← Nonprofit Nation with Julia Campbell
Nonprofit Nation with Julia Campbell
Trust at Scale: Lessons from Project C.U.R.E. with Douglas Jackson
00:39:06
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In a world hungry for change, nonprofit impact matters more than ever. Yet every day you're asked to do more with less. Less time, fewer resources and tools that weren't even built for the way nonprofits actually work. What if you could do more with more? That's the promise of Bloomerang, the giving platform built for purpose. Bloomerang integrates fundraising, donor and volunteer management into one intuitive platform. It connects your data to reveal real opportunity, showing you who's ready to give, when to reach out, and how to deepen every relationship.
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Because when your tools are built for
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purpose, your mission goes further. More connection, more confidence, more impact. Now that's more like it. Learn how you can do more with more at bloomerang. Com. That's bloomerang. Com. Now onto the show.
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C
Hello and welcome to Nonprofit Nation. I'm your host, Julia Campbell, and I'm gonna with nonprofit industry experts, fundraisers, marketers, and everyone in between to get real and discuss what it takes to build that movement that you've been dreaming of. I created the Nonprofit Nation podcast to share practical wisdom and strategies to help you confidently find your voice, definitively grow your audience, and effectively build your movement. If you're a nonprofit newbie or an experienced professional who's looking to get more visibility, reach more people and create even more impact, then you're in the right place. Let's get started.
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B
Hello. Hi everyone, this is Nonprofit Nation. I'm your host, Julia Campbell. Happy to be here today with you, wherever you are. We have a very special guest today, someone that is actually changing the world and delivering life saving medical supplies to over 135 countries. And we're going to talk about how this organization does it with efficiency, scale, and also heart. So my guest is Douglas Jackson, president and CEO of Project Cure, one of the largest distributors of donated medical supplies and equipment in the world. And I just kind of want to dive in because what I really liked about something that you said about Project Cure, you called it a scrappy 40 year startup in an article that I posted in the show, Notes on Microsoft for nonprofits on LinkedIn. So, Douglas, welcome to the podcast. Can you tell us how it all started and the impact that it's having now? And I know that's a very huge question.
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D
No, that's a great question though. There's something magic about founder stories, right? We all want to know. Bill Gates in his garage and Steve Jobs, you know, laying around in the field doing lsd, whatever. It's just fun, right? And I love to say everything good in America Starts in a garage, whether that was Microsoft or Nirvana. Google.
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B
I think Google did as well.
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D
Yeah, isn't that fun? Anyway, we got started my mom and dad's garage. My dad was a guy who came to Colorado early on and got into real estate and made a lot of money in ski areas and then figured out that you can be rich and not happy. And so he and my mom started a foundation and gave their money away. And they do still live in the same house that they lived in when. When my brother and I grew up. So the garage where we started is still in the family. He still has got his car parked in that garage. So anyway, but that's kind of how we started. He was doing economic consulting and ended up in Brazil. And they took him to a little favela health clinic and it didn't have much in it, and it just tore his heart out. So one of his buddies here in Denver, guy named Greg Low, Greg gave my dad a whole bunch of stuff out of his warehouse. He was in the medical wholesale business. And my mom and dad paid to ship that to Brazil, and that was 1987, and they shipped that down to that little clinic. And. And then his interpreter, Lorena, she was a medical student and her professors at the pukey university in Campina said, well, could you send things here to the medical school? And so he did. And then, you know, it got bigger and bigger and bigger. I'm a lawyer. I've got a PhD in finance. I thought I was going to spend my life doing hedge funds or private equity or something. And my dad said, you know, I could use some help at Project Cure. And so I said I would help him. We had six months of money left, and my friend Dave and my friend Doreen and I, we all came over and we were going to blow through that six months and see what we could do to help my dad. And then I was planning to go to Wall street, and I've been here ever since. Today, if you fast forward, we're running about a half a million square feet of warehouse. We're in seven cities, soon to be eight. So we're in Denver, Phoenix, Nashville, Houston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Kansas City, going into Dallas here. And so we ship about 250 semi truck trailers of medical supplies and equipment. We don't do any pharma. There's some great colleagues of ours, places like Direct Relief and Americares and Map, who do a lot of pharmaceutical. We don't do any pharma. But anyway, so it's needle syringes, gauze gloves, Bandaids, X ray machines, operating tables, crutches, canes, walkers. I mean, just all of that stuff that you need to. To run a hospital. We're powered by about 35,000 volunteers who come and. And give their time and their life to do what we do, and it's pretty fun.
