Tech to the rescue (TTTR) is based on the simple idea, that the tech sector, just like most law firms, should do pro-bono work. So they have built a platform where non-profits and tech companies can be matched – a Tinder platform for social impact, where non-profits and tech companies can swipe right.

In this frank conversations TTTR CEO Jacek Siadkowski and Trumanitarian host Lars Peter Nissen explore:

  • How to connect tech companies with nonprofits to innovate together and bridge the technological gap for good, emphasizing the potential for technology to scale up the impact of nonprofit organizations.
  • The frustrations and limitations within the humanitarian sector, particularly around funding, engagement, and the scalability of interventions. 
  • The potential impact of SMEs in the tech and nonprofit sectors and how large organizations often receive the majority of resources and attention, while SME and mid-sized NGOs has an undervalued role to play in responding to crises and implementing innovative solutions.
  • The importance of digital preparedness for crisis response and the transformative power of technology in addressing urgent humanitarian needs.
Transcript

Lars Peter Nissen 0:49

This week's guest on Trumanitarian is Jacek Siadkowski, a social entrepreneur and the CEO of Tech to the escue, a platform that matches nonprofits with pro bono work from the tech sector. I first met Jacek at a conference in Geneva where he sought me out to pitch me the idea behind tech to the rescue. He has that intense drive, passion and impatience about him that successful entrepreneurs often have, and I immediately was attracted to the idea behind TTTR. Since then we have had a number of conversations about TTTRs strategy and approach and how it can scale faster in the humanitarian space. And it's truly a pleasure to be able to share Jaceks perspective here on Trumanitarian. Jacek is impatient and he's not particularly impressed with the humanitarian sector. We taped this interview the day before the humanitarian exchange conference in London. During, and after, the conference, Jacek clearly and loudly expressed that he felt stuck and frustrated with the humanitarian sector. I think that's great. We are stuck and we should be frustrated. Furthermore, I fully trust Jacek's passion and drive to help us get unstuck and make the humanitarian space more dynamic and fit for purpose. So enjoy the conversation. As always, it's great if you make some noise on social media. Share it with colleagues and whoever you think might be interested in the show, but most importantly, enjoy the conversation.

Jacek Siadkowski, welcome to Trumanitarian.

Jacek Siadkowski 2:28

Welcome.

Lars Peter Nissen 2:29

You are the CEO of Tech to the Rescue (TTTR). And let's begin with that. What is TTTR?

Jacek Siadkowski 2:38

Well, tech to the rescue is simply speaking, it's a movement. It's a movement of tech companies that want to collaborate with nonprofits to build tech based solutions that may scale up the impact of nonprofits. Tech to the Rescue is an answer to the systemic problem we can see on the nonprofit side of things. Systemically, nonprofits are underfunded, especially when it comes to technology. It's very difficult to find budgets to hire, technologies to hire technology agency, so the result is that organizations that have very good ideas on how to save their world, how to impact people positively, they find it difficult to scale up their interventions because without technology it's difficult to get from community to society or from society to the region, right? So we try to bridge the gap, our response or our intervention is actually convincing tech companies that they can afford technological products on a pro bono basis. So we are kind of a Tinder for social impact. We connect tech companies with nonprofits so they could innovate together and bridge technological gap for good.

Lars Peter Nissen 3:52

A Tinder for tech companies and NGO's to meet each other, that's wonderful. And do people often swipe left?

Jacek Siadkowski 4:00

Hmm. It happens, but I think it happens very early in the process. So sometimes when tech companies are not exposed to the inspiring ideas, how they might, you know, solve social problems, they stay uninterested, right?

Lars Peter Nissen 4:21

So the main problem is to engage the tech companies. The NGOs are quite keen?

Jacek Siadkowski 4:28

I think nonprofits need those technological resources very much right? So once we have a tech company that wants to seriously invest in those pro bono projects, to seriously engage in 2-3-4 month projects then usually it's easier to find a nonprofit that is eager to work with them. But obviously the chemistry needs to be on both sides. This is why I use the Tinder word.

Lars Peter Nissen 4:55

I love the Tinder thing. I get the point that it can be expensive to invest in tech and so on. But of course the question that comes to mind is; if you really need, as a nonprofit, to invest in a tech stack, shouldn't you be able to pay for it?

