Join Kosta and his guest: Travis Trull, Founder and Executive Director of Flint Global, a 501c3 organization dedicated to helping break the cycle of extreme poverty and dependence, to create flourishing families and communities that make the world a brighter place.
Better Together with Kosta Yepifantsev is a product of Morgan Franklin Media and recorded in Cookeville, TN.
Find Out More About Travis Trull and Flint Global:
https://flintglobal.org/
Find out more about Kosta and all the ways we're better together:
http://kostayepifantsev.com/
Join Kosta and his guest: Travis Trull, Founder and Executive Director of Flint Global, a 501c3 organization dedicated to helping break the cycle of extreme poverty and dependence, to create flourishing families and communities that make the world a brighter place.
Better Together with Kosta Yepifantsev is a product of Morgan Franklin Media and recorded in Cookeville, TN.
Find Out More About Travis Trull and Flint Global:
https://flintglobal.org/
Find out more about Kosta and all the ways we're better together:
http://kostayepifantsev.com/
And watching that story, I couldn't not devote some portion of my life to it. I didn't know what that might look like, I also had the incredible benefit to watch some of those people break those cycles and to see that there are practical solutions for these problems. The world does not have to be this way. And there are just these gaps that have to be filled and have to be filled in the right way and in a healthy way.
Morgan Franklin:Welcome to Better Together with Kosta Yepifantsev, a podcast on parenting business and living life intentionally. We're here every week to bring you thoughtful conversation, making your own path to success, challenging the status quo, and finding all the ways we're better together. Here's your host, Kosta Yepifantsev.
Kosta Yepifantev:Hey, y'all, this is Kosta. And today I'm here with my guest, Travis Trull, Founder and Executive Director of Flint Global, a 501 c three organization dedicated to helping break the cycle of extreme poverty and dependence to create flourishing families and communities that make the world a brighter place. Travis, it's always an honor to have another immigrant on the show. For our listeners who don't know you were born and raised in East Africa. Tell us about that experience and how it influenced your passion for community development and social entrepreneurship.
Travis Trull:Thank you. Yes. Well, first of all, just thanks for having me. Absolutely. Great to be with you all today. I was born in Kenya, in East Africa. And I think I moved to the US the same year you did in 1994. Yep, definitely. That is one of the most formative parts of my life, the transition itself, leaving everything I had ever known, and starting from scratch, and having to discover this new world. But even more so the life and learnings of what happened before I moved here, having grown up in a place that's so different from where we are now. And bringing those learnings to apply to the rest of my life is just truly formative. I feel like I should make a caveat that my parents are from the United States. Okay, so while I fit the definition of an immigrant, they don't. And so I want to acknowledge that out of respect for the incredible hard work of so many people who had so many more obstacles than me that I had great privilege that my parents were culturally fluent. They had degrees from the US. So my pathway was a lot easier.
Kosta Yepifantev:Why did they decide to move to Kenya from the US? And also where in the US are they from?
Travis Trull:My mom is born and raised South Alabama, many generations, foreign people. My dad grew up all over Morocco, France, California, he was an Air Force kid, okay, so he was never somewhere longer than maybe a year at a time. And they just had this calling to serve. They cared about the underserved the people who lack the privileges that they had, and their story took them somewhere. Certainly my mom's family could have never imagined. All of her siblings stayed in the same little town forever. But they ended up in the tiny little community in Kenya, that at that time, especially was very remote, very isolated. Elephants roaming the forest behind our backyard. So yeah, that's what took them there.
Kosta Yepifantev:Before we started talking about your company, Flint, global, I do have to ask, did they meet Obama's Father,
Travis Trull:we lived on the opposite side of the country. Okay. My wife actually also grew up in Kenya. She was born there as well. And she lived on the side of Kenya that Obama spent when I was there, maybe like a year and a half ago, and I went by the village. There's signs everywhere. Now. It's a huge deal. But I didn't have time to stop by and check it out.
