I really wanna tell you about my favorite story which has to do with my favorite social
entrepreneur in the world, the seven-year-old boy named Dylan.
So this story started eight years ago.
I got back from my first trip to Uganda and Kenya.
I get back from this trip and a friend of mine calls me up.
She's a grade 1 teacher.
Her name is Christina.
She says, "Taylor, I wanna do something really innovative with my kids here.
I don't want them just to fund-raise.
I wanna teach them about charity.
I really want them to learn and soak something in."
And I say, "Great.
Well, I'm really passionate about entrepreneurship, more notably, social entrepreneurship, so
why don't we do this?
We'll go to your class, grade 1, 6-year-olds, and we'll give them $100, and we'll tell them
it's their seed money.
And their goal will be to spend that $100 starting a business, and their goal will be
to turn that $100 into $500.
And that way, they'll learn that business is a tool for doing social good."
She said, "Great idea."
Goes back to all the teachers at her school, it ends up having 18 teachers at this elementary
school, all wanna do the same thing.
And so I walk in there, is that cool?
So, badass teachers.
So I walk in there with...
Well, I thought it would be a good idea to bring a lot of $100 bills into an elementary
school.
And I'll never forget, you gotta picture, like, 25 seven-year-olds sitting here.
It's a grade 2 class, the first class I walked into.
I'm excited.
I'm like, "You guys have got $100, what are you gonna do with it?"
They're like, "I'm gonna touch it."
The teacher is like, "Taylor, well, you cannot just walk into a room full of seven-year-olds,
waving around $100 bills.
Like, we've got a flip chart."
And so she gives me one of those, I don't know if you remember being in grade 2, but
those little, like, squat chairs.
Sitting in this chair, she opens the flip chart.
And it has, you know, a very perfect grade 2 teacher writing and says like, you know,
"Big sale, lemonade stand," that kind of thing.
Typical kind of businesses you'd start when you're seven years old.
And then down in the bottom, it's like this squiggly seven-year-old writing, it says,
"Dylan's plays and stories."
Like, some kid was like, puts it in.
And so I zone in and I say, "Who's Dylan and what are these plays and stories?
This sounds really exciting."
There's this kid, if you picture all these seven-year-olds here, he's sitting separate.
He's like the cool kid in class, sitting at the back and he goes, "That's me."
He's like, "It's a hassle."
I said, "Dylan, would you tell me about the plays and stories?
That sounds really cool, man."
And he says, "Fine."
He gets up.
All the kids are like, "Oh, Dylan's gonna talk."
And he's wearing skinny jeans and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt.
He's like a seven-year-old hipster.
And he starts pacing like this.
He says, "Well, I've written a number of plays and stories.
They've all been very successful."
And so, he says, "I've written a play for all of the kids to perform and we'll probably
have the money raised in a night."
And so you gotta picture this, Dylan, who's seven years old, he writes his play, they
put on a play night, they charge their parents to come watch them.
Can you imagine, like, a seven-year-old, like, bouncer?
Like, "What's your name?"
"I'm your mother."
And so, they put on this play night, then they sold them pizza and Coke, and all the
things, and they turned their $100 into $500 in a night."
And I didn't hear from that school for two months.
And I got a call, and they said, "We're done."
We called it the Early Entrepreneurs Experiment.
And by the way, this important piece that I missed is that $1,800 was what we gave out,
their goal was turn into $500 each.
So 18 times 500 to be $9,000.
And $9,000 is enough to build a schoolhouse for kids just like them, that lack of access
to basic education on the other side of the world, in Kenya.
So, telling, like, there could be a school or building a school was the goal.
And so I get this call and said, "Well, did you do it?
Did you did you make the $9,000?"
They said, "Just come pick up the check, just come to the office."
So I go to the office, when I first go to the office, they said, "You gotta go to the
auditorium."
I go to the auditorium, 400 kids sitting in the auditorium.
And they've got a check, like, you know, the publishers sweepstakes under a curtain?
And I'm like, "I'm hoping that they did.
I mean, how empowering would that be?"
And they open up this this curtain and the check is not made up for $9,000.
It's made for $18,000.
Thanks.
And what I dissected that, I like to kind of take a scientific approach to any of these
random fundraising initiatives that I do and think of, like, what made this work, and learn
as much as I can out of it.
And yes, the kids were creative, they were brilliant, they thought outside the box, they
didn't have failure as a mindset.
Those are all things that six-year-olds, and seven-year-olds, and eight-year-olds don't
have or have.
But what struck me the most was that they had this innate sense of empathy.
