Four years ago, I thought I had a great idea that would fund itself. Coming out of the nonprofit world, I mistakenly believed that financing a for-profit business would be a lot easier than the donation-wringing of the nonprofit sector. After all, isn’t that the whole point of making a profit?

While fundraising for Kuli Kuli, I quickly found that while for-profit social enterprises should ultimately be self-sustaining, they rarely begin that way. Instead, different types of fundraising are needed at different stages as the business grows. Here’s what worked for me:

1. Put it to paper

Putting your idea to paper and submitting it to be torn apart by experienced judges is both a painful and useful process. There is a plethora of business plan competitions out there, and even the ones that don’t directly offer a financial prize can help connect you to investors in their network. The Mentor Capital Network falls in that category, providing an incredible amount of business plan feedback and access to a wide array of mentors and investors.

The Wild Gift Foundation provides a $10,000 prize to young, environmentally-oriented entrepreneurs, plus an unbeatable three-week wilderness trek. Ashoka’s Changemaker platform offers a range of opportunities from cash prizes to boot camps. And there are even more opportunities for students, ranging from the Global Social Venture Competition for MBA students to the $1 million Hult Prize.

Chances are, you won’t win most of these competitions (we certainly didn’t), but the process and the feedback you receive will be valuable in the long-run for developing your venture and increasing your prospects of getting funded.

2. Get with a program

After going through a business plan competition, you should have a solid plan on paper and perhaps a bit of funding as well. Now you need to build out your network. If I’ve learned anything through my own grueling fundraising process with Kuli Kuli, it is the importance of networks. Simply stated, people give money to people they like.

Joining an accelerator program is a great way to quickly build your network while learning a thing or two along the way. Similar to business plan competitions, accelerator programs vary in whether they supply funding directly or simply connect you to a network of investors. The Unreasonable Institute and Echoing Green are perhaps the best-known social enterprise accelerator programs, but there hundreds of other accelerators, many of which are searchable on the Enable Impact database.

3. Crowdfund

A lot of people launch crowdfunding campaigns too early with too little preparation and wonder why they fail. Before you launch your campaign, you should know exactly how much money you’ll need to launch your social enterprise and what the final product will look like. These are things that you should have researched through your business plan competition and refined through an accelerator program.

For Kuli Kuli, being ready to crowdfund meant researching bar manufacturers, printers and ingredient vendors to figure out exactly how much we’d need to crowdfund for our first manufacturing run. We then created a prototype so that all of our funders could get a sense of exactly what they would receive when they selected that perk for moringa bars. We also spent about three months planning our campaign.

As I’ve written before, you can crowdfund thousands of dollars in a short amount of time if you put in the proper amount of planning upfront. For best practices, check out Kickstarter and Indiegogo and, for some insider tips, see Mike del Ponte’s now classic “Hacking Kickstarter.”

Most likely your first funders will be your friends and family and, hopefully, your newfound supporters from your accelerator program. After those networks are tapped, if you plan your crowdfunding campaign right and offer some cool perks for donating, there is a good chance that the crowd will come through.

4. Get a loan

After you’ve launched your business with a crowdfunding campaign and delivered an awesome product to all your backers, you’re going to run out of money. Most likely, you’ll be too early-stage for investors and have tapped out friends and family contributions with your crowdfunding campaign. I’m going to go ahead and say it — I LOVE Kiva’s new Kiva Zip. Through Kiva Zip, social entrepreneurs can get a zero-interest loan of $5,000 to $20,000 in just a few weeks. Full disclosure: After being rejected by multiple banks, Kuli Kuli raised a $5,000 loan on Kiva (the maximum allowed for a first-time borrower). After paying that loan back, we just raised another $10,000.

Not only does Kiva offer zero-interest loans, but it also provides access to an engaged network of lenders with a high potential to become future customers. The downside, of course, is that $5,000 might not take you that far. For larger methods of financing, look into SBA and community bank loans or less traditional, newer methods like Accion and Lending Club.