Kosta Yepifantev:Amazing. Yeah. So walk us through the creation of Flint global talk about how the organization has evolved and share a bit more about the spark movement overall,
Travis Trull:from the very beginning, my life experience was immersed in the realities of people who live in extreme poverty. We're talking about people who are scraping by on less than $57 a month. These are the most financially impoverished people on the entire planet, oh my gosh, where you're in that cycle, where you can be working so hard, day after day trying everything you can think of, and you'll start to make a little progress. And then a kid gets sick, something unexpected happens. It's a volatile place to live. And you get knocked back down and you're back where you started. And that goes over and over and over again. Because you happen to be born in a particular place, where for historical reasons, you haven't had access to certain skills, certain connections, certain resources. And for me, it wasn't conceptual. These were My closest friends, my Kenyan friends who I was roaming the fields with, and watching that story, I couldn't not devote some portion of my life to it, I didn't know what that might look like, I also had the incredible benefit to watch some of those people break those cycles. And to see that there are practical solutions for these problems, the world does not have to be this way. And there are just these gaps that have to be filled, and they have to be filled in the right way. And in a healthy way. I watched nonprofits, I watched great organizations with great intentions, waste a lot of resources, and I watched them oftentimes, sadly, do a lot of harm in the name of doing good. And that is not okay with me, that has never been okay with me. So I've always had this drive to somehow play a role in that. And my life has had many twists and turns after college moved to Tanzania for five years. During that time period, some of my close friends lost children to dehydration, because they couldn't afford a $20 IV at a local clinic. Terrible. Simply having cash in their pockets would have solved these problems. But they didn't have them. And I could give cash. But then what about next month, what about next month, and a lot of the solutions that a lot of money is being pumped into provide that temporary relief, and we need that we need to provide emergency relief to people when they need it. But in tandem with that we need real lasting long term solutions that partner with people to walk alongside them as they build their own ability to provide for themselves year after year and create generational transformation. So I stumbled out of sheer desperation, looking at my neighbors and saying what can I do just saying let's start a business together. If we can build a business that's healthy and sustainable and profitable, then you'll not just have income to pay the school fees are the medical bills today, but you'll have it next month and the next month. And so I found myself in Tanzania, having no prior background in business, knowing nothing about it. And certainly having never imagined I would be interested in what years were these since 2010 to 2015. Okay, and we started building businesses. And for the first time in my time there, it was a solution that was working. And in retrospect, it's what worked for my friends in Kenya, who grew up in the toughest situations and now are building their own houses and they own a vehicle. Then I unexpectedly ended up back in the US. All of a sudden, I had no job experience that looked good on a resume just this weird. Like he went to Tanzania for five years, I was starting from scratch with nothing the way it had happened when we had to leave, we kind of lost everything. And so it's like, well, I guess I'll try it myself. I'm gonna try to build businesses. So I did a number of things, I learned a ton, I got to work with incredible people who taught me so much the learning curve in my life, since 2015 has just been hard to process really. And then that's what brought me to Cookeville for business opportunity. I was consulting for nonprofit in Nashville, that was looking for someone who understood business and business thinking but also how to get things done on the ground, in some of the toughest places on Earth, like some of the countries where I had worked a lot in Africa. And then I started working for them full time, because I just could tell, I want to help other people build businesses, I want to help that be a sustainable solution to poverty. Through that process. Eventually, the door opened to launch Flint global. So we registered the end of 2019, kind of more formally launched March 2020. And this was an opportunity to take all of those pieces of my life that I could have never planned, never coordinated the head come in front of me. And to deploy it in the healthiest possible way that will impact the most people with real results, not just a bunch of nonprofit activity, but actual outcomes that change people's lives.
Kosta Yepifantev:And so the company has been around for three years. How much different is it now versus when you first started it?
Travis Trull:Yeah, so we've just grown dramatically. Okay, we hit the ground running some of the work I had done for the nonprofit in Nashville. We brought along with us, okay, we were starting from scratch in terms of funding, but we had built a lot of systems and tools and curriculums, and even some partnerships overseas that were handed off to us. Do you have
Kosta Yepifantev:an estimate of how many countries you're in and how many businesses you helped create? Yeah, so
Travis Trull:three years in now, last year, we impacted over 18,000 people. Oh, wow. And we started over 650 Tea businesses around the world in 11 Different countries for different continents.