This unimpeded sense of empathy, where you told the kids, "By the way, there's kids that
are just like you on the other side of the world, they don't have a school," and they're
like, "Excuse me.
We need to do something about that.
We need to put on a play night."
And I love that sense of empathy.
And that kind of catalyzed a lot of the things that I do now.
And what I exist for in this world is to scale empathy.
I think empathy heals.
And I'm talking about empathy as in oneness, as in sameness, as thinking, not only knowing
what someone's feeling, but feeling what they're feeling.
And I wasn't as fast in life as Dylan was at finding something that, you know, was my
calling.
It took me a bit longer.
Like, this guy, that's me 8 years ago, my favorite pose, and that's strutting around
in front of about 400 people in a pair of bright blue man panties, and I'm wearing them
right now, my power panties.
Can you see the tan from there?
I don't if you can see it.
Like, you have to lather that thing on at 12:00 a.m., 2:00 a.m., 4:00 a.m., and 6:00
a.m. to get it that dark.
And obviously no one told me I was supposed to put it on my face too.
Yeah, quite the character.
Anyways, I like showing this picture, not only because of the panties and a little naked
man trophy I'm holding, but because this was the epitome of, like, the pinnacle of my outward
search for happiness.
This guy existed for one person, and he's on that screen.
And after a lot of trying to find fulfillment in all these different places, in money, in
relationships, in physical fitness, I decided none of those were working.
I was 28 at the time and I said, "I'm gonna go on a trip.
I'm gonna actually start giving.
I'm going to change my own life paradigm a little bit."
And this generation, the millennial generation or slightly older than the millennial generation,
we are somewhat disillusioned with nonprofits as a whole.
And we wanna know where our money is going.
I find, it's a thing that is repetitive in this culture.
I'm stereotypically one of those people.
And so I decide I was gonna go on a trip, I was gonna find a cause that I could really
sink my teeth into.
And I went on a trip to Uganda, I went to Kenya.
I checked out a whole bunch of different nonprofits.
This is the first one.
It was the first village that we visited.
And this is on the on the border of the Congo, in the Rwenzori mountain range.
And then we're getting up to the top of this mountainside and saying to my guy, "This place
is incredible.
It's beautiful.
I love it.
There are so many kids, where are their parents?"
My guide looks at me and says, "Well, Taylor, 70% of this village has AIDS.
Their parents are dead."
And that's when the trip went from being this adventure, this thing where I'm gonna find
something that I want to find fulfillment out of, to be the most transformational experience
of my life, and the biggest, I guess you could say, empathy builder of my life as well.
Because when I met these two girls, something happened in my brain, or my heart, or my mind,
or my soul, however you wanna say it, that these walls kind of came crumbling down in
my head of this separateness of, "I'm different than people living in Uganda, or people living
in Mexico, or people living in Guatemala, or Sierra Leone, or wherever it is."
All these walls can come tumbling down.
And I literally felt, like I felt what they were feeling.
And knowing what their life trajectory was like, it made it completely impossible to
do anything but contribute to ideally making their life a little bit better happier.
So, I decided I would start with one thing.
I would get home to Western Canada, and then my goal was to raise enough money to build
a schoolhouse for kids like this, and it would cost about $10,000 to do.
So I looked into crowdfunding, I thought, "Okay.
I'll just get a whole bunch people to give $20," then I did some quick math, I would
have to get 500 people to give $20 to raise $10,000.
I don't have that many friends.
And so I decided...
I'd come up with this equation, something a bit different.
And it goes like this.
Thirty-three people giving $3.33 a day, for 3 months, adds up to $10,000.
So, a group of people, like, this tiny section of people here that are sleeping right now
in the beanbags, wake up, giving the price of a cup of coffee a day, for 3 months, adds
up enough to build a schoolhouse for kids, educate roughly 1,000 kids over the next 20
years.
It was mind-blowing to me.
And so I set this goal.
I didn't wanna do the crowdfunding thing, well, kind of crowdfunding, but did this equation.
I made a little website like this, and I sent it out to my 33 friends, each a personal video
to each one of them.
And the video that would play would say, like, let's say I was sending this to Vishen.
I would say, "Hey, Vishen, real excited about this.
We're gonna build a school in Kenya.
Watch this video, it's gonna tell you everything you need to know."
Then this animated video would come on because you know Vishen's gonna have questions.
And it says, "Hundreds and hundreds of kids are gonna get educated.
You're gonna get a Facebook cover photo to show everything that you've done.
You're gonna get a tax receipt, Vishen, because I know you do your taxes."
It was gonna say...I said, "It's the price of a cup of coffee, or a slice of pizza, or
a parking downtown for two hours.
