Micheal Shaw 0:00

I realized I had to pivot a little bit, so I went back and I got my master's in strategic marketing. I've been probably marketing, quite frankly, for over 15 years, but I've been giving it away for free 'cause I didn't think people would pay me for my ideals.

0:16

This is the Your Next Success podcast, and I'm your host, Dr. Caroline Sangal. We explore how to build a career that truly fuels your life, and you will hear stories from people who have navigated big career transitions themselves so you can become your own version of authentic success. I first heard Michael Shaw speak at a local Toastmasters speaker showcase, and by the end of that presentation, he had every one of us rethinking philanthropy, what we give, why, and what we leave behind. Michael is a nonprofit leader, advancement leader, and a brand builder. He's the co-founder of Team Jenny Bean Childhood Cancer Foundation and the author of the new book, The Invisible Currency of Philanthropy. He's been featured on the Today Show, Inside Edition, and The Daily Mail, and Michael brings a powerful voice to generosity, purpose, and impact. He's an amazing human, and I'm so grateful that he was able to sit down and have a conversation on Your Next Success. Listen in.

Caroline 1:25

Michael Shaw, welcome to Your Next Success.

Micheal Shaw 1:28

I'm excited and happy to be here

Caroline 1:30

in true Next Success fashion, I wanna talk about your life, uh, your career. We'll get to the amazing work that you're doing, including this, phenomenal book that you're putting out into the world. So we will get to all of that, but let's dial it way back. help me understand, where were you born? What was life like for the very youngest, little Mike?

Micheal Shaw 1:51

So I was born in Rochester, New York. and I was raised by my grandparents from the age of four all the way to college. I think I had a really, good childhood. I had, a lot of friends, family was always around, and think it very much shaped who I am today

Caroline 2:06

how'd you get so lucky to get to be with grandparents? I feel like they are so wise.

Micheal Shaw 2:12

quite frankly, my mom had me when she was about 18, and my mom and dad split up when I was about one years old, and my mom and I came back to live with my grandparents. And I think it was kind of a collision course of sorts that my mom got used to kinda having family in, in-house babysitter, And I think my grandparents as well got used to having a new baby in the house for sorts. And when my mother got kinda stabilized in her early 20s and she was ready to move, my grandparents didn't necessarily want her to take me with her. I ended up staying there, and it was, a thing to be temporary at first, but never left. And I'm actually in hindsight, really, really appreciative that they did give me the life and the rearing that I had. I think it really does shape who and how I look at the world now

Caroline 3:02

Absolutely. what did your mom end up doing for work or what had your grandparents done for work?

Micheal Shaw 3:08

coming from Rochester, if you've ever heard of Rochester, where you probably will remember it or recognize it the most is Kodak. Rochester was a Kodak town. So at some point, probably seventy percent of the population worked at Kodak. And my mother, nonetheless, was one of those people who worked at Kodak and started her early career working for manufacturing at Kodak. My grandparents were originally from South Carolina, both sides, my father's side and mother's side. And my grandfather was a carpenter, and my grandmother was a nurse at the local, psychiatric center. So pretty everyday, middle America blue-collar workers

Caroline 3:49

there's definitely a helping vein in there. There's creative veins, there's let's get stuff done, be part of a larger community, and definitely a helping vein. 'Cause of all the things that you could be a nurse regarding, the fact that she wanted to see people where they are and, and help them out, that's, I think... We'll get into that. But I think there's elements of that in, you as well. Okay, so you are super fortunate to live in a, a beautiful place with the support and the love of your mother and the, the love and support of your grandparents. As you became, you know, got into school, even like the, at your earliest years, what were the things that you enjoyed about school, and what were the things that you found yourself doing outside of school, you know, as a really young boy?