Kosta Yepifantev:And so what is the spark movement?
Travis Trull:Yeah, so zooming back, a little Flint, Flint, global Flint is a reference to the fire starting stone, small, unassuming, seemingly unimpressive, but in the hands of the right person use the right way can create a spark that ignites great change. So that's what we're about, we're about being that spark in different lives around the world. And the spark is a community of global changemakers, who are committed to changing lives not just today, but for generations to come catalyzing this generational transformation. And that includes a woman in a remote village in Tanzania, who's building a business in partnership with flint global, to bring her family out of poverty. And that includes people here in Cookeville, who have gathered around this, and are deploying their talents, their resources, their time, their voices, to try to amplify this work, this movement to help change lives.
Kosta Yepifantev:So you're in 11 countries, every country is different, some market economies are not the same. So that means that your application for an entrepreneurship is very different, depending on what country are in. Yep. What's it like managing the community that spread around the world,
Travis Trull:one of our core values that really shapes everything we do is that lasting solutions come from local problem solvers, people born and raised in those communities, not people from boardrooms, 7000 miles away. So the last thing we want to do is go in and say, Hey, we have the answer for you. We know what you need, because we don't That's why there has been so much waste in the international nonprofit world. But what we can do is we have our toolkit, we have our connections, we have our community. And we can go into these local communities where there are already people doing incredible work locals who have been there long before we even heard of the place, and are going to be there long after work. And we can come alongside them and amplify the work they're already doing. We have a very specific way of doing that. Because what we have seen everywhere we work in the world is that there are horror fundamentals that if they're not addressed, they dramatically affect the likelihood that a business will work that someone will be able to increase their household income. And that's one of the fun parts of this work is I get to see so many types of businesses, and so many environments. And I get to see what's consistent everywhere. And I get to see just how dramatically each business is affected by those contextual issues.
Kosta Yepifantev:But like the businesses that you would create in the United States is much different than the business that you would create in Kenya. So what type of businesses are you helping these individuals start?
Travis Trull:Most of the people in the world living in extreme poverty are farmers. The vast majority of the businesses that are being incubated through a system are farms or farming adjacent, it could be poultry, it could be supplier, it could be transporting farm goods, but the most of them are that but we have mobile money businesses, we have fire extinguisher businesses, there's an incredible diversity. But our process is to train people on the fundamentals related to practical business skills, personal finance, mindset around life and business, and connecting to markets, improving supply chains, and even bringing in actual connections that will help remove a lot of the friction that is in place in these resource scarce environments. And then walk alongside them as they build business plans as they discover those local nuances that we could never understand. And then they build a business. How do they access financing? Is there a system for saving money if they don't have access to banking? Most don't write addressing the whole ecosystem that surrounds someone on the ground in a remote community? Who's going to increase their household income
Kosta Yepifantev:and all 11 countries? Are they all African countries?
Travis Trull:No. So we're in Colombia. Okay. Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti.
Kosta Yepifantev:What's it like working in the UI? My gosh, that's got to be very tough.
Travis Trull:Yeah. Especially right now. Last, basically, halfway through last year, we had to put most of the work on pause rights for the security and safety of there's just so much volatility that escalated over the course of last year. Yeah. And that is a reality of these places that affects the way in which we do our work. If you don't acknowledge the volatility, then you're not being realistic.
Kosta Yepifantev:And it's not just market volatility. It's the actual social volatility like they could have a new government, you know, and I think I think a lot of people don't appreciate the fact that You know, when you live in the United States, you can build a business and you just have to worry about the economic volatility of things. You don't have to worry about the social things exactly. As a successful entrepreneur and a business leader, what advice would you give to our listeners who are considering starting their own businesses or pursuing social impact projects?
