‍[00:04] Jennifer Wu: Hi everyone, thanks for listening to The Founder Spirit podcast. I'm your host, Jennifer Wu. In this podcast series, I interview exceptional individuals from all over the world with the Founder Spirit, ranging from social entrepreneurs, tech founders, to philanthropists, elite athletes, and more. Together, we'll uncover not only how they manage to succeed in face of multiple challenges, but also who they are as people and their human story.

If this podcast has been beneficial or valuable to you, feel free to become a patron and support us on Patreon.com, that is P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com/TheFounderSpirit. As always, you can find us on Apple, Google, Amazon and Spotify, as well as social media and our website at TheFounderSpirit.com.

The following episode was recorded during the 2023 Villars Symposium held by the Villars Institute, where I recorded several short interviews over a period of 3 days. The Founder Spirit Podcast is proud to be a partner of the Villars Institute, a nonprofit foundation focused on accelerating the transition to a net zero economy and restoring planetary health.

“The lesson in all of that was to work in something immediate and physical, where you are present completely, helps you to build that skill of being incredibly present in the work that you do, even in a crazy, chaotic environment. So that stood me very well in my work at Barefoot (College). The more we are comfortable and can assimilate risk and navigate through stressful or riskier situations, the more solid and resilient we are as entrepreneurs.”

“So I went looking for a model for renewable energy right at the equator, I knew we should be having solar there. And I looked at about six different organizations and I went to Barefoot (College). And the minute I arrived, I saw that this was an approach that made sense to me. Suddenly I was in this Gandhian environment, and it was the only solution I had seen that was really imparting both dignity, but also enormous confidence and competence to women who could not read and write. And it just blew my mind that we had gotten education so wrong that we were making all these assumptions about who could learn and who should be part of the solution. And here were these women under-utilized all over the world who were actually a solution.”

Joining us today is Meagan Fallone, an award-winning social entrepreneur, former CEO and now Board Member of Barefoot College International, and Founder of Step Up Advisers. 

A dedicated social innovation and development professional, she is skilled in working to solve complex development and humanitarian challenges across silos, systems and cultures. 

Passionate and committed to action and results, Meagan is a Schwab Foundation Social Entrepreneur and has been distinguished with the Hillary Laureate Award for her global leadership on poverty reduction, climate change, social justice and economic empowerment of women. 

A native New Zealander and a former mountaineer, Meagan is currently also serving as first Entrepreneur-in-Residence and Executive Advisor on Climate Justice at CARE.

Welcome to the Founder Spirit podcast! We're recording live today from Villars Symposium 2023. Thank you, Meagan, for joining us today. 

[03:45] Meagan Fallone: Thanks so much.

[03:46] Jennifer: Meagan, you had spent the first 15 years growing up in New Zealand. What were some of the formative experiences growing up?

[03:56] Meagan: New Zealand is a small country like Switzerland, but the extraordinary thing is that you have always the sea and the mountains. So this reality of having nature be so present and part of my childhood has absolutely continued to be my grounding place, I think, for also my work. And so I'm a huge fan of retreating to either the sea or the mountains when I need to solve something or I need to find the energy to go at a problem.Those are probably the things that I carry with me from New Zealand. 

But also we have such a rich Indigenous culture. The Maori are part and parcel of everything in New Zealand. And so this awareness and this respect for the original owners of the land and the stewards of the land is something that we grow up with in New Zealand. And something that, again, has carried with me and that I recognize in so many other cultures now, as I've worked around the world. 

And I think New Zealanders have a very particular spirit and the way they approach life. It's a culture that embraces life to work, maybe not work to live. And I love that, I think that's a wonderful attitude. 

[05:21] Jennifer: The indigenous cultures are much more connected to the land than who we are today in the modern world. Why do you think we have lost that connection and what can we do to correct the course? 

[05:37] Meagan: Yeah, well, I think those are different answers for the Global South and for the Global North. 

There's a Maori proverb where a child goes to the grandmother and says, grandmother, what is the most important thing in the world? And she answers the people, the people, the people. So while Indigenous cultures have this strong connection to nature, they also have that strong connection to community and to each other, and that mutual respect and responsibility of caring for each other. 

So that's something I love that spirit of thinking about indigenous stewardship of many things. And they see themselves as stewards, not as the extractor or the person to take advantage. They see themselves as a guardian, and that is a fundamental difference from our developed world way of thinking about things. 

