Josh Young is Chief of Staff at New Story, with a mission to pioneer solutions to end global homelessness. He declined acceptance to Harvard grad school to lead and love within his role at New Story.
Josh is an athlete, leader, and follower of Jesus. He graduated from F&M with honors while playing two NCAA sports, D1 wrestling and football. Since then, Josh has worked in investment banking, non-profit, and helped run a successful political campaign.
REMARKS
Hi everyone. I have to admit that I was a little skeptical before my conversation with Josh Young. I didn’t want to be naive and just accept some do-gooder’s hype about their non-profit at face value. But that didn’t last long after listening to Josh and learning the story of New Story Charity.
I am impressed with their mission and their operation. It’s refreshing to hear about novel solutions being worked on by organizations that really want to make a difference in the world AND understand its realities. And it seems clear to me that New Story partners with local communities and gets buyin and doesn’t try to ride in on a white horse and say “we know best.”
Josh was outdoors when we were talking so you’ll hear some environmental noise. I hope it’s not too distracting.
Listen and see if you agree that New Story has an approach that makes you hopeful. I’d love to hear what you think.
Here’s the interview.
TRANSCRIPT
(time stamps are approximate)
[00:00:00] Liz: My guest today is Josh Young. Josh is chief of staff for New Story Charity, a nonprofit pioneering solutions for global homelessness. Welcome Josh.
[00:00:12] Josh: Thanks. I appreciate you having me on,
[00:00:16] Liz: so tell me about New Story Charity. Tell me the work you do and how you came to work.
[00:00:23] Josh: Yeah, New Story is a nonprofit pioneering solutions to end global homelessness. I met the CEO of New Story, just kind of serendipitously. I was going through a period of change in my life. New Story was growing exponentially and it happened to be right before the pandemic. I flew down to Atlanta and met with him in person. I had been accepted into Harvard grad school at the time.
And. We kind of just hit it off. He had a best friend who was chief of staff at Dell and then DocuSign and has been telling Brett, our CEO, Brett, you got to get a chief of staff. You got to get a chief of staff. So it was in the back of his head that if he met the right person. He would hire them as chief of staff, although it wasn’t on LinkedIn or no position was posted, he was thinking about that.
That’s kind of how we met. And through the beginning of the pandemic, we both kind of had to reevaluate. New Story’s board of directors advised him to go on a hiring freeze. And I only had a couple of weeks to decide if I wanted to decline or accept Harvard. And that’s kind of how we met and I ended up as you can see, I ended up joining New Story and he ended up taking a risk in the middle of the pandemic to hire. A new, a new person.
[00:01:55] Liz: Wow. Well, what were you going to study in grad school?
[00:01:59] Josh: I was going to get a master’s in public policy from Harvard.
[00:02:04] Liz: So, so you’re doing work that you would have been studying.
[00:02:11] Josh: This and politics. Yeah. Although I hadn’t before meeting Brett and the New Story team, I hadn’t really thought about international work.
So joining has made me dream bigger and just think about global issues.
[00:02:27] Liz: Okay. Well, so tell me more about what New Story does.
[00:02:33] Josh: We started back in 2015 with an idea to do things differently in the world of non-profits. So New Story was created in one way, a new story for families, we help serve getting them a new house is the foundation for a whole new life.
And then two, a new story for charities and nonprofits. So as a nonprofit typically you don’t take risks. You do things the traditional way. And we really wanted to flip that on its head and offer also a hundred percent transparency. On average, 70 to 80% of everything donated to a non-profit goes to operations expenses and we we wanted to be able to promise that a hundred percent of donations go to home building. So we have a private group of donors that give to our operations. Right now it’s about 60 wealthy families a couple corporations and they fund our salaries, our events we host any other type of risk-taking we want to do. And that way we can promise that a hundred percent of your donation goes to home building costs which is novel. That idea got us accepted into Y Combinator, which is probably the best startup accelerator in the world. They produce companies like Airbnb and Coinbase a couple others that like honestly, a long list of for-profit companies that are super successful, that you would recognize.
And then we were one of the first non-profits to ever be accepted and graduate from Y Combinator. And that really set the ethos for everything we’ve done after. To dream bigger and really pursue it with excellence. The same way a for-profit startup would think about it or a tech company. Really, most of our peers were tech companies.
And then that led us to investing in home building companies. And our first one was ICON which is a 3D Builder company that produces homes. We pioneered the first 3D printed home and we took it to those who needed the help the most when typically people most in need see innovation last, if at all.
So we wanted to flip that on its head and bring it to them first. And that’s what we did. We went viral for this initiative, it got picked up by apple TV plus, and they put it in their documentary series. Then we were featured on the front of the New York times a YouTube clip went viral that produced like a billion impressions worldwide.