Jacek Siadkowski 5:09

Well, it's not easy because where do you get money from right? I have hundreds of examples of organizations that had a strong intuition that technology might be transformative for their work, but they were unable to find a donor that is open for funding technology. If you think about, you know, typical funding that you may find on the market, technology usually gets like 2-3, maybe 5% of the whole budget, right? And this is not enough to build serious technology that is scalable and more than a website.

Lars Peter Nissen 5:43

Maybe to make it concrete for us, give us your favorite example of what TTTR has done that really worked.

Jacek Siadkowski 5:51

Yeah, so an example I often tell is from Nicaragua. This is the country which has big problems with cervical cancer. This is one of the top three countries in the world where most women die from cervical cancer. And there's one special changemaker there. Her name is Anielka Medina and she runs the Lily Project Foundation. And Anielka herself is a person whose mom died from cervical cancer. She had to raise her siblings first because her mother died when she was 15 or 16, and then she decided to do something about the problem. She rented a bus and invited doctors and nurses to drive around the country, teach sexual education to women and screen them for cervical cancer. Before COVID I think they educated 20,000 women. They screened around 10,000 of them and found thousands of positive cases of cervical cancer. So they actually saved a couple of hundreds of lives, right. But then the COVID started and they felt insecure about driving the bus anymore. So they were thinking, OK, so how we might, you know, do similar things but online. So the first intuition was maybe let's start this WhatsApp group. This is something we can do overnight, and they actually started the group. They sent it to a couple of women, you know, that they worked with and they were very surprised because over the next couple of weeks, the group almost exploded. So they found a couple of thousands of women basically using the group, you know, chatting all the time. And their realization was, well, maybe it’s actually easier to deliver sexual health education online than offline, because when you go offline, you meet all those stereotypes, social friction, like ‘my husband is watching me talking to this strange woman from the city’. There is some kind of anger that ‘we shouldn't change our lives’ and so on. Especially in terms of how women are often treated more as a workforce in Nicaragua rather than partners. So they saw that this WhatsApp group was becoming more and more popular, and they thought; well, this is great. But how do you manage a group of a few thousand women on WhatsApp? So they had this idea to build an app that will educate women, which would create a more organized community where we can talk about different aspects of sexual health in kind of thematic groups. But also an app that would enable women to actually order medical screening, right? That would happen, for example, once per year. And the idea was pretty good, right? It sounds like it was a little bit tested both offline and online so it shouldn't be difficult to find a donor that would be interested in supporting this idea. And they actually had support from the US, some advisors, that really liked the idea, but they were trying to get funding for this project for over a year, unsuccessfully, because of the reasons I told you about: It's actually difficult to find tech oriented donors nowadays which is surprising because we live in the technological era. Yeah. Suddenly they found Tech to the Rescue, and within two weeks we matched them with a tech company from Pakistan that actually volunteered for the project, because women in the team in Pakistan wanted this up in Pakistan. So after three or four months, the prototype of the app was built. It was implemented in Nicaragua for a controlled group of people. It was quite successful. So they actually developed a second version of an app with the same company. Right now it's being developed and implemented in Nicaragua. They are working on implementation in Mexico and in the long term they actually plan to implement the app in the whole Central America and in the Arab countries. Obviously they need some more funding, right, because to build strong technology, that is, a very human oriented and top notch technological product, you need lots of money. But actually, having a possibility to work with a pro bono partner to build a prototype to prove that you're right with the idea, will make it easier to jump over this gap of funding that is there, especially for ideas that are untested or at a very early stage.

Lars Peter Nissen:

It's a fantastic example. Do you have any idea how much they were able to scale the intervention in Nicaragua?

Jacek Siadkowski:

It's happening right now. So as far as I know, few thousand women are using the app every single day. For sure they need more funding. They have a pretty good idea how to scale the app and transform the foundation to the social enterprise, because if you have enough women in the app, you can actually show advertisements, right? So you can make a revenue stream. So we really support them and we are in touch with them. Every couple of months we match them for smaller projects like optimizing the app to show up high in the App Store and so on. From a technical perspective, to build a really successful tech nonprofit, takes multiple projects. It's not only how to build a great idea and it's done. It's constant work to improve the product. But if you have this pool of technological actors in one place, it's much easier.

Lars Peter Nissen:

What's the scale of this? How many organizations have you worked with and what's the value of the services that the tech companies have provided to the NGOs?