We see ourselves as consumers and able to buy what we want and what we need, and I think that fundamentally separates us. So the ownership is quite far from us as individuals. 

So I think this is one of the things that needs to be healed, if I say that in a spiritual sense. I think we all need to connect the things we use and touch and feel and buy in a really serious way now and to take personal responsibility for those choices in the same way that an indigenous person will really think long and hard before cutting something down or tilling a field or taking water from a water source. 

[07:12] Jennifer: I agree with you on that, because it's a different value system, and we all need to go back to that indigenous value system. 

Meagan, you've had a very rich and versatile life. Before becoming the CEO of Barefoot College, you had founded two businesses, you were an art dealer and you also were the founder of a heli-skiing expedition company. Those are two very different businesses to what you ended up doing at Barefoot College. So what inspired you to found totally different businesses? 

[07:53] Meagan: Yes, I know it sounds, when you put it that way, it sounds a bit divergent, but actually not. At heart, I'm such an entrepreneur, but the what doesn't really matter. 

In the one case, I had an opportunity to work in something I loved and was passionate about and that's been the thread all the way through. So that's what connects everything is that I was passionate about art and about design. I was always a design thinker and that's my undergraduate degree. And so I tend to see things as design exercises, no matter what they are. 

And the artwork and accessories company really was a journey of looking at locally produced products by artisans, many of them women. And I sourced very unique artwork and unique products for hotels, the purpose there was to give work and income to artisans and women who I wanted to support very badly and understood their problem - their bottleneck was getting to markets. 

So I had the opportunity to access those markets in a sense, and then I matched that with the women and the artisans that I was seeing. Now, in the process of that, I did an awful lot of traveling in the developing world, through places like Cuba or Indonesia or Nepal or Bhutan, and then turned into a global art source and the art consulting business. 

But the heli-ski company came purely from my passion for skiing and the mountains here in Switzerland, where I can proudly say I have climbed all the 4,000 meters peaks in Europe. I am somebody who finds a lot of peace in being in the mountains, and I had the opportunity to help some very wonderful mountain guides who had access to landing sites but didn't know how to set up a business. And so I worked with them for about two years to help them set up that business. I worked at the business, I understood what it was to take 60 individuals up a mountain in a helicopter every day and worry about avalanche and safety. 

So the lesson in all of that was to work in something immediate and physical, where you are present completely, helps you to build that skill of being incredibly present in the work that you do, even in a crazy, chaotic environment. So that stood me very well in my work at Barefoot (College). I also think that for all of us redefining risk is very important. The more we are comfortable and can assimilate risk and navigate through stressful or riskier situations, the more solid and resilient we are as entrepreneurs. So I took so many things from that experience.

[10:42] Jennifer: I'm curious, how did you come upon the job as the CEO of Barefoot College? 

[10:48] Meagan: I was producing some embroideries in a village in East Africa, in Zanzibar, and the women could not deliver on time. It was one of the first times that I'd ever had a problem with women delivering. They always deliver, even if they need to work through the night, get all their girlfriends together to make it happen. This is how we are as women. 

And so I got on a plane and I went there and I saw that actually they had no access to light. So they were doing this incredibly detailed embroidery with a little wick floating in a tin can and some horrible kerosene that was shooting off this black smoke. And 50 meters away there were power poles, and I could not understand, wait a minute, this is not right. I went to the government and they told me it would be $350 to connect from the power pole to these very poor houses. And I said, well, okay, that's why that's not working. 

And I began to ask the community, what were they spending on kerosene and how much were they spending. And what I realized is they were keeping themselves poor just to have this energy access that was so basic and so unhealthy and almost impossible to work, and even more impossible to help your children with schoolwork. 

And so I went looking for a model for renewable energy right at the equator, I knew we should be having solar there. And I looked at about six different organizations and I went to Barefoot (College). And the minute I arrived, I saw that this was an approach that made sense to me. Because remember, I was not a development professional, I was thinking like a business person and a tactical person. 

Suddenly I was in this Gandhian environment, and it was the only solution I had seen that was really imparting both dignity, but also enormous confidence and competence to women who could not read and write. And it just blew my mind that we had gotten education so wrong that we were making all these assumptions about who could learn and who should be part of the solution. And here were these women underutilized all over the world who were actually a solution. And Barefoot (College) was one of the few places I saw that was doing that. 

So I'll confess, I decided to fund a project to do that, so I was a donor. When you're a donor, you become very, very on the details. 

