, when I was in grade school, we didn’t learn about the Chinese New Year. Today, Chinese New Year is part of the grade school curriculum — the customs, the history, how other parts of the world celebrate and how we celebrate here. Imagine a time in the future where all kids in school learn about Ramadan. They learn where it came from, what it means, where it started, how it is physically manifested by Muslim Americans during the month of Ramadan. If an entire generation of first graders learn what Ramadan is, I truly believe there would be less discrimination towards Muslim Americans and we wouldn’t be in situations where we are now.
All to say, never stop learning and be willing to change how you absorb information and who you absorb it from.
If you could choose one word to describe yourself, what would it be and why?
Either positive or magnetic.
I don’t think people are born positive or born magnetic, it actually is a skill that you can learn and see in practice and do. I used to have an assistant who described herself simply as “a numbers person.” She said she didn’t have any desire to develop the skill of meeting people. I wanted to show her that you can learn stuff from people instead of just through spreadsheets, so I asked her to come with me to all of my meetings. Over the the next six months, she became a social butterfly. Her entire life she thought she was only supposed to be a numbers person and fit the accountant profile like her dad, but found that she could also be an outgoing, social person.
You don’t have to be perfect. It’s okay to show your personality, and your vulnerability, when you’re meeting people for the first time and even over email. People do business with people they like. When asking yourself “how do I get people to actually respond?” Get them to like you first, and then you can get them to listen to what you’re saying.
What do you hope our readers will gain from the DoSomething.org story?
It is just as important to identify the things that you can change and set a plan to change it, as it is to identify the things that you cannot change and accept them.
Here at DoSomething, we ask: can we change homelessness? I don’t know the answer to that, but we know from our gazillions of years of research that the number one thing that homeless young people ask for when they end up in a shelter is jeans. That reason is — you can wear the same pair of jeans for years. You can wear them for three — four times without washing them. No one will make fun of you for wearing the same jeans all week. In finding that information out, we can change part of how young people are experiencing homelessness. So we ran the nation’s largest jeans drive “Teens for Jeans”, so that when a young person is experiencing homelessness, they get offered a fresh pair of jeans. Now our members are that much more informed and empathetic to people experiencing homelessness. That’s an example of the kind of mindset that we want to instill in young people, and the hope is that it will stay with them forever.
We can’t immediately change the voter registration process, but we can change the narrative. How do we make a bunch of young people to actually anticipate their 18th birthday, because they get to register to vote? Right now, I think registering to vote is probably on the same to-do list as going to the dentist and paying taxes; it’s not considered exciting. How do we change that? We can change that narrative, make it more exciting?
Generations ago, when they turned 18, young adults got to buy cigarettes and porn. This generation is more socially and civically-minded. Now we just need to ride that mindset and get young people civically active by registering to vote.
Resources and technology aside, if you could make one remarkable change in the world by 2020, what would it be?
That everyone between the age of 18 and 29 votes.
Share something that you’ve learned along the way, whether it’s one piece of advice or an experience that has helped guide you in your journey.
In the position that I’m in, it would be very lazy of me, but very easy for me, to stop learning. I have seven or eight people on my team. I could just delegate and coast all day. What keeps me leaning in is that there’s always either something that you can learn and there’s always something that you can teach. The way that I try best to teach is “see one, do one, teach one” — you can learn by seeing someone else do something, try it for yourself, then teaching someone else how to do it.
It is incredibly fulfilling and humbling working with super smart people who don’t just tell millions of young people to “DoSomething”, but actually give them the tools and teach them how DoSomething themselves.
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Concept + Production by London Wright-Pegs, Michael Tennant + Meghan Holzhauer // Interview by London Wright-Pegs // Portraits by Tom Kubik
