Exceptional People Magazine - Christal Earle

July/August 2019

Leadership Tips to Help You Quickly Build Influence Creating a Winning Company Culture Inspires IngenuityPart1

RETURNING TO THE LOVE OF HIS LIFE: MUSIC Fuller French

e l r a E l a t s i r Ch Transforming GARBAGE into GREATNESS

e l r a E l a t Chris

Transforming GARBAGE into GREATNESS Exceptional People Magazine | July -August 2019

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f anyone can make lemonade from lemons, it’s Christal Earle. In Earle’s case, the lemons are old car tires picked from landfills in the Dominican Republic.

The lemonade? Brave Soles, her growing fashion company selling shoes hand-made of leather and upcycled rubber tire soles.

But this is not your typical upcycled product story because Earle is not your typical social entrepreneur. Hers is one of self-discovery and relentless vision despite monumental setbacks including a major earthquake, an orphan, a divorce, international bureaucracy, and her own financial woes.

In 2000, not long after the heartbreaking loss of her brother in an accident, Earle founded Live Different, a youth empowerment charity dedicated to creating positive social change through motivational presentations, humanitarian programs, and internships. As she led groups of volunteers in the Dominican Republic, she got to know the impoverished landfill workers living in the area.

Deeply disturbed by the working and living conditions, Earle was particularly touched by one mother and her baby Widlene. When she learned two years later that the child’s mother had died, she and her husband requested and received permission to adopt Widlene. The paperwork took months as Widlene’s mother had been considered an illegal Haitian immigrant in the Dominican Republic.

Then, the now-infamous 2010 Haiti earthquake hit. The Haitian government abruptly shut down international adoptions to combat the rampant child trafficking resulting from the devastation. Worse, Widlene’s adoption approval paperwork was lost in the destruction. The child was now stateless and Earle couldn’t bring her home to Canada. And by this time, Earle and her husband had also separated.

Now a single mother, Earle split her time, alternately working as a speaker in North America and spending time with Widlene in the Dominican Republic.

Financially, she was not far from the workers she was helping in the tire-filled garbage dumps. But one day she realized the opportunity in those dumps: to use the tire rubber as soles for beautiful handcrafted leather sandals.

With only $250 to her name and a business plan written on sticky notes, Brave Soles was born. Earle sold 40 pairs of her upcycled shoes with her first-ever social media post. To keep up with the demand, she set up a microloan program to help local artisans obtain the machinery they needed. She also set up the Brave Soles Ambassador Program to help share the Brave Soles story across the globe.

Having discovered her power even when all seemed lost, Earle is a true believer that anyone can make a positive difference, even if that difference only affects a little corner of the world. Along with Brave Soles, she continues as an inspirational speaker and blogger. She personifies the idea that the best things often happen when we face our biggest challenges.

Earle knows first-hand that mentors and advisors are key to Brave Soles’ success, and that it’s the people behind the shoes that make her products meaningful to customers. Many of her products are even named after people who helped her start out or who inspired their design. And her company’s tagline? “Your soul will feel

Exceptional People Magazine | July-August 2019

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good in Brave Soles.” We think you’ll feel good reading our interview with her too.

Monica: In a world where so many people have become self-centered and have the “me” mentality, and they see themselves as victims rather than victors, they miss out on some basic principles of how to live a life that is filled with a joy and inspiration.

What would you say are some of things that we as a society can do to eliminate all the excess noise in our lives and truly begin to live up to our potential?

Christal: That's a great question, Monica. A couple things. One is that one of my favorite books—and I say that with a lot of levity—is Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.

He recounts his experience being in a Nazi concentration camp. He was a therapist and a doctor, and what he discovered was, when people had a greater purpose in their lives, it gave them the ability to put one foot in front of the other.

Everything that I've come through and everything I've built, I feel very drawn to being part of a bigger purpose, whether that's to help create opportunities for other people or whether it's to help meet people, inspire people to think differently, and to create ways to basically partner with people to build a better future together.

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I feel the greatest gift we can give ourselves is the ability to really find the story that's bigger than us. When we're focused on ourselves, we get tunnel vision. We can easily get discouraged, and we can lose sight of what the possibilities are.

