How RIVET is empowering the next generation of global changemakers with tools, trust, and capital
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Show Notes:
On this episode of Mission Matters, Adam Torres interviews Eric Dawson, CEO & Co-Founder of RIVET, about building a global microfinancing platform that gives young people the capital and mentorship they need to create change today—not someday.
About RIVET
RIVET channels the collective economic power of young people to fund their work as social innovators.
We work with companies to co-brand products & experiences, channeling funding from each purchase to the RIVET Fund for young changemakers.
We work with NGOs to recruit and support young leaders from all over the world.
We work with influencers who come together to amplify our message and ultimately accelerate the youth revolution for good.
Co-led and co-designed by young people, this will be the largest direct investment in youth-led social change.
Ever.
Full Unedited Transcript
I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on be Our Guest to Apply. All right, so today’s guest is Eric Dawson, and he is the CEO and Co-founder over at Rivet.
Eric, welcome to the show Adam. Thanks so much for having me. Eric, so we got a lot to talk about today, man. So unlocking the power of youth led social innovation, so excited to get into that. And also what led you to co-found this organization. So I guess just to get us kicked off here rivet how’d that idea come about?
It’s a great question. So I was I was kind of a pissy kid growing up, if I’m honest. I was pretty angry at the world and felt like some of the adults in my life hadn’t done some of the things they’re supposed to do and found my redemption, if you will, in youth organizing. So I’m 14 years old, went to very large.
Public high school, and it was the start of the inclusion movement. So kids with disabilities were being mainstream for the first time and weren’t treated very well by my classmates. So I began organizing to change the culture of my school. So rather than the principal saying we’re, we’re a zero tolerance school, it was student to student deciding we were going to be.
Different. And, and for me it was the first time I got to feel powerful and I got to feel powerful. Not in spite of being young, but because I was young. Mm-hmm. There are things I could do as a teenager that actually my principal and teachers couldn’t do. And that for me was a transformative moment where I realized that actually I could make a difference in the world.
And actually there’s special things I could do as a young person that, others couldn’t. Hmm. How do you, like many people go through these things where you know, in different parts of their life, it doesn’t have to be only when they’re a kid, it, it could be a lot of different things. How, how do you how do you take some of that energy and some of those thoughts and then create something like rivet?
Like, what causes you to like, just take it from idea to then, like implementation? You know, the funny thing about an entrepreneur is we, we tell our stories. Backwards, but we live them forward. You know, so I can tell the story now in a way that makes sense, but, but for me, as a young person wanting to change the world, I kept running up against the same obstacles.
Mm-hmm. And this is true now for all young people around the world who wanna make the world a better place, is we tend to think about young people as victims that we need to protect. Yeah. They are perpetrators that we need to punish. Or they’re the future. I mean, how often do leaders like you myself go into high schools and tell kids, okay, y’all, you’re the future, right?
That someday you’ll be great leaders, artists, athletes. But if you actually look at the research and, and we did this work with some support from Deloitte, we looked at what drives impact globally. And the only through line we could find was the centrality of young people, right? Mm. And think about the five largest companies on the planet right now.
So. Apple alphabet, meta. The average age of their founder was 25 when they started, right? Young people drive change. The challenge though, Adam, is that 85%, 85% of young people on the planet right now live in a capital desert. They’re in a refugee camp in Jordan. They’re in a favela and Rio, they’re, they’re in public housing in Houston.
They, they’ve got no access to capital, whether that’s financial capital or imagination capital. And so what we are building at Rivet is a world’s first microfinancing platform for young change makers. we find that young person with an idea, but not much else, and give them a little bit of startup money under a thousand dollars.
It’s a grant, it’s a cash transfer, no strings attached. Try something out. Make the world a better place. Wow. So over the next 10 to 15 years, we wanna invite a million young people into this ecosystem of building a better, healthier world. I am a huge fan of that and I’ve had the opportunity to, to participate in some of the different pitch competitions and things like that, that actually do give, like what you’re talking about cash to young individuals for entrepreneurial endeavors.
And I’ll tell you, for an adult listening right now, when you think like, what, what can a thousand dollars mean? Or what can that mean to like help? But I mean, I witnessed it firsthand. Like to see the ideas and to see something come fruition. And even just say whether the business succeeds, succeeds doesn’t, whatever, whatever version of that is for a young adult.
Right. But regardless, it gives them their first taste of sometimes of entrepreneurship. It can give them a that little push they need to get over the, that hurdle. Like what’s been your experience so far? I’m just so curious on, on what, what you’ve seen so far as you’ve kind of been on this journey and, doing this.