5. Pitch and pray for an angel

Now that you’ve bootstrapped and hustled your way into a growing enterprise that credibly tested your idea on the market and gained positive feedback (known as a “proof of concept”), it’s time to find some investors. The first round of investment financing for a startup is generally known as an “angel investment round” or “seed round.” Investors at that stage are known as “angels” because, by all statistics, they’re pretty darn likely to lose their money.

Raising money at this stage requires a solid executive summary, a great pitch deck and a lot of hustle. I spent six months attending every pitch event I could find. Here’s a list of the top angel groups and another list breaking them down by what they invest in.

For an impact investor specific network, Investor’s Circle is great. If you’re a woman-founded social enterprise, I highly recommend the Pipeline Fellowship and Golden Seeds. In terms of finding individual angels, a great way to start is by combing AngelList to see who has invested in companies similar to yours.

One great way to get all of these angel investors in one place and to create buzz is to do an accredited-only crowdfunding campaign, for which there is a plethora of platforms available. We used AgFunder and found that, though most of the investors came in through our network, having a campaign created a real sense of urgency.

6. Don’t give up

I had a moment last year where I almost quit. I was spending all my time running from coffee meetings to pitch events to networking happy hours with nothing to show for it. Then, out of the blue, I received a call from one of my Nigerien friends, who I had worked with in the Peace Corps and who was a major inspiration behind my starting my social enterprise. That brief phone call grounded me in the purpose behind all of my fundraising tribulations.

The amazing thing about starting a social enterprise is that you aren’t doing it for yourself. You’re doing it because the world needs it. So, keep your chin up, work your butt off and never forget your purpose.

This article was posted on TriplePundit 4/22/15

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Normally when BlackRock speaks, corporate America listens. With over $6 trillion under management, BlackRock’s Founder and CEO Larry Fink is one of the most powerful men on Wall Street. But his recent annual CEO letter has sparked a fierce debate among the thousands of powerful CEOs who received it.

Do businesses, as Mr. Fink asks, have a responsibility to make a positive contribution to society or should they follow the age-old advice of Milton Friedman to be single-mindedly focused on increasing profits?

By so many indicators, businesses are now more powerful than government. Of the 100 largest economic entities in the world, 69 of them are corporations. This means that Walmart has more economic power than Spain and Exxon Mobile has more revenue than all of India’s 1.3 billion people combined. America’s new tax bill and our pro-business president are sure to shift the balance of power even more dramatically over the coming months.

In the vacuum of government power, society needs businesses to step in. But, as we’ve heard in the Wall Street backlash to the BlackRock letter, many corporations do not believe that it is in their best interest to benefit employees, customers and communities alongside shareholders.

Often when large companies want to make innovative changes, they look to startups to show them the way. As the founder of a mission-driven startup, I am convinced that having a socially responsible business isn’t just good for the world, it’s good for your bottom line. I’m not alone in this perspective. There are now over 2,000 companies who have pledged to use business as a tool for change by becoming B Corps. In my conversations with dozens of mission-driven CEOs, I’ve uncovered three key reasons why I think being a socially responsible business is just smart business.

Stakeholders Want Transparency

In the information age, everyone feels entitled to the full scope of a business. This is perhaps most evident in the food industry where transparency has been the driving force behind the farm-to-table, organic and non-GMO food movements. Millennials are most likely to seek information about the products they buy and, according to a 2015 Nielsen report, over 70% of millennials say that they’re willing to pay more for products that create positive social and environmental impacts.

This article was posted on Forbes, 3/22/18

Nearly a decade after a trip to West Africa sparked what turned out to be a multi-million dollar idea, I was back. While passing through the villages of Ghana and Benin, I was reminded of how much living in a small West African village had taught me about business fundamentals.

The Art of Small Talk

My village in Niger was tiny, home to just 2,000 people. Geographically, it should have taken no more than ten minutes to cross it, and yet it always took forty. Every couple of feet, I would stop to speak with a neighbor or friend, asking about their health, family and farm. While this might sound like a terrible waste of time, it built incredibly strong relationships.

