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Leadership as a keyword has over 4.4 billion search results on Google. The corporate leadership training industry is big too. Organizations in the US alone spend upwards of $14 billion annually on training their employees to be leaders and leadership development is ranked as one of the top three things senior executives (and business leaders) are most interested in. Yet, somehow, most of these leadership programs fail to deliver on their promise: access to being a leader.

Why on earth would that be the case?

In a remarkable conversation with Lynne Twist — a pro-activist and acclaimed author who raised hundreds of millions for philanthropic causes (standing in the vision of a world that works for everyone, with no one and nothing left out) — who had the opportunity to work alongside iconic world leaders like Mother Teresa, Buckminster Fuller, Maya Angelou and the Dalai Lama (to name a few), points to something very important on the access of leadership.

Here’s the tip of the iceberg in terms of our conversation together on this episode:

“When you make that kind of commitment, when you take a stand with your life, what comes through you is a level of effectiveness, inspiration, and I’ll call it guidance that one doesn’t even know is possible. You stop living your life, your little life starring you, and you live your stand. When you take a stand, you let go of any position you have. You take a stand that gives you incredible access. Archimedes said, “Give me a place to stand and I’ll move the world.” You can and you do.” – Lynne Twist

Tune in to learn about:

• • • The root access to true leadership
    • Dealing with both ends of the spectrum: deep pain and extreme joy
    • What it’s like to stand for something bigger than yourself (a world that works for everyone, with no one and nothing left out)
    • The Hunger Project and its global initiatives
    • The Pachamama Alliance — a social profit (nonprofit) organization whose mission is to empower indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest
    • About the book The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life

 

Connect with Lynne Twist:

• Linkedin
• Twitter
• Website
• TED Talk

Lynne Twist’s biography:

For more than 40 years, Lynne Twist has been a recognized global visionary committed to alleviating poverty, ending world hunger and supporting social justice and environmental sustainability.

From working with Mother Teresa in Calcutta to the refugee camps in Ethiopia and the threatened rainforests of the Amazon, as well as guiding the philanthropy of some of the world’s wealthiest families, Lynne’s on-the-ground work has brought her a deep understanding of people’s relationship with money. Her breadth of knowledge and experience has led her to profound insights about the social tapestry of the world and the historical landscape of the times we are living in.

Her compelling stories and life experiences inspired Lynne to write her best-selling, award-winning book “The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life” (W.W. Norton, 2003) which has been translated into nine languages including Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, French, Spanish, German, Japanese, Bulgarian and Portuguese.

In addition, Lynne has contributed chapters to more than ten books including:

• Women of Courage: Inspiring Stories from the Women Who Live Them, by Katherine Martin (New World Library, 1999)
• Nonprofit Management 101: A Complete and Practical Guide for Leaders and Professionals” by Darian Rodriguez Heyman (Jossey-Bass, 2011)
• Einstein’s Business: Engaging Soul, Imagination, and Excellence in the Workplace” by Dawson Church, Ph.D. (Elite Books, 2007)
• Birth 2012 and Beyond: Humanity’s Great Shift to the Age of Conscious Evolution by Barbara Marx Hubbard (Shift Books, 2012)

Ms. Twist has written numerous articles for RSF Quarterly, Fetzer Institute, Noetic Sciences Quarterly, and YES! Magazine and Balance.

A teacher by training, Lynne’s desire to contribute to others moved beyond the classroom and onto the world stage when she became the chief fundraising officer for The Hunger Project, raising hundreds of millions of dollars in the course of her tenure.

In 1996, Lynne and her husband, Bill, co-founded The Pachamama Alliance — a social profit (nonprofit) organization whose mission is to empower indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest to preserve their lands and culture and, using insights gained from that work, to educate and inspire individuals everywhere to bring forth a thriving, just and sustainable world.

Lynne’s work as a global citizen encompasses membership in a prestigious group of social profit (nonprofit) boards including the Fetzer Institute, The Institute of Noetic Sciences, Bioneers, Conscious Capitalism Inc., Educating Girls Globally, Youth for Environmental Sanity, and Partnerships in Youth Empowerment.

Lynne also serves as an advisory board member for the California Institute of Integral Studies, Women’s Earth Alliance, Global Youth Action Network, The International Museum of Women and The Center for Partnership Studies, among others. She is a member in good standing of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, The Social Venture Network, The National Society of Fundraising Executives, The Transformational Leadership Council, Evolutionary Leaders Coalition, The Turning Tide Coalition, Women Donors Network.

