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hey, it’s marie forleo and you are watchingmarietv, the place to be to create a business and life you love. an idea that i hold closeto my heart is the fact that talent is universal, but opportunity is not. and we’ve recentlybegun working with sama group, an organization whose mission is to fight global poverty throughtechnology. if you’ve ever wondered what part you might play in helping make the worlda more equitable place, my guest today will show you how. leila janah is the founder and ceo of samagroup, and an award winning social entrepreneur. prior to founding the sama group, leila wasa visiting scholar with the stanford program on global justice and australian universitynational center for applied philosophy and

public ethics. the concept of sama, the rootword for equality or fairness in many languages, is the guiding principle behind the familyof impact enterprises janah founded and runs. the first of these is samasource, an awardwinning nonprofit business that connects women and youth living in poverty to microwork:computer based tasks that build skills and generate life changing income, now part ofthe broader field of impact sourcing. samasource has moved 20 thousand people over the povertyline and spun out a domestic program: samausa. in 2011 leila cofounded samahope, a crowdfundingsite for medical treatments in developing countries. janah’s work with sama groupenterprises has been featured widely in the press, with features in publications includingthe new york times, cnn, forbes, and fast

company. she received a ba from harvard andlives in san francisco. leila, thank you so much for coming out tomarietv. i really appreciate it. it’s my great pleasure. i’m so happy tobe here. so we love you guys, we love working withthe sama group, and i was wondering if you can take us back to when you started or backto when you were in mumbai and you started to recognize that outsourcing was providingmillions of jobs, yet it wasn’t reaching the poorest populations. how did that experienceinspire you and did that lead to the creation of the sama group? sure. well, at the time i was living in newyork, actually, in the financial district.

i had just finished college and i had my firstcorporate job and i was working 24/7 and pulling all nighters. and my manager, knowing thati had some foreign experience, said, “why don't we send you on this project to india?”so i was… i was basically thrown in head first into a project working directly withthe ceo of a big outsourcing company. and this was the year that thomas friedman hadwritten the world is flat and the national discourse on outsourcing was very negativeand coming from a place of concern that americans were losing jobs overseas, that we were becomingless competitive. and so i, you know, being someone interested in social justice was veryreluctant to take on this project and even though i’m of indian origin i didn't reallythink it was a good thing that we were, you

know, partnering with these companies to lowerour costs and shift jobs. so i came in with that mindset. and one day in the call centerthat i was working in i met a young man who came from dharavi, which is south asia’slargest slum where slumdog millionaire was filmed and the kind of place where there arecholera outbreaks and children playing in open sewers and just really horrible livingconditions. they look almost post-apocalyptic. it doesn't seem like anyone in twenty… 2005or now 2015 could be living that way. and so when it dawned on me that someone fromthat environment was capable of picking up a phone and answering customer service questionsfor a woman in the uk, you know, about her plane ticket, i realized that our understandingof poverty is very shallow, that there’s

a very large number of people around the world,people who we would consider to be living in extreme poverty, making less than 2 dollarsa day, unable to meet their basic human needs for food, water, shelter, and education, whoare capable of working in the new economy, working in the digital economy. and that lightbulbis what inspired sama, the idea that this business model of outsourcing, which has creatednow billions of dollars and several billionaires, that we could take some of those billionsof dollars and… and shift the model so that they went directly into the pockets of peoplewe would otherwise consider charity cases, like this young man. and that was the originof the idea. and so when you had that idea, take me fromidea to then the first whether it was project

or you actually leaving your job and thenmaking sama real. it took about 2 years. i mentioned the ideato my boss and as a tribute to that firm, you know, he really believed in personal developmentand he knew that this was my passion. so he said, “i think we should fund you to domore research on this idea and maybe it’ll benefit the firm in some way.” so our companyactually gave me, like, a thousand dollar travel stipend to go and do some more researchon this in africa. and my idea was to take the outsourcing model and figure out how wecould turn it into a social enterprise, much like if people are familiar with microfinance,much like muhammad yunus did with the banking industry. he thought, “here’s this greatindustry that’s provided access to capital