The foundation of any relationship is trust. Yet, trust takes time to build over the course of every interaction, short or extensive. Recently I was in a sales meeting with a notoriously tough young buyer. She immediately lightened up when we began discussing our shared annoyance at how often older people asked our age. It was an uncommon way to start a sales meeting but resulted in an extremely positive sales result.

Move Away From a Scarcity Mindset

One day I was walking in my village when I came across two little boys pushing toy cars down the street. Upon closer look, I saw that the cars were homemade and crafted entirely of trash. I’ve never seen anything like that in the U.S. When products are just a single click away, such resourcefulness is kicked to the curb.

I constantly challenge my team to find creative ways to use our small size to our advantage. For example, Whole Foods told us that they wanted to launch a new product of ours but they wanted us to deliver it within just a few months. At first, we thought we couldn’t do it — most food companies take over a year to launch a new product. But the opportunity was too big to pass up and so we put everything we had into hitting the deadline. We hit it, and hit a good lesson in our own resourcefulness.

Know Your Values

While in Benin, I met an incredible entrepreneur named Pierrette who had pulled herself and her children out of poverty with her business. She told me that she was guided every day by her desire to help more struggling women in her community. At my company, we all work towards the same goal of creating and selling superfood moringa products. But more importantly, we are guided by our core values and shared interest in using moringa to improve nutrition and livelihoods worldwide. Small villages survive off the support that neighbors offer each other when hard times hit. Placing concern for people on an equal footing as concern for profit has been a guiding star for our growth.

Be Transparent

In a village, it’s impossible to keep anything secret. This type of radical transparency is something I now use in my business. Transparency is integral to building community as it helps everyone feel like they understand and are contributing towards the broader goals. We have a monthly team huddle where we disclose all of our financials and talk through what they mean for the company. We also undergo an annual audit and publish the results online. I try my best to lower the barriers of communication so that everyone — from our customers to our leadership team — feels comfortable asking hard questions and knows that they will get honest answers.

Although the complexities of West African villages are profound, there is something to be learned from contributing to and drawing from a tight-knit community. A village mindset prioritizes communal living — shared ideas, customs and connection. My business was started in my parents’ kitchen, a place where I had come together with my own village over the years to share food, exchange ideas and find support. Although we now sell our products nationwide, the shared space and origins of who we are are not forgotten and have become integral to who we are today.

This article was posted on Inc. 1/4/18

Lisa Curtis, founder of Kuli Kuli pictured with moringa

When life threw lemons at millennial Lisa Curtis, she made something healthier than lemonade. She discovered moringa, a superfood that is rich in iron, calcium, vitamins, antioxidants and protein. Then she wanted to let everyone in on her new find so she launched Kuli Kulia mission-driven company that is pioneering moringa in the US and supporting women moringa farmers in Africa and South America. Since launching Kuli Kuli in 2014, Curtis has raised $4.25 million and has grown the company to sell moringa bars, powder and energy shots in 6,000 stores nationwide. Like most great things in life, there’s a story behind this story—this is Curtis’ Mentoring Moment in her words:

My biggest aha moment was back in 2011 when I was evacuated out of the Peace Corps following a terrorist attack in Niger, West Africa. Finding myself without a plan taught me a lot about how to handle the lemons life throws you by making lemonade, or in my case, moringa bars.

I had wanted to join the Peace Corps ever since I first learned about the program in high school. Growing up in a relatively privileged household in the San Francisco Bay Area, I had always felt a need to share some of the opportunities I had been given. I was particularly fascinated by the African continent, 54 countries that had such diverse cultures and communities but often were perceived as one tangled mass of poverty, AIDS and warfare. I wanted to see the truth for myself and feel what it was like to live off a few dollars a day.

The Peace Corps placed me in Niger, one of the hottest, driest and poorest countries on the planet. I loved it. The people I met showed a generosity and spirit of community that was unlike anything I’d ever experienced in America.

After only seven months, we received the news that there had been a terrorist attack in Niger’s capital, Niamey, and that all 100 Peace Corps volunteers were to be evacuated. We had less than 48 hours to pack up all our things, say goodbye to the people who we’d come to call family and get on a plane to Morocco.