As a result of her work as a global citizen, Lynne has been featured in over 10 films including: “The Shift” (Michael Goorjian, 2010), “Crude Impact” (James Jandak Wood, 2006) and “Women of Wisdom and Power” (Lili Fournier, 2000) and “Money & Life (Katie Teague).

In addition, she has been interviewed by dozens of media including The Huffington Post, “Mehmet Oz Radio,” Oprah and Friends Radio, NPR, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, and PBS.

Honoree
As a result of her work around the world, Ms. Twist earned an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Centenary College and has won numerous awards including the United Nations Woman of Distinction award, honoring her work to end world hunger; the Purpose Prize Fellow; Humanitarian of the Year Award from Youth at Risk; Humanitarian of the Year Award from the City of Fairfield, Iowa; Heroes of the 21st Century award from the Social Venture Network; Entrepreneurs’ Award from Katalysis Partnership; The Rainforest Champion Award from the Rainforest Action Network; the Nautilus Book Award; the New Dimension Broadcaster Award and the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights Award for Breakthrough Visionary Leadership; the 2015 GOI Peace Award, which she received in Tokyo, Japan; the Greenheart International Award 2016 and the Limitless Women Award 2016.

Most recently, Ms. Twist was awarded the Conscious Visionary Award from Sedona, Arizona’s Illuminate Film Festival in May 2018, as well as the Service Award from the American India Foundation in March 2018.

Lynne and her husband, Bill, live in San Francisco, California, and take delight in their three adult children and five grandchildren.

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Full Transcription:

Lynne Twist: Rather than getting into that number too much, I’ll just say 44,000 people were dying a day approximately of hunger and hunger-related causes and disease on a planet of 4.3 billion. Today, as we speak on this podcast, it’s 2019. Although it’s not gone down to zero – we have 7.6 billion people on this planet now; way more people, almost getting close to twice as many people. The number of deaths have gone from 44,000 down to a little bit under 15,000 a day. That is a magnificent, unpredictable, stunning drop. No one could have predicted that. Because the numbers were going up, not down

Tanya: That’s Lynne Twist, a global visionary that has worked alongside game-changing leaders like Mother Teresa, Oprah, Maya Angelou, The Dalai Lama, and Jane Goodall just to name a few. Having raised hundreds of millions of dollars for philanthropic causes, Lynne has dedicated her life to alleviating poverty and hunger and supporting social justice and environmental sustainability. As the author of The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life, Lynne shows that, for the most part, our relationship with money is bankrupt. It’s a trap and it’s toxic.

As we awaken, Lynne sees the possibility of living in sufficiency and gratefulness. In addition to co-founding the Pachamama Alliance and founding The Soul of Money Institute, Lynne is an award-winning speaker, consultant, executive coach, global activist, and sought-after global influencer. She brilliantly asks us to consider what if you were known for what you allocate rather than what you accumulate? Lynne, you’ve had a really actually unbelievably interesting career and life journey. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Lynne Twist: I call myself a proactivist, not an activist because I want to distinguish that I’m an activist for, not against. I stand and have for pretty much my whole life in the vision of a world that works for everyone. As Buckminster Fuller said was, “No one or nothing left out.” I see what’s in the way. I’m not afraid to tackle it, or dismantle it, or address it, but I’m not against it.

That energy doesn’t really work for me. I don’t fight against, but I fight for. In fighting for – or not fighting, that’s even the wrong word, standing for. I’m willing to hospice the deaths of the natural systems and structures, not that they’re natural, but the systems and structures that normally would serve us that are unsustainable, that are inappropriate, that are dysfunctional, helping them dissolve while I midwife the birth of the new structures and systems that I see are appropriate and more authentically accurate to the times we’re living in. This is the way to describe myself now when I look back.

I’ve been involved with global issues or issues that I cared about since I was very small. I did a fundraising event in kindergarten when I was five years old because the school that I went to, the public school, Lincoln School in Evanston, Illinois, had a budget crisis. They told my older sister who was the star of the school play that there could be no costumes or sets for the school play. They were going to do some abstract interpretation of whatever it is they were doing. She was just in sobs of tears when she came home from school and told my mother that she was the star of the school play, but there would be no costumes and no sets because there wasn’t enough money.