You said it so well. It is the power of that first. Yes. Mm-hmm. One of our first grants went out to a young man named Walter. Walter happens to live in, in rural Uganda, and his sister, when she started menstruating, had to drop outta school as every girl in this village does. Got married at 12, had four kids while she was still a teenager.
Walter wanted to interrupt that cycle, and so we gave him $250, that’s it, $250. He bought four pedal sewing machines and began making reusable menstrual. Every single girl in this community. Wow. Right. So those girls are now staying in school. They’re delaying marriage, they’re delaying childbirth. And the powerful thing, I went to visit Walter in Uganda and he was teaching boys as well as girls to make menstrual pads.
So you got these little dudes working sewing machines to make menstrual pads. Wow. I remember asking one of them like, why are you doing this? And Adam, he looks at me like I’m an idiot. And he says, menstrual health is my responsibility. Wow. Now, I don’t know, I’ve got a son. I wasn’t thinking that at that age.
I wasn’t. I love him to death. Right? But those words aren’t gonna come out of his mouth. And those boys are gonna grow up to be husbands and fathers and teachers. And I mean, no disrespect when I say this, but that change doesn’t happen if a group of girls and Berkeley, California put. Pads in a box and send them to Walters village.
That is a power refers, yes, that is a power of investing in this incredible talent that so often is invisible. Hmm. one of the other things I like in terms of your positioning is getting youth involved and, and thinking about the unique role that young people play in driving innovation.
Like what, gimme, like how do you, you’re viewing young people as you know, I won’t say adults, but you’re getting them involved in the game. I always talk about like, get in the game for entrepreneurs or if you’re gonna be a content creator or you’re gonna start a podcast or all these other things, like get in the game, you’re putting ’em in the game at a young age.
So what, what’s your thoughts on, on young individuals and innovation just in general? We interviewed thousands of young social entrepreneurs to build rivet, and what was interesting is we found three things that are unique to this age. The first is young people sit at the bottom of the privileged pyramid.
I don’t care what kind of outcomes you’re looking at. Education, access to healthcare, climate change, young people bear the brunt of the decisions that get made on their behalf, so they’re very close to this. Solutions. The problem, solution fit is really strong. The second is they’re not stuck in silos of thinking, right?
A 19-year-old in New York City isn’t thinking which SDG do I wanna solve? Or what’s my theory of change? Like we don’t have jobs, our schools are terrible. And the third is young people have low centers of gravity. Right. They’re entrepreneurs, they can fall down and get back up. All of that ability to take risks and try things out, that gets harder and harder as we get older.
There are 2 billion young people on the planet right now, and young for us is under 30, and they’re the most entrepreneurial, most creative, most engaged group of human beings we produced in the history of the human race. And nobody is calling them, you know, particularly those young people who aren’t at Harvard and Stanford and Oxford.
Yeah. And it kind of makes sense too. And even looking at I’m just thinking about like, when I was a, young guy and starting my first, like, entrepreneurial endeavor. I mean, I was probably trading baseball cards or doing something else like that, but my mind was working, you know what I mean? Like, I’m thinking about it looking back and I’m like, my mind was working and, and I, and I remember having other insights, other ideas, and I know I’ve had the privilege of, you know, working with some youth.
Through what I do now and, you know, to hear different perspectives, to hear different angles, and just to see a different lens I feel like it’s, it’s super beneficial. It’s interesting. That’s right. My, I 10 years old. I, I, would buy lollipops for, for a dime and sell them for a quarter. Right. We would’ve been friends.
You would’ve been the lollipop guy. I would’ve been the, like baseball cards or like comic books. We would’ve been until the principal, until the principal shut me down. I got shut down too. What is this? But that’s what adults do. Like if we’re really honest, right? Like adults. Do not see young people as solution creators.
Mm-hmm. And you know, for, for, for those who, who work with young people or no young people, the most powerful words you can speak to a young person who wants to start a business or change the world is, how can I help? Mm. And that’s what RVA does, right? We find young people and we ask, how can we help? So we are building a half a billion dollar fund mm-hmm.
Over the next 10 to 15 years that will invest, invest in, in a million young people at the very start of their journey. Right. Because we know their, they’re pitch competitions, right? They’re fellowships. Mm-hmm. They’re accelerators. But you and I know that’s not step one in an entrepreneur’s journey, right?
That that’s step 100. Mm-hmm. Like we wanna build the very top of the pipeline. Most of those projects won’t. Be successful, right? Nor nor should they be. Right? Yeah. Kids in, kids in East Palo Alto, so get the same opportunities as kids in Palo Alto to try things out to experiment, and we model that 10 to 20% of those projects will be sticky.
