Adam Morris - Find Your Agency to Create Change

[00:00:10] Dominique: Hello. Welcome to Green Champions.

[00:00:13] Adam: Thank you for joining us in a conversation with real people, making real environmental change in the work that they do. I'm here with Dominique, the sustainability expert.

[00:00:22] Dominique: And I am so glad to be here alongside Adam, the social enterprise extraordinaire.

[00:00:26] Dominique: Today we're gonna dive into Adam's story, but we bring you guests who saw the potential for impact in their job or community and did something about it.

[00:00:34] Adam: From entrepreneurs to artists, scientists to activists. This podcast is a platform for Green Champions to share the stories and plant new ideas.

[00:00:42] Dominique: So whether you're tuning in during a beautiful walk in the neighborhood, maybe you're just taking a little break between driving from place to place or maybe you're just enjoying this during your daily commute.

[00:00:54] Dominique: Today we're gonna hear from Adam, my co-host. We're gonna dive into Adam's background, and while he's so excited to be, one, hosting Green Champions, but also learning about the world of sustainability. Hi Adam. Thanks for letting us hear from you today.

[00:01:08] Adam: I am really excited. Let's dive in.

[00:01:10] Dominique: All right, Adam, well get us started here. What do you do? What is day to day life for Adam?

[00:01:15] Adam: I wish I knew, So one, I'm really grateful that you're tuning in and listening to this because I wish I had a resource like this when I got started. I spent like 10 years trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life and I was so stuck. And finally I realized I needed more information. So I started people helping people, a podcast for social entrepreneurs who wanna start a social impact business. And that podcast really got me talking to leaders in the community who are running these social impact businesses. 

[00:01:46] Adam: That work took me to GiveBackHack where I was able to launch a work program for youth experiencing homelessness called Wild Tiger Tees. And it's brought me further in kind of working with the social enterprise community here in Columbus, Ohio.

[00:01:59] Dominique: Well, Adam has already established himself as the podcast pro, so if you do want more podcasts in your life, which I'm sure you do because you're here, go listen to People Helping People. I've been a guest with Adam on People Helping People.

[00:02:14] Dominique: That was kind of how we got started with Green Champions a little bit. And so yeah, Adam, that is a great podcast and we're very grateful for the work that you do. And Wild Tiger Tees is so cool, I have quite a few Wild Tiger Tees items in my home that you've, you've put together, so.

[00:02:29] Adam: This is really fun. And one, like the reason that I am here with Dominique who I really admire in the work that she's doing in the sustainability world here in Columbus, is that I keep talking to social entrepreneurs who are like, "Hey, I wanna make my business more sustainable." But they don't know where to turn and I don't know where to turn, but I care a lot and it's just like, I don't know how to even focus on this topic. 

[00:02:53] Dominique: Well, diving into kind of like this love you have for social enterprise, for one, is that a fair thing to say? 

[00:03:00] Adam: Yeah. 

[00:03:00] Dominique: Yeah?

[00:03:01] Adam: I'm very passionate about social enterprises.

[00:03:02] Dominique: Is that the first thing you fell in love with as a space to work? And then two, like why social enterprise? Why? Why is that a thing that you work so hard for and have really devoted your like career to be working in?

[00:03:17] Adam: Somebody asked me this recently and I was trying to figure out like, what is it that I actually like about social entrepreneurship? And what I realized was throughout my life, I used to volunteer a lot. In college I was volunteering two or three times a week at, you know, convalescent homes, shelters, all sorts of things and then, I moved around a lot, tried a lot of different things. When I was in London, I volunteered with this group called The Samaritans.

[00:03:40] Dominique: The Samaritans?

[00:03:41] Adam: The Samaritans, The Samaritans is a 24-hour suicide crisis line. So people calling in who are very lonely at different points of despair and have a place where they can talk and connect. Very challenging work, but I also really loved it and part of me was always trying to figure out of like, "Hey, how can I pull this sort of work where I'm talking to people out there in a community connecting with others into the work that I do?" 

[00:04:04] Adam: So social entrepreneurship for me is a manifestation of that. It's a way to say, "Hey, here's how I can have a career support myself," doing things that allow us to build community and connections. 'Cause there's so much wealth of knowledge and quite often we don't connect with people who are outside of our peer group. And this is a neat way to do that.

[00:04:24] Dominique: That is very, very cool. You also alluded to the fact that you lived in London, amidst doing some really important work. Thank you for the amazing things that you do, which are a lot. But I feel like you've also lived a lot of cool places. Where else have you lived, Adam? 