Micheal Shaw 4:34

Well, I found school to be a, in some ways, a refuge. One thing about growing up with my grandparents, my grandparents were the first generation to move to New York from, South Carolina, and their house was like a transitional house in our family. Almost everyone who came up at some point or another lived in that house. so it always was a cousin or a family member that lived with us for a while. So going to school was an opportunity to be around friends and kinda get out of the hustle and bustle of family life, and I always really enjoyed school. And, and they were in my extended family many times. Some of the things, opportunities, exposures that I had were because my teacher or a mentor took me to the museum, took me on a field trip. They were my home away from home

Caroline 5:28

I see, I see. Living with your, your grandparents, even though you had a great amount of family kind of coming, coming in around and cousins and all that sort, I can imagine, did you have neighborhood friends? What kind of things did you do outside of school?

Micheal Shaw 5:41

Absolutely. Had a robust neighborhood, and it's kinda ironic because I've always wanted that for my kids, and we're in a time where people may not know their next door neighbor, and they've lived there for a decade. You knew everyone on our block, everyone around our block, everyone in the neighborhood. and I was the paperboy, for a couple years, so I really did get to know all of our neighbors, and, so many of the neighbors have been there 50 years. So I really did, get to integrate and really touch base with many of our neighbors. And I grew up in a time where if you did something wrong, there was a phone call or a walk around to your house, or they just disciplined you and then told your parents what they did, so

Caroline 6:24

Is there any particular thing that's coming to mind?

Micheal Shaw 6:28

Oh my God. I was a good kid, so I didn't get in trouble much. Um, I can just remember we were a really close-knit neighborhood. So I grew up at a time, which probably sounds archaic now, but you didn't say certain words even when you walked in front of the neighborhood church. There was a reverence for our elders, and, and it probably sounds like a time passed, but I think it really did shape a lot of how I look at the world. And, some of my values and principles were really carved at that time of my life

Caroline 7:00

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So going to church was something that would just be kinda, became ingrained in you

Micheal Shaw 7:06

I went to church as a kid, and we were very much God-fearing, but I wasn't required to go like every single Sunday and every Wednesday. That wasn't necessarily my rearing, but my grandmother every morning would read her Bible and her, I think it's called Daily Bread, and she would have her coffee, and she would read a scripture, and she would read the Daily Bread for a different interpretation. My grandfather was actually the one that went to church every Sunday. He got his suit and his, hat on, and every Sunday, ten o'clock, he was in that truck on his way to service. So it was a part of my life, but it wasn't really rigid and restrictive, or I wasn't kinda made to go to church every week

Caroline 7:51

I see. I see. Now, as you got into middle school, high school, what sorts of things did you become interested in in school or out of school?

Micheal Shaw 8:02

Interestingly enough, I think small business has always kinda been my niche. So where... I mean, I played football, I played, um, I was never good at basketball, I played football. I did everything that you would probably imagine a kid would do growing up in an urban environment. But small business was always my thing. My first business was, um... and they call them different things around the country. In, Rochester, we call them juleps, and they're the frozen cups of, of Kool-Aid. and it's, it's so funny because as I've traveled around the country growing up, all different regions have different names for them. my father's mother, I went to visit her probably once a month, and I would stay the night many times. And I went to visit her once, and in the back of her kitchen, she took the screen panel out of the screen door, and all day long you would hear tap, tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap, tap. And it was the neighborhood kids buying these frozen cups of Kool-Aid. And I know it sounds kinda nonsensical, but I would promise you she had to sell fifty, sixty a day. And, um, I was so amazed by seeing this that I was like, "Wow, I gotta go home and do that." So my dad picked me up and took me home, that weekend. I ran to our neighborhood store and I got fifty, Solo cups and five packs of Kool-Aid and a five-pound, bag of Domino sugar, and I was in business the next day, making twenty dollars a day at about eight, nine years old

Caroline 9:42

Wow. And your grandparents didn't mind everybody coming on over?