I overheard this tragic conversation. My older sister was quite a prima donna then. That was her MO. I just went back to school the next day. I enrolled my teacher, Ms. Edna, and all the kids in the class to have chocolate chip cookies and lemonade and have lemonade and chocolate chip cookies stands on all four corners of our school block every day after school and all weekend until we raised enough money for costumes and sets for the school play. It’s a funny thing to start with, but I sometimes realize that’s where it all began. That I become a fundraiser when I was five and realized that you can generate money out of your commitment to someone that you love or something that you love.

For my whole life, I’ve been involved in issues of quality, social justice. I got very deeply inspired when I took the ES Training in 1974 in January when I learned I could make a difference with my life. I really didn’t know that until then. Then from that transformational really extraordinary portal that the ES Training provided for me and millions of people really, I walked through a door where I started to define myself as someone who was destined and committed to making a difference.

That’s when I started studying with Buckminster Fuller. I introduced Buckminster Fuller to Werner Erhard. The Hunger Project was born out of that relationship, a commitment to end world hunger. It hadn’t even occurred to me that hunger could end, but I remember as a child learning that there were hungry people, hungry children. It was almost unbearable to me. When Werner Erhard who founded The Hunger Project announced that he was committing to ending world hunger, I had a transformational experience like a kundalini experience that overtook my entire life.

I became I’ll say dedicated, committed, unyieldingly focused, and declared as someone who would devote my life to ending world hunger; some of the people from outside of my community would say obsessed with ending world hunger. For me, it was – it gave me the purpose and power that I was craving in life. I had little kids just like you do, little ones that I – so I didn’t have the bandwidth or the time or the – it was completely inconvenient to become involved in ending world hunger in a global issue that large, that confronting that seemingly intractable that – and that inspiring, but I could not help myself.

That really began to define my life, that commitment I made to end world hunger, which was really an ontological commitment, a commitment to the transformation of a human condition that looked insurmountable, intractable, impossible to resolve that had become – we’d become resigned to. To transform that resignation into conscious committed action really reshaped everything I ever knew to be true and gave me a life that I could never have planned, never have designed, never have even hoped for with the privilege of working Mother Teresa, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, The Dalai Lama, people that I couldn’t even imagine I would ever meet in a lifetime. To work with men and women in, particularly women, with my hands in the dirt in Ethiopia after the famine or working to empower women in Bangladesh or Dharmapuri, India. These activities, these opportunities, the privileges, these spaces, I became a key player in a world that I was given as a result of that commitment.

There’s a lot more to say than I became very involved in many things as a result because when you make that kind of commitment, when you take a stand with your life, what comes through you is a level of effectiveness, inspiration, and I’ll call it guidance that one doesn’t even know is possible. You stop living your life, your little life starring you, and you live your stand. When you take a stand, you let go of any position you have. You take a stand that is – gives you incredible access. Archimedes said, “Give me a place to stand and I’ll move the world.” You can and you do.

The Hunger Project, the ES Training, working with Buckminster Fuller, understanding that as he said, “One little individual can make a difference that alters the course of humanity,” just knowing that or hearing that or understanding that might even be possible really altered the course of my life. I’ve been living in that recognition, in that realization, in that commitment ever since. Now, I do many things that are – that flow from that commitment.

Tanya: I can tell you, having been involved in The Hunger Project, that is something. Actually, having gone to India with The Hunger Projects when I was 13, it fundamentally changed the way I saw the world. I so appreciate the stand that you took, that you’re taking, and the dedication that you dedicated your life to really ending world hunger. The Hunger Project has been in place for some time. What has happened since you have really – you, and The Hunger Project, and everybody involved have taken a stand against ending world hunger?

Lynne Twist: When we began, we began in 1977. I was very involved in the pre-Hunger Project days when Werner was really creating The Hunger Project with Bucky Fuller and others. I was right there in the designing the enrollment card and really looking at and beginning to learn the about the statistics, etc. In the very beginning, we learned that the number of deaths, this is when we wrote the first documents that defined The Hunger Projects, the source document, and then other really important documents like the Ending Hunger Book.