[00:04:38] Adam: I love it. I, well, let's see. I was born in Virginia. A lot of people don't know that. I lived in Michigan, Minnesota, Connecticut, Maryland, California, London, Germany. 

[00:04:48] Dominique: Wow. 

[00:04:49] Adam: My wife's from India, so I go to India a lot.

[00:04:51] Dominique: Wow. What was your favorite of all of those, and what was the shortest stay of all of those?

[00:04:59] Adam: Well, hands down, I love London. It is a beautiful city in the summer, not so much in the winter.

[00:05:05] Dominique: Hopefully London is not listening.

[00:05:08] Adam: Anybody who lives in London is not happy in February, okay. That's just the way it goes. It's great and miserable, um, but you get to it and it's a shared experience. What I loved about London was that people were outside. Like people walk, they bike, they get out and they talk to each other. Like after work, people go to the pub and they, they have a beer together. And I really loved being in that pulse of a big city. 

[00:05:32] Adam: So I think that's also a reason why I love the social entrepreneurship community here in Columbus is that feeling of people coming together and connecting about things that are about something bigger than themselves. And I think that's really where life starts to get fun. Like if you focus too much on yourself, after a while, it just doesn't feel right.

[00:05:50] Dominique: Yeah. That's really interesting. And what, what was your shortest stay of all the places you lived?

[00:05:56] Adam: Well, technically I, so I spent a year in Germany as a exchange student in high school, so that was probably the shortest stay. Followed by California where I was only there for three years.

[00:06:07] Dominique: Wow. Okay.

[00:06:09] Adam: So.

[00:06:09] Dominique: That's pretty cool though. 

[00:06:11] Dominique: When thinking about your journey into social enterprise and like really carving your path as someone who not only does social entrepreneurship work, but supports other social entrepreneurs, what is something that you wish you knew at the beginning of that journey, that you think you feel very confident about now?

[00:06:29] Adam: Well one thing that I really love is this idea that we have this agency inside of us to create change. I talk about this a lot 'cause I've experienced this with, uh, GiveBackHack.

[00:06:40] Adam: So GiveBackHack is a weekend launchpad for a social innovation. People come in, they pitch ideas of social enterprises they wanna start, and then they have the weekend to validate that idea and kind of develop an idea to get off the ground. 

[00:06:53] Adam: But the magic of it is quite often people have no idea even what a social enterprise is, right? They don't know that it's a business that is solving a social issue. They come from all these different backgrounds and they don't consider themselves entrepreneurs. Yet by the weekend, they get a flavor of what it means to work with a team and how they have this inherent ability inside themselves to actually take action and do something. And I really like, for me, this is so exciting that 'Hey, there's all this latent potential in all of us. Like you're sitting here listening to this podcast. There's so much that you can do and accomplish, and if we can shine a light on some ideas that help inspire that agency in you, that is so exciting to me.' So that's one thing that just fuels me and keeps me going.

[00:07:36] Dominique: Did somebody illuminate that for you? And I guess we talked about Wild Tiger Tees really, really briefly. But how'd you start wild Tiger Tees and what is Wild Tiger Tees?

[00:07:44] Adam: Yeah. I think Wild Tiger Tea is a great example of this because when I started my podcast, I was really lucky. Somebody put me in contact with Emily Savers over at the Columbus Foundation, and if you've never heard of Emily, she is one of the forces behind Columbus's social enterprise ecosystem, right? Back in 2008, when the market crashed, the grant funding dried up. So they were really struggling to give up money. Emily realized that if they could give money to nonprofits to start businesses that supported their activities, they wouldn't be reliant on that grant money year after year and they would be more self-sufficient. 

[00:08:22] Dominique: They being the Columbus Foundation?

[00:08:24] Adam: Yeah, so Columbus Foundation was very intentional about building the social enterprise ecosystem and Emily brought together a lot of different people and helped build that initial community. Somebody introduced me to her and I sat down and I was like, I'm starting a, a podcast on social entrepreneurship. She was like, "Here are the people that you need to talk to". Made a list. Then we were meeting in the Roosevelt Coffeehouse, of course, and then she turned to her right and was like, "And here's Kenny Sipes, founder of Roosevelt Coffeehouse, which is a great nonprofit social enterprise here in town. You should talk to him." And Kenny was like, "Sure, let's do a podcast together." 