So it was all in all an awesome thing for New Story. Plus we increased the speed of construction through this process, we’re decreasing the cost of home building all while either maintaining or even increasing the quality of home building. There’s 1.6 billion people in the world that are currently homeless or in inadequate shelter and that the UN is projecting that number to grow to 3 billion by 2030. So the solutions aren’t keeping up with the problem they’re in fact, like the problems growing. So we know we need to do things differently and that’s why we set out to do 3d printing. That’s why we set out to do other innovations in our communities.
And that’s why we focus on this.
[00:06:39] Liz: Help me understand how, I don’t know a lot about 3d printing. Basically the only time I’ve seen it in action is at my dentist’s office and he’s building me a new tooth. So tell me how 3d printing works on home-sized scale.
[00:06:57] Josh: So basically it looks the same way. It’s just a giant printer, right? And then the cement mix. Proprietary cement. That comes out of a funnel, producing the walls and like a roll in an algorithm programs that leaving space for doors and windows to be putting afterwards electrical outlets, plumbing, and it looks like soft serve ice cream coming out. It just like goes around. Then it dries. And in 24 hours of printing time, you have a fully produced home.
[00:07:37] Liz: Wow. Why, why isn’t this being done everywhere?
[00:07:41] Josh: I mean, it’s just so new. It’s so novel. So ICON our partner, they recently got an NASA contract to build habitats on Mars, and then they’re also doing both for-profit and even nonprofit work in Austin, Texas, where they’re based. And then, you know, at some point New Story, we’ll continue to work with ICON, maybe not within the next couple years, but we have a strong partnership and a good relationship with their team and they want to do more work with us.
[00:08:21] Liz: Is this scalable on a, on a on a size of big enough to address this problem?
[00:08:28] Josh: That’s the hope. So the reason we are doing it this way, and pioneering solutions and global homelessness is because we know we can’t do this work alone.
There it’s, there’s too many affected. We’re hoping that we can prove that certain innovations work in this space and then other for-profits nonprofits, government entities, social enterprises. does work that addresses this problem. And then in that way we can start to bring down the total number of people homeless in the world.
Really that’s the only way you can address a problem so big, similar to climate change and you need radical innovation. And a lot of buy-in from a lot of different entities. It’s probably climate change is the only thing that affects more people than homelessness in the world.
[00:09:28] Liz: Okay. Does New Story intend to stick with a 3d printed housing or hand that off to somebody else and come up with new creative solutions or both?
[00:09:47] Josh: Probably both. ICON has their complete focus into 3d printing. There’s a couple other companies now that are also 3d printing homes. Our focus is always going to be on building homes, cheaper, faster. And at the same or even improved quality. So any innovations that fit that, that’s what we’re going to set out to do right now, we use a hundred percent local labor and local materials.
So even with the 3d printers, some parts of that proprietary mix is bought locally. And then, you know, producing the, the roofs, the doors, the windows. All of that required labor. And we use local labor to do that. So we’re really empowering the entire economy this way. So focusing on housing and serving people in need of home, but also entire communities of people kind of raising, raising them up and getting community buy-in we think that’s super important to do.
We don’t want to end up in a situation where helping hurts, which can be the case.
[00:11:08] Liz: Where are your projects and and how did you choose where to put them?
[00:11:15] Josh: Yeah, we started in 80. We, so the reason we started in Haiti is because our founder and CEO went on a mission. The Haiti knew in his Christian faith and just was floored by what he saw.
It was his first time traveling internationally, definitely first time in a developing world. And it just couldn’t believe what he saw. Just people living in tarp tents, dirt floors. We call it survival mode living where all you can think about is trying to survive to the next day. And on these tarp tents were very well-known non-profits organization logos, and he figured there has to be a better way to serve these people then tarps. He wanted to produce high quality homes that could be passed down for generations and find a nonprofit that did something like that. So he decided he’s going to do it himself set out to fund just one home. And I mean, if you ask him, he never imagined it would turn into what it’s turning into now, where, where our goal is to house a million people by 2030.
BREAK
And then, so we started in Haiti. There’s, it’s just a tough, they get hit by so many natural disasters and there’s a lot of need there. And then we ventured into Latin America. A couple of reasons. Our focus is in Latin America. The main one being there’s a lot of need, but there’s a lot of need throughout the world.
And then in developing worlds, It’s so much cheaper to build homes at a high quality. So like a, where are our offices in San Francisco producing a home? They’re the same home we can make in Mexico for $10,000 would probably cost $200,000. Is so it’s a scale type, a issue. And since our focus is on proving out solutions and different ways to make homes faster, cheaper, and at a higher quality, we’re going to do it internationally where we can do 20 times the impact for, for the cost.