[13:13] Jennifer: You get noticed, I believe. 

[13:15] Meagan: Exactly, I got noticed and I asked how much the project would cost and they couldn't tell me - that was step one. So I went into it a bit blindly - again, risk, okay, let's go. 

And I followed those women (that) I selected with the founder over their journey and was just amazed at what happened. In the end, the project cost me a lot more than I thought it would. And happily, some friends from Geneva joined to help support that project. And at the end, I had spent a lot of time with the founder in understanding his vision and I knew he had a vision for scale. And at the same time, I knew if it kept going the way it was, it was never going to reach that scale, because they didn't have a codified approach, they had a very ad hoc fundraising, way of working. 

They were going to need to structure themselves for scale, because scale is a different journey than a 1-on-1 journey. And they were really at that point of inflection. And so I wrote a note to the founder and spoke to him a few times and said, I don't think you're going to do it without a different approach. And his response was not to hang up the phone on me, but to say, then you'll come and fix it. And so I went for a six-month internship that turned into more than a decade. 

[14:36] Jennifer: That's right, a six-month internship that turned into a ten year adventure (chuckles), and you took over his job. Speaking of scale, you managed to triple the size of Barefoot College to 93 countries. And how did you do that? 

[14:50] Meagan: At Barefoot, we were working in a systems change model, and I was doing that initially without understanding that it was even a thing. It really took me being part of the social entrepreneurship community to start to understand that. 

And we had a real advantage at Barefoot because the government of India, through its Ministry of External Affairs Development Partnerships, had a program to train women from developing countries. So they funded that training for many years, and during that time, it gave me the opportunity to go into new countries with the entry point being the embassy. 

So not that they necessarily did anything in terms of lifting or work around the project, but if I needed to meet the Minister of Agriculture, the Minister of Education, the Minister of Energy, the Minister of Environment, I had a conduit to do that. So I learned pretty quickly to find my allies for entering a new country. 

And then the entire model that we used for scale was to leverage all of the wonderful grassroots organizations that already have beautiful operations in a country that have access to communities, that have the trust of those communities. 

So we didn't try to be an organization who came in and made our presence the headline. We wanted to come in and support the local organizations to be able to implement the project in the culturally and localized appropriate way for that location. So I think there were a couple of things in there that really have been key to achieving that systems change. 

The result in the end is that today there are Barefoot Colleges in Guatemala, Senegal, Zanzibar, Burkina Faso and Fiji. And all of those are joint ventures with governments, which means that the government has become a full partner in the work we do. In some cases a funding partner, but in other cases just a facilitating and a supporting partner. And then we brought private sector as well as philanthropic funds to help fund that decentralized training. 

And now, I would say Barefoot is on a second generation, where the local managers of those centers are now raising their own funds locally, designing their own curriculums and their own programs locally. And I think that was really my dream was to see the mindset and the methodology become the institution, not the bricks and mortar or one individual, to really see that movement be able to stand on its own. For me, that's how I have defined success. 

[17:36] Jennifer: And in scaling that organization, what were some of the tough challenges that you had encountered along the way? 

[17:44] Meagan: Yeah, a lot of them were organizational challenges. Because as you scale, you need different people, or you need additional people. You have different compliances and different financial needs, you need different types of capital. You need to be able to really understand with distance tactically and strategically what you're doing. And that was a big shift for the organization. 

We needed to professionalize some things in order just to manage a supply chain office that was shipping containers all over the world. You can imagine the growth from a commercial point of view. And we couldn't take those things lightly, we had to rise to that. Even though in some moments, those butted heads with the founding values and (the) idea of the organization. 

But I equate it to having children. You produce these children and they're incredible and they're wonderful. And when they're babies, they're very compliant in some sense, and you can sort of force your will on them to a certain extent. And then there's this moment when you realize you've lost the battle, when they are thinking for themselves and acting for themselves and doing for themselves, and half of what they say and do you're like, oh my goodness, how can they be thinking that? And the other half of them, you're like, just amazed at how great they are. 

But either way, you love them and you accept that growth demands a temporary loss of security in a relationship. And that's the key, is, you need to really trust that if you've put the right DNA in place, you put the right pieces and the right people in place, that they will create something better than you imagined in the end. (It) doesn't mean they won't fall, doesn't mean they won't make mistakes, but they will continue on in a positive forward direction. 

