From the CEO: Empowerful

“True sustainability does not come through handouts from privileged to powerless, but from partnerships conveying prosperity and pride.” — Kevin Prine, President and CEO

We are in an age when a cryptocurrency startup company, with no finished product, is valued for an amount greater than Sears, K-Mart, and JC Penney combined. This past month, Kylie Jenner made the cover of Forbes magazine because she is a 20-year-old billionaire, with seven employees.

As a former professor of business, and a believer in the idea that human beings generally make rational decisions when given accurate information, I wonder if the market is telling us something about how the world has changed.

For most of recorded history, people created economic value with their minds and hands. That is still true, but advances in technology, software and social media now dramatically expand our ability to influence the behavior of others. This is what power looks like now.

Outreach has been utilizing these same principles of peer influence and viral spreading for 40 years. True sustainability does not come through handouts from privileged to powerless, but from partnerships conveying prosperity and pride. Our model gets passed from one family to another; from one village to another; from one country to another, like a charge carried through a circuit.

Please look at the pictures and stories we feature on our site, social media posts, our magazine and even here in this blog to see the impact you are making in this world. Rediscover the thing youve always known: It is by empowering others that we become truly powerful.