It quickly became clear that the Peace Corps didn’t have space for all of us to go on to a new country. I was told that I could go home, wait six months and then start all over again in a new country. Going home felt like failure. My entire life up until that moment had been a series of well-planned steps up a ladder that held glimpses of a promising international development career peeking out from behind the clouds. In no world was I going to go live in my childhood bedroom for six months.

On a whim, I moved to India. While interning at Startup India!, a social enterprise incubator, I kept thinking about how much I’d been given by my community in Niger and how I never had a chance to give back. The project that kept niggling in the back of my mind was a food security project with moringa.

Moringa is a tree that grows across the tropics that is often lauded as the “tree of life” for its amazing nutritional and medicinal properties. As a vegetarian living in a Nigerien village, I had relied on moringa to provide the iron and complete protein my body needed. Though the tree thrived in Niger’s hot climate, very few people ate it largely because they didn’t see it as a valuable crop.

Before being evacuated, I had worked with a few women in my village to begin growing moringa at the village’s health center, provide educational sessions to community members on how to benefit from the nutrients and then sell the powdered moringa leaves at the local market to help the women earn a sustainable livelihood. Sadly the terrorist attack had come in the middle of the project planning and I never got a chance to see the project through.

But I was quickly learning from India’s vibrant social enterprise sector that international markets could be an incredibly powerful force in encouraging sustainable development. My Indian co-workers praised my first business plan for what would eventually become Kuli Kuli – a social enterprise that sells moringa bars, powder and energy shots in the US that help to plant moringa trees and empower women farmers in the developing world.

Six years after being evacuated out of the Peace Corps, I now run a mission-driven food company that I never dreamed of in all my careful life planning. I keep this lesson in mind every time I face one of the many hurdles involved in getting a startup off the ground. The challenge might seem like the sourest, biggest lemon you’ve ever seen but there might just be a way to squeeze it into an opportunity.

This article was posted on Forbes, 9/19/17

Starting and growing a successful business is no easy feat, no matter what your gender. The entrepreneurial field is riddled with competition, and as the leader of your own business, the stakes are high. All entrepreneurs face obstacles throughout the course of a business’s growth, but there are specific challenges that women starting or running their own business face.

Building my startup into a multi-million-dollar business has taught me a lot about succeeding in the startup world. As recent media attention has spotlighted, the startup world is male-dominated. Women entrepreneurs need to understand the rules of the startup world and how their gender both helps and hurts them. Here are a few of the guidelines I often find myself mentioning when speaking with other women entrepreneurs:

1. Fundraising is harder.

Quite simply, fundraising is harder for women. In 2016, venture capitalists invested $58.2 billion in companies with all-male founders, while female-founded companies received only $1.46 billion. While there is a multitude of reasons for the disparity among male and female-run companies, a key reason comes down to how women in business are perceived in relation to men.

Kathryn Minshew, CEO and co-founder of The Muse, describes this difference in an article, noting that, “There’s a lot of research that in business, women tend to be judged on performance and men on potential.”

I’ve personally found that I have to go the extra mile to validate my business to investors. Once my business hit a million dollars in sales, it became significantly easier to fundraise.

As if starting and growing a business isn’t hard enough, women are simultaneously dismissed as leaders while being placed as the face of their companies.  The “men are leaders” mindset is often a default for both men and women, creating an uphill battle for female founders.

I frequently find that people doubt my ability to be CEO when they meet me, asking me how old I am or if I have any business experience. In a Fast Company article, Jessica Richmann, co-founder and CEO of uBiome, says, “The worst, though, was when people would ask me, ‘So what do you do there?’ and I would answer ‘I’m the CEO’ and they would have this weird look on their face like ‘you’re the CEO?’” This experience is all too common.