Micheal Shaw 9:46

they did, but I think they appreciated my entrepreneurship and my ingenuity. I think they respect it, and I think they were always proud that I was, you know, a kid who really was a do it yourself and get it done

Caroline 10:00

Yeah, yeah. And of all the things you could be selling out of your house, Kool-Aid is the way to go, you

Micheal Shaw 10:05

Kool-Aid. That, that, that healthy, nutritious, beverage. Yeah, it was Kool-Aid.

Caroline 10:10

how did they have the freezer space for this though? You know what I mean? 'Cause I think that's, the, that's the trick

Micheal Shaw 10:15

It's funny because we had a deep freezer. Probably most people grandparents had a deep freezer somewhere in the basement or whatnot, and I asked permission, and I had a section, Just funny enough, I would cut the cardboard to stack them, so I had stacks of them. And like I said, by the end of that summer, I was making $20 a day. I had stars on the bottom of the cup, and if you got a cup with a star, you got a free, um, julep. And I cut cereal boxes to make coupons and literally punch holes. If you bought 10, you got one free. So, it was a, a enterprise for me anyway

Caroline 10:54

how long did that continue?

Micheal Shaw 10:56

I did that three, four summers, I did it until I got my first paper route

Caroline 11:03

now, inside school, were there any particular subjects that you liked more than others?

Micheal Shaw 11:09

I believe I was always a good reader, so I never took a reading class in school. I think, you know, that you kinda test out. I always, was above my reading level, but I think where I really excelled was writing, and I think my favorite subject was art though. I really had an affinity towards art. I loved to sculpture and sculpt, as a kid, and, had some really, really amazing art teachers I really attribute to shaping the creative side of me

Caroline 11:41

And then bringing up reading, were there any sorts of books that you loved reading? Like, did you read for fun or you read because you had to?

Micheal Shaw 11:50

I think it was kind of a midway. I, I read certain stuff because I had to, but I was a comic book kid, and I would walk, like, maybe five, 10 blocks to the comic book store, and always was a big DC kid and, and superheroes and, it was an escape in many, in, in many ways. And as much as I loved my grandparents and appreciated them, I did deal with, feelings of abandonment sometimes, feelings that, well, why didn't my mom, take me with her? And why didn't my dad take me with him, so per se? So though I was surrounded by love, I think many times we want that which we think we don't have in our presence

Caroline 12:32

And reading stories about a lot of the superheroes were you thinking like, "Maybe I'm gonna be a superhero too." 'Cause a lot of them, you know, it's like the superheroes or the Disney movies, it's like there's always some story of loss that gets turned into greatness for the greater good

Micheal Shaw 12:50

Absolutely. The hero's journey probably is the story of my life, and I, I would say that that shaped me always fighting for underdog. I hated to see kids pick on kids. I hated to see people get bullied, and of the few fights I had as a kid, most of them were because of me interceding on someone picking on another kid because maybe they thought he wouldn't speak up or they thought he would be a, a easy target, and I always championed the underdog

Caroline 13:20

Okay. So you became a voice for those that weren't courageous enough to do it on their own, and when you needed to step in and take action, you just went ahead and did the right thing

Micheal Shaw 13:30

Absolutely. Those who didn't know how to or didn't have maybe the presence to stand up, I always was, always willing to my dismay sometimes, but yeah, always would step in. Hated to see a kid get picked on

Caroline 13:45

Now, how did you decide as you, you know, kind of got later into high school, how did you decide what was gonna come next for you?

Micheal Shaw 13:51

I had a very unique high school. I went to, a high school in Rochester, New York, called Edison Technical Occupational Center. And the unique thing about our high school is we had, I don't know, it had to be 25, real-- literally 25, 30 shop classes. We had aviation, we had construction, we had HVAC. We had, auto body. We had, auto mechanics. And it's-- I say that with a little bit of a grin because I know so many of my classmates who are still doing the trades they learned back in the '80s is the way they made their living. And I started in, carpentry because my grandfather was a carpenter, but I ended up in photography when I found out that the lab classes, you can go out in the field around the school and take pictures, and that was all I had to see one time. It, it was over. And I transferred to photography, and I took photography for three years, and it did shape my life 'cause I ran my own studio for 22 years full-time

Caroline 14:58

Oh, wow. Okay. That's pretty fascinating. So you liked the draw of being able to take pictures or the draw of not having to sit in the classroom? Tell me more about that part.