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B
Oh, this sounds amazing. So I had said before we hit record, and a lot of my listeners know that the Peace Corps working in rural health in Senegal after college. And it's interesting, this was in 2000, 2003, before I could do like a GoFundMe or before I could really do any fundraising. And I would always ask the clinics that I was working in, and it was always things like gloves, like you just said, needle syringes, gauze, band aids, just basic. I'm like, antiseptic, those kinds of things. So. So I know what I did was so piecemeal compared to the scale of Project Cure. You know, I would write home and say, okay, here's what we need, and people at home would gather it and ship it over. And I just really realized I. Because I had grown up, obviously, so privileged and so just kind of, you know, I was. Grew up in north of Boston. But when you see that just something like a cotton swab will make the difference between someone getting an infection or not getting an infection, and I think that's so important. And I love that you are very. You're sticking to your mission, right? You're. You don't have the mission drift. You could go off in a thousand different ways. But sticking to your mission. I just value so much everything I've read about your organization. So you operate just at such an unbelievable scale. So can you tell me, like, what does a typical week. Week look like? Is every week different?
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D
Yeah.
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B
How do you manage it all?
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D
Well, I mean, the first thing always is, you know, just, you got to get some really good people around you. We. We talk about the fact we. Everybody says, well, you should run your nonprofit like a business. I don't know how nonprofits run, because I never really ran one until I got here. And. And I came at it with a business lens, Right. I'm coming at it from a guy who understands business. So I tell my team all the time, first of all, the only thing different between us and the guy down the street is we're not paying tax. The good that we do makes up for the fact we don't pay tax. But we don't pay tax. All the other rules apply. So when you think about that, what would you do in A for profit business. Well, let's take care of our customers. So we start by doing a needs assessment. If our customer is that doctor at that little hospital in Senegal that you probably worked at. Yes, and thank you, by the way, to do Peace Corps. I mean, that's a tough deal, right? It's, you're going to go live in that community, make some great friends. But I'm telling you what, they're not putting you up at the Ritz in Paris. That's, that's tough duty.
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B
Right? And I recently found out, and I don't know why I didn't know this, that I was in the 1% of Peace Corps volunteers that had no running water and no electricity. I thought that was just everybody. And then I was like, oh, wow, we really, they really put us, put us out there. But that's what I get for being a journalism student, so.
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D
Well, there you go.
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B
That's where they put the, the journalism students and the English students. Thank you for that.
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D
But, but, but we're looking at that through the lens of, you know, if you're the physician, what is it that you need? Not what do I think you need. What do you need? Well, yes, if you are going to run a business, you know, anything from making bagels to hauling trash to building cars, to building computers, whatever it is, wouldn't we like to know what you, as the customer would really need? So we look at that that way, right? We look at stewardship that way. If you were an investor in my company or you were a bank and you loaned me money, then you would want to know what I did with your money. We have the same philosophy with our donors. So that stewardship idea, you worked hard for this and now you're going to entrust me with it? To do something really important, I need to be a careful steward of the resources you gave us. That's a good point. With money. But we even take that down to the gift in kind stuff, right? And okay, so somebody gives you a wheelchair, well, that might have been the wheelchair their grandma used. And it's got some sentimental value and there's some other things that you could do. Don't mistreat that wheelchair. Just because it was free to you doesn't mean that it's worthless. But in our society, if it's free, we don't think it's worth anything. Right through this T shirt at me. Well, if I put a $55 price tag on the T shirt, you probably wouldn't clean up the stuff in the garage with it. Right. But if it's free, we misuse it. So that's a big part of our core is, is that these people are investing time, their treasure, and in our case, they're also giving us medical supplies and equipment. So you go to the strikers or the big people that are supporters of ours and all of these fantastic companies and you say, here's all of the things that Henry Schein gave us, or Baxter or whoever, hca, hospitals, you gave us all this stuff. Well, wouldn't you like to know what we did with it? That's a good lesson for nonprofits, is that nothing belongs to you, it always belongs to somebody else. And you are entrusted to invest that just the same as a for profit. You're going to invest it and come out with a return. It's just that our return is saving lives, it's building legacy, it's changing the course of history. It's doing all the important things that we do with their money, with their product, with their time. And that's a really important distinction.