3. Storytelling is your friend.

Compelling stories are built upon effective listening and language skills. Storytellers have the ability to capture the press, and since women are viewed as better listenersthan men, they more easily end up in the news. Women also continue to hold managerial positions at lower ratesthan men: 27% hold vice president positions, 23% in senior vice president roles, and 17% are in CEO positions.

While the statistics are terrible, it does mean that women in leadership positions are rarer, and the press loves to cover unique stories. Press has been a huge part of how my startup gained awareness with consumers, investors and even buyers.

4. Get used to being the only one in the room.

Throughout my career, I’ve often been the only woman in a meeting or have found myself pitching to solely male investors. It’s no wonder: Only 4.4% of investors are women, which places the focus (and capital) on male-run businesses. Moreover, the lack of female presence in the entrepreneurial world can make it difficult to find powerful female role models.

Ingrid Vanderveldt, the founder of Empowering a Billion Women by 2020, notes that the lack of women in prominent roles is part of “what’s keeping women from coming in even more and from elevating to the corner office.” I’ve personally found that female mentors are hard to come by since women in leadership positions are often in such high demand for board positions or other activities outside of their primary job.

5. Everyone will ask about your personal life.

If you are a female entrepreneur, get ready for all aspects of your life to be scrutinized. From what you wear to your romantic relationships, female founders receive undue criticism for pushing through gender stereotypes. Female-run businesses can be placed in dialogue with, and judged by, a founder’s roles outside of a company.

Aimee Kandrac, founder and CEO of WhatFriendsDo, acknowledges that female founders are often asked to make note of their various personal roles before describing their role as a business leader. She writes, “I am a wife. I am a mom. I love those roles. I am also a business-owner and founder of a company.”

I can’t count the number of times that potential investors have told me that they want to introduce me to their daughter. Though it might seem like a compliment, it’s frustrating to be forced into discussing personal lives when you’re trying to focus the conversation on the business.

6. Learn how to be a boss.

As it currently stands, the mainstream workplace culture presents women with a double standard. When women act in accordance with gender stereotypes they are viewedas weak, yet when women go against the same stereotypes, they are seen as too aggressive.

There is no easy solution to end gendered workplace discrimination. However, female entrepreneurs and business leaders have an immense potential to set a female-led, industry-wide standard of success. By supporting women to own their power, and to climb to more prominent roles within industries, we are opening the door to more inclusive professional environments and heightened innovation.

This article was posted on Forbes, 9/19/17

It isn’t everyday that you get to sit down with the CEO of a Fortune 500 company and the CEO asks you for advice. It’s happened to me twice in the past few months.

What makes this even more surprising is that I’m 29 years old and have less than 10 years of experience in business. But the experience I do have, the journey of taking a company from an idea to our first few million in revenue, has given me a uniquely scrappy business mindset that Fortune 500 CEOs are increasingly seeking to replicate.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to sit on a panel with Western Union CEO Hikmet Ersek and four other millennial entrepreneurs. As Mr. Ersek wrote in following the event, “It’s invaluable for Western Union – a 166-year-old entrepreneurial-minded company – and these start-ups to learn from each other and explore how to keep the entrepreneurial spirit alive as the operational needs of the business grow.”

The entrepreneurial spirit is a difficult mindset to qualify, but I think can best be described as a combination of creative thinking powered by a relentless drive to succeed. When you’re a small startup, you’re forced to be creative because you don’t have the resources to do things the same way that established, existing businesses do them.

One example of how this entrepreneurial mindset comes into play was when I was launching my food startup, Kuli Kuli, we conducted all of our consumer testing on our moringa products at a farmers market. Most food companies spend thousands of dollars convening focus groups before they launch new products. We found that conducting short interviews with potential customers at the farmers market gave us the insights we needed for a tenth of the cost.

At the same time, this entrepreneurial mindset can be taken too far. Uber’s culture of breaking the rules helped it grow fast but now is being cited as part of the reason for its current upheaval. Particularly in industries like financial transactions, where Western Union plays, and food, where Kuli Kuli plays, it’s important to follow government rules that protect consumers.

