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The PM Podcast
Don't Be Afraid to Change Your Mind: A Conversation with Payton McGriff, a 2024 Top Five CNN Hero
00:37:07
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- [00:00]
Peyton McGriff
This journey has forced me to flip that on its head entirely and challenge myself to see that the strength of my character is not directly related to the strength of my conviction. It's in how loosely I'm willing to hold my beliefs and then how loosely I'm willing to hold my belief that I'm right about something and. And that I have chosen the right thing of a million choices on the first try. And so I think that's one, one thing that I offer to people who are making that decision for themselves is the first decision that you make doesn't have to be the last one.
- [00:39]
Jay Frost
Welcome to the PM Podcast brought to you by Donor Search, the show that takes you inside the lives of thought leaders, innovators and change makers in fundraising, philanthropy and civil society. I'm your host, Jay Frost. Peyton McGriff is the founder and CEO of Style Her Empowered or She, a non profit organization dedicated to empowering girls and women in Togo through education, employment and innovation. Established in 2017 as a class project, she has grown into an international organization currently providing over 1500 girls with free uniforms, school fees and resources, while employing 33 women across 21 rural communities. Recognized as one of the top five CNN Heroes of 2024, Peyton is breaking barriers and changing lives one uniform at a time. Now, you described this as a transformative experience. What. What made it so for you?
- [01:37]
Peyton McGriff
Yeah, I mean, allowing or having the opportunity to have a platform like this is something that small grassroots organizations really don't get the opportunity to have very often. And so it's bu much awareness for the work that we're doing for the people that we're serving and kind of the vision that we've been building towards. So this entire experience has just allowed a lot of doors of opportunity in the form of partnership, collaboration, possibility to really open for our organization at she. And so it's really just a series of very fortunate events that have helped really move us into the next level and helped us start realizing the vision that I said we've been building toward for so many years.
- [02:28]
Jay Frost
Can you talk about that vision a bit for people who don't know the organization, the origin story?
- [02:33]
Peyton McGriff
Yeah. So at she, we focus on girls education and women's employment opportunities in Togo Africa. And so we've been building our program for the last seven years to focus on providing education sponsorships for girls. Right now we have 2,000 girls in our program that we provide new school uniforms, full tuition, scholarship, reusable menstrual supplies, and kind of a whole host of financial resources that Help allow girls to get into school and stay in school. And then in addition to that, we employ local women who are seamstresses, who sew the school uniforms that we provide for our girls and other products. And then in addition to that, we manufacture products that we sell to businesses in the US Primarily to earn revenue for our programs. So we've been trying to build kind of this holistic model of girls education in women's employment. And a big, you know, next step of that vision is building our education and employment center in Togo that will allow us from employee to go from employing, you know, dozens of women to employing hundreds of women and from serving 2,000 girls to 10,000 girls or tens of thousands of girls each year. So it's really kind of that key cornerstone piece that would allow us to really mobilize so much of what we know is working at a larger scale.
- [04:07]
Jay Frost
I understand you got the idea for this while you were in school, is that right?
- [04:10]
Peyton McGriff
I did, yes. Kind of happened upon it in a way. I actually read it in a book called Half the Sky. And what stood out to me in this book is obviously kind of the plight of women and girls around the world and how many girls around the world are not in school. At the time it was 130 million girls. It kind of hovers around that number still today. And what kind of surprised me was that something as seemingly simple as a school uniform was one of the largest financial barriers to education. But providing school uniforms can be one of the most cost effective ways to keep girls in school. So that small, you know, statement in the book really stuck with me as, you know, a place to start and kind of a tangible, you know, model to build around. And so that was the really, really simple, high level idea that inspired me to kind of explore further.
- [05:11]
Jay Frost
You needed partners in doing that kind of work, I'm sure. And initially you worked, I know, with the professor at the university, but I'm sure you've also had other partnerships since, because in order to implement a program like that, you need to not only make the uniforms, let's say, and have the programs, but work with other organizations to get distribute them where they need to go. Can you describe what it was like for you to grow and evolve the organization so that you built those partnerships and were able to have this impact?
