The Power of Social Business: A People Movement to Meet Urgent Needs
Tonight, I know you’re gonna talk about something that not only you’re passionate about, but I’m insanely passionate about.
And I think it it thrives and kind of, like, drives what makes Alovéa so unique, so special, and why I think we’re seeing such growth, you know, with, you know, double digit growth, two straight years in a row.
I think we’re just gonna continually see that growth number grow as we grow around the world.
So I’m excited to pass it to you to kick off our October kickoff call.
Yeah.
Thanks, Craig.
You know, I did a presentation yesterday for a brand new group of people that are just coming in, some new, Social Business Partners.
And, of course, there was a little bit of the history.
You know, how did this thing happen?
And they knew a little bit about my past.
Where did you get the idea to do social entrepreneurship?
You know, I love telling the story, but it’s always a fast story in an environment like that, because there’s just not time to develop everything.
So tonight, I’d like to just kinda go back and just talk about how did we come into contact with social entrepreneurship?
What is it?
Why is it so relevant not only to our business, but to what is going on in the world today?
We’re gonna take a deep dive into social entrepreneurship tonight.
I mean, you know, of course, I had MannaRelief for years.
I started that in 1999 officially.
We donated product.
And so there’s always that connection to, you know, using our core technology to do something good in the world.
But I never never even thought that there was an organized effort around that at all.
And you and I met back in the, nineties, and you came to me with a project, I’m sure you remember, called give out loud.
So what what was give out loud?
Because this is the entree into my walk with social entrepreneurship.
You want me to share a little bit about Give Out Loud?
Just a little bit about it.
My goodness.
Yeah.
Boy, I talk…
But, yeah, it was actually a unique project with, sir Anthony Hopkins.
And it was a whole concept of of of really partnering on the expansion of social biz…
How…
Or how social media was growing because it was at the beginning of Facebook and things like that, but was how to support businesses and people to be able to be part of a giving movement.
Because it’s not…
It’s hard to create your own charity.
It’s hard to do that, but a lot of people wanna be part of something bigger.
So how could businesses align themselves with a cause?
And that was the beginning stages of it, and you and I met, and you you took it to a whole different vision.
I was so intrigued with the concept of rupture around this passion, but it it just kind of…
I mean, you know, life happens, and there was a lot of things going in our business and your business.
But I never forgot that beginning because that’s that’s…
For the very first time, I realized, wait a minute.
There could be structure around this passion for changing the world.
Fast forward into the two thousands, of course, I had MannaRelief.
My biggest problem was fundraising because we donate product to kids every month, every day of their life, not just at Christmas time.
You know?
So it’s not like you can do a big fundraiser, you know, build a wing, buy a bus, and then it’s over.
I mean, these kids need it every day.
So sustainability was the issue.
And I remember going through seasons of the up and the down and the up and the down.
We build a donor base to, you know, eighty, ninety thousand children a day.
A glitch in the economy, we lose half of it, 60%, overnight.
I mean, just vanish.
Because the first thing to go in hard economic times is charitable giving.
It’s pretty well established.
And so…
And then I’d have to call all these distribution partners and caregivers and say, listen.
We didn’t have such a good fall this year.
Our fundraising dropped considerably.
I can only give you half.
And I remember talking to president Fox and his wife about this, and this is, like, 2012, and I said, we just had one of those flips.
This spicket turned off, and I can only give you half.
And missus Fox was just beside herself.
She said, Sam, who gets to pick what children don’t get access, you know, from this day forward?
I don’t wanna do that.
You know?
I don’t wanna put that on our caregivers.
I mean, you’ve got to find a way.
And I said, well, that’s our number one prayer request is that, you know, that we get a revelation of how to do this.
And President Fox soak up and he said, Sam, I think I know the the answer to your your problem.
Have you ever heard of a business strategy called social entrepreneurship?
And I said, I don’t know.
It sounds vaguely familiar, but, no, I don’t really know what it is.
He goes, it’s actually a pretty significant movement.
