Building Hope

What are some common mistakes or issues that you see among entrepreneurs who don't make it?

Who don't make it, and many don't, and many have very tough lives. One is the unwillingness to frankly realize that they can change reality, they accept the reality as it is given to them. And you see that especially in smallholder farmers. We today are working with, our organization's focus is changing to focus on to really our preferred client group is going from people who own about two dollars fifty to three dollars a day, to people who own less than two dollars a day or a dollar a day. About 80 percent of them are smallholder farmers, mostly in Africa, primarily in Africa. So when you come to meet these people you realize, you know, they have sort of resigned themselves to life. They accept reality will never change, the farm will only yield so much. The person who's buying their product will fleece them, constantly has for generations. That will never change. Their kids will never have any opportunity. Many of them will actually not even survive to teen years. So they just accept it as reality.

And part of our work, what we've discovered, by the way, that one of the most effective solutions to get people to want to do better is you could call it group therapy. But that's what it is. It's just groups, bring them together in small groups. And when they start to see one or two or three of them do better, then everybody wants to do better because nobody wants to get left behind. The peer pressure takes over. So that's the fun part of watching, you know, and participating with our clients in their life journeys is the sense of you don't have to go it alone.