- [05:43]
Peyton McGriff
Yeah, I mean, that's. You're right on. That's been something that's been so critical in the foundation of she and building the programs that we've built today. And not only partnerships, but really earned trust in the communities that we serve. When we kind of started, we. We walked into a landscape where there have been a lot of nonprofits that have kind of come in and washed out with the tide. And so when we approached some of our communities in the beginning, some of the rural villages that we serve, you know, we received a little bit of hesitance because there's kind of been this paradigm and expectation that's been set around nonprofits and nos as not really being there in a lasting and meaningful way. And so it took having just an incredible local team that we still have today. They've been with us all seven years, who built so many of those trusted partnerships with key leaders in our communities. So we think about partners not only as other NGOs in the area, but as every person that we work with is kind of our partner. And so that's been, I think, just a critical mindset for us to maintain and an approach that we've had to be really deliberate in earning the trust of the communities that we serve. So, yeah, that's been such a. Such a key part of. Of building for xi.
- [07:13]
Jay Frost
I'm trying to imagine what it's like for the people that you've encountered and now work with if they wash, watch those organizations, others come in and then wash away with the tide, and not only in terms of trust, but how they must have felt abandoned.
- [07:31]
Peyton McGriff
And misled. You know, I think we hear a lot of our community leaders speak to that frustration and that disappointment, because, you know, there's a lot of promises that are made and not kept. And I think there's a lot of good intention in informing some of these partnerships or with these NGOs, but just not a lot of time taken to really understand the root causes of a lot of the problems that they're trying to solve for. And so, you know, we've taken a little bit of a slower approach or an approach that feels slow in some ways for us, but it's all with the intention to really understand the root causes and not just be stuck treating symptoms. And so that's been, I think, one of the big differences that we hear from our community leaders, that they're able to speak about some of those root challenges with us in a. In a capacity that feels collaborative, that feels judgment free, that feels like, you know, we're actually paying attention and listening to those needs and modifying our programs accordingly. So that's been such an incredible learning experience, not only for me, but for our local team, who may have been raised in Togo, but didn't spend as much time in the really geographically excluded areas of the region. And so all of us have. Have been learning together what some of these additional barriers and additional challenges really look like.
- [08:59]
Jay Frost
When you speak about barriers, I'm sure there have been some big psychological barriers too, because if the barrier for women's education, one of those is material, it's the lack of a uniform and the cost of acquiring. But then there's also everything that grew up around that as people associated the value of women. I think you've talked about this in other venues as being what they can produce and, like, how much money they can produce, and education is a piece of that. But then you've got everybody's kind of set of expectations or their belief about the way things are or should be. Have you run into people believing that, that it just won't work, and then tried to find a way to help. As women were able to exert their agency in part through Xi, I mean.
- [09:50]
Peyton McGriff
To some extent, I would say that that's very much the minority of opinion that we see in the communities that we partner with. What's been so beautiful to watch is how invested our community partners have been in uplifting girls and women. We have a lot of local authorities who do a lot of sensitivity work on our behalf, and they say to our communities, you know, for a long time, we thought it was our boys and our men that would kind of pull our communities out of poverty and really drive the development of our communities. And what we've seen over time is that when you invest in girls and women, that money goes back into the communities at extremely high percentages. And so what's been really, you know, helpful is the timing of a lot of work has come, of our work has come after a lot of that sensitization work has happened at the local authority level. And the chief of the A People, which is the predominant tribe that lives in the southern region of Togo, he is extremely invested in the future of girls and women. And so he's been a really large advocate for our program and for the work that we're doing and helping our communities see the value and realize the value of building, you know, multiple contributors to the household. And that that responsibility doesn't have to lie totally on. On the shoulders of men. I think we see a lot of men see some relief from that kind of financial pressure and financial burden to be the main provider. But it is certainly, you know, a sensitive area, women's empowerment. We've had to be really selective in the language that we use because what's been. So I'll offer an example of one thing that, you know, we've learned from that. The word empowerment does not have a very good translation in French. There are very few words that kind of capture this, this entire spirit of the word of empowerment. You have autonomization, which is like autonomy, or you have liberty, some words that kind of imply independence. And so when we try to translate or talk about empowerment, sometimes that can be misunderstood as we're trying to create independence of women that doesn't, you know, build back into the community and creates kind of that sense of abandonment that you mentioned earlier. And so we've, you know, switched from using some of the previous words in French that we had, you know, used previously to language like when women rise, we all rise. And really representing, you know, we're here to lift up the entire community. And the women and girls that we serve are really the ones who are going to lead this forward into the future. So that's why we're investing here first. So it's been. It's been, you know, something we've encountered at times, but I again would say it's in a limited capacity. And for the most part, our communities are finding the ways that they can also invest in girls and women to enhance the impact of the work that we're doing. So that's been really, really encouraging.