Jacek Siadkowski:

Today, as we speak Tech to the Rescue is more than 1500 companies from over 60 countries. Not all of the companies are super engaged. Some of them join us looking for a project. It's not always easy to find good projects for them, but more or less half of them are very active and engaging in this one project. Over 2000 nonprofits joined Tech to the Rescue with some requests, and until today, we were able to kickstart over 700 collaborations.

Lars Peter Nissen:

And how did this start? Those are quite impressive numbers – that's a significant scale. When did you actually start working on this?

Jacek Siadkowski:

Well, prior to Tech to the Rescue, I used to run my own digital agency. Since I remember I was a social impact guy taking responsibility for its community and environment. Then actually, one day I started an organization back where I live in Warsaw, which was organizing community spaces for young students. It was very successful. We got a space in the city center. But then I thought, well, in Warsaw, in the city center in the Big city, young people have so many opportunities. So I thought, well, can we create a similar space for hundreds of small villages around Poland? And I thought, well, we need to use technology. We found the partner, we did it, we implemented those similar community spaces in over 100 small villages using Internet gamification. And they thought well, this is a good idea that we can scale up, right? Like if we take game elements, psychology, internet, apps, we can actually help many nonprofits to build impactful solutions that are scalable. Then I started my company. It was a digital agency. I was developing software solutions for nonprofits for eight years. But every single time I was approached by a client, a nonprofit, I saw the potential and solution that could be built, but every single time there was little or no budget, right? So I was very frustrated. At one point Ashoka invited me for a process of becoming Ashoka fellow and then they started asking difficult questions: OK, So what is the system you operate in? What are the problems?

Lars Peter Nissen:

Maybe just explain to the listeners – what is Ashoka?

Jacek Siadkowski:

Ashoka is a global organization which offers stipends and fellowships for social entrepreneurs who have ideas for solving systemic problems. So every single time they review a candidate for Ashoka fellowship, they try to understand if this person is solving the problem with a cluster - or does this person actually try to solve the problem of being scratched in the 1st place, right? So in the process they ask questions like: OK, what is the system you operate in? What are the root causes of the problem? How do you want to approach them? And I started thinking, OK, so I do this gamification thing. It's important. People need to have external motivation to change behaviors and habits. But how do I work with technology and gamification if nonprofits don't have resources to actually buy technology at all? So I started thinking: OK, so how to solve this problem systematically? Am I able to bring hundreds of millions of dollars to the nonprofit space? Rather not. But I saw this great idea: An example of organizing a pro bono workforce in the legal industry. In the legal industry, almost every single legal company does pro bono and it's part of the process when you join a new company, you can expect that the company will offer you an opportunity to do pro bono. It's even part of the culture. There's this famous TV show about lawyers, The Suits, right? It's watched by hundreds of millions of people, and in every season, the main character Mike does at least one pro bono case.

Lars Peter Nissen:

Yeah, I like Mike.

Jacek Siadkowski:

Mike is great! And this is, you know, really part of the culture, right? So I had this idea that maybe one day someone will start a similar movement in the tech industry. But is that me? How do I start a movement like this – is this really possible? Would I need to attend 1000 meetings to get the first fifty companies on board? But when you start a movement, usually there's, you know, a bit of serendipity and you know, social pressure, social tension, that helps. In our case, it was COVID. It was three years ago. You know, I remember that the lockdown started in Poland. Everyone was afraid of what would happen next. Entrepreneurs were thinking, OK, what do I do? And basically we used this social tension to, you know, create this movement. We started Tech to the Rescue. Obviously I wasn't alone. There were so many other entrepreneurs that we're thinking: OK, what do we do? And one of them, published a LinkedIn post: OK, guys. So I want to help with COVID. I have no idea how to help, but I have these talented people in my team. So if you are a nonprofit that knows what to do, I will donate those people to you free of charge for the next three months. So he published the post. It became viral very quickly. So he decided to attach a very simple Google spreadsheet in the comment. And he wrote something like: If you like the idea, please join me and sign up here. After the weekend there were around 30 companies. So he had this: Wow, this is something, like it's growing, I didn't expect it. So he asked his team to actually promote the idea and after six weeks there were the first 150 companies on board. At that moment, when I saw these 150 companies, I had this insight that this might be a solution to the systemic problem. So I basically called this guy, I called Tomek and said: Thank you for your openness to kickstart this with me and with other people. And basically I said: You know, Tomek I think you started something amazing. If we don't work together, it will die because those COVID initiatives die. But I think this has potential to become a global organization.

Lars Peter Nissen:

So you and Tomek are in a sense the Cofounders of TTTR?