for billions of people globally but has leftout the poor,” and he adapted the model to fit the needs of the poor. so i thoughtmaybe we could do something similar with outsourcing. and from that moment in… in late 2005, istarted working on a business plan on my nights and weekends to start a company that wouldonly hire people like that young man i met at the call center. so the threshold for newworkers would be, of course, you have to want to work hard and be capable and have basicskills like reading and writing english. so high school graduates. but you also have tocome from a very poor background, and we would actually screen out people who came from wealthierbackgrounds who might otherwise get a job. so i worked on the business plan for abouta year and a half and i submitted it to a

competition online in the netherlands forthis new category of social venture. and lo and behold they sent me an email several monthslater saying, “congratulations. you’ve made it to the semifinals. come to amsterdam.”and i had kind of forgotten at that point that i’d even sent this out. it was reallya pipedream. and… and i went to amsterdam and they gave me i think it was the firstrunner up prize, so i had, like, 25 thousand dollars that they gave me. and that was enoughto convince me that i could quit my job and survive for long enough to do this. and itwasn’t easy. my parents don't make much money, i’ve loaned money to my parents inthe past, i don't come from a wealthy family, i still am paying off my undergraduate studentloans at the age of 32. so it was a pretty

big decision for me to do that, but it justgave me that… that push. and i had a lot of friends who were willing to, you know,let me sleep on their couches and such for a while. and what did you do with that first 25 thousand?like, how did you figure out what you wanted to spend that on? i know you had your businessplan, but it was like do i need to hire someone first? how did you… what did you do withthat money? so i realized that it wasn’t going to bevery much money to hire anyone, even back in 2008, the year that i ended up launchingthe business. so my first step was to go to kenya where i knew i wanted to launch basedon demographics. kenya is a former british

colony, much like india, that has a largeyouth population that is both somewhat educated and dramatically unemployed. so you will findyoung people living in the slums who can read and write english, who’ve gone to a ruralschool, and, you know, paid their school fees their whole life and really wanna work hardbut are… just happen to have drawn the… the wrong ticket in life’s birth lotteryand happened to be living in a slum. so looking at the demographic trends across sub-saharanafrica, the world’s poorest continent where we thought we could make the biggest difference,i identified kenya and i used part of the money to go there initially, stay in the cheapesthotel i could find, and interview local entrepreneurs who could partner with me. and my idea wasi saw all of these internet cafes around the

world in low income areas and i thought, “whatif i could convince the internet cafe owners to make part of their business an outsourcingbusiness? what if i could convince them to hire local youth, use their computers, andcomplete small projects?” and initially my first instinct was data entry. somethingvery simple. i had a lot of friends who were entrepreneurs or involved in startups in siliconvalley that needed basic data processing like, you know, we’ve collected all these receiptsand we need them scanned and entered into a spreadsheet, that sort of thing. yeah. and so it’s straightforward enough thati could actually be the person to secure the

work and do the quality assurance. so thefirst money i spent going to kenya, identifying that partner. i came back to the us, i renteda tiny office space, i paid myself 400 dollars a month for the first 9 months or so of theoperation until i literally could not do that anymore and… and then i got to work. soi spent the money also on software. i found a software platform that would let me loadthese projects and manage them myself, and then i went around to every entrepreneur iknew who might need these types of services, i made a brochure on my mac, printed it outat kinko’s… yes! ...and i got our first contract in septemberof 2008, which is the month we started officially

the business. a friend of mine who is runninga large nonprofit in the bay area said, “we have this project for blind readers.” heoperates the largest online library for blind readers called bookshare.org and it’s anaudio library. and so he had a need for people to review transcripts of books to make themreally perfect before he put them into his audio software. and so we loved the idea ofworking with a social venture and having our first project be, you know, be beneficialfor… for disabled people around the world. and… and he was willing to give us a…a 30 thousand dollar contract to start. and… and so i personally guaranteed him in themeeting that i would… i would take personal responsibility for the quality of the work,which meant many, many late nights, you know,