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B
I agree. And I love that you are even thinking not just the fact that they made the donation, but what it might have meant to them and, and how they want to see their, their donation used and leveraged. I think that storytelling is so important, and I know you use stories from the field. Can you talk a little bit about how Project CURE uses storytelling and communicates with its donors around impact?
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D
Yeah, I think, you know, it's interesting. Everybody gets paid, even volunteers. They just don't get paid in cash. So the currency of a volunteerism or donors is stories. Right. Tell me something that moves me. And so we look at it just, I mean, at the very foundational basis of a story, there's always five elements of story, right? There's the character, there's the plot, there's the setting. Where we as nonprofits fall down a lot is we don't have that challenge or that obstacle or that, you know, that thing. The good guys meet the bad guys or, you know, whatever that is, and then you have the resolution. So part of our story is, you know, here was the bad thing that was going to happen to these people. We had a great story about a guy who, his aunt was sick with tuberculosis at Ethiopia. Sadly, she passed away. That's the conflict. And he realized that all these other people were passing away too. So here we come. Part of the resolution, the story really is about him. It's not about Project cure. We just helped this guy out and so we helped him raise the money and then we shipped that container over. And now they're doing all of these treatments and things and helping to save people. So that's the storyline. And as many times as you can tell that we've got other fun stories. We had 100-year-old man who volunteered with us in Chicago, and his name was Thurb. And Thurb decided to spend his hundredth birthday with his family volunteering in our warehouse.
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B
So I want to donate a hundred dollars on his behalf.
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D
Yeah, there's. There's a. There's a super neat story about somebody, you know, and if you talk about the fact that post covet especially, but even before, but especially now, what are we looking for? We're looking for community. We're looking for meaning in our lives. We want, you know, there's certain things that are even more valuable than because we forgot we had five years to remind us. You know, the first eight months of that was just, I mean, existential terror. Right? So anyway, so you say, okay, so that's the tough part. That's the conflict. The resolution is, here's this guy and he can bring his family and he comes in and does this. What a great story, right? So we try to be intentional about it. The thing that we're working on now is to try to put measurement to those stories and not just, you know, hey, we delivered this container. We delivered this container, and as a result, tuberculosis deaths, maternal mortality, deaths, whatever, went down by X percent. We were able to retain a certain number of nurses and doctors, right? They're not getting paid, but we got them scrubs. And now their morale went up. They were able to treat more people. That resulted in more insurance money, government insurance, government funding coming their way. So now the nurses get paid, now everybody's happier. Right. But can you quantify the outcome of that story? We're not there yet, but we're working hard to get there.
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B
Well, that leads me to my question around technology, because it plays a huge role in your work. And from what I understand, paired with the Ministry of Health data, you can now measure this kind of change you're starting to, such as reductions in maternal mortality, which you talked about, and you've actively contributed. So how are some ways that you are using technology not only just to measure, but maybe to share your impact with funders?
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D
Yeah, there's a lot there. That's a great question. We got started down this road a little bit by accident, but kind of because we recognized that we weren't doing a really great job of keeping track of our donors.
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B
And so as Many nonprofits are shaking, like, nodding their heads in their car or wherever they are.
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D
They're saying, yeah, yep. And so we jumped in. Our choice. And there's a lot of choices, good choices. Our choice was Microsoft Dynamics. And partly because Microsoft has been so good to nonprofits and they sell you their software for really cheap, right?
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B
Yeah.
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D
And it's great software. So we got into that. I hired a guy local here, where I live to try to help me move data over. And it was honestly too big of a project. And so that we found somebody. In our case, it was a group called wifli. And Whipley came in and they said, we can do this. And they started to help us build it out. So here's what we have now is that from the minute that I would meet you as a, as a prospective donor, you go in my system as a lead. Right. Which is almost every salesforce, blackbaud, you know, good, reputable organizations. That's what they do. Then I can qualify you as a lead and I can create an opportunity. The opportunity might be a proposal that I'm going to give you. It might be a sponsorship at my gala. It might be whatever. Right. Again, that's pretty standard. Here's where we built onto it. That makes it different. Let's say you come along and you say, hey, I want to do this project in Guatemala. Great. So now I know the name of the hospital we want to work in. I know the name of the hospital administrator. I know your three top surgeons. I know how many people come to your hospital every year, how many of those are hospitalized, how many babies were born there, what your cesarean rate was, how many doctors are surgeons, what surgical specialties do they practice? I mean, we know that all the way down the line, what's your electrical grid look like? Who's going to repair the equipment? We know all of that. We know what things we put on your container. We know the trucking company that moved the container from here to the port, the shipping company that moved it from the port to the next port, who hauled it over there, who consignee was. And we're working on this measurement evaluation study on the back end to say, what did we really do? All of that is on one screen. It's a click, click, click. And you can get through to the next layer of data and how many people gave to this project.