[19:13] Jennifer: You know, it's funny, I thought I was the only one who equates parenthood with entrepreneurship because I always tell people it's a journey and you don't know what you're going to get, and you just have to figure it out along the way. No matter what, you have to continue. And many times you make mistakes, but they're not fatal, so you learn from those mistakes. 

I wanted to ask you about your new exciting venture - can you tell us a little bit about that? 

[20:05] Meagan: So after leaving the CEO role at Barefoot, I stepped into a for-profit agri-food company to build with them a digital application for smallholder farmers, to help move smallholder farmers towards regenerative practice and better land stewardship, and to hopefully develop a platform and marketplace that would feature localized, climate friendly inputs for farmers, because this is really an urgent need now. 

And really I was interested in how do we build a piece of technology for no- to low literacy users, first of all, that would be delightful and interesting and would offer curated content that was science based, but at the same time completely mastered for a rural farmer in modalities they would enjoy watching. Like, two farmers having a conversation about a new product, or two farmers learning from each other a mistake that one of them had made. I think these are powerful ways of communicating. 

And in rural context, there's such a low level of content, any kind of digital content available for consumers in rural areas - they end up with advertisements or really bad content. And so it felt like there was an opportunity there and that also gave me an opportunity to work as a corporate social intrapreneur. I developed their ESG strategy and worked on developing some changes in their supply chain to move towards a nature-positive and net-zero direction. 

And (it) was probably the most humbling experience of my life to have been somebody that maybe threw a few darts at private sector actors, and then to find out just how hard it is to move and change things from within a company, how many barriers and compliances and financial challenges there are to moving in the right direction. And so I think it's really deepened my knowledge base, which I think is a positive thing. 

And as I stepped out of that to take up the Entrepreneur In Residence job with CARE, it was again to look at how can we take entrepreneurial thinking into places that maybe haven't had that or have grown beyond that, and remind them about the value of having agility, perseverance, a crazy idea, thinking bigger, disrupting in really positive ways to give people the energy to move a little faster because the problems now need us to move fast. 

And so CARE has this incredible reach and opportunity to meet this moment of scale, but has also a lot of very calcified systems and ways of doing things. And those systems serve all of us because they serve to protect and reduce risk on some of the big bet programs that we do, but they also stop us from reacting quickly. And so I'm trying to bring all the skills from all the different roles I've had into this team who are just brilliant and to see how I can serve them in that environment in a way that will serve others at scale. 

So yes, we're going to launch the CARE Climate Accelerator next month and that will have a really dramatic impact and an opportunity to go to large scale with many of the successful solutions, not only ours, but other social entrepreneurs. And we're going to be looking at climate finance as well as women and girls leadership on the ground and how our CARE programs can really drive better leadership on climate.

And then lastly, we're going to work on technology. So I've brought my learning from my digital product with smallholder farmers through the Microsoft Entrepreneurship for Positive Impact Accelerator. And together with the Microsoft team, we are going to build a digital product that will enable many of CARE's programs. And so I'm really excited about the next year ahead. 

[24:15] Jennifer: Congratulations and also best of luck to you, Meagan. 

We're now in the second day of the Villars Symposium. Can you tell us what have been some of your key takeaways so far? 

[24:29] Meagan: Villars (Symposium) is a wonderful event. It's wonderful because what we are able to do here is to bring together multigenerational leadership. 

And that may sound strange to people listening, but there are high school young adults, 14 to 18, who have ideas you would never imagine. Not only do they have ideas, they've actioned them - they've built prototypes; they're serving other people in their school, they're serving their communities, they're working with companies directly. And I just think that it's such an example of the opportunity and hope that we can harness and bring together these kinds of dialogues. 

Villars is special because it allows them to sit side by side in the same status in the same environment and to have those very equal conversations. There are very few organizations around the world that really give young people that platform. By the same token, they have access to some of the best thought leaders in the climate space. This morning we heard Johan Rockstrom (a well-known climate scientist) speak, as usual, about where we are and the complexity of transitioning and protecting our planetary boundaries. 

And I think it's important for young people to understand it's not easy to go where we must go now. It's not going to be without challenges and barriers and hurdles. So they need to understand that and see that with eyes wide open, so they cannot be discouraged as they move forward with whatever their projects are. So I think that was really a great moment. 

I really really enjoyed some of the sessions that have happened here. The workshops. There was a game on nature positive and biodiversity and net-zero today, run by (Professor) Cameron Halford from Oxford, and that was just fantastic and I think really energizing for the students and adults who participated in that. We saw some young musicians, we've had some deep conversations about artificial intelligence and generative AI, which are important conversations. 

