[Unified Purpose] Clayton Ferrara Ep. 23

Podcast Transcript

Daniela (D): Okay, Clayton, before we start the podcast, I’m going to do cancel or keep with you. So let’s start. Four-day workweek, cancel or keep?
Clayton Ferrara (CF): Let’s keep that.
D: Unlimited PTO policies?
CF: Cancel.
D: Hiring influencers instead of traditional ads?
CF: Let’s keep that.
D: Remote-only companies?
CF: We’ll keep that.
D: Firing clients who drain too much time?
CF: We’re definitely keeping that one.
D: Donating to large non-profits instead of local ones?
CF: We’ll keep that, depends on the org.
D: All right. That was pretty good. Thank you so much for doing this. Guys, welcome to Unified Purpose. You guys know what this podcast is about. We share inspiring tales of compassion. We talk about resilience. We talk about community spirit. I’m your host, Daniela. You guys know me. I’m Penji’s partnership coordinator, and I have a great guest today with me, Clayton Ferrara from Ideas for Us. Hi, Clayton. How are you?
CF: I’m great. Thanks so much for welcoming me. I really appreciate it.
D: I’m so happy to have you on the podcast. I’m actually like, when we were looking into organizations to have on the podcast, yours was really interesting to me. I always love nonprofits that have kind of environmental focuses. It’s probably one of the biggest things that we need to focus on right now, if you ask me.
CF: Mm-hmm.
D: So to kind of get the ball rolling, get us started, can you tell me a little bit about Ideas for Us, what you guys do for anybody who’s watching or listening that is not familiar? Just the whole shebang that we got to know.
CF: Of course. So Ideas for Us, we are an environmental action organization. And it’s interesting, I’m a millennial and the narrative my whole life has been to learn about all of these environmental issues that we’re facing in the world, from species extinction to biodiversity collapse to climate-related things, you name it, global warming and the whole, even as far back as the hole in the ozone layer, right? And the narrative has always been, these are problems that the adult world has created, and we’re going to leave young people to it. And it’s your job to solve these problems. See you later, right? And one of the problems from that narrative that I would say environmental education has focused on for the last thirty years or so, have actually been a destructive narrative, and that is what led to us creating Ideas for Us. So advocacy-only environmental work is very important because it educates the public about these problems, but it doesn’t really give them a discourse to follow to solve it or to organize for action in their own communities. And what then happens is people start to feel very small against these global problems, very isolated in a system that they don’t understand. And it leads to a lot of apathy and a lot of disenfranchisement among young people. And unfortunately, as this environmental narrative of educating people on the problems has increased, we’ve also seen depression, anxiety, hopelessness, and apathy increase as well, especially among young people. So our organization started in a dorm room back in 2008 to be an environmental action organization. So everything that we do revolves around environmental action in five areas: energy and water, food, waste, and ecology. And of course, all of those things have so many intersectionalities between them that that’s what makes our projects so fantastic and so game-changing to create policy and ordinance and different types of mandates and gather communities around these issues and really move the needle on climate and environmental action. So we’re headquartered in Orlando, Florida, but we’ve done work in nearly forty different countries around the world. Right now, we have about eleven branches that are highly active in places like Uganda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nepal, Romania, Bolivia, and many, many more. So that’s a little bit about us.
D: That’s amazing. I love that you guys have worked with so many countries that have different environmental issues. I feel like sometimes we tend to be very kind of Eurocentric or America-centric in a lot of problems and I love when there’s a sort of perspective of the world that happens. To give you some context, I’m from El Salvador and we have had like a very recent boom of tourism here. I live in El Salvador too. And this might be a tangent, but I think it’s relevant. It’s a very short story. We have a very big boom of like tourists coming from Europe and the United States specifically. So like a lot of developed world people are coming to El Salvador for tourism. And I talked to—I was at the beach one day, it’s like a very big popular spot. And I talked to this German tourist who was telling me that a big culture shock that she had here was that people throw the trash in the floor without a care in the world. And how there’s no environmental consciousness, basically. Because in Germany, they recycle, and they’re environmentally conscious. And she was like, I just think it’s really horrible to see people throwing trash on the floor everywhere. There’s no recycling. And… it made me think like, I think that’s such a, it’s a very systemic issue because you’re looking at a third world where, you know, there’s like education is very different. You have a very large part of the population that doesn’t even understand environmental issues. There’s a lot of like policies that need to be changed. Then there’s like budgets because to introduce an entire recycling program in this, in a country you need finance. Right. And I think, it just made me realize like, I think a lot of times people don’t really realize that, you know, it’s very different to compare the environmental solutions that a country like Germany can have versus a small Central American country. So I love talking to people who can kind of see a lot of that, because I think a lot of times you, you tend, people, us as people, we tend to kind of get very sort of have like one vision and lose sight of how intersected and how like big these type of environmental problems are and how they’re connected to just like a whole other sphere.
CF: Right, of course. Yes, in order to have an outcome, right, you have to have an income, right? Because many of these projects and programs and technological advancements require funding, right? Certainly recycling plants and these kinds of things and that requires so much kind of development as a concept in the public’s desire in order to get them funded by officials, right?
D: Yeah, I know. And you need people to also have like, because I feel like, for example, for us here, there’s also a lack of education. So it’s like you can have these programs, but you also need to educate the public into what the environmental issues are. Only two percent of our population in El Salvador actually goes to college that’s a very small amount of people that actually get any higher education. There’s like I don’t remember what the percentage is, but there’s a very large percent of people that don’t even finish high school. So, you know, it’s like such a complex topic and I love talking to people who can kind of have more of a deeper understanding of stuff like this because I always think that, you know, taking care of the environment should probably be like one of the first things that we care about because if we don’t have a planet to live in, like everything else is irrelevant. Right. But I always want to talk to people who know about this and who understand how like a lot of things sort of come into play to actually be able to help the environment. And like you said, when you actually start to sit down and think about it, it can make you feel very helpless when you’re just like one person in your room thinking about stuff like this.