Travis Trull:I have a few thoughts. My first thought would be that the word successful is a fickle word. And if we don't define what we mean by that upfront each of us for ourselves, then we might think we're finding a type of success. And in retrospect, looking back at the end of our lives, we may be missed the mark. And so my first thing would be, what is the success that we want? What does it mean, to live the good life? I think there are a lot of quote unquote, very successful people who look back, wish they had made different decisions, because it's all trade offs. You can't do everything, you can't have it all. And so what's the most important, and for me, that's people, the people in my life and prioritizing that.
Kosta Yepifantev:Just to clarify, you put people in front of money, essentially,
Travis Trull:I guess, so. Yeah. Nice. That's good. And but also, in terms of my time commitments, like I could just drive and drive and build a bigger and bigger organization and try to leave a legacy in that way. But at the end of the day, what did my kids remember about me, right? Was I present? Was I there? What about the people I interacted with each day, as I walked through my day, those are the things I don't want to miss. And that it's very hard not to miss in the chaos of trying to do important things, even if you're doing good things. And then that's related to another thing. I really think success in business in life. It is all about the people you surround yourself with. Better Together, as you say, the more I can surround myself with really excellent good people who make me better, the better I'm going to be, and whether that's within my organization, or my friendships. And if you're trying to build a business in a specific area, then how can you get in the room with people who are really good in that field, spend more time with them, just learning and being present, and discovering all the things they've learned the hard way, you can skip a lot of pain, if you're willing to learn under people who've already been through that pain. And then the other thing I would say is discomfort, if you're not willing to endure a lot of discomfort, and it's gonna be very hard to get the job done. The reality of anything that brings value, it brings value because it's scarce. And it's scarce, because it's hard to get to. So if you want to do something different, if you want to build something special, if you want to break the status quo, then by its very definition, it's something that's hard to get to, and you've got to be willing to endure discomfort to get there.
Kosta Yepifantev:You know, it's interesting when you bring that up, because I was just having a conversation with our COO. And as we're talking the problems that come up, you know, the staffing problems, the quality problems, all these things prom prom prom, but a lot of times, people, they shy away from tackling those problems head on, or just providing a solution for it. Because they think that it's just the way that businesses Well, it's just part of the industry. You know, it's just the way things operate. But there are people that are excellent, the companies that grow to multi million, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars are the companies that tackle those problems head on, and they solve them and they ignite and invigorate their employees to be willing to solve those problems. Because here's the crazy part. There's actually a solution to every single problem in this world. Yep. It's just whether or not you're willing to solve it. A lot of them have been solved. But there are still big, big issues. And like you said, a lot of them being in Africa as well with people not being able to earn a living and $57 a month is that's terrible. It's crazy.
Travis Trull:Yeah, an illustration we use in our business mindset training in Africa and around the world is a problem is like there's this barricade in a room and everyone is on one side of the barricade. Everyone assumes you can't get over that barricade. But the person who gets over it, suddenly they've got no competition, they have that whole side of the room to themselves. So if you're willing to face that problem, to climb over, it's not going to be easy. It's not the easy path. But if you climb over it, suddenly you're on the other side, you've eliminated competition, and then you can win. Right? And a lot of the problem that we see globally that I think is true here in Cookeville, is people don't believe they can climb over that barricade. So step one, there's a lot of practical skill. So how do you climb? Where do you put your hands? There's practical skills in business. But phase one is, can we believe in our own ability to solve hard problems? And
Kosta Yepifantev:how much time are you willing to commit to solving them? You know, at the end of the day, especially since the pandemic, people are very much concerned with them, their and their families and things that are happening in their life, all right, and they're not going to solve those big difficult whether you're going to help them or not, it doesn't matter. They're not going to solve those problems, because they don't find value in it. You know, it's not like there's an incentive, that's going to create more time for them. There may be a monetary incentive, but not everybody nowadays is motivated by money. Yeah.