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A
Wow.
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Incredible, right?
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Where were they from? What amount did they give? What might they be interested in in the future? I mean, all of these things. So that's what we Built out. And now the really cool thing is, is that we can create Power BI reports with just a click of a button. My meeting with my fundraisers is really. I think it was a little uncomfortable at the beginning, but now it's really easy because I just. I share. Screen click, open the screen. Let's talk about your new leads this week. Who are they? Where do they come from? What about the ones from last week or the week before? When can you qualify that guy into an opportunity? And is that opportunity won or lost? You know, and all of the notes, all your emails attached to that person's file in Copilot will create a summary for me so that I don't have to read through 75 emails. It just says, here's what actually happened.
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B
Here's the five bullet points.
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D
So cool. I mean, so cool. That's kind of where we're trying to head with it around here. And of course, then we're all scrambling on the AI thing to figure out, wow, what does that mean? And how do I use that?
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B
When you say those fundraising conversations were uncomfortable, can you talk about that? Like, what was it? Just more ethereal and sort of like, what's happening? And tell me what's going on? And. And no one had really much data.
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D
Yeah. And, you know, I mean, if you're a good fundraiser, you are positive, you're enthusiastic, you say, man, I just had the greatest week I've ever had. I talked to these five great people and whatever, and I'm taking notes. Well, what do I do with my notes? Well, they're probably in a yellow file, some folder somewhere, Right. And I got to get out the notes and go review all of those notes and whatever. And. And it was like, okay, so this is taking a lot of time just to keep up with what happened. And so it just brings a whole nother level of accountability, which is good for everybody at the end of the day, because if you are out there and you're really working hard at it, then you need to have some recognition, and you need to know that I'm seeing, or whoever their team lead is is seeing what's actually happening. Right. So if you're out there really kicking it, let's talk about that now. Don't wait for a year till your annual review. How did you do this week? Right. And on the other side, if you're kind of a slacker, frankly, it's. It's pretty well apparent really quick. It's like, wait, you've gone three weeks and you've only had two New leads. What the heck?
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B
Maybe it's not worth your time, right? It's not a good fit.
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D
Or you got all these people hanging out there that you talked to six months ago and you haven't talked to them since. That's a really great reminder. And this gives people a tool to say, oh, man, that guy said to call him back, and I didn't call him. That might be somebody who needs to be involved. And I just forgot because I didn't have the ability to manage all of these people.
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B
I honestly don't know how anyone did anything before. These AI tools, the ones that I use just because I have two children in school, and that's, you know, 10 emails a day, and then they're both in multiple activities, and that's like five emails a day. And then just managing, you know, just managing my business, managing my clients, managing everything. Being able to really understand what's important and pull it out, like you said, like the bullets of, okay, what do I need to focus on in the next hour, I think is so important. I want to talk to you about just kind of the world we're living in. Like, I'm sure the demand for medical supplies has dramatically increased because it seems like there's so many global crises across the world. Like, what are you seeing on the ground and what can other nonprofits be be doing right now? Like, how can we help?
