Welcome to the first session of Impact Everything Podcast, co-hosted by Lanna Nawa and Professor Sandra Enos. The Impact Everything podcast champions the idea of creating a space where we can engage community members in discussions that examine the social, political and environmental issues facing our world with the dream of creating a world that we see as better, fairer and more sustainable. Founder of Impact Everything, Lanna Nawa, has created a unique retail shop in Providence RI Island where products with purpose fill every shelf and where company culture celebrates key mission values. Sandra Enos, founder of Giving Beyond the Box, founded the company to “curate gift boxes that feature products that carry social missions—refugee resettlement, concern for the environment, empowering women, providing clean water and much more. We want those who give gifts and those who receive them to share values and purpose in the gift exchange.”
Because this series will examine leadership, courage, innovation, storytelling, commitment–all tied to the question of how we live better lives–we will start the journey of how this all began. We are kicking off our series with the introduction of how we came to these positions in our lives, a backstory of meeting one another about two years early in 2018. Lanna is a young woman, a graduate of the University of Connecticut, a global traveler and the daughter of 1992. Sandra just retired from a twenty-year career teaching sociology and celebrated her 70th birthday in 2019. Despite their surface differences, their ideas about social impact, individual responsibility are remarkably parallel. They both see their life’s work in making a positive impact in the world and making that possible for others around them. Unfolding their personal stories help us to understand that there is no one path to purpose and that there are many winding roads to find a career and lifestyle that feels authentic and right. In the podcast series, we will feature our heroes—conversations with individuals who we think are making extraordinary impacts in our community. We hope to introduce our heroes, not to suggest that we can all do the wonderful that they do but instead to hold them as models of one person who saw a problem and decided they needed to do something about it. As we do in the first podcast, we will trace the path of these heroes to their lives of purpose. We will seek to understand what led them to this path and what challenges they face and continue to confront each day. We will also explore how they see the issues in our world and how they have selected their path of change. We will ask them questions about we can help and how they see their work connected to other issues, locally and globally.
The Impact Everything podcast hopes to be a place where we can openly and compassionately talk about how we can all be better people, each day and in every big and small way. As we have discovered, none of us has this figured out. We are interested in exploring issues of sustainability, equality, inclusion, human rights, education, immigration and refugee resettlement, humanitarian work and many others. Attending to this, we wish to explore all the ways we can make an impact through political action and social advocacy, philanthropy, wiser investing, conscious consumption, volunteering, sustainable travel and many more. We are convinced that the more we know about people doing good work, the more committed we are to join them. We all have heard that it takes a village to raise a child. We are working with others to build that village. We invite you to listen to our podcast, to inspire us, and to join us as a hero or as a guest.