Travis Trull:And that could be good. If the what that means for you is, I would trade making more money for more time with my family. Yeah, then that's great. Maybe, maybe that's how it should be. But in other cases, it's fear based, right? The world seems so crazy right? Now, it seems so scary that we build these walls around us, and we want to protect our little kingdoms. But there's actually something better on the other side, if we're willing to have courage. And we're willing to care about others and not just protecting ourselves.
Kosta Yepifantev:What's fascinating as I'm reading about your business and getting ready for this podcast, you live in the United States. Yeah, the people that you come into contact with in Africa. I mean, they would kill to live in the United States. But their thirst for entrepreneurship is probably I mean, the it doesn't need any Fanning. Yeah, it just needs a little bit of education to get over that wall. Right. Right.
Travis Trull:Most of the people we work with are entrepreneurs by necessity, yes, no job market. The degree to which I hustle and create opportunity for myself is the degree to which I provide for my family and move forward in life. So that's all there is. And there's no complacency. There's no laxa days. Likkle nests like we have here,
Kosta Yepifantev:right? Yeah, maybe that's why immigrants get that strange tag about being able to start big companies and accomplish big things, because they're used to it being a part of their lives a necessity in their life. Exactly. Yeah. When I look through Flynn's social media and websites, so much of the content is seemingly geared around empowerment and education rather than throwing resources at a problem and just walking away. Do you think this is what sets Flynn global apart from other similar movements?
Travis Trull:Yeah, I think it's all based in some of those core values I've mentioned. Like, we're not the heroes from the outside lasting solutions come from local problem solvers. Collaboration, and partnership is a way that all people in the world can work together to make the world a better place, you'll see that represented in our social media, because it's a core belief of ours, but also the belief that outcomes matter, not just we're gonna do a bunch of programs, but we actually care about the end result. And we don't just care about it for today. We care about it for next year, and five years down the road, building solutions that actually last and create generational transformation and families is all built into what you're talking about that this is about amplifying what's already present in communities so they can break through some of those historical gaps have been present, and take off, way beyond what we could imagine why
Kosta Yepifantev:aren't other companies doing this? Why aren't they taking this problem and putting a performance based solution to it?
Travis Trull:There are many that are trying, okay. But when you talk about something like poverty, it's incredibly complex. It's multifaceted, hard to get your mind and arms around it. What is this thing? What does it mean to solve it? And I think in that process, the global aid industry has grown and become very bureaucratic, and lost sight of some simple practical approaches that use more of a business mindset where we have KPIs and we're thinking about the process and the outcomes. The other component is most nonprofits are started by people with huge great hearts, but they don't necessarily have a lot of experience on systems or organizational development or understanding metrics ilding value. And then there's a trade off. For those that do that grown to these giant behemoth organizations that you see out there. They understand that but they often end up trading, wanting to scale kind of infinitely, and they lose the ability to adapt contextually, like you're talking about, it has to look different in every place. They're trying to over systematize it as if there's like a magic bullet, you know, it would be a lot easier if I were raising money to drill 10,000 water wells across, you know, 100 countries. It's very clear, it's very simple. Oh, look, there's a water well, but it's, it doesn't last, who's gonna fix that when it breaks, who has cash in their pockets? And so that skills, that's easy, easier, it's not easy. But I think we're just standing on the shoulders of all those people who have done very good work, address very important problems. And then our team having spent so much time living in these environments, we're trying to just take it a level deeper, and have a little higher standards in terms of excellence around outcomes, and we're certainly not doing it perfectly. This will be a lifetime of growing and improving. But we want to have the highest standards.