poring through transcripts of audio booksfor middle school aged kids. and… and that’s kind of what got us on our way. and the nextyear we ended up doing about 200 thousand dollars in sales revenue from those typesof projects all initially secured by me and then i found someone on craigslist to helpme with sales who remains a friend. how incredible is that? you’re just suchan inspiration. i love this story and i haven’t… i’ve done so much research and i love whatyou do and i haven’t heard that, so genius. talk to us about impact sourcing. what itmeans and why it’s important. i’m so glad that you brought that up, marie.impact sourcing is a new term that refers to making sourcing decisions in your business,or at least part of them, based around social

impact in addition to quality. so the ideais, you know, we have all of these problems around the world, global poverty and domesticpoverty being one of them. one way to solve those problems is to deliberately work withenterprises that have a social or environmental mission. and thus you can use the… the budgetthat you have allocated in your business to address these social problems rather thantrying to maximize your profit and then donating it at the end to a charity. and this is away of thinking that actually has a long history here in the united states. one of my favoriteexamples is goodwill industries. most people think of goodwill as a nice charity and theydonate their clothes. goodwill actually earns 3 billion dollars globally in store revenuefrom all of their stores globally. and all

of that store revenue comes from employingmarginalized people in the store in addition to recycling donated clothing. and goodwillalso offers services for offices that want to… that want to move and have a large numberof items they need picked up and recycled, or i think they also offer setup servicesfor corporate events. so if you are the procurement manager in a company or you’re running anevent, you have a choice as to what vendors you choose. and the idea of impact sourcingis that you… you deliberately choose vendors, and maybe not for everything that you, youknow, need to source, but maybe for some percentage of your sourcing needs, that have an overtsocial mission. and the other idea of impact sourcing is that you needn’t compromiseon quality to have that social impact. so

i was just on a panel yesterday with the ceoof glass door, which is a technology company that lets employees rate their employers andprovide more transparency in the workplace. they now have about 600 employees. and i methim just before the panel, 30 minutes before, and he said, “i had no idea that samasourcewas a nonprofit.” i was telling him about some of the fundraising challenges i had.and he was kind of blown away and he said, “we’ve been working with you…” theynow have about 85 workers who are samasource workers globally. he said, “we’ve beenworking with you for over a year and nobody on my team ever said, ‘these guys are anonprofit.’ i just thought you were the best quality service we could find.” andso… so that’s a wonderful story and i

do wanna tell people we’re a nonprofit becausei think it helps them understand that if we do ever make a profit on this kind of workit will all be reinvested in our work and none of us are doing this for personal gain.we can’t, by law. and i think the model of impact sourcing that’s so interestingis that by hiring samasource, glass door is directly contributing to the same kind ofpoverty alleviation that we would normally be paying for with aid or charitable dollars.so, you know, in the prior model, americans work hard, we get taxed, some percentage ofour income through that tax goes to usaid, our agency for international development,and then that organization hires people to administer programs overseas that theoreticallyhelp the people that we’re helping on this

project. theoretically. theoretically. right?exactly. and, you know, and i think these agenciesdo a lot of good but i think it’s really interesting to imagine other ways of addressingthat same population and if we can marshall the capital that’s available to us in theprivate sector, we have so much more resource to tackle these problems. the thing i love about impact sourcing, youknow, i hadn’t heard that turn of phrase before, but through my lens it’s bringingconsciousness and a sense of intention to

every aspect of your business and lookingat how every piece of what you do can touch another human soul in a positive way beyondthe traditional ways that we’re thinking of it. and that’s why i’m so not onlyinspired by what you guys do, but i love that we’re working together now and i can’twait to do more with you because it is, it’s using the power of entrepreneurship and thinkingabout how do we tackle these global issues in a really smart, effective way not justin the developing world but here in the united states as well. one of the things that i loveis the strong focus you have on outcomes. what are some of the most important metricsyou guys track through your work? and i know that’s not an easy thing to do. and howdo you do it?

