who wants some lemonade?
This past week, in our first week here back in America, the kids and I decided to put on a lemonade stand. Now if you've been following me for some time, you know this is not their first lemonade stand. They have been doing this lemonade stand for over five years and they love to do it in the summertime. You probably even saw their first Facebook live. Not only were they selling lemonade, but this summer, they also came out with their own clothing brand.
IT'S CALLED YOUNG AND WOKE
There’s a Young and Woke design on the front and the back has inspirational quotes from Harriet Tubman, and the other one is from Mahatma Gandhi.
They chose the quotes.
They made the design.
They made the t-shirts.
They are going through the process of deciding what their inventory needs to look like and they’re devising a plan to get out and sell the shirts.
They are then taking the profits from both the lemonade stand and t-shirt sales, and adding it to their Kiva account. If you don't know what Kiva is, it's one of my favorite organizations.
KIVA
Kiva allows people to do micro lending all over the world. For more information, please visit here. You can put an amount of money to support an entrepreneur all over the world. When the boys first started this lemonade stand, they wanted to donate the proceeds to Kiva. Over time they have been able to accumulate $1,000 worth of loans and have been able to put out over $1,000 worth of loans. What's cool about Kiva is that you put a loan out, you fund an individual or group of individuals and you can look at their profiles and see what they're doing and see what their business is all about. Kiva has a 99% return rate. After you make the contribution, they use the funds, they're able to grow their business, they pay back the funds, and you're able to then redistribute those funds to another organization.
Every few months the kids get onto Kiva, they look at what money has been invested and put their money back into bigger account and redistribute it to another group. They've been exclusively focused on women entrepreneurs.
NEW BOOK ALERT …. FROM MY KIDS
In addition to doing this cool lemonade stand and starting their own clothing line, they also drafted a ten-chapter, middle grade book. We have worked on picture books before but never a middle grade book. They have written the first three and a half chapters and are at about 6,000 words in their first draft. It's pretty exciting to see the project come into fruition!
MOMMY BRAG :-)
If you don't know, my kids are seven and ten years-old and I am super-duper proud of my boys! They are amazing young men and just, it's so fun to see the way that they think and how they move in the world.
A lot of times people ask me "Deanna, how did this come to be? How did you get your kids to be living in their purpose at such a young age?" I want to tell you is that my husband, Justin and I, have been incredibly intentional. We've been intentional about talking to our children about purpose. We've been intentional about talking to them about how they can make a difference in the world. If you have children in your life, I would highly suggest that you do the same, but even if you don't have children in your life, the same practice that we're using with them is the one that we use with ourselves.
Let me tell you how we have been intentional with them in the way that we are trying to raise them.
the purposeful family
The first thing is that as a family we sit down and we talk about our goals. At the beginning of the summer, one of the goals was to get Young and Woke off the ground. The second goal was to try and write a middle grade book. Those are two goals that we decided to do as a family and support one another as a family and getting them achieved.
The second thing we did was we wrote down those goals. You can talk about things all the time. You can say, "oh, I want to do this. Oh, I want to do that," and that's all fine and good, but until you put yourself in a position where you are committing yourself and you're putting it on paper and you're saying, "this is what we're going to achieve," that my friends, makes a huge difference!
The third thing that we did was to put aside the time to with intention. We make a goal for today that is essential to the overall goal and put aside a little bit of time each day to achieving those goals. I teach a whole webinar you can find here on how to put 15 minutes aside for your goals.
I can't wait to see you all next week! Remember: HUSTLE with PURPOSE!
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