At that time, we had 4.3 billion people on planet Earth in 1977. At that time, the number of deaths per day were 44,000 a day, 44,000, mostly children under five on a planet that had 4.3 billion people. The infant mortality rates around the world we very high. Infant mortality rate I think you know measures the number of babies who die before their first birthday out of every 1,000 live births. Infant mortality rate measures in a gross way but an important way the health and well-being of a society. Because if a baby cannot make it to Year One at a certain number out of 1,000 live births don’t make it to Year One, the chronic persistent hunger is part of this scenario of that country.

Rather than get into that number too much, I’ll just say 44,000 people were dying a day approximately of hunger and hunger-related causes and disease on a planet of 4.3 billion. Today, as we speak on this podcast, it’s 2019. Although it’s not gone down to zero, we have 7.6 billion people on this planet now; way more people, almost getting close to twice as many people. The number of deaths have gone from 44,000 down to a little bit under 15,000 a day.

That is a magnificent, unpredictable, stunning drop. No one could have predicted that. Because the numbers were going up, not down. We being the human family are on the trajectory to end chronic persistent society-wide hunger that cripples a country by 2030 which is one of the Millennium Development Goals measured by infant mortality rate, which I’ll go back to now.

Our commitment was to have infant mortality rates drop to 50 or below in every country in the world which says in the United Nation statistical studies that society-wide hunger has been completed in that country. There is no country on Earth that after the infant mortality rate drops to 50 or below has gone back up. It is a stability number in statistical analysis that means society-wide hunger has been handled, or completed, or is no longer the basic issue of the population.

When we started The Hunger Project, infant mortality rates around the world were in some cases as high as 238 per babies dying per 1,000 live births in a country like Afghanistan or Ethiopia. Those infant mortality rates have dropped dramatically even with the AIDS crisis which was a huge break in the – a breakdown in the work of ending hunger. The global infant mortality rate dropped to way down of not 50 but 56 I believe or 54 by the end of the 20th Century which was completely unpredictable. That’s the average infant mortality rate.

Now, many countries still have high infant mortality rates. There’s a lot of work to do, so we’re not done with ending world hunger. That work has made a gigantic difference; I want to say the work of everyone working on ending hunger. What The Hunger Project really did was distinguish the commitment to end it from what was going on at the time by the hunger response community which was alleviating the suffering at the periphery of the problem but with no hope of ending hunger. No one had even spoken those words. In fact, thought that was an almost impossible task.

The Hunger Project shifted the game from hunger being an inevitable, hopeless tragedy that we could never resolve, but we could alleviate some of the suffering to – that was the world community’s narrative and point of view and the way the work was evolving to we can end world hunger. Now, CARE, UNICEF, Oxfam, Save the Children, Christen Children’s Fund, all big giant organizations way bigger than The Hunger Project are committed to ending world hunger, which is a very different way to work. All of the activities, the government grants, the countries all over the world through the Sustainable Development Goals and through the Millennium Development Goals made commitments to end world hunger which were unthinkable before The Hunger Project. We ontologically shifted the entire issue from a hopeless, inevitable tragedy to something that we are now eradicating off the face of the earth.

That is one of the greatest contributions The Hunger Project made. Now, The Hunger Project has really established some of the pathways to that, one of the most clear, and powerful, and famous pathways that we established is the empowerment of women and girls being the key factor in ending hunger and poverty. The Hunger Projects made a gigantic contribution.

The statistics today are – they were unpredictable. Every organization on the planet of – the planet has played a role in having those number goes down the way they have. There’s a long way to go, but we’re on the trajectory to end it. We were not.

Tanya: My God, those numbers from 44,000 people dying every day to 15,000 globally is among the population not quite doubling but almost is enormous. That’s amazing. One of the things that you mentioned in I think it was maybe a microdocumentary, which I was deeply inspired by the way.

Lynne Twist: Thank you.

Tanya: You know what; maybe it could have been the interview with Oprah that the poor people – or I know you don’t like to call them poor people, people in poor circumstances taught you something, something very important. What is that?

Lynne Twist: First of all, just distinguish that most of my life, I used the term poor people until I meet them, until I started working with them, until I started knowing their names, and breaking bread with their families, and sitting in the desert with them in a circle and in a drought. I realized these people are not poor and that label demeans them and those of us that would call them that way. They are some of the strongest, most courageous, most innovative, most intelligent even though they can’t in many cases read and write, people on this planet. One of the phrases Werner used that I use all the time is, “They exhibit more courage to live through one day than most of us are going to need in our lifetime.” To call them poor people is a label that is – just doesn’t fit.