Jacek Siadkowski:

I must say that there are many other people: There is Daniel, who also believed in the idea from the, you know, almost the very first day, who is working with me right now. There are 10 other tech entrepreneurs who joined, you know, in a very early moment. There's also Ashoka because I was able to reach Tomek only through Ashoka, because I called Agata from Ashoka and said: Thank you for that Agata – I think there's a potential we need to reach out to Tomak. I can offer him this idea to scale this up. And together we managed to put this into action and it worked.

Lars Peter Nissen:

Now the example you gave from Nicaragua is very much in the development space in the health space. I know you're also engaging in the humanitarian space and you and I have had a couple of conversations before, around how to engage there for you. What is the difference between working with a development use case and a humanitarian use case?

Jacek Siadkowski:

There are two big differences that are, I think, obvious for the audience of this podcast. First one is urgency, right? Most of the time, humanitarian use cases are very urgent. And we have lots of experience, especially from the beginning of the Ukraine war. This is actually an interesting story because I come from Warsaw, Poland, which is next to the border to Ukraine. And before the war we were observing that troops were gathering at the Polish Ukrainian border. So we had our own projects – Tech to the Rescue was, you know, developing. We initially hired at first four people in the team, but one day we had a conversation with Daniel that, you know, maybe something bad is going to happen there. So maybe we should think about some special campaign for Ukraine. So we managed to have a call with the most influential person in the Tech for Good space in Ukraine. And we asked him if he thinks that the war will start, and if he thinks that we should start a campaign targeting Ukrainian civil society? And he answered that in his opinion, the war won't start because Putin cannot win the war. But he also thinks that we should start this campaign right away because Ukrainian society needs this right? So over the weekend I sat down with the computer. I told my wife that I'm busy. I created a website which was called Tech for Ukraine. I published the website on Tuesday and on Thursday, I guess, the war started. So when the war started, we were there and the whole attention of the tech industry focused on Tech to the Rescue. And for the first five or six weeks, I didn't sleep at all. I was trying to, you know, make the best use of this talent that was gathering around us and we actually kick-started 150 projects for Ukraine in the first two years of the war. So the impact was big, right. So urgency is the first one – coming back to the question. The second part of it is obviously importance or responsibility. Because in the development space, you know, in most of the cases, you are not deciding on the, you know, health, or life of someone right. In the humanitarian space you actually need to be much more careful about those implementations: What is the potential positive and negative impact of them. And you need to be more responsible.

Lars Peter Nissen:

And so in a sense, you really were the right person at the right time, right? You managed to get in, just two days before the war. You're there, you're timely, and you're from the neighborhood. You're familiar with the culture, you know Ukraine very well. And so there's a good fit there. And you managed to scale massively after that first really big success. How has it been trying to engage with humanitarians?

Jacek Siadkowski:

I would say it is much more difficult than in the first case. So after the Ukrainian, let's call it campaign, we tried to support Turkish and Syrian society facing the earthquake, and we recently engaged in support for Palestine and Lebanon in the phase of Israel-Hamas war. And what we learned was obviously that without having the local network, and without knowing people who are behind those organizations, it takes much more time to actually get people's trust. This is, you know, obviously very important. So for example, in the case of Palestine, Lebanon, it took us, I think three or four months to actually get the first organizations to join us. And let's remember they have the opportunity to get technology for free, right. So I think proving that you are trustworthy and reliable is very difficult and important, but also I think the crucial part of our intervention is that we can offer those organizations technology talent, right? But it's easy to mobilize technology talent when people are worried about the health, safety or, you know, well-being in the very close neighborhood. But if the crisis is happening in the other part of the world, well, people read the media and get interested in the development of the situation. But it's more, much more difficult to engage them. So right now we are actually trying to understand what is the future role of Tech to the Rescue in the whole system, and we are trying to somehow combine different incentives for different groups to make the success of the Ukrainian campaign repeatable.

Lars Peter Nissen:

And is there also an element of in Ukraine, you have alignment between the West and Ukraine, and so Western tech companies are happy to help the Ukrainians? Gaza has been a far more polarized situation right, with a lot of Western governments, not necessarily wanting to engage…. Do you see a limitation in engaging the tech sector in such ‘controversial’ humanitarian settings?