i’m so glad that you asked that becausei think one of the challenges that the nonprofit sector faces is the perception that we’renot efficient. and coming from the private sector myself i also had that bias when icame in. i saw lots of aid organizations on the ground in africa and asia and i was alwaysthe person to eyeroll and think, “wow, if this were done by the private sector it wouldbe so much more efficient.” i think part of the challenge is that in the private sectorwe have this unifying measure of success, which is profit measured in dollars. and everybodyagrees that that’s a measure of success and we can, you know, we have accounting standardsfor reporting it and we can look at a company’s pnl and we can look at their, you know, theirfiled statements and understand how successful

that company is. in the social sector we lack,unfortunately, such a unifying metric. you know, if you’re working in animal care oranimal services, you’re measuring, you know, the cost of… of saving an animal’s life.right? the cost of spaying and neutering animals so more don't get created that we then haveto euthanize later. right? i mean, so that’s one set of metrics. if you’re working inthe environmental arena you might be looking at the long run impact of your program onsomething like climate change or, you know, forestry. so there are so many different metricsthat it’s very difficult for a donor to determine impact. it’s always like comparingapples to oranges to pineapples. and… and this is a very deep problem. that said, wehave relied for too long on what we call in

the nonprofit sector, the tyranny of overheadas a measure of nonprofit effectiveness. so we shouldn’t use the challenge of measuringimpact across these different sectors as an excuse to look at the easiest thing, whichis what percentage of my gift goes to fundraising and marketing versus program related expense,which is typically how impact is seen. and that measure really starves nonprofits ofthe agency and capital they need to produce good outcomes. so i’m a huge fan of thisnew movement, peter singer calls it effective altruism, many people just call it, you know,strategic giving or venture philanthropy. this new movement around thinking about impactin terms of outcomes for dollars spent. just like we would in, say, clinical drug trials.we would think, “ok, if you’ve got a new

drug that’s, you know, being tested forfighting diabetes. we wanna look at, you know, how much it costs to purchase the drug versuswhat kind of outcome you have on people who have diabetes. and, of course, the outcomesare gonna be different depending on what the drug intervention is, but you don't reallycare how the drug company is spending their money to produce the intended effect. youcare about dollars in versus total impact out. so with that lens, we in our field beingfocused on poverty alleviation decided to form an organization that would measure howmany people we moved over the poverty line and by how much and at what rough cost todonors, you know, per person impacted. and so now 7 years in we can say that internationallywe’ve moved 7 thousand people… actually,

right now it’s like 6,974. something likethat. but roughly 7 thousand people from a baseline income of less than 2 dollars a dayto 3 years after starting our program a baseline income of 4 times that. wow. and we can then track the investments thatthose people are making with that additional income in households expenditures like education,like health care for their children, we see a lot of improved, you know, consumption interms of food. our workers literally start buying more protein for the first time andfresh vegetables. so you can then track that 4x income increase across all of these otherindicators in terms of quality of life. but

we’re really focused on reporting outcomes.and we tell people, “you can look at how much we spend on fundraising or travel orany number of things, but that’s not gonna give you a good sense of whether we’re effectiveat what we do, which is moving people out of poverty.” and i will mention to yourviewers that there’s a great website called givewell.org that helps people understandwhere their gifts could be most effective. they don't have the capacity to evaluate everyorganization, but that lens, that way of thinking, for, you know, any smart person who’s lookingat making a charitable donation, that lens that they use could be applied to their giving.and a few questions asked of the non profit that they might wanna give to could probablyyield answers as to how those nonprofits view

outcome tracking. speaking of outcomes, one of the things thatmade myself and everyone on our team cry was a beautiful video that you guys have of ayoung woman named martha. and numbers are awesome and as businesspeople and entrepreneursand creatives, it’s… it’s something we need to pay attention to. but for us andfor me, you know, i love the stories and i think we all do and loving the ability tosee even one individual’s life completely transformed by the dignity of work and thepossibility of independence in creating a better life for himself or herself. are thereany stories, i know martha is a favorite, we’ll put a link to that below, whetheryou wanna tell martha’s story or any other