What’s poor is their circumstances, not them. They’re whole and complete people living in sometimes horrendous, oppressive, violent, and completely really resource-poor circumstances. What comes out of that for people I think is it almost forces one to rely on their inner life. If you have no outer resources, often, and this is what I’ve learned from them, the sense of your own sufficiency, your own resilience, your own inner depth, your own inner resources is where you go. That’s your treasure and your relationship with other people.

The family systems in Sub-Saharan Africa, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Menevia, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, places where I’ve worked, are so strong. The sisterhood among women, the inner resources that a woman needs to draw in when – you’re a mother; I’m a mother. I’m a grandmother now. Just imagining not being able to feed your children for days on end what you would need to draw in yourself to stay – to keep your kids filled with the possibility of life. That strength, that resilience, that human spirit as we say in The Hunger Project, that capacity to find a way through when there’s no way, as Martin Luther King said, “Find a way when there’s no way,” is who human beings ultimately are.

That’s where I learned about sufficiency, the central theme of The Soul of Money Book. That our enough-ness does not come from money or what is normally termed success, but rather from our sense of self and inner strength, the human spirit, the capacity we have to endure that no matter what, we have a well of being that is the source of our well-being rather than outer resources. The world wealth actually, the etymology of it is well-being. The etymology of well-being is the well of being that’s almost infinite that’s available to every human being.

When you have nothing on the outside, and the government doesn’t recognize you’re even a person, or your husband treats you like a possession or cattle, where people go, and these are the people that I’m thinking of right now that I’ve worked with over these years, you go to that well of being which is an infinite source of strength, and power, and vision, and inspiration. That’s what people living in resource-poor circumstances, living in war – I was in Mozambique after the war. I’ve been in Libera after the war. Women who’ve been raped by soldiers 20, 30 times have children that they have no idea who the father is. Just the strength of these people, these women. In particular, I’m thinking of, the courage of Leymah Gbowee who won the Nobel Prize for stopping the war in Liberia, or women in Ethiopia after the 1984-1985 famine who lost every single child to starvation, hadn’t learned to read or write, had no livelihood, no money, no hope, and got – and ended up going all the way through school and getting a PhD and serving in the government to make sure that never happened to another mother again.

These are people like you and me, like anyone. Those circumstances, those resource-poor circumstances can be the environment, the ecology that really has people turn to that infinite source and the source of their relationship with let’s say the other dimensions, the spirit world, their relationship with God, their relationship with the natural world where they find – like my partners in the Amazon now: extraordinary relationship with the spirit world. Just unbelievable power that they draw from what you and I would call the spirit world, but for them is a daily life. It’s not prayer; it’s not a belief system; it is a source.

I think people living in resource-poor circumstances have a direct experience often because they must in order to survive of true source. That gives them infinite power. They’re whole and complete people. When we call them poor, we demean them and we demean ourselves. That label, it just doesn’t fit them. It fits their circumstances yes, but not them.

Tanya: What you are speaking of – so much to unpack there. Have you ever been in a situation where it’s just you’re standing for something and obviously you’ve dedicated your whole life to it but isn’t it also heartbreaking at the same time? How do you keep going and keep standing for all of these women and families and people in the face of what is so in some cases atrocious, and ugly, and fundamentally disturbing to see and deal with?

Lynne Twist: Sometimes it’s hard; often it’s hard. I don’t mean to stop over that. Somehow for me, I’m always able to find that source of inspiration. I just know that people’s circumstances that they live in, and the way they’re raised, and what happens to them as children often is the soil that produces a monster for example.

There was a man named Mobutu, who was the Dictator of Zaire. Zaire was a country; it’s now been broken up into several countries in Africa. When I was working there, he – this particular man, Mobutu, he wore a leopard skin hat if you maybe remember. He was in the news all the time because he would massacre people right and left. It was like a horrific rain of terror in Zaire. He murdered hundreds of thousands of people, probably millions and then had billions in a Swiss bank account. He was just a – most people would call him a monster.