Kosta Yepifantev:So what you're describing sounds eerily similar to the terrain of grant in the upper Cumberland. Are you familiar with that? TANF? No. So do you see HRA has this grant? I talked about it every other episode. I'm sure everyone that listens to this podcast, like he's talking about it again. But it's so important. And when I explain it, you'll actually understand why. So there's this grant, you see HRA, I believe even the biz foundry and the Chamber of Commerce, I mean, millions, millions of dollars, to target children who are in poverty 1600, I believe, and essentially improve the conditions of the family overall, to pull those kids out of poverty. So they're targeting parents who are on government benefits entitlement programs, so to say, Okay, let's go to work. And as you're working, that benefits cliff that you're afraid of falling off of, we'll go ahead and provide a little bit of support with this money so that you can continue to receive your benefits. And you can actually understand what it's like to work and eight to five and provide for family, etc. Without the necessity for government benefits. Yeah. So you've met a lot of people in the United States, and you've also met a lot of people in Kenya, do you think that your program for entrepreneurship could work in the United States, because that's what I believe the terrain of grant is, is essentially gearing people up to believe in themselves to say, I can work, I can do this job, I can do it well, and I can get my family out of poverty and essentially get the 1600 kids out of poverty.
Travis Trull:Yep, it's the exact same thing. In Kenya, in East Africa, there's no benefits cliff, there's no safety net at all, there's no benefits. Yeah, there's just no safety net. So we also have systems that we put into place over there, where it's creating these sorts of systems that our community owned, we are actually beginning a new partnership with harvest hands in Nashville. And we are exploring how we can build more domestic programs here in the US. Because it's the same thing, where when you've been in that cycle of trying to find your way forward in life, we've all had it in different like sub sectors of our life. And there are a lot of people here in Cookeville, who have the financially, and there are a lot of obstacles to them breaking through in a way that you don't get knocked back down. And some of the essentials are exactly what we teach everywhere in the world, like, what is your view of yourself? Do you believe you can grow? Do you believe you can solve problems? Do you believe you can learn new skills? When you've been knocked down over and over and over again, you start to wonder, you start to doubt yourself. I think we can all relate to that when we zoom in and are honest about certain parts of our lives. So there's that there's personal finance skills that we teach. There's practical skills about building a business, but also we teach personal and professional skills, how do you apply for a job? How do you connect with a business owner and see if they're willing to hire you? All of those things. They have to be contextualized to each place. But we're eagerly wanting to do more here in the US.
Kosta Yepifantev:I can see how that might be a barrier in Kenya, right? I mean, which part well, the barrier in terms of like people needing financial literacy training, people needing to understand how to you know, obtain a job, keep a job, what to wear to work, etc. It is somewhat unfathomable that that type of dynamic exists in the United States that people live in the richest country in the world, the largest economy that literally believe that capitalism is king and the American Dream is Queen How was that possible? How do you reconcile that?
Travis Trull:I think these fundamental struggles are the same everywhere. And I think that it's very hard. For those of us who have grown up in awareness of like, professional workplace etiquette, or how you do a job interview, or even just like certain social skills, there are so many factors in each of our lives that are affected by the family that we're born into the circumstances that hit our families, I think we have to have more empathy for where people are coming from, No one wakes up and says, I want to be poor, I want to not be sure how I'm going to pay rent the end of this week, right? I want to owe the hospital some money, that stuff is stressful. And things happen in people's lives, that take them to a certain place. And it can become this thing we call a cycle where it seems to an outsider, like, well, you could just go work there, and then you get paid this, and then you work your way up. But first of all, the outsider doesn't understand the complexities of their situation, like, okay, maybe you get paid this much at McDonald's. But that's not your true hourly rate, because you don't own a car. So you have to walk this amount of time to get there and this amount. So if you're factoring in that time, your hourly rate is lower, there's a lot of complexity. And we need to acknowledge that we don't understand other people's situations, we need to trust that people are trying their best. And if we can come alongside people, and be willing to understand where they're coming from, and be able to enter the complexity, understand these things that keep getting in the way, and create pathways for people to walk along. that progress can be made, there's a million things that will keep plenty of people from ever being able to get out of that. And those are often byproducts of something that happened in their story. That will be very hard to overcome. But there are reasons that people are where they are. And they need to not be critiqued. But they need to be told you can do this, there is a pathway forward. And we're willing to walk alongside you and try to understand what that pathway might look like.
Kosta Yepifantev:So you recently spent about two weeks in Kenya in partnership with our friends at the biz foundry. Tell us about the trip and share a few highlights from your time.
