Transcript
A (0:01)
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a special edition of the Money Mondays podcast where we cover three core topics. How to make money, how to invest money, how to give it away to charity. But today's episode, we're only going to talk about how to give it away to charity. I want to focus on philanthropy because right now I'm in the midst of hosting the 12th annual world's largest Toy Drive. Trina's Kids foundation was started 12 years ago, and at first there was just eight volunteers on the floor wrapping up toys for children.
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Then we had around 21 volunteers, then 30 or 40 volunteers, and we just kept growing year after year. We added another city, doing Salt Lake city in years eight and nine. Then the 10th year, for the 10th anniversary, I decided to go crazy and do 10 toy drives, 10 cities over the course of a three week period. Well, last year, on year 11, I was addicted. I saw the children's faces. We were giving out thousands and thousands and thousands of toys per city. And I decided I wanted to do it again. And this year, the 12th year, we're doing it again, because I can't even imagine not going back and physically into these cities giving out toys. I'm literally here in Tampa, Florida for our second toy drive, filming this podcast live for you right this second. Why? Why is it so important? Charity is super, super important for different aspects. One, there's an emotional, moral aspect that's up to you to decide for yourself what matters to you. What types of charities do you care about? Does someone in your family or friend circle, have they been impacted by something that you could help? Meaning breast cancer, homelessness, autism, hunger? There's so many things. There's so many different categories for charity. There's no one main category. There's so many different aspects. But sometimes charity has a bad stigma because people think the financial part of it, the money part of it. Obviously, we're here on the Money Mondays, so let's talk bluntly about it, that not all of the money goes to the cause. That's true on some charities, some philanthropy, there's a big overhead or a big office or a big staff, and some of them actually need that. Others, some of them may take advantage of it. But for the most part, the general good of charity is super important. And we've watched how impactful it can be. Are there bad actors? Are there people that could take from charities or steal from charities or not be efficient? Of course, we've seen that, sometimes on a grand scale. However, that's never going to stop me. And it's also part of what empowered me and made me passionate about doing charities is I run this myself. For the first decade, I really didn't even have people donating. I never really posted or asked people to donate. For the first decade of doing these toy drives, I was just pushing myself as hard as I could, spending a ton of money, six figures a year, sometimes over a million dollars a year to supply these toys. Flights, hotels, warehouses, venues, shipping, et cetera. So myself and the co founder, Vince Ritchie, we've just been super passionate about the charity side. Now, however, charity is not just about money. You can do it with your time, energy, social media power. You can help charities in different ways. There's a ton of charity work that you can do from volunteering, which costs nothing. And back to the point about why is it important for families or offices or businesses or like the brand or inside of you, why to do it because you could inspire people, whether it's your children, your parents, your friends, co workers or siblings. You could inspire and showcase to your vendors, clients, customers, partners, investors, etc. Showcasing to them the charity that you care about, the efforts that you have, bringing them together, bringing morale, bringing loyalty, building a company culture, having your family closer together, having your city and community closer together. Those are the things. Like you're going to hear me a little over the, all over the place because I'm so passionate about this topic. I'm literally right this second about to drive over to the venue for our second of 10 toy drives. So let me explain the world's largest toy drive and then I'm going to use actual cases from it to talk about the money, finances and execution of it. So that you could host a toy drive in your own city. You could host a Thanksgiving food drive yourself. You could host something to raise money for mental health or autism or diabetes, cancer, leukemia. There's so many different. There's an unlimited amount of different topics that all need money, time and energy. Your help, your efforts can literally change the world. That's why I post about charity so much. That's why this whole episode is going to be all about charity, is because you can physically change someone's life. Sometimes people think, oh, you're just, you know, feeding them a meal or you're just giving them some supplies, or you're just giving them some toys. The butterfly effect of that is staggering. And we're going to get into it. Okay? So the world's largest toy drive, the first city was two days ago in Dallas, Texas. 