story. you’ve done so much work in the fieldand seen so many lives change. anyone come to mind? sure. well, i can give a refresh on the marthastory. sure. we produced that video back in 2012 for agala that we ran, 2012 or 2013. and martha came to us, she was a young woman living inan orphanage in nairobi run by an amazing catholic charity in the slums. and she hadbeen orphaned at age 10 and then moved to this orphanage and at age 18 as is commonboth in the developing world and even here in the us if we look at the foster care program,kids at age 18 age out of the system. and

yet if you have no job training, no familymembers to support you, no, you know, emotional infrastructure of any kind, and, in additionto that, many of these youth have trauma, as martha did, from just any number of thingsthat can happen to you in that vulnerable situation, how could you possibly be expectedto make a living for yourself? and martha was reported to us, her orphanage actuallyhad a partnership with one of our recruiting centers. and so we heard from the recruitingcenter that the sisters at her orphanage said that martha was routinely the top student,she was extremely bright, she was very humble, and she was the kind of person in the backgroundhelping all of the other young girls in her orphanage succeed. and so they took a realshining to her at our recruiting center and

even though i think she lacked some of ourcriteria, she had her… i think she had some difficulties with high school, she ended upgetting recruited to join a samasource center. and then after she got her first job she wasable over time to move out of the slum that she was living in, to escape the reality formany women in urban african environments that don't have a lot of money, which is gettinginvolved in prostitution out of absolute necessity because it’s the only way that they mightmake an income and sustain themselves. so she… she told us that that was really heronly other choice was to go on the streets. she got this job, she… when we first mether would only wear baggy clothes and look at her feet and she had, i think, internalizedthis… this message that a lot of people

from very poor backgrounds feel which is thati don't… i don't really belong, i don't have any value to add in the world, i’ma nobody. now i just saw her 2 and a half weeks ago in nairobi. she stopped workingfor samasource about a year ago and she got a job working as a customer service rep fora local travel company in kenya. and she was just beaming with pride because they loveher so much that she started getting involved in social media, she’s a very beautifulyoung woman and she’s finally able… i think she feels so much pride in being ableto buy clothing that fits her and do her hair and she was wearing makeup when i met herand she was extremely poised and she told me that she really wants to get more involvedin media and marketing for that industry,

for the travel industry. and the idea thata young girl from a slum, you know, who would be continuing to toil away in that slum, youknow, doing some kind of informal labor at best, the idea that she is now this poised,mature woman living outside of the slum who really has come into her own, i mean, that’swhat we’re all about. and martha now serves as an inspiration to our other workers, wehave about 700 active workers in east africa and asia alone. and many of them have heardher story because we play the video for our workers as well to show them that they mightalso have an outcome like martha, and it's just incredible. so i think there’s a…a psychological ripple effect that comes with the dignity of work and with other peopleobserving that in her community and seeing

what’s possible, that those girls don'thave to go into prostitution, that there are other paths. and… and i think so much ofwhat we offer is just hope, hope that there’s a better future. and a lot of that hope needs to come righthere in the us. and that was another reason why we were so thrilled to find you guys.on our team it’s always been an internal discussion. you know, where do we want tostart to channel things and our resources of how we can make a bigger impact? and iwas so thrilled to know that you guys also do work here in the us. you want to tell usabout that? sure. and i think for us the story is comingat a good time because with the presidential

debates happening, i think there’s a lotof concern about threats from afar, from outside of the us, whether they’re foreign workersor whether they’re immigrants, illegal or legal immigrants, and i think the importantthing to consider is that at the end of the day we’re all human beings, whether we livein timbuktu or tennessee, and for us we… we think we have as much of a moral duty topeople here as we do to people overseas. and we also think it’s not an either or. it’snot like because we’re helping someone in kenya we can’t also help someone here. yes. and i think that’s a traditional dichotomy.“oh, there are international poverty groups