Travis Trull:Yeah, it was a great trip. I've worked out of the big foundry, our organization's offices there. We just have a great relationship with everyone at the foundry. And Tiffany Anton, the vice president came along, as did shella Rooney who works with go knee here in Cookeville. And we had a lot of different objectives, we packed into this one little trip. But the biz Foundry has very generously been collaborating with us in this move to develop an Entrepreneur Center, a brick and mortar center there in Kenya, oh, wow, that will act as a hub for all of our work across East Africa, and will also provide business incubation for larger businesses that will create more employment in Kenya. And it will also be a revenue generator where that revenue can be used to fund these programs for people who cannot afford access to a center like that. So Tiffany came along, we had a lot of strategic conversations about what this Entrepreneur Center is going to look like we met with incredible community leaders who are going to be instrumental in that process. It was good for Tiffany to get to meet them to understand the key players. And we saw elephants in the wild. And just the beauty of Kenya, it's a really beautiful place. If anyone ever wants to travel with us, we love taking guests, Tiffany also interviewed a bunch of women entrepreneurs as part of powered by her. So Kenya will become a critical hub for all of our work in East Africa, as we scale as we grow more and more of our work to be executed through these local hubs around the world. And for the US role to be more minor in terms of the operational parts.
Kosta Yepifantev:How often do you travel to different country?
Travis Trull:For me, it's usually around four times a year, and I tend to be going to Africa or India. So it's a two week trip. I try not do more for my family sake sometimes end up having a fifth but we have about 10 on our team here in the US. And so most of them are traveling one or two times, sometimes three times a year as well.
Kosta Yepifantev:So when I was reading your article, only 13% of the money that you generate goes to overhead. Yep. So the rest have the money. That's when 87% is used to promote entrepreneurship in different countries. So last
Travis Trull:year, that was an older number last year, or it was more like 10%. So 10% is going to critical fundraising and administrative things. These are things that also have to happen for our work to happen. But 90% For every dollar you give 90% is being deployed directly into the program around the world.
Kosta Yepifantev:Where do you get your funding from just like regular people or businesses,
Travis Trull:almost all of our funding is individuals and families give monthly or occasionally, as a part of the SPARC community to help this movement happen around the world. We do have some businesses, we have some churches, we have gotten a couple grants, but we're really, you know, we're only three years in, we're learning a lot, we've had this amazing community rally around the work because of the quality of what it is because we're a team of field practitioners. We know a lot about doing the work on the ground, right? And we're new to this whole fundraising and all that. But we're looking for business partners, we're looking for more church partners, we're looking for foundations that want to be a part of this. That is what fuels all of this to be possible. That is the economic engine that creates these sparks around the world for lives to change
Kosta Yepifantev:one thing and not to take anything away from obviously Kenya or South America, Central America, but India man. Yeah, right. Like that's an economic engine, right? They're a global powerhouse. They say that India's population will be the largest in four years, if I'm not mistaken. So it will overtake China is wild. What a lot of people don't understand about India. It's a duality. So there are two specific economic sectors in India or economic levels in India. So the majority of people are farmers, right? Yep. And then there's this IT sector that have the higher earners. And then there's, you know, obviously people that are very wealthy, but primarily it's duality of an economy. And so Exactly, you want to create all these different sectors so that everyone has a way to use their skills to move up the ladder, right? Yeah,
Travis Trull:one of our lead partners in India, when I went to visit for the first time, she said, India is the country where we can put a person in outer space. And we have 1000s of people sleeping on the streets of Calcutta. So those extremes are so extreme, right? It has this huge economic growth. But because it is so populated, there's this enormous population who have been neglected and lost along the way. And so we worked with Sonia and her family and they built a buffalo dairy. They're building this herd of buffalo dairies, and this creates employment for people managing the Buffalo for farmers who are growing the grass to feed the buffaloes. Once buffalo milk tastes like, Ah, I only had it in tea and just tasted like great, great Chai. It was it was all good. As far as I can tell.