Micheal Shaw 15:09

So you're gonna make me be completely honest. I, I liked to meet girls, and taking those pictures afforded me to be able to socialize and meet. But as often we do things for one motivation and you trip up and learn something. So I, I did learn in a mastery of photography. I spent countless hours in the dark room and rolling film and, dodging and burning with my hands before we could just click AI and give it a prompt to make a picture look a certain way. Just really became acquainted with a camera, but also a thing I learned that I probably value even more than the technical part was I learned how to talk to people. I learned how to break the ice. I learned how to make people feel comfortable in their skin in a short amount of time of banter and communication. So I think that was probably as important as the technical aspects

Caroline 16:04

So as you're making this business and you're liking this, photography and you're getting to communicate with all kinds of other people, where did more schooling come in, and why?

Micheal Shaw 16:16

Ironically, at that time where I graduated in 1991, and my perception of what photography looked like was chasing people around in New York City with a camera. And to some extent that was a small part, but it was more studio work or trying to be paparazzi to some extent, and I didn't-- that didn't really sound inviting to me. Um, and after I graduated, I decided not to pursue photography in college, and I actually went to college originally to be a teacher. And while I was there, I learned, a, a fascination for marketing and how businesses, leverage marketing in that time, before there was a social media, before there was the internet. it was a very, very different, landscape, if you will. So when I first went to school, I, I majored in sociology, and that was a labor of love, but then I actually ended up getting my degree in, organizational management and then my master's in strategic marketing

Caroline 17:28

And where did you go to school? Did you stay at home? Did you live there? Like, what was that like?

Micheal Shaw 17:33

Well, the irony of that is that I originally, when I graduated from high school, the first school I was accepted to was Shaw University, which is in, uh, North Carolina, in Raleigh. Ironically, I would end up here after 40 some odd years. But I went to the State University of New York College at Brockport, dropped out a year or two and eventually got my degree from a Wesleyan school, Roberts Wesleyan University in Rochester as well

Caroline 18:02

what was happening that you decided to pause, schooling?

Micheal Shaw 18:07

Life, life. As they say, life was lifing. Um, I got a job, started thinking that that money was enough to survive off, and it had an interweaving of school. Start a job for a while, live, pay bills, back to school because I found out that it was never quite as much as I thought it was at the time. And to some extent, was a professional student probably for a decade or so, um, and finally finished up and, kind of pivoted because I knew that I had to get the, the degree. I had to finish the degree to really go where I wanted to go

Caroline 18:48

I forgot to ask, from your younger vantage point, what did you think success was? What did you think it meant for somebody to be a successful adult? Like, from some of your earliest renderings of that vision, what was the vision that you had at that time,

Micheal Shaw 19:05

I grew up with, as I obviously said, my grandparents, but one thing my grandfather always taught me was that as long as you got a truck, you always have a dollar in your pocket. So that kind of entrepreneurial fortitude that you have to find a way to, to make it work was always in the back of my mind, and I was always around entrepreneurs. My grandfather built steps and did construction work. One of my favorite aunts was a beautician that had, remodeled her basement into her, her salon and lived a really amazing life with her own hands. And I saw those entrepreneurial examples. We had a liquor store. My grandparents owned a liquor store when I was very young. So there were always examples of entrepreneurship or the fortitude of you can do it, and I think that kinda stuck with me. And as I look back, that was shaped very early on. So when I even talk about selling Kool-Aid, it wasn't the Kool-Aid, it was finding opportunities and filling gaps

Caroline 20:17

That's awesome. Okay. So, and you're a professional student, you pause for a while, then you realize maybe I do want that degree. You get the degree, and then what happened? was your photography studio already a thing, or were you working other jobs before that?