and international charities and then thereare domestic groups.” and i think so often the strategies that we employ to fight povertyoverseas have equal application here. so we kind of think of ourselves as… as sort oftransnational in that way. and our work here started a couple of years ago. it was actuallyinspired by negative feedback we’d received from a guy in ohio who saw an ad that we’drun on hulu, the web tv service, and the ad featured a refugee, who we’re still in touchwith, who was doing work for us from a refugee camp. and this is one of the most destitutecamps i’ve ever seen. it’s the dadaab refugee camp on the border of somalia, about800 thousand people. so we really thought that this would be non controversial, thatnobody would think these refugees are stealing

our jobs and we should be really concernedabout it, especially because the nature of the work that he was doing. it was very basic.but this guy from ohio wrote in and told me that i was ruining america and that i shouldbe ashamed of myself for calling myself a nonprofit… calling our organization a nonprofit.and it came at a time that was a very tough time for me. i was really in debt from sama.started it as a nonprofit so i have no equity in it, i’m never gonna get rich out of this,and it really demoralized me. and i initially, you know, wrote this email that was… thatshut him down. and then i didn't send the email and the next morning i woke up and iread it again and i just googled unemployment in ohio. and it turned out that this guy wasfrom a community that had just had a huge

set of factory closures and unemployment wassoaring and people there had no hope. and so he was coming from a place of hopelessnessand desperation and i think that’s where so many of these fears are bubbling up. imean, people aren’t being mean or angry because they wanna be. they’re… they’rescared. they’re deeply scared and we have to address that. especially if we’re gonnabe working overseas, we have to address that at home. and so instead i wrote back and iasked him if he had ideas and that kernel led us to start our us program 2 years later,which is called samaschool. and we started with a model of adapting what we had overseas,which is we know how to train low income people to be successful in the digital economy infields like data entry, social media, and

a number of different things that you cando online without being co-located with the business… ...that’s giving the work. so we realizedthat there was a unique opportunity in the us because we now have all of these new platformswhere you can exchange your services online. there’s a website called upwork. it used to be odesk and elance. and upwork has paid out billions of dollarsto… actually, just over a billion dollars, to contractors in the last 7 or 8 years andit is a fast growing marketplace. whether you look at upwork or you look at even offlinemarket places or market places for offline

work that are mediated online like taskrabbitor care.com if you’re looking for a babysitter or an elder care specialist. i mean, there…the number of these sites has just exploded. and the digital economy is not something thatour job training infrastructure in the us is prepared to handle. i was even listeningto the republican debate last night and there was a lot of concern about jobs but nobodywas talking about the threat to jobs from automation and technology and the way we canmitigate that by training people to succeed in the new economy. and not just trainingpeople to write code, but training people to think first about applying online for ajob or putting up a profile and how to navigate that to get the most bang for their buck.

and how to market and sell themselves onlinein an effective way. i mean, it… it’s something that we talk about a lot in ourcompany because we’re a virtual company and often times the folks that we hire we’venever met before and you have to be able to represent yourself and interact and put yourbest foot forward online in a way that makes sense now. absolutely. and you guys would probably bea great case study and the kind of company that would hire a samaschool graduate in theusa. absolutely. we have a woman, i’ll just tell you onestory about one of our sites. so we… we

started in california and then we got fundingto expand to different pilot sites around the country and we just got funded to expandinto new york city with the robin hood foundation. congratulations! this quarter. so we’ll be… we’ll beyour neighbors soon. that’s awesome. and one of the sites that we piloted, whichis one of the hardest places i’ve ever seen in the us to work is dumas, arkansas. it’sa little town in the mississippi river delta region of arkansas and it is an extremelychallenging place to do anti-poverty work. there are a number of organizations that haveworked in the delta for years and have tried

to reduce the endemic poverty in the region,but because of a number of things from the decline in our agricultural production asa country to the legacy of slavery and racial injustice that continues in that region, there’sa pocket of poverty there that has been really hard to tackle. and we started there workingwith people who were in many ways more similar to our african workforce than anything i’veseen in the us in terms of their skill level and workforce readiness. they had very fewskills and very little access to technology. many of them had never used a computer outsideof our one recruiting partner. most of them had had jobs working at places like gas stationsor the local mcdonalds. there were no, you know, white collar jobs available. so my favoritestory is of a woman named stacy, who’s a