Eventually, he was overthrown. He fled. I don’t know where he is now. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that I – we didn’t work in Zaire because it was too dangerous for us. We knew what was going on there. The Hunger Project would deal with refugees who had gotten out of Zaire who’d been tortured or who’d been horribly suppressed.

One time, I was in Japan raising money for The Hunger Project. There was one of my big donors, multimillion-dollar donors, one of our big donors, not mine, but I was very close to him, invited me to go to a reception at the American Embassy; unfortunately, that’s the kind of dictator we’ve cropped up, for a reception. I didn’t realize that the reception was for Mobutu, the President of Zaire, this horrendous guy. I remember thinking when I saw him – and there was this long receiving line of dignitaries waiting to shake his hand at the American Embassy. This makes my blood curl.

My Japanese donor wanted to stand in line and meet him. I was thinking do I want to shake the hand of this man who’s literally murdered, raped, pillaged, destroyed his people? I remember standing in line and watching him as he greeted each person and thinking about whatever happened to him that made him, that turned him into that kind of a – turned him so far away from his soul that if I’m really true to myself, I need to see that inside of that man just like inside of every human being is a divine spark.

It got dimmed; it got crushed; it got covered over; it got manipulated. He was probably beaten bloody as a child. He was probably called names. Something happened to him to turn him into the kind of person that would do what he did to his own people.

As I got closer and closer – you can picture this receiving line. I’m getting closer and closer thinking I’m going to actually shake this guy’s hand. I began to see in watching him, there was a little boy in there who was hurt, who was damaged, who was crushed, who had to turn mean to survive. Something horrible had happened to him.

By the time I got to him, I remember looking him in the eye with tears in my eyes. I said to him, “Whatever happened to you that made you be cruel to your own people, I’m sorry for you. I know you can find that place in yourself again.” Then I moved on. There was the next person to shake the hand of and the next person to shake the hand of. I didn’t even know if he heard me.

I don’t know if I need – I can’t even remember your question. I know that there isn’t a person on this planet who doesn’t want to love and be loved. When that is shut off, or shut down, or unrecognized, or unseen, or unacknowledged, or not received, it’s like turning off a switch that can always be turned back on.

Let’s see; I think your question was I’ve been in situations where I’ve seen people be unbelievably treated in a kind of cruelty. I work with the Nobel Women Peace Price Prize Laureates now. We’ve done delegations to Liberia, and Sudan, and the Congo, and places, the Rohingya people in who are no in Bangladesh in exile. What’s happened to primarily women is almost unspeakable. I know that inside of each one of us is a Mother Teresa, is a Hitler. We all have that capacity

What we choose is always there for us. Sorry to go into this so long. I also know from being in the company of women in the Congo who’ve been raped and sexually tortured in such a way that they can barely walk that kind of deep sorrow, and grief, and tragedy, and crushing cruelty, being the recipient of that and even being with people witnessing people being the recipient of that has given me the capacity, that depth of pain and suffering to be with them, sharing what they’ve been through, has given them and me the capacity for almost unbelievable joy.

The other thing – sorry to go into this so long – I also know from being in the company of women in the Congo who’ve been raped and sexually tortured in such a way that they can barely walk, that kind of deep sorry and grief and tragedy and crushing cruelty, being the recipient of that and even being with people, witnessing people who have been the recipient of that has given me the capacity, that depth of pain and suffering to be with them. Sharing what they’ve been through has given them and me the capacity for almost unbelievable joy. What I mean is there’s a spectrum. I move toward suffering in my life. I always have. Not for myself, but the suffering of other people.

I have seen it, particularly in Africa I’m thinking of now, women who have been through that. When it’s time to dance and celebrate and sing and share and love, their capacity for the other end of that spectrum, if I can draw it as a continuum almost, is greater than anyone I’ve ever seen on earth. I learned all this from my experience with Mother Teresa, that the capacity to endure suffering and witness suffering deepens your soul so powerfully and gives you the enormous capacity for forgiveness and an enormous capacity for celebration and joy and to really express the human spirit. I don’t know, did I answer your question? What did you ask me?

Tanya: It so is beyond the question. I’m here bawling. I’m so moved by what you’re saying, and I totally get it. The degree to which you can be with suffering and hurt is the degree in which you can feel the other side, joy and life.