Monica: You spent over 15 years of your life working with impoverished communities in the Dominican Republic. What inspired you to become a humanitarian, and specifically in the Dominican Republic? I do know often; you have to go through valleys in order to discover your true calling.

Christal: Yes. Monica: In those adversities, we oftentimes see the talents and gifts that we weren't aware of before. Were there challenges or adversities that you experienced while being in the Dominican Republic that eventually led you to your ah-ha moment of becoming a humanitarian?

Christal: In order to answer that, I need to dial it back just a few years before.

In September of 1998, I lost my brother. He was 20 years old, and he died in an industrial accident, trying to save somebody else. At the time, I was a community youth worker in a small town in Saskatchewan, Canada.

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When you lose someone, you can expect the stages of grief, and the shock, the anger, all those things. But then there were things I didn’t anticipate. One of the most profound things that happened as a result of losing my brother was realizing the intrinsic value he had purely because he'd been alive.

He was only 20. So, it wasn't like he had accomplished all these great things. He was just a normal guy. In fact, he was working at a job trying to save money for college, and he died in an industrial accident trying to rescue somebody. That led me to some realizations.

Because I had a platform, I had the ability to give people the opportunity to see the power of their own lives differently.

So, we started an organization called Live Different. It's still very active and bigger than ever now. I started it with my then husband. There are about 40 of us in the organization. We started doing high school and college presentations in Canada and around the world, talking to students and audiences about the power of our choices and how we can affect change.

When I went to Dominican Republic in 2004 for the first time, I went there on vacation. I was staying at an all-inclusive resort. And while all-inclusives are relaxing, they are not adventurous. After a couple of days, I said, "There's got to be more here."

I knew nothing about the Dominican Republic at the time, but I remembered that I had a couple of friends who were missionaries there. I went into the internet café and I sent a message to my friends, saying, "Hey, I don't even know where you are, but this is where I am, and I would love to see what you do."

I knew they were working with an organization that was building schools. They responded to the message right away. They said, "Hey, we're actually only five minutes away. If you want, we could pick you up tomorrow at 9:00 and we could show you what we do." The following morning, I went walking out through this beautiful reception area of this hotel, and I jumped in the back of this little pickup truck, and we drove seven minutes from my resort. We went down this little dirt road off the side of the highway that you wouldn't have even known was there.

We came around the corner, and we were in a little tiny village. It was my first encounter with such extreme levels of poverty.

In this particular village, there were a lot of Haitian people who lived in Dominican Republic. The relationship between the two countries and between the two cultures is fraught with a lot of racism and problems—hundreds of years’ worth of hurt.

The village I was in was a Haitian village, and that day, I met a woman, and I sat with her in front of her house, which was the size of my apartment bedroom. Something very profound happened that day because she invited me into her world. She shared her story with me. She gave me the gift of being able to understand her, and to be heard, and for me to be able to experience and recognize that all this time, up until then, I thought I would never have anything in common with someone like her.

As she was talking, all I kept thinking was, "I have so much in common with this woman." I left that day, and I went back to the hotel where I was staying, and it was so profound, I didn't even know how to process it.

When I got back to Canada with my team, we used a big whiteboard as we began to plan out what would we do.

How could we take what we were doing here and with students and begin to translate that into something else?

This was 2004, when the word voluntourism didn't even exist yet.

We created this whole plan. The following summer, we brought 280 teenagers and volunteers to the Dominican Republic. We were partnering with organizations on the ground there. We built homes for families. Since then, Live Different has gone on to build hundreds and hundreds of homes in different parts of the world, but we always work with vulnerable people groups in those areas. So, now it was 2005, and I had these groups of students there.

A local person who had been working in a garbage dump asked me if I would be interested in meeting the people there and learning about what happens in garbage dumps. So, he took me to the garbage dump, and we brought a group of people. We began to connect with the people there. At the time, there were about 80 or 90 people working. Some of them were living in this garbage dump. This was on the north coast of Dominican Republic.

Recycling in a lot of the developing world is privatized, meaning people are actually digging through the garbage and collecting what is recycled and sold. So, the people that work in garbage dumps around the world are often stateless, meaning they have no country to call Exceptional People Magazine | July -August 2019

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their own. When you hear the statistics of people that live on $1.00 or $2.00 a day, this is what it is.