They’ll then be eligible for second round funding, a thousand, 5,000, 10,000. And then we think 5% of those will be game changers that we’ll find the next. Impact unicorns. We’ll then give them scale funding and the idea is to get them investment ready for traditional philanthropy or impact investors. So we’re building a through line from Walter and rural Uganda to eventually get funding to build and scale a business, which he’s now doing.
Hmm. let’s go a step further in terms of just the, the support you feel young people need to succeed in this space. Now, of course, there’s funding that’s a given, but what, what else? Like what about funding? Like what else do young people need? I. At Rivet, we talk about three types of capital, right?
There’s financial capital, we know what that is. Then there’s social capital, right? It’s mentorship, it’s coaching. There’s no through line. There’s no world which Walter gets to meet you. Mm-hmm. And so how do we begin to build those connections? How do we find that social capital that lets the mentorship, the connections happen?
And so we do a ton of brain trust where we bring our young entrepreneurs in community with, with established entrepreneurs to brainstorm, think, create. And this third piece is what we call Imagination capital. These are about the stories that we tell. We want to create stories where young people see themselves as the heroes, particularly young people who.
Aren’t coming from traditional backgrounds. And so it’s that blend of capital. It’s a financial, it’s a social, but it’s also the imagination capital that who these young people are, what they want to create is possible. Hmm. Yeah. I’m a fan of this. I feel like how do people get involved? How do people get involved?
Like, so how do people contribute? how are you getting the pipeline of young people that you work with? So I guess two part question on that one. Yeah. Well, and I’ll add a part. So there are two cool things about what rivets building. The first is how we find young people.
We’ve built a global network of youth serving organizations. So think about the Red Cross, think about the scouts, think about the wises. We can reach about 300 million young people across 198 countries. So we are turning, that’s amazing youth. Mm-hmm. We’re turning every youth worker, every educator, every aid worker into a talent scout.
So they find the young people for us, they provide mentorship using our tools. We provide the funding. The second part is this half a billion dollars we’re raising is going to be raised by young people themselves. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Gen Z, and now Gen Alpha as of 2020, controlled $3 trillion of consumer spending.
By 2030, that number will be $12 trillion. Wow. $12 trillion is a tremendous amount of capital that young people control. And they’re different consumers, right? They’ll cancel brands based on their social practice, right? They’ll spend more for products aligned with their values. So we’ve created a brand Mark, and we co-brand consumer experiences for Gen Z.
Mm-hmm. Where young people, when they buy behind Rivet, know that a portion of what they spend goes to fund their own ideas. So we’ve built basically a philanthropic windmill. That collects those, those activities young people are doing already. So we’ve done eight brand partnerships. We’re about to do our ninth with Crock.
So anyone who’s got little kids know how much they love crocks. So we find the brands that young people love and brands are doing this, not out of their philanthropy, but out their marketing. ’cause what we give brands, the ability to do is tell local stories of impact at scale. Hmm. And so we create this flywheel where every product we do, every project that gets funded, every story we create builds a bigger and bigger pie all funded by young people themselves.
So we’re three years old. We have funded well over a thousand projects, across 120 countries. We’ve done second round funding for 26 of those. There are three ways of folks can get involved with rivet First. Check this out. rivet.org. Mm-hmm. One is we’re looking for mentors, people who wanna give an hour a month, an hour, a quarter all virtually to work with other leaders to support, mentor, guide, and, and coach young social entrepreneurs.
The second is we’re always looking for brand partners. People who want to support young social entrepreneurs through their own brands, messaging and marketing. And then finally, we’re always interested. People who’ve got young adult kids, so young people under 30 who are listening to this or who have young people in their lives, we’re building a really powerful youth community of, tens of thousands of young people who are building and driving rivet.
That’s wonderful. Eric, one more time. How do people, how do people connect? How do they follow up? So rivet.org is the best place to learn more about what we’re building, sign up to be involved, and folks can always reach out to me directly. I’m just [email protected]. Perfect. And for everybody watching, just so you know.
We’ll definitely put the links in the show notes so that you can just click on the links and head right on over. And Eric, this has really been a pleasure having you on learning more about what you’re doing with Rivet. And I’m glad it’s on my radar now and I’m gonna keep my, eye out for this and make sure to continue to, to bring this content to, to my to my audience. ’cause I’m sure that this is not the last, you said you’re three years old. Oh, man. I, I can’t wait to, you know, these anniversaries start kicking in and we just keep on seeing more and more impact that you’re, that you’re doing, you and, and your team over at Rivet.
So thanks again for coming on the show. Thanks Adam. Thanks for having me.