This is where it can be helpful for a startup to work with a more established company that has spent years successfully navigating the rules. For example, after Kuli Kuli received investment from Kellogg’s venture arm eighteen94 capital, we were able to get advice on the claims we could make on our packaging from true experts.

The nature of work changed tremendously with the rise of the internet. In this new era of digital disruption, it’s clear that the only thing we can count on is continued change. The best way for businesses to successfully navigate these changes is by cultivating an entrepreneurial mindset and forming new ways of collaborating across company sizes and industries.

This article was posted on Western Union 8/7/17

When I set out to start my social enterprise in 2011, I chose to base it in Oakland. Oakland is quickly becoming a hub for startups, ranking eighth in the nation for food manufacturing companies and eleventh for tech startups. But whether you’re in the business of food, tech, social or whatever, there are four underlying reasons that draw business-savvy “Warriors” to Oakland in search of success. Let’s call them the Oakland A’s:

1. Arts (& Culture)
Described as having “homely sister status” compared to the shiny city of San Francisco, buzz words like “gritty” and “countercultural” seem to pop up often in conversations about Oakland. But what it really comes down to is diversity. Oakland is a city of contrasts, boasting nationally renowned sports teams and artists alongside a hefty dose of urban reality. What better environment to incite creativity and urgency in entrepreneurs?

If startups and small businesses are truly going to make the world a better place, they must have roots that resonate that mission. And if any city promotes a culture focused on the triple bottom line, it’s Oakland. Centuries of continuous immigration to the city, amidst the Gold Rush, the Transcontinental Railroad and the opening of the Port of Oakland have guaranteed a city diverse in race, ethnicity and culture and thus rich in needs, ideas, and creative solutions. Consistently ranked among the most sustainable cities, Oakland lures green-minded, solution-driven startups that fit in with the city’s eco conscious culture. And as the recent unofficial headquarters of the Occupy movement, Oakland is inevitably replete with innovators who hold high standards of fairness, transparency and social good. The triple bottom line that Oakland upholds makes burgeoning Oakland businesses a triple threat.

2. Academics
Read: experts, advisors, and eager interns. The proximity to renowned universities like UC Berkeley, UCSF and Stanford provide an endless amount of opportunity to young entrepreneurs looking for words of wisdom, academic expertise and a motivated (cheap) workforce. When my startup Kuli Kuli needed legal advice, we turned to UC Berkeley’s free startup law clinic where young law students and wise professors gave us thousands of dollars worth of pro-bono assistance. Every summer we receive a deluge of applications from highly-qualified and passionate students from UC Berkeley and Stanford interested in dipping their toes into the startup food scene.

The vast amount of resources for entrepreneurs in this area is astounding. If I chose, I could attend a panel or networking event almost any night of the week that would teach me something new and introduce me to someone interesting. When starting a business in Oakland, the networkability and hand-holding feeling you had as a college student don’t feel quite so distant.

3. Accessibility
The Bay Area is known for outstanding public transport, and most will agree that Oakland is a favorable hub. With consistent ferries and BART trains into SF, the commute is easy and almost enjoyable if you can snag a seat. By car, if you can evade traffic, you can end up just about anywhere in 30 minutes time. Proximity to the 880 allows for the ease of getting to any part of the Bay Area for business. Yes, even those from the Silicon Valley of the South Bay hella love Oakland. Their techie busses make the 880 trek, as many employees prefer to work in the valley by day, but live the East Bay lifestyle by night.

The City of Oakland itself is determined to make the resources of the Bay Area accessible to entrepreneurs. After quitting my day job in solar finance to plunge into the food world, I found easy assistance and encouragement from Oakland’s Economic Development Offices. Regular workshops and networking events have made integrating into the food world a breeze.

4. Affordability
Relatively speaking, Oakland is one of the more affordable options in the area. To encourage business development, Oakland offers several tax breaks, incentives and refunds to small startup companies. Resource centers like the Impact Hub Oakland provide reasonable rates for coworking and networking. Impact Hub Oakland even recently became the first Hub of over 60 locations in the world to start a Youth Hub dedicated to empowering young entrepreneurs. And guidance from business plan development to funding is available from numerous nonprofits, such as Inner City Advisors.

