If you'd liketo learn more or connect, please do at http://DrChrisStout.com. You can followme on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drchrisstout/. Joinmy email list to keep in touch: https://tinyurl.com/ALifeInFullSubscription Tools and mypodcast are available via http://ALifeInFull.org.

If you'd liketo learn more or connect, please do at http://DrChrisStout.com. You can followme on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drchrisstout/. Joinmy email list to keep in touch: https://tinyurl.com/ALifeInFullSubscription Tools and mypodcast are available via http://ALifeInFull.org.

I've written a variety of different places about what I call being an accidental humanitarian. I first I had a goal some years ago to climb the Seven Summits, the tallest mountain on each of the seven continents. And I was doing Tanzania, which is a good starter, one back in the early nineties and met a fellow who was a porter on the on the climb with me. And in that process, we got to know each other. He want me to try and teach him some English. I wanted him to try and teach me some Swahili on. We really kind of bonded around them. And he was working as a porter to kind of put himself through school to the eventually become a priest. So we kept in touch back in the nineties. It was very primitive pre email, things like that. So we were, uh, kind of wanting to do things to be able to be helpful with him. We kept in touch, and over time he got he became a priest and got involved with working with orphaned Children in Tanzania. And one of the things that we wanted to do was to be able to help support them. So we would send over materials, education, materials that then evolved into funds. And with those funds, then they were able to develop a kindergarten and some other projects. I'm sure we'll talk about in this conversation. So it really wasn't by any strategic kind of way that I wanted to go out and create this. It just sort of organically happened. And hence I call it accidental humanitarian. And basically I was kind of funding everything out of my own pocket, which was fine. Everything was all very modest. But my mentor at the time said to me, You know, you could keep funding this, but what you really need to do is, you know, kind of step it up a notch and become a legitimate Bible one c three. So I said, I have no idea how to do that, He said, Cock. My wife, who was an attorney. Hey was an attorney as well, and they then helped pro Bono put through all the forms and people working things that you have to submit for us in the state of Illinois to incorporate and then to subsequently send off Thio. The federal government to the Internal Revenue Service Department Treasury to get sort of get vetted and certified. And then that was really the start of becoming an official. 501 c three.

um, I'll probably maybe dial back the scope of things. We, um our ethos was and continues to be that we are. We're the people that someone might contact if they need help. We didn't go out, you know, kind of searching for projects or anything like that. We didn't throw a dart on the map and say, Let's go to tens In the end, let's go to Bolivia, etcetera. We had some kind of contacts or some kind of way through our network of friends and colleagues and said, Hey, we know that you do this kind of work or we think you do this kind of work. Could you help us? Or could you connect us with somebody that could be helpful with that? So we started off with a number of projects over the first couple of years. None of them were exactly full time projects, and we're again an all volunteer organization. So myself and everyone else that works at the center are all donating our time and volunteering. No one gets any kind of compensation for it, which again is kind of part of our model that any every dollar that comes into the center gets spent on the work of the center. It doesn't, you know, cover overhead and things like that. So anyway, we got up to about our sixth project and someone had come to us and said, We want to do a project in Ukraine. They wanted us to partner with them on a U S A. I D. Grant. They told us about what they needed, and it was a three year commitment of the grant was funded and would require one of the members of our center probably me being trained as a psychologist to go over each quarter so four times a year of the course of three years to do evaluations in these orphanages. And, you know, I kind of like, look sideways that my colleagues, because the time there would be 2 to 3 weeks and I didn't have you know, I had a day job. I didn't have two or three weeks every quarter toe, you know, to go to Kiev and and work on this project. So and nor did anyone else in our organization. So the the outcome of that was that they didn't get funding, which is not good, but the other outcome was that we did. Our center did a major pivot. We realized that relatively quickly. We kind of maxed out on our capacity, our scalability. And I was thinking, Well, this is great, you know, kind of tripping right out of the gates. So we put our board together, but our brains together, put our heads together and came up with our pivot of saying the board had said to me, You guys, you have put together a lot of tools, A lot of things. You've learned a lot. You've learned how to become a 501 c three, all of those air tools that can help others go out and do their projects or can help others become and build their own 501 c three. So take that concept and what we then kind of framed it as is open sourcing, humanitarian intervention. So everything we do in those instances of sharing materials, etcetera are all done free of charge to anyone that you know, comes to our website and looks at that are reaches out to me. So that was kind of our Our first start was really kind of kind of making difficult, but all sort of organically starting

together aboard, as you know, do not allow nonprofits to. And we had a kind of ah directors board and advisory board, and so it really kind of the first things that I did. It was sort of like I started off on projects and was kind of doing that all by myself. And then once we became a 501 c three, we, you know, enlisted the help and brain power of others. But again, it was just sort of organic. I didn't. I went out to people that I knew, um, that I knew had worked in the space, maybe in a different kind of area, maybe more nonprofit education, but generally internationally involved and asked them for help. I was also deeply graduate program that had an opportunity to have students be involved in research. So, um, I got about four or five students that were just excellent, and we went out and started interviewing some of the non profits that I had felt were really terrific places. Doctors without Borders, um, Amnesty International, etcetera, some of the big names, but then also some of the smaller organizations as well, and we put all that together and created a book called The New Humanitarians and the New Humanitarian sort of became our guide book to say here, Cem, models of kind of what we could do with that and how we could start developing our own projects. We learned from people what didn't go well and then what we could then do to try to avoid that.