The Shin Fujiyama Podcast | Social Entrepreneurship | Nonprofit Organizations | International Development Aid | NGOs

During his senior year at the University of Kentucky, Jacob Dietz made it his mission to raise $25,000 for Students Helping Honduras. He and his classmates wanted to build a school in La Lima, Honduras, where 400 children lacked a middle school building.

Jacob asked himself: “Do I have the ability and time and self-discipline to do this?” It all seemed daunting. The previous year, they had raised $11,000—less than half of what they...

Rich Johnson is the co-founder of Spark Ventures, a nonprofit focused on international community development in Zambia, Mexico, and Nicaragua. Along the way, Spark Ventures began to facilitate engagement trips for the mutual benefit of supporters and partner communities abroad.

In this episode, Rich discusses his past challenges, fundraising, creating a separate business venture called Ignite, Board development, trends in impact tr...

Alex Altman and Zeke Copic are longtime supporters of Students Helping Honduras. They have been organizing a charity gala each year in NYC called Brick By Brick to benefit SHH. In this episode, we discuss what it takes—step-by-step—to organize a gala that can raise $25,000+ for your favorite nonprofit organization.

Show Notes

Countless nonprofit organizations are stuck on the treadmill of financial survival. Most of their energy is spent trying to make payroll at the end of each month—which means less time is spent maximizing their impact. Does that sound familiar to you?

For five years Kathleen Janus traveled the country to find out how successful organizations like Teach for America, City Year, and Charity: Water broke through their barriers. She cond...

"Everything that could have gone wrong, went wrong," said Steve Sexton. His first major fundraising event as the chapter president of Students Helping Honduras at UMD—a 5K— was a, "disaster that barely broke even."

“I wanted to deflect the blame at first," he said, "But I took a long look in the mirror and said it is my fault. I can’t let this happen again.”

He dusted off and said to himself, “You can’t let ...

While studying at the College of William & Mary, Sam Pressler learned about the post-traumatic stress disorder war veterans were facing as they reintegrated into civilian life. 

So in 2015, he started Armed Services Arts Partnership (ASAP) to help them re-enter and thrive in their communities. ASAP, based out of Washington DC and Hampton Roads, VA gives veterans a voice by doing something completely unconventional… By offering ...

Today’s guest is Noam Angrist, the founder of Young 1ove, an NGO providing sex education to 35,000+ young people in Botswana. Sex-ed is a complicated issue, and over the decades it’s been hard to tell what worked and what didn’t. In Botswana, where 22% of the population has HIV, much of it hadn’t worked.

But when Noam used a tool from the scientific community, he could actually tell what interventions worked. Like a scientist, ...

The incredible waste of time was tragic...

While volunteering in India as an undergraduate student, Annie Ryu fell in love at first sight. What she saw at the market wasn't tall, dark, and handsome. It was a spiky, green fruit she had never seen. The huge fruit she was looking at was the jackfruit, the largest tree born fruit in the world. 

Fascinated, she researched the fruit and ate them. Many of them. So much so that she'd soon be known "The Jackfruit Lady.&#...

When Robbie was 12 and his sister Brittany was 13, they heard the story of a soldier returning from Iraq with a near $8,000 phone bill. They couldn’t believe that a man serving his country was unable to call his family for free. So they decided to do something about it. In 2004 with just $21 and some help from their parents, Cell Phones for Soldiers was born.

Today the nonprofit organization provides cost-free communication service...

Most foreigners who visit Indonesia end up at the beaches of Bali. But not Adam Miller, a young conservationist from St. Louis. While volunteering at a pet shop at age 10, he came up with the vision of one day working in Indonesia to help the animals there. His vision quickly became an obsession. Many years later, Adam found himself in a remote village in Borneo, Indonesia. It’s a part of southeast Asia facing the fastest rate of d...

How did Rachel Sumekh (founder and CEO of Swipe Out Hunger) respond when she was told "you're just too nice to be a leader"? In this episode, Rachel Sumekh talks openly about her inner doubts, challenges as a Persian-American social entrepreneur, how she responded to opposition from campus administrators.

Swipe Out Hunger is a nonprofit organization that is working to end hunger by activating college students to donate ...

As an investment banker, Andy Stein never imagined that a visit to an orphanage in Chile would change his life, and the life of thousands of others. In 2001, after 25 years on Wall Street, Andy Stein left everything behind to start the Orphaned Starfish Foundation, a nonprofit organization that works with orphaned, trafficked, and at-risk youth around the world. The NGO has built 50 vocational centers and computer labs in 25 countr...

WARNING: If you are involved or will be involved in the medical field, this episode may alter your future aspirations...

CNN Hero Dr. Ben LaBrot began working on fishing boats in California at age 11 and always knew that he was destined to live at sea. In 2009, he began refurbishing a 76-foot-long fishing boat and named it The Southern Wind. A year later, Dr. Ben and his penniless team left EVERYTHING behind and set sail to Haiti t...

Social entrepreneur Henry May is the founder of CoSchool, a B-Corp* that's worked with 5,000 youth in Bogota, Colombia. CoSchool works to build emotional, social, and leadership skills through extracurricular programs. In this episode, Henry May speaks about his journey of self discovery, hardest moments, greatest lessons, and why he decided to make CoSchool a B-Corp instead of a nonprofit organization.

Henry May is a young tea...

Today’s guest is social entrepreneur Doug Bunch, a full-time attorney from DC and the co-founder of Global Playground. It’s a nonprofit organization providing educational opportunities around the world. They’ve built schools, computer labs, and libraries in eight different countries (Uganda, Cambodia, Thailand, Honduras, Vietnam, Myanmar, Philippines, Kenya). In 2010, they partnered with us here at the Villa Soleada Bilingual Schoo...

Today's episode is the opposite of what I usually do. I’m actually crossposting a podcast episode where I’m the guest answering questions. So the tables have turned. In this episode, I’m on the show, Failures From the Field with Jordan Levy of the Ubuntu Education Fund, and I talk about my biggest failures while working in Honduras. Definitely subscribe to their show on iTunes if you get the chance.

Social Entrepreneur Seth Maxwell has the goal of providing clean water to every single community in Swaziland. And at age 28, he is on his way of doing it. A few years ago, Seth founded Thirst Project with his friends from college. Together, they set out to end the number one global killer of children: the world’s water crisis.

Since raising $1,700 at their very first fundraising event, Thirst Project has worked with students from ...