They’re teaching at Harvard Business School, which he’s a graduate of.
He got his MBA there.
He said it’s it’s about a new breed of entrepreneur that’s leveraging the economic power of the marketplace to provide sustainable solutions to the world’s biggest problems.
And they’ve come to realize that it’s not gonna happen through charity.
It’s not gonna happen through government or institutions, mainly because they profit from some of these challenges.
And so change of that magnitude, he said, can only come through people movements.
But he said, I’m hosting the first international symposium this summer on social entrepreneurship.
You should come.
Learn the model.
And he said my cohost is gonna be Mohammed Yunus, who won the Nobel Prize in 2005 for very innovative social entrepreneurial solution to global poverty.
It was called microfinance.
You know, put impoverished people into business, give them the dignity of working themselves out of their situations.
Mohammed Yunus did this in Bangladesh, the poorest country on the planet, impacted the lives of 40,000,000 people in Bangladesh.
That’s a country of a 160,000,000.
I mean, that’s the impact it made.
Started the Grameen Bank.
It was a for profit bank, but it was designed to facilitate microfinance.
And today, microfinance is the number one strategy for solving poverty in parts of the world.
In fact, I met with a big relief organization about two weeks ago called Convoy of Hope, and they’re gonna help us with some of our future distribution.
And they’ve just started a microfinance program putting women, impoverished women, into business.
And I said, so what’s missing?
They said business in a box.
We need something to give them to do that we know will work, and we had a great discussion after that around Mighty Milk and the distribution of Mighty Milk throughout the world in all these villages and the poorest countries on Earth.
So he said, Mohammed Yunus is gonna be my cohost, and you need to come.
So I did.
2012, that summer, I went to Mexico.
It was incredible.
I was so fired up.
I mean, they had about 200 people from all walks of life.
I mean, we had bankers and attorneys and not for profit organizations and government officials and anybody that president Fox thought was concerned enough about the various flights in the world and solutions…
Finding solutions for them was invited.
And so it was really an interesting presentation and dialogue.
And, of course, listening to Muhammad Yunus was very inspiring.
You would think that someone of that stature that won a Nobel Prize would be on the flag of his country, but he posed such a personal threat to that government that they actually filed suit against him.
I mean, it’s it’s a crazy story, and and they chased him for years because he believed that the political climate should start favoring the poor instead of just the wealthy, and he was advocating for that.
And, of course, he had the notoriety as a Nobel Prize winner, so they came after him with a vengeance.
Kind of an interesting end to that story, not at this event, but later, years later.
So he actually got convicted at some point, and they were sending him to prison, but the military had a coup and took over Bangladesh and called Mohammed Yunus and said, would you be our temporary president?
So it’s that crazy.
Anyways…
So these were the type of people that were at this event.
One of the exercises that we went…
Of course, president Fox had me do a presentation on Acemannan and what we were doing with, medically fragile children in Mexico.
And so one of the exercises or the the primary exercise of the event, at the end of it, after all the dialogue and question answers, we broke up into groups, and and then we got into bigger groups.
And the exercise is what is the world’s biggest problem that would lend itself most appropriately to a social entrepreneurial solution?
And the answer was global health care.
And the reason for that is because our global health care, what we call health care, is really a sick care system, and it’s not working.
I mean, it’s it’s costly.
It’s growing at an unsustainable rate.
There’s no real good solutions for people with chronic infections and disease, and so people just live, you know, on medications for all their life.
This sick care management system is just horrible.
And they said, after watching the presentation on Acemannan, it’s those types of science based solutions that could absolutely transform global health care.
But they also said that change is not gonna come through the system.
I mean, you had people there from government agencies going, it’s not gonna come through the system.
It’s not gonna come from the government because there’s too much of a vested interest in what we’re doing now in the status quo.
And so it’s gonna take a people movement, and you’re gonna have to overcome apathy and disbelief and the medical complex basically saying nothing is worthwhile other than what we do.
