Shaunda Brown: The Formula to Create Social Impact
On episode 12, we unlock the secrets to driving real change through social impact work with Shaunda Brown, a world traveler, entrepreneur, adventurer and community builder. Before beginning her world travels a year and a half ago, she worked with Sofi to build a startup into a $5 billion fin tech company to provide student loan benefits for Americans and founded Goddess Institute to empower women to connect with their divine feminine through exploring their conscious sexuality. Since then, her natural entrepreneurialism and love for Mama Bali led her to pursue many impact-driven projects including co-creating Bali Live (a virtual festival series to raise funds for Balinese livelihood who have been severely impacted by COVID-19), the End of Life Collective at Roundglass (to support end of life conversations and transform this terrain into one of deep engagement) and researching an approach with Circles to implement Universal Basic Income in Bali to create a potentially better financial system.
In just days following the success of Bali Live #2, which raised $27k for the Balinese farmers, we sat down with Shaunda to celebrate and dish out about all things community, impact and purpose driven work for the love of humans, including:
What it was like to work at SoFi and drive the growth that enabled the startup to have significant impact on mounting student loans
The catalyst that inspired Goddess Institute into being, and Shaunda’s personal practices for connecting to higher consciousness
Her experience volunteering in the slums of Bangalore, and how this sparked activism to be the change
With tourism wiped out in Bali (which historically supports 80% of the local economy), what the state of food security looks like today and how Bali Live (and its partners) has impacted those hardest hit
With tourism spending not likely to return to pre-crisis levels until 2024 (putting as many as 120 million jobs at risk), the need for building local economy from the inside out — and potential for administering universal basic income using blockchain technology for the long-term financial health of the Balinese
COVID represents both literally and metaphorical death, which has forced us all to confront our mortality — what we can learn about this process with more grace, ease and consciousness, and how Shaunda’s End of Life program is tackling just that
More about the show: https://www.digseedgrow.com/thealtnormal-podcast
Produced by Resonance™, the creative practice of Dig | Seed | Grow
While stakeholder capitalism has been around since the 1970s, it’s only recently this model has taken off. That said, most corporations still struggle to have real impact considering their fragmented ecosystem of business objectives and structured give back programs like ESG and CSR. If sustainability is no longer a ‘nice to have’ but rather a ‘must have’ by consumer demand, how can corporations make sustainability the most SUSTAINABLE practice?