Kosta Yepifantev:I like that. So locally in the upper Cumberland, how can we support Flint global? And what resources do you need as a company to continue growing,
Travis Trull:it really is about the community that gathers around the belief that the poorest people on the planet can be equipped to solve their own problems to build their own pathways out of poverty. And people who realize that we're all in this together. We're one big family on this planet, and who are willing to rally around this work. And so we need volunteers. We need advocates, we need donors. We need people willing to commit time or skills or expertise. Do you want to look over a business plan of a buffalo dairy in India? Do you want to travel with us to see it in person and understand the nuances and ask the hard questions about what does this have to do with my community in Cookeville? And how can we be a part of a solution here, while we're also solving problems in our hometown, the more people who can rally around that, the more we can all do more together and being connected to churches or businesses or foundations, or just families who are willing to give 50 bucks a month. I think it's very hard for people to understand how far $50 can go on the ground in the places we work. It could seem small to people here, but it is enormous. The way it genuinely can change a family forever. So we're just looking for people for whom it would bring them joy to be a part of this movement, to walk alongside us and to just reach out and talk to us.
Kosta Yepifantev:Isn't it crazy? Just how complex and how different the world is? 50 bucks yeah, in the United States relative to how far $50 would go in a place like Kenya, it's insane South
Travis Trull:Sudan, a woman $50 can capitalize her whole business that doubles her income in less than a year doubles her entire household income. And suddenly, instead of only one kid in school, all three of her kids are in school, they've got two meals a day instead of one. And they are working their way to just changing that reality forever for a whole family. And then that ripples through the community,
Kosta Yepifantev:I think we should not take advantage of our social safety net. Every time you put a saying, you keep telling these stories, I keep thinking to myself, if we didn't have a social safety net, imagine how people would be living. It's quite insane. Where do you see Flint global in 10 years? And how do you envision the organization evolving, both locally, but also globally?
Travis Trull:Yeah. So based on what we've been able to do over the past three years, we've set a vision that over the next 10 years, nine and a half ish now to impact over half a million people. So we know what that takes, because of the data we have economically. And in terms of the growth of the organization. Every day, there are people reaching out to us who have heard about our work all over the world who want partnership that drives us, the fact that I want to be able to provide for my family for my kids. And I know that they want that for their family. So we would like to impact over half a million people over the next 10 years, we want to build these local hubs in these different regions. And we want to have more domestic work here in the US in Nashville in Cookeville. And wherever else it makes sense for this to be deployed the same toolkit, reapplied for the American, the United States context here.
Kosta Yepifantev:Amazing. So we always like to end the show on a high note, who is someone that makes you better when you're together?
Travis Trull:Yeah, so I get incredibly focused, I get tunnel vision. And it's easy for me in my Drive, to forget to be present to forget the more important things in life. And a lot of people make me better I work with so many amazing people. But Lauren's role, my wife teaches me that at the end of the day, the time I spent with my family, the time I spent with my friends, how I interacted with the person at the grocery store, or in traffic, I get a little irritated and traffic, I'm trying to learn. She's teaching me that when I look back at the end, the things that will have truly made an impact in my life, or the moments I spent with the people who I was with on any given moment. So that's what I'm trying to learn. And she teaches me just by sheer example, because she is so present. She cares about people. It's all about People First, it's about caring about others and not serving yourself. And I think if we would all just do that. I wouldn't even need to do this organization. None of this work would be needed if we could all be more driven by that desire to be present to what's around us to serve the people we come in contact with, and to treat people well.
Morgan Franklin:Thank you for joining us on this episode of Better Together with Kosta Yepifantsev. If you've enjoyed listening and you want to hear more, make sure you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts. Leave us a review or better yet, share this episode with a friend. Better Together with Kosta Yepifantsev is a Kosta Yepifantsev Production. Today's episode was written and produced by Morgan Franklin post production mixing and editing by Mike Franklin. Want to know more about Kosta visit us at kostayepifantsev.com We're better together.