Jacek Siadkowski:

Ohh yeah absolutely. I think there are two levels. Obviously those sources of friction are different for different types of companies. And we work with two types of companies. To simplify – the big, large corporations that are shaping the whole tech industry, and that are playing a big part in the political landscape around the world. And then, you know, small and medium sized companies that are developing software for clients, and for them it's a different game. It's a game for getting new clients, for building brand recognizability and so on. And for the bigger ones, the large ones, I think those companies…..maybe it's worth saying that tech Industries are full of creative people who are really oriented towards making a positive social impact. This is the fundamental reason why Tech to the Rescue makes sense. Because people that work in the IT sector, they can create something out of nothing within weeks. They feel the creative power of their skills and almost all of them would like to contribute positively to the world. Most of them don't have these opportunities at work. Uh, they work at a company that develops commercial solutions for whatever the industry is, right? But they basically write codes and you know, they may feel very distant from the problems of civilization today. So for them, Tech to the Rescue is a great opportunity to actually be purposeful and meaningful in their work. So there's no problem engaging specific people. But there is a problem with the political/business contexts of both small, medium and large companies. For large companies, it's obviously about sanctions. They need to be aligned. Yeah. If they make a mistake when it comes to their reputation, you know, they may lose millions of dollars. So they are very, very careful with those controversial topics. Sometimes we hear at the meetings that, you know, people would love to help, but they need to be very careful. During the meeting, they say: Yes, we want to help, but then, you know, two days later, they send a polite email that they circled internally and they understood that it's too risky. So they need to wait for a couple of weeks.

Lars Peter Nissen:

Yeah, they had a conversation with their lawyers.

Jacek Siadkowski:

Maybe. Maybe with the boss, right? It depends. For the smaller companies, the friction is somewhere else, right? Sometimes they are afraid that they will lose clients, right, because they may work for a company from the wrong country, right? In the specific context. And, you know, they would love to help, but they put up the well-being of their families versus the well-being of people from other parts of the planet. So sometimes it's difficult. But you know, honestly speaking, I think there are many people in the world who can get over these risks, and this is why we continue to deliver value for those organizations. But for sure, we learned in the last two years that probably every next Humanitarian campaign that will launch will be less powerful than the campaign for Ukraine. Or maybe powerful is not a good word. Maybe… It will take more effort or creativity to engage people, but you know, sometimes this mega crisis that starts makes it easier for the humanitarian sector to get resources.

Lars Peter Nissen:

You really are thinking about it like a tech person, right? It's about scalability. It's about the lack of friction, and that's what you found in Ukraine. But the reality we often have in the humanitarian sector is that there's a hell of a lot of friction.

Jacek Siadkowski:

Yeah, like, I'm not the person who is exposed to the bombings in the field, right. This is my perspective. I'm aware that, you know, I'm not the classic humanitarian.

Lars Peter Nissen:

So I think what you do is fantastic, I think, one of the most fantastic things, and when we first started talking, I was sort of waiting for the: So how do I get to the donors? How do I get some money to finance my platform? But actually, your project is interesting because you don't need money to run the shop. You actually get that money from the tech industry, so you truly come free of charge to the humanitarian sector. And that is quite unique.

Jacek Siadkowski:

I think there is something beautiful in our model, right? And we are able to connect people who need technology with people who want to offer technology free of charge, because this is something important for the people and they are in a good position, when it comes to the economical market, that they can afford it. And yes, we were able to raise funds from big tech companies that think, you know, such a movement should exist and should empower people to actually do good. So we are in a comfortable position that we don't have to raise funds from the humanitarian sector. But obviously being super honest, it's not easy to raise funds from the big tech companies as well.

Lars Peter Nissen:

No, no, I get that. And it's impressive what you're doing. I think my question is: What do you wish we did differently as humanitarians?

Jacek Siadkowski:

I think there is one important thing that we actually are trying to fix. From my perspective, lots of funds and resources are going to the small number of organizations that are large, and those organizations, sometimes, from what I see, are quite distant from the needs of the regular people, especially at the very beginning of the crisis or disaster. And, we kind of stumbled upon this definition of the problem by accident, doing our job, because from the very beginning we were supporting small and medium sized organizations, because they actually lack funding in contrast to these large ones. And you know, from every experience that we have from a crisis, we see that those small organizations are playing a crucial role, especially at the start of a crisis. They provide basic aids in the very first days. They are closest to the people's needs. They are sometimes providing lifesaving support. I believe those organizations should be funded much more, and this is why we are focusing on them, trying to build their, as we call it, digital preparedness, for the next crisis.