You’re gonna have to overcome all of that to get a big enough movement in the world to really make a difference in the lives of the world’s most vulnerable children.
But they said it can be done.
This was really interesting, Craig.
They had someone from Stanford there, Stanford Business Review, the magazine they published, and they had just done an article on best practice in social entrepreneurship.
And it was an article on the buy one, give one model.
And it was kind of like the good, the bad, and the ugly.
And it’s kinda like, here’s how it’s been used successfully.
Here’s some of the challenges with it, but it is by far best practice.
If you wanna link a consumer good, that you think will be beneficial in developing nations, there’s nothing better.
But they did say in order to maximize the effect of a buy one, give one thing, three things have to be in place for longevity.
Number one, the product that is being sold must offer an innovative new solution to a global problem.
So when we look at the problem of sick care management, what’s the innovative solution?
Providing the body with something that can support its ability to heal itself.
That would be the most innovative disruptive thing that you could ever do in that environment.
So we have that.
Put a big check mark beside Acemannan.
And number two, the product needs to provide as big a benefit to the consumer as it does the recipient of the donation.
And they used Toms Shoes as an example.
They said Toms shoes was huge, but people in The United States or in developing nations bought it because it was trendy to be a part of the movement, not because the shoe was that valuable.
And so when the trend wore off, the shoes stopped selling.
So the product was not as valuable to the consumer as it was to the recipient of the donation.
Kids still needed shoes.
It’s just that consumers kinda got tired of that little trend and then moved on.
And so they said, you’ve gotta have a product that is…
That solves the problem in the consumers’ life as well as it does the recipient of the donation.
Then the third thing they said is your product needs to be proprietary to your company, or you will build the business for Walmart because any successful product will end up on the shelves of a major discount store at a fraction of the cost if there is a market for it.
So if you build the market and you don’t own it, you can count on it.
And so those are the three things, and, of course, we could check all three of those boxes on.
I came back, and I was on fire for social entrepreneurship.
I got some books.
I’m gonna read a couple things out of some of them.
Somebody actually sent me this book.
It’s called The End of Charity.
Now if you’re running a charitable organization, that’s not easy reading.
In this book, he said, charity just isn’t enough.
Charity is sadly only, ever the leftovers, the spare cash, the leftovers that are not going to be enough to solve all the problems of the world.
I’m advocating for an end to charity because it’s not driving change.
Charity and welfare support the status quo.
And he said we’ll need to challenge our long term beliefs to make changes real of this significance.
What I’ve come to realize is that we will only overcome our problems by ensuring that all citizens get a chance to participate in the change movement, and using the market is the best way to do this.
We have to create the opportunities for change in a global market driven economy.
So Nick Francis, the author, is an award winning publicist down in Australia, wrote that book, and he just said…
He called it social enterprise.
It’s time for social enterprise.
I mean, if we’re really gonna take on these problems, we gotta do it from that perspective.
Then I got this book.
Love this book.
Social entrepreneurship, what everybody needs to know.
Couple things out of this that said, although problems are being attacked from any directions, today’s changemakers share one common feature.
They are building platforms that unleash human potential.
They struggle to increase the number of people who have the opportunity to contribute their talents to the world.
In doing so, they help more people live with dignity.
Consider some of the developments from the past few decades.
Microfinance, we just talked about that, are expanding economic opportunities to hundreds of millions of poor people, rural schools and libraries, deliver quality education to places beyond the reach of asphalt, and finally, health innovations that can release people from illness and prevent child deaths by expanding access to science based prenatal care.
And so they were singing our song.
I mean, I’m I’m reading this.
You can imagine going, oh my gosh.
That’s us.
That’s us.
That’s us.
Okay.
It says reforms at this level frequently require that require this level of change have been extraordinarily difficult.
Six hundred years ago, when the prince Niccolo Machiavelli wrote, “there’s nothing more difficult to take an end, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take on the lead in the introduction of a new order of things, because the innovator cast for his enemies all those who profit under the current conditions.”
I mean, that was in the sixteen hundreds, he wrote that.