Oakland locals prefer the scene for its diversity, creativity and community culture. Citing better weather and friendlier neighbors, it’s a community that’s bound to draw more down to earth and up for anything innovators. As startups strive to be the next Pandora or Sungevity, the city is behind us. Like an entrepreneur, Oakland is striving to grow and excel in the real world. And when the big ideas and community’s resources aren’t quite enough, we roll up our sleeves, work hard, and seek inspiration from diversity and creativity.

This article was posted on Huffington Post 6/18/2015 09:59 am ET, Updated Jun 18, 2016

Fifteen years after 9/11 and in the midst of an election cycle where one of the leading presidential candidates proposes to ban Muslims from entering the United States, a hijab, for some, evokes fear and misunderstanding. I say this because I used to feel that way.

The first major news event I can remember is 9/11. It was the day my entire 7th grade class stared uncomprehendingly at the TV, watching planes crash into the Twin Towers, leaving in its trail a new era of fear and animosity towards the Muslim and Arab world. With less than two percent of Americans identifying as Muslim, many Americans go through life without any Muslim friends to help parse through the stereotypes. I was one of them.

It wasn’t until I graduated college that my worldview shifted and I started waking up with the call to prayer.

In Niger, where I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer, Islam wasn’t just a religion; it was the very fabric of everyday life. I saw the generosity embedded within my neighbors’ religiosity. Despite living off of less than USD $2 a day, my neighbors regularly gave zakaat, or charitable donations, to anyone in need. I saw a devotion beyond anything I’d ever experienced, a devotion steady enough to bow down and pray five times a day. A devotion strong enough to cease all eating and drinking during the daytime for the entire month of Ramadan, the desert heat notwithstanding. And a devotion to community and kinship that left me with longing once I’d returned back to my American world of iPhones and Instagram.

I returned to the United States with a yearning to learn more about other cultures and ways of life, which not only enriched my life, but to my surprise, helped me to learn more about myself and the contribution I wanted to make to society.

Because of my experience in Niger, I wanted to explore feminism in an Islamic context and what that would mean for women’s empowerment. Many of the Nigerien women I loved had very little power within their society. As is the case in so many rural villages where opportunities for women are limited, the man is the head of the household and has the final say in everything, from whether his girl children attend school to whom they married. Husbands could restrict their wives’ travel and who they interact with. Yet despite their limited opportunities, these incredibly strong, powerful Nigerien women encouraged me to pursue an entrepreneurial path. Their encouragement ultimately led to me to start a food company, Kuli Kuli, based on my Peace Corps experience.

A few months ago, I was offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to travel to Jordan to participate in the Open Hands Initiative’s Fellowship for Young Women Entrepreneurs. I traveled with 10 American entrepreneurs to Amman where we met ten Jordanian young women entrepreneurs. We spent a week together learning and collaborating. We dressed differently, spoke different languages, and prayed to different gods (if we prayed at all). But the differences, in my mind, were trivial compared to how similar we were. We were all navigating starting businesses while balancing family and society’s limited expectations of us, which did not include being entrepreneurs.

I was amazed by how shockingly similar our life experiences were. All of us had experienced sexism in one form or another. And all of us had found men who appreciated and supported our work. And despite my preconceived notion of the hurdles that a woman in a Muslim society would face, the women wearing hijabs were just as outspoken, assertive, and determined as any of the Americans in their good ol’ blue jeans.

One of my new Jordanian friends Malak Al Akiely finally explained the hijab to me in a way that I could understand. “It’s like my hair” she said, “I change it depending on what I’m wearing and it feels as natural as changing my hairstyle.” When I commented that her incredible sense of style and color coordination between her clothing and her headscarf almost made me want a hijab Malak laughed. She told me that was part of her plan of challenging misconceptions of Muslim women. “I want to prove that a woman wearing a hijab can be beautiful,” she said.

