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Hi, this is Tony McWilliams and I’m here with my daughter.
Hi, I’m Lindey Duckworth and I’m here with my dad.
One of the things that keeps coming up a lot is this idea of social business. So the charity part of this, the people giving dollars toward this, like do we need more? Is there enough money to go around to actually, can we help in a way that 7 million children will not die every year? Like that seems like a lot of kids. Can I just send money? Well, sure you can. You can send lots of money. You can send all your money. But the amount of money in charity is very, very limited. If you divided up all the money among all the best of the charities, they still couldn’t get the job done in terms of their mission.
And that’s really what frustrated Sam Caster because he had set up a nonprofit organization in 1999 to address this very thing that got him started with those Romanian orphans that I mentioned earlier. He set it up and then he had to go into fundraising mode. I had interviewed him on a podcast some years ago and I remember him telling me then that they got to the point where they were nourishing 50,000 kids a day with the donor base that they had at the time. But then economic bad times showed up, specifically 2008. And I said, what happened? He said, well, our donor base dwindled and we went from 50,000 kids a day to 20,000 kids a day. Wow.
So the fundraising word literally probably became begging? I’m sure he felt it that way. But he says, I’m not a fundraiser, but I am a businessman. So anyway, he spent years from 1999 to the time he founded it through 2008, 2009, 2010. That was when those years were pretty lean and bad economically. And those were the same years that your mom and I met Sam and Linda.
But it wasn’t until 2014 that I had him on the phone talking to him because between 2011, I think is when it started for him, and 2014, he started looking into social business as an answer, as a solution, as something that they could bring a resolve to this shortage that they were constantly having.
If you’re feeding kids, you need to be committed to feeding them every day.
Yeah, this isn’t seasonal.
No. As he put it, we couldn’t catch up next year.
Right. Oh, that’s really heartbreaking when you think about that.
Yeah. The loss, that breaking point.
Right. Momentum, and then all of a sudden, a cutoff. He had to field phone calls from people, you know, hey, don’t forget about us.
Right. From other orphanages literally around the world. I mean, they were reaching 90 countries of the world. Then all of a sudden, the bad economic times hit. He says we can recover. You know, we just make economic adjustments. But the orphans at the other end of the donation that they were giving, they’re the ones who lost out and whose lives and health were in danger.
So that’s the point where he started looking for something that was a little bit more sustainable with maybe heavier engines.