- [13:09]
Jay Frost
Yeah. What's been the biggest surprise for you so far?
- [13:14]
Peyton McGriff
Oh, goodness, so much. I think for me personally, you know, I wasn't expecting that this is what I would be doing for my career. You know, I was interviewing for a totally different job path. It was my senior year of school. I had what I thought was my dream job at the time kind of lined up when I was graduating. And I received that job offer a couple weeks before I graduated and ended up turning it down to start. She. And so I think when I initially embarked on this journey, I just was totally naive to how much of both a professional and personal journey this would be. Building a social impact organization internationally, recognizing all of the inherent privilege that I carry into this conversation being, you know, a white woman from the United States and trying to strip away some of those power imbalances to co create with the communities we serve. It's been a huge learning curve for me and trying to even just understand the type of leader that I want to be. You know, I hadn't even had a real job before starting xi and so didn't have a lot of models to look to or experience to pull from. And so I think had to gain a lot of, like, confidence for some of the things that we were intuiting and some of the things that, that we've now seen benefit our program in a lot of ways. But it's taken really an unlearning and relearning journey for me to kind of arrive at that understanding.
- [14:54]
Jay Frost
So much of our lives are framed by both experience, but also the language we have to describe it. You just talked about it with being in, you know, a francophone country. There's a lot of history in the adoption of French and there's a lot of history behind the words we use wherever we use them. That was probably also true for you if you didn't have an idea about the kind of leader you wanted to be until you started becoming that person. I'm wondering who was the person before. Tell us a little bit about your own origin story. Where are you from?
- [15:26]
Peyton McGriff
Yes, I'm from Idaho, a small town in Idaho. Grew up kind of as a high achieving individual. But, you know, I, I thought I was kind of excited about going into a really, you know, high growth, high potential corporate job. That was kind of what I had imagined my life around. I was a tennis player. I played tennis in college to begin with. And so it was kind of a funny process what eventually led me to start this organization. Kind of a series of, you know, seemingly directionless changes that I was making. But now I kind of see how that was all helping guide me to this kind of place. But, you know, I started in architecture and then I was craving a little bit more opportunity to contribute early in my career. I think the, the storyline that I was learning about a career in architecture is that it would take 30 or 40 years to be able to contribute meaningfully to a design or a building. And so I, I found myself seeking, you know, business and marketing. Not really seeing myself as an entrepreneur in any way, but just for the opportunity to contribute creatively to something a little bit earlier in my career. And it was really my junior senior year that I think I started to recognize I was lacking a lot of, you know, I guess, purpose. I just wasn't finding a lot of purpose in the different career choices that I was starting to make. And I grew up watching my dad be a really key figure in the community that he's a part of. And seeing his kind of power to change an entire community or the country, I think inspired me to, to have that efficacy that one person really can change or have a large impact on the world. But I didn't really know where my fit was until I read that book. And that was my.
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Jay Frost
What kind of work did your. Did your father or does your father do?
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Peyton McGriff
He led a non profit. He's a kind of a civil rights figure. He's done a lot of advocacy work here in Idaho and nationwide. So he's kind of built kind of his own pathway around that. And I. I got to be a witness to that growing up. That was a large part of my childhood. Volunteering and being a really active, contributing member to the. And I think that's really what was the missing link for me that I didn't cognitively recognize. But I think my body knew that that was a really key purpose for me in finding alignment with whatever I was doing for my career.