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D
You know, it's interesting. I mean, we've had a really crazy couple of years, right? I don't think anybody would have understood that USAID was going to cease to exist. If you look back, that wasn't a black swan event, because when George W. Bush is president and he started the Millennium Challenge Corporation because he was so frustrated with usaid. When Raj Shah was at usaid, when Hillary Clinton was the Secretary of State, they talked about sending money directly funding international nonprofits directly, which would have disintermediated a lot of the people, you know, NGOs that were managing those funds or those projects. So they kind of took a stab at it either. I just don't think that anybody thought that we were just going to do surgery and kill the patient. So there's that piece of it. It's interesting to see what is coming back through the State Department. It's interesting to see what's happening still with CDC and with HSS and some other, you know, pepfar and some things like that. I think that the ground is still moving and it's kind of hard to figure out, you know, what's stable and what's not until the earthquake is over. But you know, the other thing is, is that if you look at what's going on in France, Germany and England, I mean, they all did it, not just us. Everybody did it. DFID gone. You know, I mean, all of these things. So it's, it's, you're sitting in Africa and it's like, well, it's okay if the United States. I'll call the people in England. Well, can't call them anymore. I'll just call my French friends. No, not them either. You know, and so it's really been an interesting thing. So that's sort of the dark side. I was at a conference with pqmd, the Partnership for Quality Medical Donations. They're great, great group. And, and we're, we've been, I think, 10 years a member of that group. Anyway, there was some people from like Botswana and some things like that Senegal that we're talking about. There is a ray of hope coming out of that. And that is with a lot of that money came a lot of strings. The money's gone. And now, interestingly, you know, the president of Kenya just said, it's our responsibility, guys. And guess what? We get to make our own plans. And we can do this the way we want to do it, not the way United States or Britain or China or anybody else tells us we have to do it. This is our country. These are our people. We're going to take care of them in the way that we see fit. Right? So that was kind of the trend that I came out of last week in New York at PQMD with was, wouldn't that be an interesting thing if what we actually created was less reliance and more self determination? And of course, for us, we've gone over there and said, what is it you're driving? It's your car. I'm just going to sit in the backseat and hand up gas money. You know, we've always done that that way. So for us it sort of is okay. It feels like home. But if it's an organization that, you know, had a big staff over there, it's going to be disruptive. So you got to figure out how to get these folks the resources that they need. But we'll sit down at the beginning of a project and we'll just tell people our goal is to make sure that you don't need us anymore. Think about this. Here's a, here's the one to make your listeners in the car hit the brakes. I'm not talking about museums or Universities or hospitals. But wouldn't it be interesting if every other non profit had as its goal to put yourself out of business because
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B
you have so many very nice
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D
underlying cause that there's no reason for you to be there anymore because you fix the problem, not the symptoms. And again to your point, you know, I'll, I'll be in Nigeria and say that. And they just start laughing. They're like, you understand we have 230 million people crammed into Texas, right? And report, when is that ever going to happen? When we don't need you. And I said, I, I get it, but the goal needs to be for you to be self sufficient and not need us anymore. We'll find something else to do with our warehouses.
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B
I think that unfortunately the role of government has just been completely decimated, slashed. There's no safety net. Not like there is in Europe, you know, certainly not like in the Netherlands. And I think that for a lot of people in this country, like, unfortunately a lot of the services will be required. But I love the idea of like, like I always teach my nonprofits like your idea of a vision. Like what is your vision for a better world? Like obviously like a food pantry. Our vision for a better world is that people do not need our services. Like everyone can afford groceries and everyone can afford healthy groceries and everyone has access to groceries. So I think that unfortunately there's so much non profits can't do because we really, I mean we can affect policy, but we're not as powerful as sort of the, the powers that be. But I think we need to be more vocal around that and be more vocal about like this is what we want to see in the world. This is the vision, this is the North Star. This is like where we want to go. So how do you communicate such a complex mission? So you don't really have a complex mission, but your work is very complex. How do you convey that and communicate that in a way that resonates with donors and shareholders, Especially in this like attention economy that we're in where we, we just need sort of a sound bite.
- [26:24]
D
Well, I think one of the things, and again this goes back to, you know, borrow a lesson from our for profit friends, right. If you can make it so easy. I call it my five year old rule. Because when my youngest daughter Caroline was in the back of my car one day, she had her little buddy and they were strapped in, they were five, so they're in their little car seats and we're bouncing along and I hear Caroline tell her friend, well my dad goes to the hospital and gets Band Aids and sends them to kids in Africa. And I thought there's a little more of a nuance to it than that. Right. We're also in South America and Asia, but for a five year old kid to understand it right, that means we're doing something right. Warren Buffett, that was one of his things. He understood Coca Cola, he understood Dairy Queen. He didn't understand Enron, and for a long time he didn't really understand Apple. So can you take the work that you do as a non profit and break it down so simple that everybody gets it right? Look at Charity Water, they we just give people clean drinking water. Well, I, I get that, you know, Compassion International, well, we're going to get Julio to school and take care of him, his room, board, books and a uniform at 38amonth or 42 or whatever it is. Susan G. Komen Women should not die of breast Cancer. There you go. That's pretty easy. Got that. There's some nonprofits that I talk to and they, well, we do this and then there's that and then, lost me. I'm out. I don't understand exactly what it is that you do. So I think part of that is on us to really think through.
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B
Oh, it's on us.