CF: Well, let me kind of jump right into it then, right? Let’s just take this as an example, right, of a problem to talk about. The aspect of people throwing trash on the ground is something that happens in many countries around the world, and ultimately what it comes down to is that you need a shift in perspective and in the way that people think of the trash and in the way that they think of their own communities, right? Most people, I imagine, would not throw trash inside of their own homes. They do the moment that they leave their homes. Plus, in poor countries, there’s usually not an infrastructure that helps to move trash, clean places up, maintain general cleanliness and orderliness. It’s difficult. Often it’s only governmental buildings that have the money to hire someone to sweep around the perimeter or to keep the grounds clean and tidier. So this requires a shift in belief and a shift that things can be accomplished and done even without money. So if we were to tackle something like this, what we would start with is organizing for action and we would come into schools, we would come into orphanages, we would come into community centers, and the first thing that we would do is bring people together and feed them and provide them with hundreds of free meals for people to pay for their time to hear what we have to say. And that subconscious aspect of eating, breaking bread together, and then speaking with them usually has an effect where people are attuned to be more agreeable, more open, and to have a desire to help. And from there, we would organize zones in a city, maybe even one block at a time. That becomes the responsibility of different groups of people to keep immaculately clean. And even in some of the most downtrodden areas of the city, you know, even working with whoever we need to work with in order to maintain these areas as being clean. And psychologically, what this does to people over time is that when they see routinely, okay, the trash is gone one day, they throw a bunch of things there. And consistently, no matter how long it takes, people are out there again and cleaning it up and maintaining the area entirely for free, entirely with their own labor, entirely as volunteers. And even see if there’s a potential business model for the garbage that could be melted into scrap, could it go to different recycling places, could plastic garbage be stuffed inside water bottles that could then be entombed inside of concrete blocks and could build a school structure or something like that, or perimeter fences, or a designated area in the community for gathering these types of things. And slowly through that, you get attention. And then there’s newspaper articles about the trash being cleaned up or local radio stations that are talking about it, more local celebrities on TikTok or whatever that are talking about this. And you start to shift the thinking of how people believe the city should look and what’s possible, right? And you want people to see their ownership of their country as something that extends outside of just their own that they live in, right? And something that extends into nature itself as well. And we’ve done many projects like this in different places. In Liberia, for instance, in West Africa, there’s a huge problem with open defecation. Where people literally don’t have bathrooms, right? So they’re just going to the bathroom from the streets, right? And it’s a huge public health issue, right? So we’ve built latrines, right? And we’ve built areas where people can go to the bathroom and have some orderliness to a system because it’s that disorder that if left to its own devices, nothing will ever get better. It’s hard to be inspired about making the life of your children or family better in a filthy environment, right? So it’s like very important from a psychological level and even just seeing a street that’s been dirty for as long as someone can remember suddenly becoming clean, you’d be surprised how much it inspires people, right? So there’s all of this kind of environmental work that can stem from something as simple as a trash cleanup.
D: I think like what happens with environmental problems sometimes, and feel free to correct me or jump in whenever, is that once you fix an issue, you would discover that there’s another one. Right.
CF: Yeah, like it happens.
D: So yeah, pretty much. Cause I feel like, you know, like you build public bathrooms to, to like address the public defecation problem, but then the bathrooms don’t get cleaned. They’re also disgusting. Like, and then it’s like, okay, now we have to figure out a cleanliness thing so that people are not grossed out by the bathrooms. And, um, then you know you do that and then it’s like okay now we need to find like funding to like always keep these like—do you know what I mean? Like it’s a constant thing that you have to be doing all the time in order to make it work. I feel like that’s just kind of how the world has operated. Um and science in general of like fixing something and then realizing that something else needs to continue to get better until you reach to a point where it’s pretty sustainable.
CF: Yeah, so it’s the aspect of like building capacity. You know, this is something that affects organizations, it affects families, it affects the whole nonprofits, businesses, right? Capacity is so important, right? And in a society, if you have everyone striving to make things better, right? That’s a mentality that starts in childhood. Right, which is why I believe childhood education is so tremendously important because through the environmental narrative, right, what you don’t want to do is educate people that the problems are so significant that we don’t know what to do, neither does anyone else, and why is any of this matter anyway? We’ll all be underwater and dead in a hundred years anyway, right? So why does anything matter? And it’s this kind of like post-modern nihilism, right, that you don’t want to have getting anywhere near young people because what you want them to do is to believe that they are indeed the future because that’s the truth, right? And there’s so many things that someone can do, especially if they start in their own home and then work outwards from there. Too often, people jump into wanting to change laws or legislation, and I understand wanting to change broken systems. There’s no shortage of broken systems out there, right? But too often in trying to change broken systems, sometimes the most important work gets left undone, which could be just a trash cleanup of a market street that everyone goes to on a Saturday or Sunday and wouldn’t they immediately notice if all of a sudden overnight the trash was gone, right? And then you could do an art campaign with signage or something on social media that talks about how that happened and how it’s going to continue to happen, right, as opposed to someone trying to, you know, uh, affect something at a very high level that might take ten years to do. I think when you think of everything in a large scale, it’s gonna feel overwhelming.
CF: Right, yeah.

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