Micheal Shaw 20:31

at this time, or how the photography, or I come back to photography, is I always was asked by friends who knew I was into photography, "Mike, would you take pictures of a birthday party?" Or, "Mike, would you take pictures at this function?" And the pivoting point was 1999. I had been doing nightclubs. I would go to nightclubs, and what I had was a professional Polaroid. The professional Polaroid is a little different than the Polaroid we see that people take a picture and the picture spits out. The professional Polaroid used to be used by realtors to take pictures of properties, and it's-- the quality is almost like a 35-millimeter qual- time. So I took that camera, trying to innovate, and I took it to the clubs, and I would take pictures of people, who were out for the night, dressed to the nines, and the picture would spit out in a, in a, a minute or so, but it took about two minutes to develop. So I did that for, uh, probably six months off and on, and I got my taxes, and I decided that I was gonna invest my tax refund that year into digital equipment. So this is, like, really at the early stages of digital photography. My first camera wasn't even a megapixel. And I bought a, a Olympus camera and Olympus printers, and I started doing digital photography in this nightclub environment. And literally, I got about three contracts, and one thing I got really particular about was these little coupons I would keep, and I would punch holes in them to track who had paid for a picture. And I ended up doing literally about three to four nights a week. I would be Wednesday through Sunday some weeks, and had a full-time job at this time. I was teaching at this time. at the end of a year, one Sunday, I'm cleaning out my, my, apartment desk, and I kept my receipts in this little shoebox. Every night, I come in, 2:00, 3:00 in the morning, and I would put my equipment in the closet, and I would put my receipts in the shoebox. So I'm there, and I'm cleaning my desk out, and as I'm going through this box, I'm counting the tickets. You know, counting, counting, counting. And I had done $75,000 in picture sales, on this little weekend hustle. And then it was like- Wow, this, this might be a thing. so out, out of all the money I made, honestly, I only retained about 10,000. I was having fun. It was almost like this fun money, if you will. But I took that $10,000 and I opened up my first little storefront studio, and that's where, the professional part of, my photography career really began

Caroline 23:28

Wow. And so then you shot everything? You, you were like weddings and babies and families and, reunions and all of that? Or, like, was there stuff that you didn't do? Or h- how'd that work

Micheal Shaw 23:41

So I, I, portraiture was my signature. I, because of everything I, I've aforementioned, I knew how to talk to people. I knew how to make people feel comfortable pretty fast. And I based my studio, ironically, on Apple technology. My computers were Apple. I would have clients fill out the intake form almost like at a doctor's office. And one of the questions that was really unique at the time, people would always say, "Why is he asking that?" I would always ask, "Name three of your favorite musical artists." And back at this time, this was like right around the iPod, coming out, and I would program songs from their favorite artists into their photo shoot, and I would stream the songs into the studio. So by the second, third song, the person would kinda get like, "Oh, that's what I wrote down." you would get a smile. And I would just kinda journalistically snap, snap, snap, snap. And it became my signature of how I, I formatted my photo shoots in my studio environment

Caroline 24:48

Oh, that's so awesome. That's so awesome. Okay, that's aw- all right. And then, and then what happened? So, like, you're do- it sounds like everything's kinda going along and all of that, but, but when you talk about photography, you talk about it with past tense. So what happened?

Micheal Shaw 25:05

Literally, I ran the studio for 21, 22, almost 22 years. Well, I went back to school, number one, funny enough, the same thing that brought me in was digital photography. After making a life and a business of this thing for almost two decades, the thing that literally, kind of took me out of business was same thing, smartphone. So I came in with digital photography, and some of the enthusiasts and old-timers were like, "Oh, that'll never last. It'll never beat silver hydride paper and, you know, traditional photography." And digital photography was growing with the advent of the, cellphone and the smartphone. So I realized I had to pivot a little bit, so I went back and I got my master's in strategic marketing. I've been probably marketing, quite frankly, for over 15 years, but I've been giving it away for free 'cause I didn't think people would pay me for my ideals. so that's when I went back to school, and shortly after I finished my master's, an opportunity had come, for my ex-wife, and we relocated to Raleigh in 2019, and I planned on reopening the studio and continuing the momentum and opening a, marketing, arm with s- my digital firm. And, um, we came here three months before the pandemic started

Caroline 26:36

And what was the draw to Raleigh after all those years in New York?