My relationships with those people began to grow and develop in such a beautiful way. I started to bring groups, and we would work alongside them. We were literally in the garbage with these people, helping them to collect their daily wages. As I spent more time there connecting with them, I started to learn about their lives, too.

By 2007, I had been regularly going back and forth between Canada and the Dominican bringing groups.

There was a woman there in that garbage dump, and she had this little toddler on her hip. I didn't think much of it.

One of my friends had gone back there to check on her after we had left, and I found out that the woman had passed away. I knew there wasn't really anybody who could raise that little girl. So, it led us on this journey to start to try to adopt this little girl.

2009 is when I started the journey to adopt her, and shortly after, we began signing papers in Haiti, because my daughter is Dominican-born, but she's Haitian. She didn't have the papers to be in the Dominican Republic, so we went to Haiti because there had been a process in place, and we were going to sign the papers, and Canada was going to allow us to bring her in, sort of under an emergency humanitarian situation. I was working with her grandma, who was helping to do everything.

In early 2010 in January, an earthquake occurred.

Everything that we had signed, even the judge who had signed the papers, was lost. So many people lost their lives in the earthquake.

Everything was buried. Everything came to a grinding halt in the process. We were left with a child whom we didn't have the legal rights to protect without the ability to be able to show the papers that had been signed, and in a system that was broken, and after the UN shut it down, there was no possibility of anything changing. That was, essentially, ten years ago. To this day, my daughter is still denied access to Canada. She can't leave the Dominican Republic.

She's now 14. I had to rebuild my life.

As a result of a lot of things that were going on, I ended up splitting up with my husband, but we raise my daughter together.

I ended up resigning from Live Different because it just became too difficult for me to be able to keep up with 8

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what Live Different needed me to be, and to be able to be with my daughter. I was speaking and writing, and traveling between the two countries, just to be able to keep things moving. But I'm a single mom, and like a lot of single moms out there, that is not the plan.

You're just responding to a situation where you have no choice. During that time, there was an incredible financial crisis going on in my life. I was still at this time hosting teens, and we'd go out to the garbage dump. I remember I'd be in the garbage dump looking at the people and I'd think, "Wow, you actually have more net worth than me."

I lost all ability to judge anybody for situations they find themselves in. I really began to understand something was changing inside of me, because I began to realize that we really do share this earth. I'm with these people at the garbage dump, and I'm seeing how the poor and the vulnerable never get to make the decisions that affect their lives. They always have to deal with the consequences of other people's decisions.

It inspired me to think, "Well, what would I do? If I could change anything, what would I do?" In January of 2017, I was walking out of my apartment in the Dominican Republic, and my neighbor—a good friend of mine— walked out at the same time. She was wearing a really cute pair of sandals, and I said, "Hey, I love your shoes."

She told me she'd just been to Cuba and she was on vacation, and they were handmade. She said, "You know what? I love them so much. I would have paid twice as much for them." As I'm holding this shoe, it was like a lightning bolt hit me on the side of the head.

In the garbage dumps, waterways and in the ditches all around the Dominican Republic, there are tires and more tires. The only way they know to deal with them, like a lot of the developing world, is to burn them, or they just abandon them. Mosquitoes breed in them, and they carry deadly diseases, and they're toxic.

So, I had this idea. I thought, what about handmade sandals with tires for soles? I knew people were doing that, but I'd never seen a pair that was like the style that I would have liked to wear. I had no money, but I've been blessed with an incredible level of creativity and imagination.

So, I went into my apartment later that day with Post-it notes. I made a business plan on a business model on my kitchen wall with pink and yellow Post-it notes. I had talked to somebody already and I showed him. This

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gentleman had a small workshop above his house with about ten people working in it. There was a gentleman who lived down the street from him who was a thirdgeneration Haitian of men in his family who knew how to make sandals out of tires. So, I began to gather these people. And I thought, "If I could find $250, I think I could make this work."

When you hear stories about micro finance and people needing a little bit of money, this is what this looks like, but I didn't even have $250.

In fact, my rent for my apartment was $750, and I didn't have that. So, I tucked the idea in my heart. I said, I'm just going to sit on this because I feel like this is a really big idea inspired by God. Later that week, a friend of mine reached out to me. He's a very successful businessman. We went out for dinner. I hadn't told anybody about this idea, and I knew that I had this name called Brave Soles in my head.