- [18:17]
Jay Frost
The reason I asked before about experience and language is because sometimes we have the language to describe these things that we evolve into or imagine and start to create, and sometimes we don't. But it sounds like you already had a language for that if you saw it exhibited in your own family. And then you started to discover your purpose. Did you already have a way of talking about that, both with yourself, but also with, you know, your fellow students and with professors that you. You started to know how to describe what you were starting to imagine?
- [18:49]
Peyton McGriff
You know, it's funny you say that, because I would say I didn't. You know, I think what a lot of this understanding and meaning that I've been able to understand later in this journey, I've had to kind of ascribe to previous memories because at the time I don't think I was conscious of a lot of these things or it wasn't part of my awareness. And so it's been through. And I think I gained that through having some of the most incredible mentors and people who were incredibly curious, who have asked me so many questions and challenged me to reflect on things that I was never challenged to reflect on before. And I think the nature of this work is one that requires a lot of observation. It requires a lot of, you know, questioning of systems that have been built and prescribed and understanding kind of the motivating factors behind them. So it was, I think, the combination of this type of work and the type of mentors that I've had that have not, you know, laid out a path that I should follow, but have helped me to process a lot of these, you know, experiences that I didn't have the language to understand for myself previously.
- [20:11]
Jay Frost
It sounds like as you interrogate these things, you're. You're doing it in a very robust and analytical way, leaving yourself open to the solutions rather than in implementing solutions that you, you just, you know, came up with in the kitchen of your mind. And I, I say that because you talked about NGOs and one of the criticisms in some quarters of NGOs working around the world, especially coming from the US or from Europe, is that they, they're implementing their own solutions rather than working with people wherever they are locally to help them implement the solutions which they have imagined for themselves. As you're thinking through the process of xi, both how you've developed but also where you're going, how much of the imagination for what the future holds is coming from your colleagues in Togo or wherever you imagine working next.
- [21:10]
Peyton McGriff
I'd say we prioritize that as an organization that voices and, and creativity of the team that we have in Togo is really centered in a lot of the solutions and direction that we're pursuing. I think my kind of propensity for that approach actually comes from my architecture background because I, I didn't realize this again at the time, but it teaches you to design not from your own lens and your own style, but through the lens of your client and trying to take their vision and their needs and create a physical environment that serves that. I think that process and that skill set that I developed in, you know, human centered design has really informed how I've been able to show up in this organization and show up in an international context, not trying to lead from my own design desires, but in trying to listen and learn about what that, you know, they're kind of seeking or, or trying to build toward, but again, might not have the language to perfectly describe what it looks like yet. And so I think that's been a really fun development and something that we've had to really intentionally work toward is making sure that our Togo team feels empowered to share their own perspectives and that my, you know, the power that I hold or the privilege that I hold as a white woman is not dominating the conversation. And so I think it's. We've had to really learn that language together, and we've had to learn what that practice looks like because it's not something that's baked into the natural working culture in a francophone country, but it's something that I think we've been able to really intentionally create together at she. And that's probably one reason why our team is so impactful is I think they do really feel like owners in building our mission and kind of getting to develop projects and programs that speak to their own creativity and their own problem solving abilities.
- [23:21]
Jay Frost
You've mentioned architecture a couple times and when you said before, I think that you imagine it wasn't going to be a 40 year trajectory to build maybe the buildings that would really be yours. And do you have to have that kind of patience in doing the work you're doing with she, or are you able to have impact sooner as a result of working the way you do?
- [23:46]
Peyton McGriff
Yes and no. I think there are certainly ways and a lot of the systemic change that I think we've been working toward requires a great deal of patience and it requires a great deal of willingness to be wrong because some of the assumptions we make aren't getting close enough to the root of the problem or we're uncovering more as we go. And so we've had to really be flexible and patient to that uncovering process and allowing it to inform the changes that we're making. But then there's other areas where, you know, we've been able to make a surprising amount of impact in a really short period of time. So I think we are constantly challenged by discerning. Is this a patient approach or is this one that we can iterate quickly? I think we're building a better skill, skill set in, in like I said, discerning which lane we're actually in. A little bit earlier into the project development, but there's definitely a wide variety of, of, of both.