Malak’s words come to mind across the Atlantic to a spring day where I’m standing in the dry cleaning shop, ready to leave. I take my stuff and pause in front of the woman waiting at the end of the line. “Nice hijab,” I tell her, smiling. Her face registers shock, just before her lips curve upward into a small smile.

This article was posted on Huffington Post 5/25/16, updated 5/26/17

Business as usual has changed. Only 6 percent of consumers believe that the singular purpose of business is to make money for shareholders. Consumers want companies to take the lead on creating social and environmental change not just through their charitable arms, but also as a part of their core businesses. My instruction in starting a socially responsible food company came from an unexpected place—my Peace Corps service.

Five years ago, living in a small rural village in Niger, West Africa, I learned about a plant called moringa that is arguably the most nutrient-dense vegetable on the planet. Moringa is a tropical tree with leaves that are more nutritious than kale and provide a complete protein like quinoa. The moringa tree thrives in hot, dry climates and grows year-round, making it often the only food available in many drought-prone countries with high rates of malnutrition. And yet too often this “miracle tree” was vastly underutilized—not dissimilar to the way Americans used to scorn kale before the bitter green became haute cuisine.

After many conversations with friends in my village and local NGOs, I realized that the main barrier to making moringa the “kale of the tropics” was that there is little market demand for moringa leaves and so few people see value in growing it. Upon returning to America, I became obsessed with finding a way to connect the amazing smallholder farmers I’d met in West Africa to U.S. consumers who could pay them the prices they deserved. That obsession led me to start a moringa company, which I named Kuli Kuli after a popular West African snack. After two years of selling moringa bars and powder sourced from women’s cooperatives in Ghana, Kuli Kuli was approached by a Haitian nonprofit with a vision for reforesting Haiti with moringa trees.

Our product development started with a Haitian farmer named Mercillie. She wanted a way to earn money for her family with a low-maintenance crop that could survive Haiti’s drought. A Haitian nonprofit, the Smallholder Farmers Alliance (SFA), wanted a way to reforest Haiti, a country that has less than 2 percent of its original forest remaining. Timberland and the Clinton Foundation wanted to finance an aid project in Haiti that would pay for itself. Whole Foods Market wanted a new product that offered something unique to their health and socially-conscious consumers. And me, well, I wanted to create a product that my millennial friends really wanted to buy.

Creating a product that solves a problem for both consumers and the world isn’t easy. The Haitian nonprofit SFA spent months interviewing Mercillie and other Haitian smallholder farmers like her to determine what type of crop could best improve their incomes while meeting reforestation goals. Once it was determined that moringa was the right crop for the job, Timberland and the Clinton Foundation Haiti Programme financed the costs of starting a new agricultural supply chain from scratch. Kuli Kuli spent months working with Whole Foods Market buyers to create a moringa product that could support farmers like Mercillie while delighting Whole Foods customers. Together we came up with the idea for a Moringa Green Energy Shot, a cross between a green smoothie and a cup of coffee with the health and energizing benefits of both.

Finally, we gave our new prototype the ultimate test—we took it to the crowd. We interviewed hundreds of consumers as they tasted our energy shots, carefully recording what they liked and didn’t like. We refined our product, taste tested it one last time with Whole Foods buyers and then put it up on Indiegogo for the crowd to decide if it would happen. A few amazing celebrities helped us spread the word, including Rainn Wilson, Edward Norton and renowned Chef Jose Andres.

We raised $100,000 through a crowdfunding campaign, giving us the funds we needed to do our first major manufacturing run. Whole Foods Market agreed to launch the Moringa Green Energy shots in all of their stores nationwide, where you can now find their vibrant colors in the Whole Body department.

These shots stand on the shelves not just as a tasty new product but as a symbol of what can be accomplished when a business stands for more than just profit. By endeavoring to solve a problem for the world, not just a problem for our P&L, Kuli Kuli was able to form partnerships with much larger and more prestigious organizations who were aligned around the same problem. This type of innovative collaboration around real-world problems isn’t just the socially responsible way to do business, it’s the best way to do business.

This article was posted on New Hope Network, 3/4/16