[00:08:59] Adam: On that initial list was ambitious- the CEO of the Star House. The Star House is a a very cool drop in center for youth experiencing homelessness. Age 14 to 24 here in Columbus, Ohio. They have a 1000 to 1500 unique youth coming through their doors every year. And so I went and recorded a podcast with Anne and I fell in love with their facility. Just the way that they collaborated with people. Got feedback from the youth to develop programs. And on that, Anne mentioned, "Hey, we'd really love to start a work program inside the Star House." That idea just kind of sat in the back of my head until I showed up at GiveBackHack six months later and that's how I pitched an idea for a work program.

[00:09:39] Dominique: So Wild Tiger Tees is that work program?

[00:09:41] Adam: So Wild Tiger Tees. Yeah. So a few months later I, I ended up at Give Back hack and I pitched this idea for a work program, which is what turned into Wild Tiger Tees.

[00:09:51] Dominique: Okay. Really, really cool that, that, that's really cool and it's always cool to hear the different people that have helped, like either turn a light on or like pave a path that you wouldn't have like connected before. So that's very cool. What is Wild Tiger Tees, how does it work? What do you really do as a work program?

[00:10:10] Adam: So Wild Tiger Tees started as a screen printing company, we would go inside the Star House, work with three youth at a time, teach them how to screen print t-shirts. So we'd go out into the order, we would go out into the community, get orders, fulfill those orders, and then pay the youth for that work. But we were really focused on building team working skills, communication skills, kind of the basics of like, how do you show up in a job environment? Post pandemic, the T-shirt side of our business hasn't worked. So we now print mugs. We do a lot of different products and I support a lot of the work that's being done by Petals That Inspire.

[00:10:44] Adam: So those of you that know Amanda Greenwood, she runs a floral studio. We actually have the youth come into her studio for doing various programming. So in the last year, we've created a very consistent work program where every week they come in, they commit to four weeks. So we get to work with the youth for a longer period of time, really deepening their skills and helping support them in their own journeys.

[00:11:05] Dominique: Are there any other businesses some of our listeners might be familiar with that would be using Wild Tiger Tees supported merchandise?

[00:11:15] Adam: So one of our biggest supporters is Stauf's. They purchase mugs from Wild Tiger Tees and sell them in their shop. So if you're ever at Stauf's and you see these white mugs that have a line art design or a nice floral Stauf's design, those were actually printed by the youth in our program.

[00:11:28] Dominique: I love that. We always like to know how to support each other, so that's really cool. I know all people in Columbus are big fans of Stauf's coffee roasters, so.

[00:11:36] Adam: We have great coffee in town, which I think is one thing that makes Columbus really special. So many wonderful coffee shops here and they have a tendency of giving back to the community. So all the kind of independent coffee shops are very involved in community activities and I think that's so enlightening.

[00:11:52] Dominique: Yeah. As if coffee wasn't already good enough. They had to go to some good with it. That's really cool, Adam, thank you for sharing that. So then how do you feel like you craft this idea of like, agency? What was that like for you in terms of like, one, having the idea of agency to actually seeing yourself do it? What was helpful for you to like really take action?

[00:12:15] Adam: Yeah. It's funny because like my own journey of finding my own agency to create change, quite often, it's more of an internal journey into yourself, like realizing your own barriers of what's holding you back. And then understanding, "Hey, here's the things that I don't know, and just having that push to go out and figure it out."

[00:12:34] Adam: The turning point for me was when I started following my curiosity and I think understanding, "Hey, this is something that I'm curious about" is a huge driver for agency. 'Cause once you figured that thread of like, "Hey, I'm actually curious about this thing, I wanna find out more", and you follow that, things start happening that you just don't expect.

[00:12:54] Adam: Really neat things start happening because that curiosity is an open net. It's like saying, "Hey, anything is possible here. I'm just gonna pull out the thread and see what comes. But I'm not trying to force something to happen". And you're engaged because like you find it interesting. So if you're listening, if you are curious what your passion is in life or what you want to do, start noticing the things that you're curious about and then make some time to dive in deeper and don't try to force it to be something. It's already inside of you, you just have to follow it.

[00:13:23] Dominique: As someone who is so passionate about the idea of agency, people seeing it, knowing how to really wield it towards some really cool stuff, what are you most excited about when it comes to our Green Champions and talking about agency?

[00:13:36] Adam: So one thing I have found is the more that we connect to people with new ideas, the more really this really cool stuff happens. And I know so many people in the social impact space who wanna learn about sustainability, and I do too. There's this part of me, which is like, I know there's stuff going on in the world. I read the news. It's like, I don't like that. I wanna do something, but I don't know what. And so my hope is that by sharing all these cool stories of what people are doing successfully, it'll give us all more ideas of what we can do. And we're all gonna take action in our own way. 