- [24:52]
Jay Frost
It sounds like you've also built this almost perpetual energy machine with having she, but then also another enterprise which is generating revenue. I think probably to help she. Can you describe that a little bit more and how you imagine that working going forward? I mean, will there be only two or do you imagine that you're going to have more of these things kind of building on what you've. You've accomplished together so far?
- [25:17]
Peyton McGriff
Yeah, I think that's something that, you know, has always been really core to the ways we've imagined. She is our understanding that creating a donation dependent nonprofit is, is not the most sustainable pathway. You know, we've seen organizations develop and become really resource constrained and not be able to solve in the ways that they need to. And so we've always been trying to figure out what a non profit social enterprise model could look like to not only scale our work, but sustain it in the long term. So we've dabbled in many different earned revenue kind of pathways. We've just recently in the last couple of years started to really gain traction in manufacturing the products that we do for other businesses. But I Imagine there will be quite a few pathways. We're in development for some other ones even right now. So I think it's all with the, you know, intended outcome to fund the work and the programs that we're building in Togo that serve our girls and women with the understanding that we need to build a sustainable business model that can make the case for this very long term.
- [26:31]
Jay Frost
And one of these is with the existing business, I guess, is recycling clothing, which is a huge issue around the world right now, and people are finally gaining some awareness of this. So has that also kind of exploded in a way that you thought it might, or is it. Has it taken on a life of its own? Where does that fit? Not just economically, but in terms of your life, because you only have so many hours in a day day.
- [26:58]
Peyton McGriff
That is one of my personal passion areas, for sure. So I always feel like I have some energy reserve for exploring the. The challenges and potential of textile recycling. You know, I think we've seen just in our program, we started by recycling our own offcuts from our school uniforms and transforming those into reusable menstrual pads. And then there was another factory in Ghana called Global Mamas, that is this amazing fair trade factory, who all of these really ethical practices who heard about what we were doing with our fabric offcuts and said, hey, we end up with a lot of fabric off cuts in producing our products. Can you start taking ours and transform that into your products? So we've now recycled, you know, over £15,000 of fabric from their factory into usable products. So from an impact standpoint, we've seen tremendous success and potential for recycling materials into usable products. Where I think the space continues to develop and needs to continue developing is in developing some of those sustainable financial mechanisms that incentivize scaling up our infrastructure for textile recycling. You know, we're £15,000, but we're talking 92 million tons of fabric waste globally. So that's something that I. I kind of creatively cross train with on the side of my work at she and we've been doing some really fun work and, and scientific research in Kenya for other ways that we can recycle textiles into usable products. But TBD there.
- [28:43]
Jay Frost
Well, one of the things you alluded to a second ago is every nonprofit's challenge, which is the balance between the revenue they earn in order to sustain their work and that which has contributed. You've just gone through this whole process with being recognized by cnn. How has that impacted your ability to also raise those contributions, whether they're restricted or unrestricted.
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Peyton McGriff
It has been that I think has been one of the most transformative elements of the experience of CNN heroes. You know, we had this really unique timing when our story first aired in July, about four days before that story was set to air. We had a video go about our school uniforms that grow. And so the two, you know, awareness building exposures that we received in that month almost doubled our fundraising capacity for the year. So that has opened, like I said, so many doors of partnerships. We've received in kind donations, we've received a tremendous amount of new donors. It grew our donor base by over 10 times. So we've just received so much additional support from incredible new community members who never knew about our work previously. So we're just excited to continue building with our, our new donors, start to understand our new community members because many of them are coming from geographies that, you know, we haven't worked with in the past and that we haven't had donors in in the past. And so it's taken us from much more of a localized organization in a lot of ways to a more national or global presence. And so we're kind of recalibrating what we need to be communicating with our new donors and how we can form better connections with them.