It's less than the tip that you leave at a restaurant.
And if you give this $3.33 a day, your mom's gonna be really proud of you."
So, sent that out to my friends really, like, hacked together this site on YouTube, and
Dropbox, and whatnot, sent it out and all my friends gave.
We raised $10,000 in 24 hours, which blew my mind.
And then I'm guessing like...
I love talking to rooms like this because we're all the same way.
We're thinking, "Well, what if you had 10 people do it, then if 10,000 people do it?"
So you get that vibe, right?
And so, I had a friend of mine do it, he raised $10,000 in 24 hours, another friend, another
friend, another friend, 10 people do it.
We ended up funding 150 schools, all this exact same way, all the same way, with $3.33
a day for 3 months.
And in total, we had 16,000 people from 80 countries all over the world give $3.33 a
day for 3 months, funded 400 projects in 14 countries.
And we scaled, we are at, like, schools, libraries, water projects, girls scholarships, anti-sex
trafficking work, homelessness initiatives, veterans rehabilitation, you name it, all
under this idea of giving $3.33 a day for three months.
But what blew my mind and I'm talking fast because the timer is going fast is what people
were feeling after these campaigns was a deeper sense of empathy.
They're feeling similar to what I felt when I went on my first trip to Uganda and Kenya.
And I started thinking, "Is it possible to scale this?
Is it possible to scale that?
Not just fundraising, but that feeling?
Can I give someone such a crazy visceral experience that they are a different person when they
come home?"
And the number one question that we had asked by those 16,000 people was, "Can I go see
the project?
Can I go see the school?
Can I go see the home?
Can you go see the water project?"
So we decided to do an experiment.
And we changed the equation.
We changed it to having 10 people give $3.33 cents a day for 3 months, which add up to
$3,000, enough to build one home for a family living in some conditions throughout Latin
America.
So we're a for-profit company.
We partner with a nonprofit that's been around for 20 years.
They build 100,000 of these homes.
They're prefabricated.
They go up in two days.
And we decided that we'd say, "Yes, you can go and build the homes.
You raised $3,000, you can go and build a home in person, yourself, with the family
that's gonna be living in it."
So what we'll do is we'll land on Friday.
I'll stay over Friday night at a hotel, then we'll go Saturday morning, Nicaraguan coffee
on our hands, we'll go build with the family that's going to be living in the home, meeting
the kids, learning about them, and learning their stories.
Like, this woman, this young woman here...
And these homes are built for...
You know, they're built for the most in-need people.
There's 1,000 point analysis that a nonprofit does on every single-family in these communities
to make sure that the homes are going to the person of the family with the most need.
Like, this young woman on the right, her name is Uraling [SP].
She's 18 and she's pregnant.
And currently, well, prior to her receiving a home, was sleeping on the ground in her
mother's home, which was made of tarps and two by fours.
And on the left is Angela who helped her build her home.
This is what happens on the second day of our build trip.
So you build all day Saturday, build all day Sunday.
At the end of the day, on Sunday, if we will all work our butts off, the house is done,
we have a ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Those hands belong to a 95-year-old man named Senior Rodriguez.
And Senior Rodriguez has never had a brand new home.
He's been on the earth for almost a century and I would love to tell you how he felt,
but I think this does a better job.
I was about 20 feet away from this moment happening falling my head off, like every
time, and watching Marlon, 40-year-old nightclub producer, who built Senior Rodriguez's home,
who raised enough money to build Senior Rodriguez's home, built alongside him.
I'm watching Marlon have that moment that I had, watching him cry and knowing that he'll
never be able to go back from that moment.
And I'm watching empathy be created in someone that already had empathy, of course, but maybe
it's, you know, going from a 2 to a 10 or a 3 to a 7, or something like that.
And it was a beautiful moment.
And so after this, we go to the beach, we do surfing, we bring amazing yoga teachers.
We do three days on the beach.
This is Danielle Rosati from New York, an incredible yoga teacher.
And we do meditation, but most of all, we create community around the thought of shared
empathy.
Every single trip, I feel all these feelings.
I feel shame, I feel guilt, I feel depressed, I feel hope, I feel optimism.
I feel the ability to make massive change.
That rainbow of feelings, in my mind, leads to the most beautiful, world-changing emotion
in my mind or state, which is empathy.
Because I believe that a world where we truly all genuinely feel empathetic, where we feel
like we're the same as every single other human being on this earth is a world that
legitimately could not have war.
It's a world that would not have gender inequality.
It's a world that would not have poverty.
It's a world that I know that I'm here to help create.
And the reason I'm standing right here is because I wanna create that world with every
single one of you.
Thank you.