Lars Peter Nissen:

So in a sense, you're bringing big tech to big aid.

Jacek Siadkowski:

Uh, I would say, we are taking small and medium tech to small and medium aid.

Lars Peter Nissen:

*laughing* Fair enough. Fair enough. No, that's really interesting, right, because I often see the same… on one side from the private sector, there is a calculation around reputational risk. We want the brand names, the big ones. We know they're OK. These small ones, we don't know what they are, right. And of course, on the other hand, we all would love to speak to Bill Gates or those big money bags that are floating around. But what's interesting about what you're saying is – actually, there's a lot of value in the medium and small sized both tech companies and NGOs.

Jacek Siadkowski:

Yeah, if you think about it, there are probably 200 large tech companies around the world, and they may employ a few millions of people, right? But it's not the case that, you know, they will be able to engage 10-15% of their employees because for such a huge company, sometimes it's enough to engage in 1-2 or maybe 10 projects right? What we are trying to change in the situation is that we want to approach this long tail of the market, right. We collaborate with one platform for digital agencies that actually has 240,000 digital agencies on it, right? It's a few 100,000 tech companies that potentially may be a source of technological innovation and support for smaller organizations. We believe that if we can one day reach to having 50,000 of companies in our community, or if we manage to actually implement this pro bono culture in the tech industry, we might unlock resources for maybe even hundreds of thousands of nonprofits.

Lars Peter Nissen:

And what's the time scale here? When do you think you'll get them?

Jacek Siadkowski:

I'm very impatient. I would like to see most of the market being, you know, part of pro bono culture by 2030. I'm not sure if it's possible. I think with this ambitious approach to solve or change the whole system, sometimes it takes a little bit of strategy and thinking, in a reasonable way: OK how do I realign the incentives on the market, but sometimes it takes serendipity and it reflects to, you know, to use the moment to get on the next level, right? So I think it's very difficult to give the number, but yes, our goal in Tech to the Rescue is to unlock $1 billion of value for nonprofits by 2030.

Lars Peter Nissen:

And what's your optimal mix between sort of development and humanitarian? is it 50/50, is it 10% humanitarian, 90% development? Doesn't it matter? What are you thinking?

Jacek Siadkowski:

It's an interesting question. I don't think about it that way… I think we are trying to learn where our intervention gives value and we are trying to develop in those spaces, right. So right now we are, you know, testing the new model of humanitarian intervention, which is focused on building digital preparedness of the local aid responders. This is the definition of where we think we give the most value, and this is the definition of where we see the biggest need right now. And I think that if we see that those organizations think that we are delivering intervention of a good quality, and something that is really needed for them, then we would, you know, expand more in this specific field. If we see that, well, maybe it's more difficult than we thought, then you know this mix may vary right? For now, looking at the last year, I think we kick-started 429 projects, and among them there were around, maybe 50-70 in the humanitarian sector, right. So that would be around 15%. But two years ago when the war in Ukraine started, it was actually 80%. So it's difficult to say, but I think we are not really about the numbers, we are about chasing the value.

Lars Peter Nissen:

Fair enough. Fair enough. Now last question: The name Tech to the Rescue. What are you guys? Superheroes? Talking about a savior complex… it's almost in your name. Are you going to rebrand?

Jacek Siadkowski:

Yes. One day.

Lars Peter Nissen:

Give us a sneak preview.

Jacek Siadkowski:

I don't know. But this is the branding challenge, right? We started, you know, in the pandemic, right? So we actually felt: We can rescue people, we've seen cases of, you know, people being organised through technology to, you know, give materials to hospitals that were lacking them, right. So it very much felt like rescuing the system. Obviously over time, when we learned more about the humanitarian system, about different bad habits, that the whole social impact sector has… this, you know, colonial approach that we sometimes still have in the Western world… we started thinking: Well maybe this is not the best name, in the long term, but also, we are pretty small and rebranding is a big cost. So we are trying to understand when will be that good moment to, you know, make this courageous decision to change. Is it really that bad??

Lars Peter Nissen:

It is that bad, but I felt horrible about asking the question because I'm a huge fan. I think what you do is fantastic. The value you create is fantastic. It gives me hope to see an initiative like this take off, so I should not have asked that question! Jasek, thank you so much for coming on Trumanitarian, and best of luck with your future work.

Jacek Siadkowski:

Thank you. Thank you. It's great to be here and I hope to find many great organizations that could use our work. Thanks to this podcast.