- [30:38]
Jay Frost
It sounds like you think carefully, not slowly, but carefully about what you do. But you obviously have big vision. So what do you see as next not just for sheep be but for you? Where do you imagine this all going in the next few years?
- [30:58]
Peyton McGriff
That's a great question. And I think I always allow myself to write some of these plans in the sand because if you would have asked me where we would be sitting today, a year ago, before any of the CNN heroes experience happened, it would not have looked like this. And so I think I've been, you know, know, so happy to be wrong about some of my assumptions for the future in the past. But I think what we see for our vision is she is building this self sustaining model that we can replicate or share in other geographies around the world. And so in the immediate term we have a lot of impact that we want to deepen and more programs we want to build within the context of Togo I mentioned our education and employment center. That's really high on our, our priority list because that really allows us to lean into our earned revenue, to lean into this business model that can continue sustaining our work. And then once we feel like we've made that business case for this model that can really place communities at the center of Their own development. That's something we would love to be able to share in other geographies around the world. So right now, I think for me, I am so excited to be contributing and helping to form these connections to partners that might want to be a part of that journey. And so I think that's how I can contribute best in the near term. And really helping our local team develop confidence in their own leadership and their own decision making, their own creativity. Because I see our local team really owning so much of what this looks like in the future, but really centering our focus around this model that can serve as an example to other nonprofits or other social impact missions serving different types of communities.
- [32:59]
Jay Frost
I have to ask you that the college question. There's a lot of discussion everywhere now about whether people see the value of an education, and you built your whole work around the value of education in the United States. There's a lot of debate about what form that should take. And I'm wondering what your suggestions or advice would be to college students now who are making two sets of decisions. One about whether or not to go to school in the same way that we might have chosen 20, 30 years ago. But then the other is if they are there, if the path that they. They would choose might be to go towards finance or architecture or something like that, or to become a social entrepreneur, if they should entertain that, and if so, why.
- [33:52]
Peyton McGriff
Oh, that is a hard one to offer advice on because it is such a personal deliberation, you know, and I recognize that some. So many of the opportunities that I had in my journey might not be available to everybody who's making that decision at this time. I think what has served me well is maintaining a continuous level of curiosity for my own potential to contribute, whether that's in the career field and kind of the traditional path of my choosing, or if that's in kind of the social entrepreneurship context. Remaining curious about what you're contributing, what you're learning, and what ultimately that's creating has guided me through every decision and every step that I've taken, whether I had the language for it at that time or not. And so I think I would just recommend, you know, the, the biggest value and the, the most helpful, you know, asset that I've built in pursuing this different journey is in building a really trusted network of great mentors and in building a really trusted individuals who can help form connections and who can help really process so many of the life decisions that you feel like you're making at that time. I think the other thing I always try to offer to people at the early stages of of their career is like, don't be afraid to change your mind. Because I think that was something that I held as a super strong belief for myself before embarking on this journey, was that, you know, the strength of my character was determined by the strength of my conviction for what I was doing or what I was pursuing. And I think this journey has forced me to flip that on its head entirely and challenge myself to see that the strength of my character is not directly related to the strength of my conviction. It's in how loosely I'm willing to hold my beliefs and that how loosely I am willing to hold my belief that I'm right about something and that I have chosen the right thing of a million choices on the first try. And so I think that's one one thing that I offer to people who are making that decision for themselves is the first decision that you make doesn't have to be the last one.
- [36:26]
Jay Frost
Well, that's it for this episode of the PM podcast. If you would like to learn more about she, go to styleherempowered.org Our thanks to our sponsor, Donor Search, the world leader in AI and donor research for nonprofit fundraising. Our producer is Jack Frost, and our theme music is Moving Out, Moving in by Jay Taylor and is provided courtesy of Epidemic Sound. If you like what you heard, make sure to subscribe wherever you like to listen. Check out our sister show, Front Lines of Social Good and How to Raise, and come back next weekend for another conversation with a leader in the world of social good. Until then, this is Jay Frost. Thanks for joining me.