10 cities over a 17 day period. From the 5th to the 22nd. So Dallas, we went there and I have a semi truck donated from a guy named Sean Callagy. Sean Callagy committed to 119,000 toys. So one person, one donation from Sean Callagy. However, there's obviously donators in every city there's donators that do directly to the charity called Trinaskids Foundation. That's Trinaskids.org is the website. There's people that donate directly on the website or via PayPal, Cash App, Venmo, wire transfer, Bitcoin. If you have a charity, make sure that you can accept funds in any different way, any different format. You don't want any friction if someone wants to donate to your charity in case you want to create a 501C3. So Sean Kellygate donated 119,000 toys across the country for these 10 cities. And then we're going to obviously have a similar amount donated from friends, strangers, social media, followers, volunteers, locals, etc. Hoping to get bigger organizations and businesses to start doing that as well. So Sean decided to donate 119,000 toys. Last year he donated 100,000 as part of my One on One coaching program. I think some of you know that the last three years I've done one on one coaching. It's $100,000, but they get to choose. The members that want to do the one on one coaching get to choose a charity of their choice. There's three charity options. They get to choose between those three charities, whether it's for animals, whether it's for homeless. Creating Backpacks for the Homeless, which is my model citizen fund charity, or it's for the toy drive, which, which many of them have done. The donations to the toy drives, some of them do it for the backpacks and some have done it for animals. But for the most part, the last couple three years, it's been raising 1 to 2 million dollars a year for the toy drives. So in this instance last year, Sean Callagy already donated 100,000 to the charity. And then I went to his event in New Jersey, which is also coming up again December 19th, and he waited outside in the 13 degree cold cold to surprise me with 3U hauls of more toys. So picture this. Sean has 700 guests for his event inside. His staff, employees, doctors, lawyers, et cetera. He already donated 100,000 and he decided to wait outside in 13 degree weather. By the way, he's blind and he has a lot of things going on. He's got to run this event that's going on inside. And he decided to wait outside to surprise me with three u hauls of toys. You can actually see the video on my Instagram. And so this year he wanted to go to a whole crazy another level and decided to donate this 119,000 toys. So we start off in Dallas, Texas. We have 24 semi trucks, 5,000 toys per semi truck from a company called World Tech Toys. Why does that matter? You want to get reliable partners. And so World Tech Toys, they do over $200 million in toys. They've been our partner for the last 12 years to help us supply the toys at deep, deep wholesale prices. Some of these toys are amazing. 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, $70 toys that we're getting for 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, $8. And so it's very, very efficient. If we were to go buy these at the stores, these same toys are $25, $15, some of them 40, 50, $60, et cetera. We're able to get a lot of these toys for $6, $4, $8, $1 dollars plus a lot of toys donated when they have excess inventory. So if you have a charity getting partners, whether that's your venue, catering sponsors, for example, in Dallas, Texas, we had Ever Bull. Ever Bull is the Acai bowl chain that I'm a part of. I actually just posted a video on my social media this morning about it. When I first invested money, time and energy into Ever Bull, you can look@everbowl.com they had 13 locations in 2018. The video I just posted this morning, this Monday, Monday was about that Everbowl set up a booth at our toy drive in Dallas, Texas to feed the 1,000 children and family members that showed up to the toy drive. So ecosystem, right? Two different ecosystem. I'm aligning them together. I'm taking Everbowl, the restaurant chain I'm a part of. There was 13 locations 2018. Now there's over 100 locations in 2025. So in seven years, I went from 13 locations to over 100 locations. The video I posted was about the 11 locations in Dallas, Texas and Iowa that are owned by the franchisee Justin Sloan. That's the video I posted. And he decided to set up a booth to help us feed these thousand children and family members. During the toy drive in Dallas, Texas, a company called Stella Jets, a lady named Tia who's always helped us, her company, Stella jets, used her Stella jets hangar, her airport hangar as the host venue. She hosted a charity gala, brought in Charlie Sheen.