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D
Yeah. What, what. And if it's, if it's more complicated than a couple of steps to get the main idea across, then you probably need to do a little more analysis of your story for us. I mean, the actual execution. Oh my God. We've got manufacturers, we've got expiration dates, we've got trucking, we've got all of our volunteers. So that means a lot of training. We have all of our IT and that's just to get the stuff ready to go. And then we're dealing like right now with fuel charges. We've got, you know, during COVID you remember they were all, all the containers are stacked off the coast of California. Well, now they're all sitting in the Strait of Hormuz. So you got that and then you got, you know, hey, we had a really great relationship with country xyz. They got a new president. Now we don't. Or the ambassador just got recalled or there was, we thought things were going to go really well, but then there's a war next door and now we can't work in Syria or which side of the Israeli Lebanon thing do you want to play on both? Can you play on both? I don't know. I mean, that gets really, really, really complicated, right?
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B
Exactly. Global events directly affect the work that you're doing.
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D
Well, and just little things like $4.70 gasoline, and we're running 50, 60 trucks. You know, how do you do that? And by the way, we told these people that to get a container over there was only going to be $38,000. And now all of a sudden, our cost is almost doubled. So it's complicated, but that message is still really, really simple. And I always get a little concerned. I just was talking to somebody about a organization, and they said, we do this, but. Oh, yeah, but we also do this, and then we do this, and we do this, and then we do this, and we do this. And I'm thinking you need to revisit your mission statement. Right. Because the mission statement should allow you to say no, not yes.
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A
Oh, I love that.
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B
So for us, statement is like your line in the sand.
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D
Absolutely. You know, throw it on the wall. If it sticks, it better be in a really, really small spot. Our. Our sirens call going back to Ulysses, right? And the Odyssey. The. The sirens. It's been water, because everybody says, well, you really ought to get into water because all these little kids are getting sick because of bad water. So if you just start a division, a project here that would be related to water. And I'm saying, you know, there's some really great water organizations, like the charity Waters and Water. Anyway, Rotary. Rotary does great water sanitation hygiene projects. I'm going to empower and let them do that. In fact, if we. We did this in Congo, actually, we. There was a priest who had a hospital, and so he wanted to bring everybody in. So he drilled this big well right in the middle of the hospital yard, and all the women would come in that morning to get water at his. Because it was wonderful, clean water. And. And that would allow him to do the healthy baby checks and check the pregnant mommies and all of that stuff at the clinic, because they're coming for water. Smart. We didn't drill the well. We got him together with somebody else who drilled as well. Right. Because we're not going to mission creep. Our job was to fix the clinic. Their job was to drill the well. And that's. You know, what. What. Anyway, it's worked out well for us.
- [31:19]
B
I would love to see more collaborations across the space. And I think it's so important that nonprofits really do, like, double down on what they're doing. And I hate to say, like, stay in your lane, because I just think that's kind. Has a negative connotation to it. But like, focus on what you do best. And then like you said, you're a connector. Connect people with other people that drill wells, because you don't drill wells, but you certainly have the resources to connect them with somebody that does. And I just really wish there was more collaboration across the sector and we stopped looking at each other like competitors and our little piece of the pie. And oh, there's only so much money to go around. Like, there's billions and billions of dollars in this world to go around. But I think collaboration is very attractive to donors.
- [32:07]
D
I'll tell you the other one that's really interesting is watching the blurry lines in Africa. One of the players for all talking about clean water is Coca Cola. And they said, well, that's what we do is we actually bottle things that you can drink safely. And we have this really incredible distribution system. We can get things to the smallest village in the world. If we can do brown syrup water, why can't we do just clean, pure water? Which is a cool idea, except for the nonprofits are like, whoa, stay out of our space. Free water is ours, not yours. And, and even like with, you know, interaction, there was a. I remember a conversation we had. Deal at Coca Cola, join a nonprofit organization that's doing clean water. I don't know, do we? I mean, you know, so anyway, there's some really interesting blurry lines. There's some cool stuff that's being done too. One of my friends, David Ansell, he's at Rush University in Chicago. Rush is a big supporter, Project CURE. And Dr. Ansell, I just think he's the coolest guy. But he started working on this project and around Rush University in Chicago. It's a pretty poor area. And he realized that that was also a food desert. So the people who were living there, they don't have access to good food. And he starts thinking, he's like, well, why is it that we're buying all of our food and we're trucking it in from 50 miles away? What if we invested in food prep three blocks from here? Now let's go find somebody, a family or somebody who, who maybe they used to run a restaurant or they used to run a little bodega or something. Let's give them the resources and then we will buy all the stuff from them. And we just created business there, right?