Things haven’t changed.
Therefore, the system changer must overcome apathy, habit, incomprehension, and disbelief while facing heated resistance from those with vested interests.
Social entrepreneurs have to figure out a way to make it happen.
I love that.
This is the book that introduced me to the concept of social entrepreneurship 3.0
It talked about the evolution of on…
Social entrepreneurship.
It started with sort of like the Toms Shoes idea or the Warber Parker.
People are making products, selling it themselves, and making a donation donation.
Two point o is when these companies started teaming up with mass retailers and allowing retailers to participate in a broader distribution of their products.
But here’s what he said.
“Social entrepreneurship 3.0 looks beyond individual founders and institutions to the change making potential of all people and recognizes that social entrepreneurship is contagious.
Social entrepreneurship 3.0 is concerned with the building of platforms that enable more people at every age to think and behave like change makers, and to help them work together in powerful teams and teams of teams for the rapid circulation of technologies that can change the world.”
And finally, How to Change the World.
Can’t leave that book off.
I mean, if you wanna be a world changer, you gotta read how to change the world.
And I’m just gonna read one quote out of this because I just love this.
For any…
Talking about social entrepreneurship, indeed, for anyone who ever said this isn’t working or we can do better, for anyone who gets a kick out of challenging the status quo, shaking up the system, or practicing a little entrepreneurial creative destruction, these will be prosperous times.
Okay.
So that’s the foundation for what introduced me to social entrepreneurship.
First of all, the idea presented by my friend Craig Smith, and then president Fox puts structure around it, and then we realize that we may have one of the most important components for changing the world that exists out there based off the opinion of hundreds of well educated global leaders that say our biggest challenge in the future is gonna be the cost and the expansion of sick care.
What they all say is it’s gonna require a science based solution to overcome the apathy.
Now I will tell you this.
I think that COVID in 2020 gave us a huge boost in terms of credibility.
Because for the first time, I think consumers realized that both the government and World Health Organizations were colluding together to promote solutions that really were profit motivated, not consumer health motivated.
Gosh.
You had all kinds of…
And now it it goes on today.
There was a recent hearing with
Anthony Fauci not too long ago.
And so I think what consumers realize is if they wanna be healthy in the twenty first century, they better find a way to take control of their own health.
You don’t wanna fall into that funnel of sick care because it’s very difficult to get out.
You know, you take a drug to reduce the symptom of a chronic condition, and after a few months or years, the toxicity of that drug is so great that it creates another problem, so you take another drug to reduce the symptom, and it just goes on and on and on.
And now they say that the average person over 70 years old takes five to ten pharmaceutical drugs a day.
That’s just crazy.
And so what’s the way out for all of us?
You know, we have some people in our organization right now.
They’re young moms that build networks of concerned young moms online, and what they’re all concerned about is the health of their children, and they’re looking for science based solutions.
They’re not looking for gimmicks.
They’re not looking for celebrity endorsed products.
They’re looking for science based solutions that can give their children, their families a chance at a quality of life that they deserve.
And, of course, that’s the business side of what we’re doing.
The benefit of all of this is that through the buy one, give one model, we can match every purchase of every product with a one month supply of Acemannan into a child in need.
I was talking to an accountant who’s making a big contribution at the end of the year, and her contribution will be, in terms of Acemannan, bigger than all the children that were impacted through nutrition from UNICEF last year.
Mean, that’s just enormous.
So where did this lady came from?
Well, she started off as a consumer of our product.
She had a a considerable health challenge.
She was taking all these drugs, going to all these doctors, and nothing really was changing in her life.
She didn’t even think she could be cured.
She just wanted a better quality of life.
And somebody introduced her to us.
She started taking products.
She called me and said, what’s going on with my life?
I’m feeling this.
I’m feeling that.
Should I get my children on it?
Should get my husband on it?
And then her accounting business took off, and she became the biggest donor to MannaRelief as an individual that we’ve ever had.
And this year, we’ll eclipse anything that she’s ever done.