single mom, who was a gas station attendantpart time for 3 years before she found sama. and we got her into our training, it’s a10 week boot camp. it’s designed for people who have existing care commitments at homeor existing jobs. so it’s night… it’s a night and weekend program. and it’s designedto be fast and to get you making money as soon as possible. so she stuck with it, shefinished the program, and now she’s making several thousand dollars a month as a customerservice rep and she found the job… or, i should say. not customer service. social mediamarketing. she… she found the job through upwork after going through our training. andso she is managing social media accounts for different companies, small businesses aroundthe country. she loves the work. she’s very

outgoing and well spoken due to her, you know,gas station training. she had talked to a lot of people and she’s personable. andso you think about that and you think, “wow, how many people around the country are sittingat home hopeless because they haven’t had success in the traditional job market whomight well be able to earn a living through this kind of an approach. and stacy is a perfectexample of that and i think… i think there are millions of americans who could benefitfrom this kind of program. i agree 100%. one question i have for you,it’s something that will keep me up at night. i’ll read articles online, i’ll watchvideos, i’ll read books and my heart breaks and i live here in new york city, i spendtime in los angeles, and i feel so blessed

to be able to be exposed to things that inever dreamed were possible. i grew up in new jersey and did not come from a lot ofmoney either, and so i find myself sometimes going like, “woah, what have i created?this is amazing, i’m so grateful for it. but there’s so many millions, billions,of people that have so little.” how do you manage the emotional part of what you do asa leader, seeing the extremes of humanity? oh, god. it is so overwhelming and i thinkone of the refreshing things about what you just said is that it still bothers you. all the time. because i think it’s so easy to developa callous layer over our hearts to be able

to deal with that more easily. and there’sthis great quote by an amazing writer name arundhati roy about how the trick of remaininghuman as you progress through life is to always get upset when you see injustice and for itto always affect you and for you to be, you know, emotionally… in a bit of emotionalturmoil when you see it. and that just confirms that you’re still human. and… and it’s so important for us to continuethat because as we progress and, you know, in the case of sama, i had no idea that wewould even be around as a… i thought it was just gonna be me with steve muthei, myguy, my internet cafe guy in kenya, the guy i hired off of craigslist, jess mccarter,to do our initial sales, and i just had never

imagined that we would get to the scale thatwe are now. and so for me the trick is to continue to be upset because that… thatfuels so much of our programming and i think without empathy, without a feeling of solidaritywith the people we’re trying to help, we, you know, we lose the most important thingin guiding our decisions, which is… which is human empathy. it’s been a huge strugglefor me, that said. i mean, i… i have been engaged before, i’ve had a lot of personalturmoil as a result i think of committing myself so fully to this work, and it’s verydifficult for a partner to… and i have so much respect for people who’ve been my partners.it’s so hard to support someone who’s constantly, like, up and going to rural ugandaand without a clear return date.

or having to cancel things at the last minuteto go and fundraise. but i think there too, that empathy really helps. and i feel verylucky, i think the only thing that can sustain, you know, people who are in this kind of fieldis having a really strong network of supportive friends and family around them who… whoget it and who can listen to the stories and who can, you know, sit there when i'm cryingon the phone about having checked in with martha and i’m so depressed that i can’tdo more for her. you know, who can sit there and console me.and… and at some level i think faith also helps. i’ve been really impressed with popefrancis and i’m not a lapsed catholic because i never was a catholic, but my father grewup jesuit and went to catholic school and

