Wild Tiger Tees Special: The Journey to an Idea
Today’s special, special guest is Suzy Bureau of GiveBackHack. If you listened to episode 50, you knew this would happen. I was encouraged to share a little more about my story, especially Wild Tiger Tees, and Suzy jumped in to share my experience starting a social enterprise.
Wild Tiger Tees came together during a weekend at GiveBackHack in 2018. I, Adam Morris, am the co-founder of this social enterprise where we “empower youth experiencing homelessness with the skills necessary to gain employment through the art of screen printing.” We partner with Star House under their workforce development program called Star Works.
Our talk began at a point where I did not have an idea for Wild Tiger Tees or the People Helping People Podcast. In 2006, I was out in London working at a bank after my MBA and was not connecting with my role. If anything, the most meaningful thing to me at that time was my volunteer work with Samaritans for suicide prevention. Once I acknowledged that passion I began trying to build a career around giving back and making an impact. Of course, I didn’t forget to tell Suzy about the oddly comical moment of being let go from that bank job.
Until 2016, I wasn’t having any luck with ideas on how I would give back or make an impact. Then I realized that 10 years passed already. I told Suzy about the importance I found in being able to connect with people and what things mean. I discussed my thoughts on being inspired to make a change awhile “thinking into it”. Suzy gave a positive outlook on my choice to look at the strengths and weaknesses of my entrepreneur skills; whether it was looking at experience or exposure to the issue.
I discovered that spending 10 years of trying to figure something out on my own was not helping much, and decided I needed to talk to people who were active and engaged in cool work. My only thought was to see where that would take me. With this approach, I was led to the conversation inspiring this podcast. Coincidentally, or maybe not-so-coincidentally, the same approach towards interaction inspired the idea behind Wild Tiger Tees. I enjoyed getting to dig back into the journey with Suzy.
Another inspiration behind Wild Tiger Tees came from a staggering statistic. Out of the youth that come into Star House, 90% secure jobs within the first 3 months. After revisiting those youth three months later, only 10% still have that job. Wild Tiger Tees began concentrating on better preparing the youth to deal with the real-world workforce. Our focus points are teamwork, communication, effort, and punctuality.
The conversation with Suzy had such great momentum, so we split our talk into two episodes. Up next, we get into building an interdisciplinary team, doing the groundwork for your ideas, and making things work.
If you want to learn more about Wild Tiger Tees, check out Instagram, Facebook, or the official site.
Originally published at https://peoplehelpingpeople.world on February 13, 2020.