We talked about everything, but I never told him anything about the idea with Brave Soles. When I got up to leave, he reached over, and grabbed my hand, and puts $1,000 in it.

He said, "I really feel like you'll know what to do with this." Now, my rent was $750. I thought, "Oh, my goodness, if I do not do this now, I will always be wondering what if."

So, the next day, I went back to the workshop where I met the gentleman, and I said, "Here's $250. I have ideas." I had brought drawings and a picture. We built some prototypes. I started to get friends to wear them for about six weeks. I had people wearing the different styles of shoes and filling out surveys. I was working on the story plans for the whole brand, and really getting clear on what we wanted to do.

On June 7, 2017, I launched through an organic post on Facebook by saying, "Hey, I'd like to introduce you to Brave Soles." And at the end of that first day, I had 40 orders from all over the world.

Before I knew it, we were shipping all over the world. Our e-commerce business had begun. We started this brand.

That first year, we turned that $250 into about $120,000 of just raw sales, which I know does not sound like a lot.

We went from nothing to now being in stores. We have people in Canada and the US, and places in Europe that

represent us, and we host trunk shows online. We're working on spreading all over the place. And it all started with $250 and an idea.

Monica: See what happens when you believe?

Christal: I've had my fair share of ideas. I always tell people, "I feel like I could write endless volumes of books on what not to try." But then you have that one thing, and you think, "For this chapter in my life, this is that thing."

When I first started years ago, I saw being a humanitarian as different from being an environmentalist. You are either one or the other. And slowly, my heart began to change, and what I began to realize was that with every generation, we're presented with the opportunities of what's going to be the defining thing about our generation.

One of the things that I feel is defining our generation, meaning anybody who is alive right now on the earth as our generation, is what we're willing to do for people and the earth. It's not separate. What we do to one, we do to the other. Brave Soles is built around the idea of our love for people, planet, and building a prosperous future that we can all share.

Our values are built around how our people are treated.

And when I say "our people," I mean obviously our workers and the suppliers, because we have suppliers now. I'm working with people from the garbage dump who are supplying us with tires, and we're providing equitable employment.

But when I say "our people," I also mean our customers in terms of our price points and opportunities that we want to give them to grow. And sustainable fashion is such an unattainable thing for so many people because it's often been sequestered into being an expensive thing. Our goal with Brave Soles is always to think about ways we can make it accessible and sustainable so people can make better choices and be proud of the choices they make, and they can share in the story behind those choices.

Here we are, basically almost two years later, and just last May, we were nominated for a fashion award in innovative fashion in Canada.

Monica: Congratulations.

Christal: One of the things that has amazed me is that the most fulfilling part of all of it is that I have this chance to co-create with people, right down to the guys who are Exceptional People Magazine | July -August 2019

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in our shop. They're able to provide for their families, and they've never even had consistent employment all these years. Their lives have been defined by vulnerability.

programs within our own supply chain. When one of our suppliers needs to buy a machine or something, we help them obtain that.

Now they have health care plans. We recently had our first real team building exercise this year. We brought out LEGOs. One of my friends, who is also one of our team members, is a coach. We brought out LEGOs, and some of the guys in our workshop had never even touched toys. They’ve had no childhood.

We are always reminding them and connecting with them with the bigger story that they're a part of.

They're making something out of love and passion and expression for who they are, and it's so important for them to be able to feel connected to the people who are enjoying what they've created as well.

I watched their faces light up. These are 40-year-old men who were playing with LEGOs.

Monica: How do you envision Brave Soles impacting the world in the next year or two?

As I'm sitting side-by-side with our team, and we're playing LEGOs together, we're talking about the future world that we want to build together. I felt so blessed.

There have been so many things that have happened in my life that I didn't count on. But that's life, you know?

And that's called a journey. It doesn't have to be about all the things that are bad.

Christal: Well, that's exciting, actually. One of the things that we're working on now is our actual supply chain and how we're providing those things. We're working internally on how to work with our suppliers. When I say "suppliers," it's very small-scale. So, number one, for us, it’s considering how we can make it better for them.

