Welcome to Your Brand Amplified, the podcast where we interview marketers, publicists, and

brands to learn their stories, what makes them tick, and tips and tricks that make a difference. Hello and welcome back to your brand Amplified.

I'm so excited today to have Steve Fredland as a guest on the show.

Steve, welcome to the program.

Thanks, Anna come, excited to be here. Yay. So one thing that

really stood out for me about you as a potential guest was your nonprofit background and your

work in Africa.

So I don't think you know this about me,

but I have a nonprofit that I started,

shoestring small, all volunteer.

We work in Ghana and we have we focus on children's education and we quickly and realize that some of the kids also didn't have a place to live so we built an orphanage know, comes, all these things come with a lot of issues that you, if you don't think them through if you're just trying to be a good Samaritan, right? And then now we've also have organic farming and we're looking to expand that so then it can create self-sufficiency and fund everything because it's been really difficult.

And so I think it's really interesting to talk about how you went from being a humanitarian, I mean you still are, right?

And doing your work overseas and with your career and entrepreneurship.

So I love that you're doing that.

I mean that is exactly it and you know it's community transformation ultimately.

It's really hard to just choose one topic and say, oh we are are going to help with, you know, food security or clean water or

micro financing or whatever the one issue might be because it's so integrated with everything else.

It really has to be this community transformation work. and so that's the same thing that we found to as we started getting involved and for us it was started the end of 2009 was when we took our first trip but it was a couple of years of preparation for that of figuring out how do we have the most impact over there while having impact over here as well. So I love to hear that you're involved in a different part of Africa, but sub-Saharan, tons of needs, and man, we could talk for hours about that.

Yes, we could. We're going to have to, yeah, we're going to have to stay in touch 100% and maybe have you back on this podcast or another podcast to talk more about these issues.

But what drove you talk, introduce yourself to our audience, talk about your story and what drove you to do that while you were also still

making really impactful you know work in the United States. Yeah so long

long story short I'll try to give you the high level overview because I'm a

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