And then the reason Latin America is proximity over like, like Africa or where need is still huge, but we’re a company operating from the U S and it just makes sense to be able to fly down to Mexico within two to four hours and, you know, be able to have boots on the ground, go back and forth. And we need to take our donors to see the work live and not have them have connecting flights and stuff like that.
So that along with the 3d printing initiative, we had to actually drive the printer across the border. So Mexico from Texas was pretty close.
[00:14:40] Liz: I get it. What’s possible in terms of expanding with those limitation, where, where do you go from here or at least where do you go in the next three to five years?
[00:14:56] Josh: Yeah. So. Three to five years, we are going to grow rapidly where at the point now where we’ve kind of established certain building practices, and we also know that philanthropy isn’t the only way that this problem is going to be fixed. So we’re transitioning to a blended philanthropy and a repayment model where we still want to serve the world’s most vulnerable families. So we’re going to subsidize these homes with philanthropy. We think philanthropy plays a major role, but half of the home costs will be paid back at a very affordable rate over like a five to 10 year period by families. And this way we can, as a nonprofit we’re, we’re not keeping any of the money.
It just goes right back into our home building budget to build more homes. So our reach can go further right now, as I mentioned, our goal is house a million people by 2030 to do that, we need to build about 225,000 homes and to house families of roughly four to five. And then that’s going to cost about a billion dollars.
So our, the way we’re planning it out is 600 million in philanthropy raised and then 400 million in loans that we’ll be able to give out to families. And then one proving that this asset class can be lent to at an affordable rate will be huge and having other companies do similar work and then to, to make our money go further and be able to house more families.
We found in our work that families actually want to pay for their homes. It provides dignity and respect. And then with. Our historical work, we’ve collected repayments, but kept it in the community to build roads or any community maintenance they need. Now we’ll just be collecting that as a loan in the beginning.
So we’ll be the direct loan giver. And eventually within this decade, we’re hoping banks see like, Hey, this works and give New Story or in partnership with New Story, affordable housing loans. Right now it’s impossible for a family in Mexico or El Salvador, which is the two main places we live to get housing loans.
The main reason is they don’t have bank accounts. Nearly 80% of people in Latin America are unbanked. So they have no credit. They’ve historically been taken advantage of a lot by banks and governments. So they don’t trust to hold their money there. And then the ones that would want to get a, a loan often it’s predatory, the interest rates.
It’s not uncommon to see a hundred percent interest rate, which is just unaffordable. And when you talk to families, I’ve been to El Salvador a couple of times, and you ask them like, if you wanted to build a home, like how would you do it? And they’re just like, it’s no possible.. They’ll tell you like it’s a dream come true.
Just to be able to dream of having a home right now, most families are squatting living in makeshift shelters. So being a able to provide affordable loans in this area is pretty revolutionary.
[00:19:07] Liz: Wow. I don’t even think about those, those factors when I think about it. What about the land?
[00:19:14] Josh: Yeah, the land, we are starting to acquire land ourselves to have more authority over the projects we do, and the people we’re serving and, you know, expedite the process of, of building and.
Historically, we’ve been granted land by governments. That’s how we would choose our projects. And now we’re at a place where we can acquire land. We are still taking government grants to do work, but for the most part, I think we’ll be either acquiring land or in some cases in Mexico, families are owning their land already, but can’t get a loan to build a high quality home and we’ll be doing some incremental housing at a demand driven type model. So families will come to us, say they have land, they need a home. We verify that, one they’re in need. So they are within an income range that we serve. And then two, that they are the sole owners of their land.
And then we can do, we can build a home that they’re proud of. Right on land that they already have.
[00:20:31] Liz: Wow. How many have you built so far?
[00:20:34] Josh: Close to 3000. We built 3000 homes changing the lives for close to 15,000 families.
[00:20:42] Liz: Wow. That’s great. It sounds as though there are so many facets, different kinds of, of work that New Story has to do that. I mean, like verifying that people actually own their land and setting up banking and and loan stuff. I mean, how can your organization manage so many different types of the process?
[00:21:14] Josh: Yeah. I mean, one. The thing is we’ve been blessed to have awesome local partners. So we partner with organizations in Latin America, in Mexico.
It’s actually in El Salvador, it’s been and now Hope House is another organization, Bitcoin Beach as well. And we’re going to have to start to expand that, that reach. As we grow now, we’re able to fund a lot more homes. So we’ll need to continue to find high quality local partners to work with. But historically that’s been our saving grace and being able to do this work is having boots on the ground that are high integrity, high quality work.
And as we transition into this loan model where families are required to pay back. For a portion of their home, we’ll also need to be partnering with financial institutions. The goal is to find institutions in country or in that we can support, you know, we pay everybody out of profit. So empowering, even that section of the community is.