The world that our young people are going to inherit will not be where we've come from, and they need to understand and start to be able to absorb and integrate these new technologies in everything they're doing and to understand the implications. So I think that was very positive. 

[26:55] Jennifer: And speaking of transitioning into a nature-positive economy, you are moderating tomorrow's plenary session on the role of investment and finance in that transition. Can you give us a small peek into what will be discussed? 

[27:14] Meagan: We have a stellar panel and we're going to look at not only the economics of where we're at and how our economic system is currently set up and working. 

We're going to look with Keith Tuffley at how Citibank is managing with their clients specific examples of how they're managing transitions and success stories, as well as difficult stories. We're going to talk with Deloitte about how they are thinking in terms of supporting organizations with best practices and guides, how they're able to think through some of the risks looking at board governance and other things in order to advance what is currently not moving fast enough. We're going to wrap up with the newest board member of ExxonMobil and we're going to talk about fossil fuels and have that debate and get the elephant in the room out onto the table.

I think the thread running through in our preliminary discussions as a group has been the misalignments of incentives, the lack of creative financing that's happening, the asymmetries in skill availability and the lack of mechanisms for collecting data and ensuring transparency and accountability. And that all of those things are really working quite badly to arrest the speed of forward transformation. 

And then I think we will touch at the end on a carbon price and biodiversity price, which I think we all collectively feel is the absolute minimum thing we've got to do now to trigger everybody in the system to start thinking differently. 

[29:00] Jennifer: Speaking of carbon price, it's a concept that's actually existed since the 60s. Because if you think about how we have evolved in terms of industrial development, we've paid a price for extracting resources and transporting those resources, but we've never paid a price (for) the extraction and the damage that we've caused to nature. So I think it's really important to put that into context. 

[29:31] Meagan: Absolutely. And I would add to that the conversation around climate justice is a broad conversation. It's not just one conversation and it's justice with our planet as well as it is justice to correct the asymmetries and imbalances about the causal effects on different geographies and different people in different situations. 

And we've heard a lot about what's been committed monetarily to correcting those things, but that money is not flowing yet. And I think that's one of my concerns now is the lack of follow through on financial commitments around climate justice. And I think everybody's sort of looking the other way thinking maybe somebody else will solve this for me, but that's not going to happen. And that's our biggest risk, that we think somebody else will solve the problem for us. 

Each and every one of us has to be a solution. And that includes everybody in a refugee camp and it includes everybody in sacred rainforest and it includes everybody who fishes from the sea and everybody who lives in a major city. Well, we have a little bit of a PR problem because I think we haven't communicated that universalness of this challenge to the world in the way we should have. 

[30:49] Jennifer: You definitely hit the nail on the head. I think we have to come together just in face of planetary boundaries the same way that we came together during the times of Covid. So it is actually possible that we could drop everything and start working on a solution, or in this case, multiple solutions to solve climate change. 

Last but not least, what does the Founder Spirit mean to you? 

[30:58] Meagan: I think Founder Spirit is about ownership for what you do, and it's about putting yourself out there to take responsibility for serving a problem that's larger than you are. 

Founders, by their nature, are visionaries in a way, but they're also stewards, they're also servant leaders, or they should be. And most importantly, they are catalysts. Being a founder means sometimes, yes you pull the bus up the hill, but other times you catalyze 100 other people to pull the bus up the hill. 

And being able to trust, being able to see yourself out of that role eventually and to see that as a success and not a failure, and to realize that the world is changing all the time, it’s an organic living thing. So as a founder, we can't think that our role is set in stone and we are always going to be that thing we have to change with and at pace with, and continue to reevaluate where we sit in that equation. 

For me, it means you really commit yourself to follow through and to own something, with passion and purpose, of course. 

[32:30] Jennifer: Meagan, I want to thank you very much for joining us today, it's been a pleasure. 

[32:33] Meagan: Thank you so much. 

[32:35] Jennifer: If this podcast has been beneficial or valuable to you, feel free to become a patron and support us on Patreon.com, that is P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com/TheFounderSpirit. As always, you can find us on Apple, Google, Amazon and Spotify, as well as social media and our website at TheFounderSpirit.com.

The Founder Spirit Podcast is proud to be a partner of the Villars Institute, a nonprofit foundation focused on accelerating the transition to a net-zero economy and restoring planetary health.

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