[00:14:10] Adam: This is what I love about you, Dominique, is that you're very much like, "Hey, start with where you are. Find something that, that you can do and just get a little bit better at it."

[00:14:17] Adam: And so here we are together, just learning and exploring and getting better at things.

[00:14:21] Dominique: Well, Adam, I'm very excited. I think you bring so much perspective to all these conversations. I'm so excited to hear your really insightful questions. I think you have such a broad perspective on like what it means to create impact, and I'm really excited for you to bring that to our conversations with all of our Green Champions. To one, add a little bit of life to the conversation outside of the whole green space. But I think also like reminding us why we do stuff like this, why we care about it. And I'm excited for also for the listeners to get to hear you spin things towards this idea of agency because I think that's really important. I think it's a big part of the idea of Green Champions as we've both cared about it, is that it's for anybody, that title is open for anyone to grab, and it's better if seeing yourself in that space and like maybe it's because you haven't figured out the curiosity that you wield that is like special to you or your talent or whatever it is that like will make you feel like the space belongs to you. Do you feel like you agree with that?

[00:15:19] Adam: Totally. And if you're listening, like what you'll find is one, we wanna have fun on this podcast because that's the only way you really learn and develop that curiosity is by having fun. 

[00:15:28] Adam: But two, this is your podcast, you're part of this. So as you find topics which you're like, "Hey, I'd like to learn more about this", or, "I know this person, they're really interesting, I think they'd be a great guest in your podcast". Reach out, be part of this conversation that we're having. because it's only together that we're gonna create really awesome change in the world. 

[00:15:46] Dominique: Yeah, I agree. If you were excited to really tackle like one particular question with our time with our green champions, what is that one question you're really hoping to tackle? Give us a sneak peek into what Adam is so excited to talk about. 

[00:16:01] Adam: Well, I want to find a way to really magnify the amount of change that we're doing. So part of my hope is to actually just get a very broad overview of what's going on and say, "Hey, here are the ideas that we need to focus on most, and here's who we need to share those ideas with so that they know what to do."

[00:16:20] Dominique: Yeah, I fully agree. I think that's something we haven't even touched on at all in our chat so far. But I'm assuming we both care about too, is not only just discussing the success our Green Champions have had, which I think we both can relate to like where we've both been.

[00:16:33] Dominique: But a lot of this is about where we're all going. And getting to talk to our guests about, I know you've done this with some of our guests already, but being able to ask our guests like, "Where are the problems? Where's the opportunity? Where are we going next in this, with this journey of sustainability?"

[00:16:48] Dominique: And I think that speaks to that a lot of, what are we all doing together with what we know now, right? 

[00:16:53] Adam: Exactly.

[00:16:54] Dominique: And the news doesn't do a good job, or media doesn't do a good job of showcasing these like these champions at this level. So I think I'm excited about that. Also, like you said, magnifying the impact already, already happening. Like that's just so true. 

[00:17:06] Adam: And the news is very focused on Armageddon. It's like, "No, we wanna have some fun."

[00:17:11] Dominique: Yeah, hopefully this will be fun.

[00:17:12] Adam: Plus, like, I tell Dominique this all the time, but it's so much fun being in a room with Dominique and myself. The energy is so cool and we wanna bring you along and make you part of this because life is so much better when you have like something exciting going on. So welcome to this journey with us.

[00:17:26] Dominique: And hopefully you as a listener, maybe you're laughing at us like only a little bit, you know. That's fine. Laugh along with us.

[00:17:33] Adam: You can laugh at me all you want. People laugh at me all the time. I can take it.

[00:17:38] Dominique: Well thank you so much, Adam, for sharing so much about your background into starting to fall in love with the world of social enterprise, all the amazing places you've also lived, which is cool. And I look forward to being like you one day.

[00:17:49] Dominique: Also about how People Helping People got started. Give it a listen. And Wild Tiger Tees, go buy a mug and also what you're passionate about in terms of allowing people to see their agency in the world around them. So thank you for bringing that to the table and sharing that with us. And I am very excited for our future episodes of Green Champions and for all of our amazing guests to come. 

[00:18:13] Adam: As always, our guests have chosen because they have found a unique way to champion sustainability. We are here to put the names and stories behind the idea that no matter your background, career, or interests, you have the power to create sustainable change.

[00:18:25] Dominique: So if you know a Green Champion that should be one of our first guests, email us at thegreenchampions@gmail.com and to find out more, check out our show notes on thegreenchampions.com. Until next time, keep learning, keep growing, and keep championing for brighter, greener world.

[00:18:42] Dominique: Thanks Adam. 

[00:18:43] Adam: Thanks, Dominique,