Everything within the construction life cycle in making housing more affordable and more accessible is within range of what we’re trying to prove. So each community it’s built with a purpose for us and for the world, just to prove that some aspect of the construction life cycle is possible. And that’s, and then we share it.
We share everything we learn as we try to do it the right way. And that way more organizations know best practices.
[00:23:13] Liz: So New Story is happy to share your way of doing things so that other charities can do the same thing. Can, can copy you?
[00:23:25] Josh: Absolutely our hope is that other organizations copy us and we’ll help them copy us. Again, like that’s the only way we’re gonna make a dent in this, in this issue.
[00:23:38] Liz: What are the kinds of things that you want listeners to know about, to be thinking about, to possibly take action on?
[00:23:47] Josh: Yeah. So with this mission that we’re set out to do, we need very generous hearts and supporters for this work. So sharing the work we’re doing is always helpful.
If you want to learn more about New Story, NewStorycharity.org is our website. We’re on Twitter at New Story Charity Instagram as well, same handle and. That alone, like having people care about the global homelessness issue is a major factor that we’re working towards. And then if it’s on your heart to get involved financially, then we have a couple different options.
One is for the builders group that I mentioned, which is our private donor group that funds our operations, that. That private donor group is a $50,000 a year minimum, and then they get certain perks and they’re really partners in our organization making our work possible. The other way is the Neighborhood, which is started during the pandemic as a way to do rent relief in the United States.
When we had to pause building internationally and has grown into a way for the masses to contribute to global homelessness, the issue. A hundred percent of those donations go directly to home building costs and you can join the Neighborhood directly from our website.
And then the last is, if you have a company or an organization to partner with us in some way, we have different levels that get different perks and stuff like that that can make it fun for your organization. And, and also help you meet your ESG goals or get some marketing or press related materials.
And we have an in-house brand team that is literally the bomb like they do excellent work. I’m super proud, and just blessed to that we have the team members we have.
[00:26:00] Liz: And are you the person to contact? If they have a business, I’ll put all of these links into the show notes, but if somebody has a business that wants to partner, who should they be in touch with?
[00:26:12] Josh: Yeah. [email protected] is my email address. I’m super responsive on that. You could also message me on LinkedIn Josh young at New Story Charity. I’ll pop up.
[00:26:23] Liz: Wow. It sounds daunting and enormously important. And heartwarming. Your work is, is really beautiful and exciting that it’s so creative.
I love that you’re looking, you’re purposefully looking to do things in a new way and break some, some of the limitations that we’ve had. If you could wave a magic wand for New Story, what, what would be your next vision for how, how the next 10 years will play out?
[00:27:01] Josh: Our goal is to house a million people by 2030 and do it in innovative ways. So, you know, quick access to funding would help us exponentially. So like I would dream that we would get a lot of that capital upfront and then we could expedite our ability to help others.
And then also just like being able to partner with so many growing local entities and have them be excellent and full of integrity would be awesome. More, more likely is that like we’ll test a couple as we, you know, grow exponentially and a couple of them will be the best options for us and we’ll have to iterate, but the more, the more that we can get lucky and partner with awesome people and vet appropriately Yeah.
And that not having to do too many restarts would be, would be great. And then also just backing innovation that actually works. Like we’ve been lucky so far to pioneer solutions that truly. And if we can continue to vet appropriately and partner with awesome companies that’ll expedite our work.
[00:28:52] Liz: It sounds like you know what you’re doing and what you need. And it also sounds as though, because you are, you have a good idea and you’re working hard and you are striving for, for, for excellence that you you’ll have better luck than ordinary people. I mean, there is something about that kind of energy that attracts awesome partners.
[00:29:21] Josh: Yeah. We say all the time, bold ideas attract bold people. Yeah. That’s the type of things that are gonna, you know, help in this work. My mom also, always says. Love begets love is what she likes to say. But if you’re constantly putting in lots of hard work, you’re going to attract people who put in lots of hard work.
If you operate with integrity, you’re going to attract people that operate with integrity. So, you know, just maintaining our character and ideology through our growth process is going to be super important. As we scale and. I don’t imagine that we would compromise that for anything else. So hopefully we can continue to attract similar organizations and people.
[00:30:13] Liz: That’s a perfect place to close. I don’t want to send it off in any other direction. So I thank you so much for your time and your work. It’s really inspiring.
[00:30:24] Josh: Thank you, Liz. It was a pleasure.
[00:30:28] Liz: My thanks to Josh Young, you can find out more about him and New Story Charity in the show notes.
I invite everyone to write and tell me what you’ve always wanted to try. I’m Liz Sumner reminding you to be bold and thanks for listening.
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Theme song written by Michael Cohen https://michaelcohenmusic.com and performed by Complicated People https://complicatedpeople.com
Additional music by Michael Cohen
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