It’s funny because as you were talking before I asked the question, I said I can feel a resistance in me. I’m not sure that I can even experience some of the stuff that you’ve seen because it brings me to tears. Even you just speaking about it brings me to tears. It makes sense, the ability to be with the hurt and the fear and the upset is access to the other side of the spectrum of living.

Lynne: I once had a women’s magazine call me and ask me if I would do an article for them. They wanted to put me on the cover. I had just written The Soul of Money. It was a big opportunity to get the book out there. I said, “Of course. What’s the magazine called?” The woman said, “Our magazine is called Balance.”

I said, “I don’t think you have the right person. I don’t think I can do that.” She said, “What do you mean? Don’t you want balance?” I said, “Actually, no. I don’t seek balance in my life. I know that’s what many women are looking for, balancing their career with their kids.

I know what you mean, but I’ve just got to say what my life is about is integrity. Integrity is very different than balance to me. If I need to stay up all night to keep my word, if I need to fly from Ethiopia to Japan to be at the Japanese Diet to present a proposal to resolve something in Africa, if I need to go into the minds of South Africa to find a woman and rescue her, I’ll do it. I don’t have a thing about balance.” I said this to this lady.
If you ask me to write about integrity, give you my word, being in touch with the wholeness, that fullness of life, authenticity, I can write about that. I can’t write about balance. You’ve got the wrong person. She was so stunned by this strange response that she did put me on the cover. I said, “If you interview me, then write what you think can fit for your magazine. If you ask me about balance, I don’t even want it.”

It’s like being on a teeter-totter in life and wanting it to never go up or down but just to be balanced. You want the person on the other end to be the same weight as you. How unexciting is that? I want plain, full-out life all the way. Everybody doesn’t need to do it this way, but that’s just my path. I can’t not do it. Now I’m crying.

Tanya: My God, completely unplanned here. I am moved by who you are, full stop, what you stand for, who you are. It’s just really beautiful. Let me switch gears here a little bit. You wrote this incredible book called The Soul of Money, which I read years ago. It’s called The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life. In that you cover a lot of things, but mainly the theme is our relationship with money. Can you talk about it a little bit?

Lynne: When we started The Hunger Project, I was assigned the job of enrollment and fundraising. It was kind of what the whole Hunger budget was at that time. We didn’t know how to balance our checkbooks, Joan Holmes and I. We couldn’t even add and subtract. I don’t mean to demean her. She’s brilliant and continues to be one of my greatest teachers.

When we first started The Hunger Project, we really were fairly clueless. We knew that one thing we would not do is we would not use the pornography of poverty and hunger to raise money. We would not create a narrative where people pitied hungry people or felt sorry for them. We would end that kind of fundraising. We wouldn’t do that.

We would raise money in a way that elevated the power and courage of people living in conditions of hunger and poverty. There’s still a little bit of this, but not much anymore, starving babies with bloated bellies and flies in their eyes on ads on the television all the time. Help little Maria or little Muhammad with skinny legs and big bloated bellies. People felt so terrible that they would send $50 in the middle of the night to whatever agency was advertising that way. We vowed we would not do that.

We would not only not do it ourselves, but we would create a fundraising that was consistent with the end of hunger, rather than its persistence. It was challenging because people were used to charity and pity and feeling sorry for, and we just weren’t going to go there. That wasn’t transformation. That didn’t elevate the image of these courageous men and women who are on the front lines of ending world hunger. We started a different narrative.

We talked about the billion people living in conditions of hunger and poverty and standing on the front lines of ending this scourge that none us want on this planet. You and I have the privilege to join them rather than feel sorry for them. We have the privilege to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with these unbelievably courageous women, men, and children. We start creating a different narrative.

I had the insight that you read about In the Soul of Money book of sufficiency, the wholeness, the completeness in every human being. I started to really see that that’s how we wanted to talk about the people living in conditions of hunger and poverty. The sufficiency message and addressing the mindset of scarcity became the central tenant of our fundraising. We developed a fundraising methodology that really spoke about the front and the backside of the hand of hunger.

If you hold up your hand right now, the front side of the hand of hunger is the physical hunger of children, women, and men, malnutrition, malabsorption, seasonal hunger, famine. That’s the physical hunger of humanity. The backside of that same hand related in completely the same hand is the hunger from meaning, the hunger to make a difference with our lives, the hunger to matter in the affluent world. The affluent world and the people living in conditions of hunger and poverty, it’s all one hunger. It’s the same hunger with two different faces, the front of the hand and the back of the hand.