Monica: You’ve experienced such a challenging yet amazing life journey. In addition to re-using tires to create shoes, what else are you doing to incorporate sustainability in the products that you create?

Christal: We also have our accessories, which all have an element of upcycle in them. They include inner tubes on the leather that we use for our accessory line. Our products are often from upcycled plane seats, or furniture off-cuts, or dead stock, where there's like half a hide left, or something like that. We use it all up cyclable materials.

For example, our shoes come in a shoe bag, but that shoe bag is from the remnants and upcycled material that we reclaim from basically the last stop before the garbage dumps. Our sewing team turns that into dust bags for shoes, and our accessories. We're working together to continually think about how can we use all these materials differently.

Monica: So, what do you want your customers and business partners, including your suppliers, to think and feel when they see, feel and wear your products?

Christal: I want them to have the assurance that they are part of a story that we can all be proud of. Fashion can do good. Beautiful things can have beautiful stories. They don't just have to be aesthetically beautiful.

We work hard to be able to give our suppliers the resources they need. We have some micro loan 10

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Number two, we're working on some experimental things with vegan materials, looking at how we can dial in a little bit more and develop this more. We're working on some partnerships with airlines to continue to be able to get the plane seats that are headed for the landfills into circulation to create some really useful products.

Then, in the Dominican Republic, we're also now working on developing the model for our charitable arm of how we want that to look, and how we can build a model template for us to be able to implement it in other cultures and in other contexts as we continue to grow and expand on how we're going to do our supply chain.

Inside Brave Soles, we're working on building our own foundation, so we have some very specific areas around statelessness that we are really wanting to help impact, to provide opportunities for the stateless people we work with in the garbage dumps.

Monica: Your life's journey has been comprised of many twists and turns. Along those twists and turns, you have seen dramatic differences in how life positively and negatively impacts people and the planet. From your personal perspective, how have the people you've met in the different corners of the world impacted your perspective of yourself and how you live your life today?

Christal: That's an awesome question. I would say the thing that has impacted me the most is the reality that if we can strip away all the labels that we put on things, and the agendas we think we should have, or the priorities

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we think we should have, we are all actually on the same team. We all should have the same goals when we're really willing to consider the other person's perspective.

I don't like to say “the poor,” because it's not really how I see it. My work with vulnerable people, or with people who have found themselves in situations that would not be of their choosing, has provided me with the ability to realize that I can learn from anyone.

In North America, in the western world, we tend to strive to build bigger.

We have an isolationist or protectionist perspective, and we want to quickly put labels on things. In my work and in my life working with vulnerable people from communities around the world that have far less socioeconomic opportunities, there is such a sense of connectedness to the people around them.

There's a lot of ease around recognizing that we can do this together, and we can do difficult things. You learn to let go of the things that are really not a big deal.

Monica: What can we as citizens do to help you further your mission?

Christal: One of the things around Brave Soles that we have identified is that we are about helping, but of course, we're selling also. We are an actual commerce business. We're a for-profit organization. We exist

because people buy our products. But we are a shoe and accessory company that's really about selling people on the idea of the power of their own choices. So, how we view the smallest choices we make has amazing ripple effects all around us.

One of the issues that's close to my heart is statelessness and immigration vulnerability. We have a lot more power than we realize, and we can raise our voices for change.

By making simple changes in how we consume and in how we see our own choices, we really do help to accomplish a much better mission. It's a legacy that we get the opportunity to be part of if we're willing to see our choices in a fresh light.

Monica: This has been a refreshing interview. Would you mind ending with your last word?

Christal: I'd have to say that we all have the opportunity to decide whether we want to see ourselves as a victim or a creator.

How we see ourselves determines the choices we make from that point forward. Being a creator is incredibly liberating, because that means you open yourself up to limitless possibilities. Where you are today doesn't need to determine what your future will be. The choices we make helps to determine it, but we have the power to decide what kind of future version of us we want to have in the world.  Exceptional People Magazine | July -August 2019

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If the path to success was totally clear, we all would achieve our goals in record time.

No matter what goal you aim to achieve, the entire path to reaching that goal is never one-hundred percent clear. You have to take a few steps at a time, then based on where you are at the moment, plan the next steps.

That means having patience and being willing to make adjustments and corrections along the way.

Monica Davis