Micheal Shaw 26:40

Durham had the second-largest plant for my wife's company at the time. And she had been coming here one month out of every year doing training, performing trainings. And it just was opportunity and preparation kinda had a, a inter- a intersection at the time, and when the opportunity came up, she was like, "You know, they approved me for a transfer." And I was like, "For a transfer here?" We hadn't talked about it in a couple months. And she was like, "To Raleigh, Durham." I took my daughters, my two daughters, and my ex-wife out to dinner at the time, and we took a family vote, and literally in 60 days we had packed the house up, and we were living in, Wake Forest. So we really made the transition and, and didn't look back

Caroline 27:29

Now, how old were your kids at that time?

Micheal Shaw 27:32

So I have four kids. My, older two are young men, and they were already adult and out the house, and my younger two were, my two daughters. And I think when we came here, It was 10th grade and fourth grade. My oldest daughter was in 10th grade, and my youngest was, in fourth grade at the time

Caroline 27:53

Interesting. Okay, and I wanna back it up a little bit before that, 'cause I think some stuff also went down in New York that kind of pivoted a little bit,

Micheal Shaw 28:03

So in 2017, my youngest daughter, Jenesis, was diagnosed, with stage four kidney cancer. I was in my graduate program at the time. I was doing a paper on a Friday night. I was in my home office writing a paper, and my wife at the time, says, "Mike, can you come here for a second?" And I'm kind of like really knee-deep in writing this paper. I go, "You know, I'm writing. Can you, can you give me a second?" she's like, "No, come here." So I go into the bathroom, and she's giving my, my six-year-old a bath, and she says, "Look at Jenny's belly." And she had these two small mass on both sides of her abdomen, and they were about the size of half of a breakfast sausage. It looked odd. It didn't look dangerous but it looked odd. And I, I reached down, and I kinda touched the stomach, and I said, "Jenny, do they hurt?" And she said, "No, Daddy. I don't feel anything." So I figured, "Well, we'll, we'll take her to get checked out on Monday and see if there's anything there." I, I assumed they were gonna give us some cream or salve, and it would've been over. And, um, my ex-wife said to me at the time, let's take her to emergency. I wanna take her to emergency." And I'm like, "It's a Friday night at 8:00. We don't wanna go into emergency on a Friday night." And she said to me simply, "Get your keys." So we went to emergency, and after about five hours of testing and a barrage of tests, again, would have never imagined in a million years it'll be anything other than something topical. As we're in the, the emergency room with the little thin curtain that separates you from the family on the other side, two doctors walk into the room, and it's a male and a female, and the female doctor says, um, this is calm as I'm talking to you right now, "It looks like cancer." And I look at my daughter, and I look at my, my wife, and they both look at-- we all look at each other, and it's like everything stopped and started to move in slow motion. and all I can remember is putting my hands up to tell the doctors back out of the room. Like, back out of the room. I can see her like, you know, puzzled, and I'm like, "Back out of the room." So I go in the hallway, and we both tell Jenny "Just sit still for one second. Everything's okay. And I'm-- I look at the lady and I'm like, "What the hell were you thinking?" Like, "Why would you say that?" And it wasn't as much as she had said something shocking. It was like, "This kid doesn't have cancer. What are you talking about?" Um, a sense of somewhat disbelief and, and probably was deniable, denia- uh, and she explains that, "I, I just, I just wanted to be straight up. I didn't... I'm so sorry I didn't..." And it's like, wow. So we're admitted into the hospital, and about two days later, they do a, a formal biopsy, and it is staged at stage four kidney cancer, which is called Wilms tumor. The formal diagnosis was Wilms tumor, and our, our lives are kinda turned 360 upside down, and we start this journey of, addressing how do we fight, uh, this proverbial monster of cancer with our six-year-old, and, and life was never the same after that