raised us with those kinds of values and…and i really think that faith in those times of turmoil can be an anchor for us and it’sso inspiring to have a moral leader like pope francis who’s willing to be bold and talkabout poverty and the importance of caring for our fellow human being as the highestcalling. yeah, i… my heart always breaks open anytime i watch the news and i start to see, from faith based communities, the openingup and the inclusion of everyone, and i’m just… i sit there and i do my jersey fistpump and i get so excited. speaking of family, you know, there was a bit that you said aboutthe best advice that you’d ever received when your parents fresh from india were signingtheir first mortgage here in the us and they

were nervous. and your grandmother, a belgianwho hitchhiked around the world before meeting your grandfather in calcutta, she told them,“don't worry so much. trust the world. it’s a vast, beautiful, wondrous place.” howdoes this notion serve you today? how does it impact who you are and how you show up? my grandmother, crissann, was just the mostamazing character even just in terms of her style with these grand caftans she would wear.and i think what impressed me most about her was that as a young woman coming out of worldwar ii, they had to… they had to flee belgium when the nazis came, that she could stillretain her sense of openness and possibility and… and a positive lens on humanity. andi think it is so easy to be cynical. the temptation

is always there to see the worst in the peoplearound us and to assume that their intentions are the worst, and i fall into that trap allthe time. and i think her lesson is really that, you know, we have a choice to eithertrust the world or to hole ourselves in and to assume that everyone else is out to getus. and those decisions that are fear based, that are based on that idea that everyoneis out to get us and we need to hunker down and protect ourselves against this horribleworld, i… i think that never leads us to a good outcome. and i feel like the most incrediblemovements in history and the smallest acts of kindness every day that make us feel betterabout ourselves and that build a better world are grounded in that sense of positivity andoptimism about human nature. and… and i

really do think that’s choice. i don't thinkthere are facts that prove one way or the other that humans are inherently bad or humansare inherently good or humans are inherently untrustworthy or trustworthy. we are all ofthose things. right? yes, absolutely. and we have to wrestle with it. and i think…i think if we choose every morning when we wake up to see the positive, to trust theworld, even if traumatic things happen, even if we witness, you know, tragedy in frontof us, as so many people do, that optimism is ultimately what’s gonna guide us throughlife. you know? and i think it’s the only way to leave a better world than the one thatwe were born into.

if anyone wants to get involved with sama,tell us where we should go and what… because our audience is full of enthusiastic actiontakers, which i love. so where would you direct people and what can they do to get involvedwith you? great. well, first of all, we’re spreadingthe word about samaschool. our goal is to enroll 10 thousand students by the end ofthe year. it’s a free online work program. so if anyone that you know is looking forwork, struggling with unemployment, looking just to boost their skills and figure outhow to make the most of the online economy, samaschool.org is a great place to start.and then i will mention 2 other things. we have a crowdfunding site for medical treatmentsthat raises money for people who can’t afford

basic medical treatments, both domesticallyand abroad. and so if you’re passionate about providing healthcare you can make adirect donation and 100% of the gift goes to one of our doctors to perform lifesavingmedical treatment. and then as a donor you get a report back on exactly where your moneywent. and, lastly, if you’re more interested in larger strategic philanthropy, we are raisinga new investment in sama to expand our work domestically and overseas on the job creationfront. and we’re doing it through a loan called a program related investment that donorscan be part of. and so if they’re interested in… in participating in that you can goto our website at samagroup.co and leave us a message or email us at info@samagroup.co.

leila, thank you so much. this was such abeautiful conversation. you are an incredible human being. i’m so thrilled that we’reconnected and i can’t wait to work with you for years and years and years to come.thank you. likewise, thank you so much. now leila and i would love to hear from you.from everything we discussed today, what was the most significant thing that you’re takingaway and why? as always, the best discussions happen after the episode, so go on over tomarieforleo.com and leave a comment now. did you like this video? if so, subscribeto our channel and i would be so grateful if you shared this one, especially this one,with all your friends. and if you want even

more great resources to create a businessand life that you love, plus some personal insights from me that i only get to talk aboutin email, come on over to marieforleo.com and sign up for email updates. stay on yourgame and keep going for your dreams, because the world needs that special gift that onlyyou have. thank you so much for watching and i’ll catch you next time on marietv.

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