We started to address the hunger in the affluent world, the hunger to matter, the hunger to make a difference with our lives, the hunger to do something meaningful, the hunger to have purpose, the hunger to see that we can make a difference. Our fundraising became almost like seminars about making a difference with your life, about knowing that money flows through your life, and you have the privilege of sending it to where it will make the most difference for the most people. It doesn’t really belong to you. It belongs to all of us or none of us. It just moves around the planet.

Those of us who are awake and transformed and committed can have money be an expression of our commitment and love for the world. We developed a fundraising methodology that was about the work of ending hunger, but it was consistence with the end of hunger rather than its persistence. It was about the world community coming together, recognizing the health and well-being of ourselves, of each other. Hungry people don’t live somewhere far away. They live in the space of our own humanity. A billion people would go to bed hungry every night is not a seed or a food issue. It was an integrity issue in our relationship with ourselves and one another in the human family.

Our narrative, our conversation, our methodology, you could say our ontology about fundraising was very unique. That was the source of these principles and my relationship with Bucky Fuller of starting a new relationship with money. We started to talk really directly to people about their relationship with money, their hurts, their wounds, their baggage, their anxieties, their constant fear that they can’t have enough even if they were in the million and multi-million dollar category. We start addressing the lie, the scarcity, which is in the source document. We took the lie of scarcity and applied it to fundraising and the world of people’s relationship with money.

That became the signature of The Hunger Project fundraising, which I was the person responsible for it. I trained 50,000 fundraisers around the world in 50 countries. I trained people in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau to raise money from each other, not from the World Bank or from big giant monster agencies, but from each other so that they would realize that the resources were right there in their own country. Money coming from the Mozambicans for the healing of the war in Mozambique, even though it was smaller on spreadsheet and accounting total, it had power, a different kind of power that money was a carrier, a currency of people’s love for their own country. It had a power that a World Bank grant would never have.

We through The Hunger Project developed a whole new way of seeing people’s relationship with money. That was the source of The Soul of Money book. I must say that before I wrote the book, I also had the encounter with the Amazonian Achuar people, the uncontacted Achuar people who we had earlier had first contact with. They didn’t even know money existed. Money was a new concept for them.

They said if you can’t hunt for it, you can’t eat it. Why do people want it? We explained to them if we’re going to have contact with the outside world, you need to understand this thing called money. Why your rainforest is in danger is because there’s oil underneath the forest, and it’s worth a fortune. People will do anything for money. They’ll do horrendous things for money. They’re obsessed with money.

It’s an addiction. It’s a narcotic in our consumer culture. All of that became the foundational thinking for The Soul of Money book, which is not about finance or investments or about financial literacy. It’s about our relationship as a human family, as individuals with this thing called money, our dysfunctional, distorted relationship with money, a mindset that comes from our current economic system and our current commercialization of everything, and the mindset that if we can see it as false, we will discover our own sufficiency, our own wholeness, our own completeness, our own integrity. The Soul of Money book just sort of came out of me like a fountain as a result of all of these experiences.

I don’t want to not mention Mother Teresa because working with her, she raised millions of dollars and nobody even thinks about money and Mother Teresa in the same sentence. I watched her. She was awesome. If she saw that there was a building in Guatemala that would house all the people that she wanted to serve, she would go talk to the person who owned the building and ask them to give it to her. They would say yes.

She would take out the carpeting, no hot water or anything so that the Missionaries of Charity could live like the poor, but she would have her building. They would just give it to her. I watched her. She started 406 missions in 103 countries.
I learned from her that reallocation of the world’s financial resources away from fear, away from overconsumption, away from destruction, reallocating those resources towards what we love, the health and well-being of each other, the health and well-being of our families, the health and well-being of our environment, our communities, our country, all children of all species for all time, that’s what money is really for. I became an advocate, a leader in the reallocation of financial resources from fear to love. That was the source of The Soul of Money book and The Soul of Money Institute, which I run now.

Tanya: Lynne, that is just spectacular. Thank you for the stand that you are in the world and the difference that you’re making, the leadership that you are for so many of us to wake up and feel life and live. Thank you.

Lynne: Thank you; great to meet you by phone. I hope we meet live in person someday. Send me your cellphone and when I’m in New York, I’ll call you.