Caroline 31:35

So walk me through a little bit of w- what transpired after that, because your initial reaction is, is disbelief and also, like, a protection of your daughter. And I think even in, in reading some of your book and, and, you know, talking to you y- you know, as a friend, it's like y- you chose very specific language in talking to your daughter about what was happening.

Micheal Shaw 32:00

So as we're in the hospital, and, you know, we, we, we are now started chemotherapy and radiation, and we are feverishly doing whatever that we're instructed to do because we're gonna fight this with everything that we have in us. on one of my, daughter's hospital stays, her principal and her teacher, she went to a Catholic school at the time, they come to visit her. And, one thing she noticed, my daughter notices, is that as she's in the hospital, we're in a unit at Golisano Chil- Children's Hospital, but it's almost like panoramic, so you see almost everyone's room from your room. And my daughter says to her mom and I, "Why doesn't tho-- or why don't those rooms have anyone but white coats and scrubs going in?" And honestly, I, I didn't realize it. I guess the, the eyes of a child, but she noticed that some of the other kids didn't have moms and dads or family members go in their room. And Mom explained that, in fact, there are other kids who had different family structures, and they may not have moms and dads that can stay around the clock, or, in fact, they may be orphans, and they don't have moms or dads in their lives. So the nurses and the hospital staff become their de facto family, and my daughter could not let that go. She was, "Well, what can we do to help those kids? What can we do to help those kids?" And, um, I'm, I'm-- At this point, I don't want any more disappointment to befall on my little girl. And I would say like, "Well, Jen, we, we can pray for them, you know?" And she's like, "That's not good enough. Like, what can we do? We need to do something for those kids." And I'm like, "Well, Jenny, we're kinda going through our own thing." And we didn't use cancer at the time. We didn't, call what she was going through cancer. We actually referred to it as tumors. So on one day when we had a Toys "R" Us, back in 2017, I went to Toys "R" Us, and out of sheer just numbness, if you will, I filled a cart up. I literally cleared several shelves and filled the cart up to the brim with toys, and I come back to the hospital dragging these giant purple bags full of toys, and literally had to drag them because they were too big to carry. And I bring them to this little girl's bedside, and I say, "Jenny, can we start here?" And she looks, and she's figuring, and it kinda clicks, and she's like, "Yeah, yeah, Dad." And she gives me a smile, and she puts her finger to her face. So we take those toys after she kind of gets her idea of what we're gonna do, and we carry them out to the nurse's station, and we explain to the two nurses who were there what Jenny's goal is And they're listening to me pretty intently, and then one of them just starts turning red and bawling. And I'm like, "Are you okay?" And she's like, "You don't understand. She's going through it, and she's more worried about helping other kids than her own fight." And she said, "And that's so beautiful." So, when that-- back to her principal and, and, teacher coming, when we tell them about this interaction, they decide, two nuns, a sidebar, they're two nuns. They decide, "Well, we gotta do something to help Jenny's, project." And I'm like, "What project?" So they go and do a fundraiser at school, and I come to the school that week for the fundraiser, and I'm like, you know, just trying to support and thank them for their kindness. And the communications person pulls me over, and she says, "Mr. Shaw, would you talk to this reporter?" I'm like, "What reporter?" And she's like, "Well, we, we were telling her a little bit about Jenny's story." So I'm like, "Oh, okay." I talk to the reporter, and I tell her the same thing that I basically shared with you. They run the story that night on our local news, and by the next couple days, checks start coming to the school, in care of Jenesis for Jenny's Project. And for weeks, checks would come to the school for Jenny's Project. And then things kind of organically formed this movement that I didn't see coming. But I found that quite often that's where the best movements come from, things that you never planned to be the case

Caroline 36:34

what happened? Then this, this thing kinda like blew up a bit in a great way.