So that’s our social business model.
We’re bringing the the most impactful solution to global health into the first world marketplace that’s affordable for anybody who wants a better quality of life for themselves, their families, and their children.
I saw an article from the NIH, National Institute of Health, that said almost seventy percent of the people in America now live with one or more chronic conditions.
And when I say live with, I mean, there’s no good solution.
They live with it.
So they have to take some form of symptom suppressant just to get by day to day.
So that’s a huge marketplace, and the World Health Organization said it’s almost identical worldwide in terms of the number of people that are living with poor health.
And so we just have an enormous responsibility to do what we do, which presents an enormous opportunity.
One of the quotes I read in how to change the world is that wealth is never the objective of a social entrepreneur.
It’s simply the byproduct of succeeding in their mission.
So here’s our mission.
Seven million children die every year of preventable disease.
That’s chronic and infectious diseases that if their immune systems were working, they would live.
What looks like a common cold here turns into lethal pneumonia there.
And so Acemannan is by far, and we have seen it year after year, child after child, decade after decade for the last three decades.
It is immediate and impactful.
And, and that’s why we like to take people to Mexico.
That’s why we like to take people around the world and show them the impact that we’re making.
But I think this year, we expand again all over the world.
We’ve grown enough that now, again, I’m having conversations with organizations that can help us distribute into dozens of countries around the world with people on the ground in those areas that can help us in our distribution.
And so look for Mighty Milk to go far and wide this coming year.
It’s gonna be incredible.
But, guys, that’s what we work for.
That’s what we do.
I I think I’ve closed events by saying everybody has to do something for a living.
We get to do this.
You can do anything to make a living.
It takes something like this to make a life, and that’s what we all get to share in credit.
So but buy one, give one is not a percentage of profits.
It’s a top line contribution.
So it doesn’t matter what your expenses are.
It doesn’t matter what your sales are.
I mean, you’re gonna give.
Buy one, give one every time you sell.
So for a publicly traded company, that is no man’s land because you can’t control it.
I mean, if you’re gonna give a percentage of profits, which I’m not saying is a bad thing, I think it is a good thing for anybody who’s willing to give anything, but profits change.
And in public corporations, you try to keep profits as low as possible and invest in growth to eliminate tax liabilities.
So, really, the only true giving for a business, I think, is top line giving.
You have to attach it to something that says, you know, if we have to turn out the lights, we’re gonna give.
That is ingrained.
So when we registered as a public benefit corporation Alovéa, that’s part of the criteria.
What is your giving in at what level are you going to give?
And then we’ll monitor that to make sure that you can keep the status of a public benefit corporation.
So there is that.
I think the other thing, Craig, is, you know, companies are consumed with what they do, and charitable giving is just on a different planet.
You gotta find somebody to give to.
It just so happened that our passion was wrapped around the benefit of our product.
Linda, my wife, and I were funding…
Financially funding orphanage organizations before MannaRelief, but our contribution would buy a bus or, you know, buy books or…
But as I talked to one of the caregivers one time before MannaRelief, I said, what’s your biggest problem?
What is nobody helping you with?
She said, it’s the health of our children.
Our kids are sick all the time, and because of poor nutrition and stress and poor sanitation and all these things that compromise their immune systems, they get sick and they don’t get better.
We lose thirty to forty kids a year.
There’s nothing more important than solving that.
And I said, you have no idea what I do for a living, but I think I can provide a contribution that’s gonna change the lives of your children in ways that you can’t conceive.
And that was in Romania.
We gave them the first Acemannan product.
It’s the four man of relief.
They did it for a year.
They came back and said, not only are kids enjoying a better quality of life, but for the first time in over a decade, no children died.
And she said, and everybody that I’ve shared that story with in our industry wants to know how can they get access to that.
So that’s what started MannaRelief that came out of the pure desire to make a difference with something that we could make a difference with.
And so MannaRelief grew on its own.
I mean, we ran that organization.
It wasn’t part of my other company.
It was Linda and my organization, and we took it all over the world.
