Hi. This is Paul Zellizer, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request. If you could hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps more people learn how to have positive impact with your values based business. Thank you so much. Today, I'm thrilled to introduce you to Cameron Neil.

And our topic today is capital entrepreneurship in the Indo Pacific region. Cam is the cofounder and director of Lend For Good, a crowd lending platform to support the growth of Impact Enterprises and the cofounder and director of Red Hat Impact, with which mobilizes capital to finance Impact Ventures in the Asia Pacific region. Cam, welcome to the show.

With Thank you, Paul. I'm very excited to be here.

I'm super excited. And I just have to say, listeners, we are getting a growing audience. For instance, I get this every 2 weeks or so. And so we've got a bunch of listeners in Kuwait and, and Ireland, with, and, Cam is in Australia. So it's been one of my big goals for 2023 to move the needle outside of North America and Europe where a lot of our listeners have been historically, and it's really exciting to have you here to help do that, Cam, in terms of what's going in the Indo Pacific region. So before we do that, Cam, if somebody wanted to kinda know a little bit about who is this and what's like the short version of your backstory before we talk about the ventures that you're doing now and getting capital in the hands of awesome people doing great work in the region. What what would somebody need to know about you and your background for this to, you know, make sense?

Thanks, Paul. It's a really good question. And I think the the request to do this in a in a thumbnail is, is always challenging. I think for us impact entrepreneurs. They always have big stories to tell. Short version, you know, I I was motivated to, with, you know, save my fellow peers at school, kids committing suicide, here, and so that drew me into psychology. With But I quickly figured out, in that context that the individual problems that I was seeing were actually based in systems, And that kind of drew me into the world of business and finance to kind of say, well, I think these these things are having a big impact on the kids that I'm You know, and that kind of led me on a journey of discovery, like coming from a psychology degree, just spending more of my time now in Excel spreadsheets, than, you know, than counseling people. But, you know, I've been on this journey, of kind of understanding business and how business works and how global trade works and the impacts that those things have on the lives of individuals.

And, with I was very lucky and fortuitous, to be looking for a job at the right time and found my way into building the Fair Trade Movement in Australia and New Zealand, and that really with Exposed to me, you know, overseas development, cooperatives in developing countries, farmers, and supply chains, And then the role of businesses in developed countries that need to change the way they operate to support, you know, tackling poverty in emerging markets. With And so I've kind of, you know, I spent 7 years doing that and and increasingly just followed that path now into focusing on how do I help enterprises that do good, be good businesses. How do I change the finance and capital system to support those kind of values? And and, you know, with How we organize and deploy money has massive consequences for the lives of everyday people, for for the ability of our planet. And, You know, I think while I kinda set out to, you know, study psychology so I could help people stop killing themselves, you know, I think where I've kinda landed now is with What's the innovation required in the way our capital system works? Because that has a massive impact on people's everyday lives and communities.

Lot of similarities. I had a 1st career in community mental health. My, degree I have a master's degree in counseling psychology and clinical mental health. So, yeah, same thing. Like, it was awesome work. And I was like, wait. But all the horsepower and, like You know, if you go to a politician, these kids are killing themselves, they say, oh, that's too bad. Maybe we can do something.

But if a business, especially a big business, needs something, like, boom. It happens. Yes. All the horse hours over there. I'm going over there, and we gotta figure out how to do that for good. So there's a lot of similarities in our stories. Yes.