- [33:49]
B
And created jobs and.
- [33:51]
D
Unbelievable. Here's a nonprofit hospital that just got involved and created a whole bunch of for profit stuff that results now. And kids going to college because now mommy's got a job. And she could send the kids to college. Everybody else in the neighborhood now has access to food within a few blocks. They're not, you know, going to the five and Dime to get sugar water and Twinkies for dinner for their kids. They can actually get food right there. But just to sort of blur those lines a little bit is kind of cool because, like, well, what if we just did that? That could be neat. That could work, right? So I'm excited about some of that, too. Not only nonprofits collaborating, but that gray space. Am I a nonprofit? Am I for profit? Am I a B corp? Not really. But am I something? I don't know. Let's just see what good we can get done.
- [34:37]
B
I love that. Let's just see what good we can get done. I love it. Eliminate the silos. We're all working together toward a common goal. If listeners can take away sort of maybe one thing from your leadership journey, one leadership lesson, what would it be?
- [34:54]
D
That's a really great question, because I've made so many mistakes. So making mistakes about things, I think, you know that thing about make sure that you can build a team around you that you can trust. In the times that I've hated my job the most, it's been because I don't have that person. In the time that makes life so much better, it's because you do have those people. We're doing a kind of a fun thing. I've got my whole team coming into town today, and we'll be all together. We call it town hall. We do this twice a year. We bring everybody together in the first day. I always invest in professional development and personal development. Right. So we're going to do the Kolbe test tomorrow. K O L B E. That's kind of a cool thing. A lot of people done Myers, Briggs and some of the other ones, but this is.
- [35:43]
B
Oh, it's a personality test.
- [35:44]
D
A little bit. Yep. And then we're going to spend the other half of the day working through the. The eos, life coming out of the book, traction. And this whole idea of do the things that you really want to do, right. Delegate stuff you hate, do it with people that you really like, be well compensated for it, you know, Anyway, there's. There's five elements to that, but that one piece of that right. Right now is really resonating with me as far as, you know, get your team right. And if there's a problem, because we're always so afraid to, you know, call it out and say, hey, I don't think you fit here or. I need you to not be so damn negative. Are you on this team or are you not? Think about this like in the world of professional sports, right? You get somebody that comes on there, one player can ruin the entire basketball team and you go from being champion material to not. And it's, and it's, it's not that these people can't play ball. They're really good. They just got the attitude and it ruined the culture. Right? So, so anyway, that would be one of them that I would talk about is just make sure that you got, you know, pay close, close, close attention to the. Just the negativity and the backbiting stuff. It will kill you so fast. As an organization, it just. And as the leader, it just, it's a, you know, it'll gut you. I mean, it's just bad. So don't be afraid to make quick decisions. You know, you think, you know, you need to do this and then you
- [37:11]
B
ponder and you think and you procrastalearning, right? You like watch a million YouTube videos on it and you're like, oh, what do I do? Yeah.
- [37:21]
D
Yep. Make the decision, move on.
- [37:23]
B
Make the decision, move on. This has been amazing. This was a really wonderful conversation. And I know you're super busy managing 35,000 volunteers at 135 countries, but where can people learn more about you, connect with you and project Cure and support the work you're doing?
- [37:41]
D
Yeah, thank you. Our website, projectcure.org and then we've got social under the same moniker and then I'm at Dr. Douglas Jackson on LinkedIn and they can come find me there and have a conversation.
- [37:55]
B
That's wonderful. Thank you so much for, for your time, your expertise. This was fantastic.
- [38:00]
D
Well, thanks for the work you're doing and for sharing with all of us. We really appreciate it.
- [38:11]
C
Well, hey there. I wanted to say thank you for tuning into my show and for listening
- [38:16]
B
all the way to the end.
- [38:17]
C
If you really enjoyed today's conversation, make sure to subscribe to the show in your favorite place podcast app and you'll get new episodes downloaded as soon as they come out. I would love if you left me a rating or a review because this tells other people that my podcast is worth listening to and then me and my guests can reach even more earbuds and create even more impact. So that's pretty much it. I'll be back soon with a brand new episode, but until then, you can find me on Instagram. Julia Campbell, 77. Keep changing the world, you nonprofit unicorn.