And we learned the hard way how to economically distribute around the world.
We took 50 people at a time with suitcase loads of product.
I’m telling you, that’s not a very economical way to service hundreds of thousands of children.
But it’s it’s how we started.
Then we realized the benefit of linking up with regional distribution partners like the Foxes.
And what’s really interesting in these developing nations is that they weren’t hard to find.
In Uganda, the ambassador to The United States from Uganda, her name was Sida Simbala, she had me go do an…
A trial on children suffering with AIDS at hospitals in Uganda.
When the president saw what was going on, his name was Museveni, President Museveni, he said every child in this country needs to get access to this product.
So, you know, they don’t care about Big Pharma.
They don’t care about the medical complex.
They’re looking for what is the most inexpensive, effective way to deal with this problem of childhood disease and death.
And whatever you step up to the plate with that’s meaningful and legitimate, they’re all over it.
I tell people I met president Fox at a fundraiser, and I stood in line just to shake his hand.
I had no expectations.
I just wanted to meet him.
He said, so who are you and what do you do?
And I said, I’m Sam Caster.
I have a not for profit organization that provides medically fragile children with a technology that changes their lives.
And he said, what are you doing to Mexico?
And I said, well, not doing much because I haven’t found the right distribution partner.
And this is what he said.
Do you think my wife and I would qualify?
So I’m just saying, you know, when you start saving the lives of children, you can have a meaningful conversation with anybody, anywhere, anytime.
Now they may not ultimately want to do our business with us.
That’s okay.
But they’re not gonna say, oh, you’re in one of those saving the lives of children things I get.
That doesn’t happen to us.
Yeah, Craig.
I I think it’s it’s a unique situation that we have where we not only have the number one most innovative scientifically based technology to solve the problem, but we have three decades of experience of providing that to the world’s most vulnerable children, which is the other half of the give one.
That’s one thing that Stanford Business Review shared.
They said, Tom’s had no capacity for what they were gonna do with all these shoes.
Had no idea.
They were just coming in by the boatload, and it’s just like throw boxes, you know, cases, crates, containers of them off over here and over here.
Just…
They just didn’t have an organized effort to effectively…
So that was some of the good, the bad, and the ugly with that with that model.
But we’ve got it all in alignment.
There’s nothing we can’t accomplish.
You can’t outproduce our potential to give.
We have too many people around the world that are already in line to help us with this after three decades of work.
This is crazy.
There is no reason why they shouldn’t write books about what we’re going to accomplish, Craig, because it’s gonna be phenomenal.
Well, Sam, I mean, this is a fascinating call, tonight.
And I love how you finished what we’re doing.
And, usually, we get to see the news or stories of companies, and nobody gets to participate with that.
But when you said we are doing, literally, you’re talking about everybody on this call.
It is a people movement.
We’re all participating in this, so it’s so cool to be part of something where we’re experiencing it together.
For each product we order, we’re making an impact.
For each customer we share this with and grow this, we’re making this impact as a collective group.
So for anybody listening tonight, the name of the company, love is in the center of the name of the company.
It’s q love a, so Alovéa.
It really is, and I love the tagline, whoever first said it.
Love is in the center of everything we do.
And at the end of the day, we would love for everybody on this call watching the video or watching the recording or participating to to join this movement.
And like you said, Sam, you can become a customer.
That is a great way.
Stop drinking, like, Red Bull or whatever you may be doing.
Switch it to one of our products.
It makes sense.
Right?
You know, you’re doing your own body good, but then you’re also doing this good with Buy One Nurse one.
And we would love to have you partnered with us.
You could join us an affiliate.
You can become a social business partner.
And if you are a coach or trainer, athlete, or a health care professional, we have a unique program that’s a unique sponsorship program that would create that alignment.
So there’s multiple ways to partner with us.
And, Sam, what a great kind of way to pitch to understand the vision of who we really are and how we got to where we’re going.
But I think what’s really exciting is where we’re going, and it’s gonna be an exciting future.