Micheal Shaw 36:38

So my best friend is-- I'm telling him everything, obviously, because I'm-- he's my confidant, he's kinda my support system of sorts, and he's kinda watching it from afar, and he's like, "Yo, this is a, this is amazing, you know, how you guys are facing this and handling this is really, you know, exceptional of sorts." he said, "You gotta do a GoFundMe." And I say to him, "I'm not doing a GoFundMe. I'm not asking anybody for money." And he quite frankly says to me, "No, stupid. It's not about asking people for money. There's a whole community that probably wants to support and help you guys, and they don't know what to say or they don't know how to engage. This would be a way to afford that, and it could probably be a positive distraction for Jenesis." So I break down, I do a GoFundMe, and I think by this time we probably raised about $3,000, and we're really gonna just plug it back into buying toys to take to the hospital. So around Giving Tuesday, GoFundMe reaches out to me personally, and they say, "Hey, we love Jenesis' campaign, and we want to send her something special on Giving Tuesday." And I'm like, "Oh, okay. Sure." It's not clicking to me that GoFundMe is reaching out to me. It's not me reaching out to them. And at this time, we're going through radiation, more chemotherapy, and I'm really just a positive distraction for the most part. So that happens, and they give Jenesis a big $1000 check to really amp up her campaign. And then a couple months later, I get contacted again by GoFundMe, again, not processing that the largest fundraising platform in the world is reaching out to you, not the other way around. And they say they wanna feature Jenny as their hero kid for the month of April. So at this point, I think we may have raised $7,000 or some- somewhere in that range, five-- $5,000. And they do that. So they send a photographer down from Toronto. He spends the day with us. They do video and pictures, and then they launch this campaign. So they launch the campaign. They-- I'm being contacted by text and email at 4:00 in the morning, and they launch a national campaign. So Jenesis's, video and press release I'm thinking, "Oh, yeah, they'll do a press release." I'm not thinking it's a national press release. I'm thinking it's, like, our local news stations. So they do that, and we go from really in about the matter of five hours from, like, 6,000, 7,000 to literally $85,000. and the scale just literally goes up, in real time. And then I'm getting calls from, the Ellen Show and Steve Harvey and all these different, TV producers are calling. And at the time, we were on a flight to Hawaii, they're trying to get her on the show. So some shows we couldn't do because they wanted you to come to be on the air in the next day or two. We were on The Today Show, and we were featured on Inside Edition and Daily Mail and a couple other national platforms. So it definitely goes a whole nother turn at this time. So quite an amazing ride

Caroline 40:16

and Jenesis today, how's she doing?

Micheal Shaw 40:19

Jenesis today is sixteen years old. She's a junior in high school, and as many times as I've told this story, I always leave out that Jenesis is a survivor. She is, as I like to say, she's beautifully aggravating like every other sixteen-year-old, and, hasn't been on a med or had any, residual from cancer besides she had one kidney removed. So now she has one kidney, but lives normal as in every capacity as every other teen. But the testament for what she's been through is just one for the books, for triumph and survivorship and tenacity

Caroline 41:04

is there still part of the foundation? Is there still giving that happens for this cause? Or did she, did she move on to other endeavors?

Micheal Shaw 41:13

we have a 501[c][3] now. Team Jenny Bean is a, federally accredited, nonprofit. She to date has raised about $385,000 for pediatric cancer. as I said, she's been on multiple national platforms, and we are actually getting prepared to do kind of a refresh relaunch because now she's actually at a age where she's taking the helm, and she knows the direction that she wants to vision taking her nonprofit to another, another level. Same ideal, but she has some nuances that she definitely wants to do. Um, and we are having some conversation with local hospitals right now

Caroline 41:56

Oh, wow. That's amazing. Okay, so now we whoop, whoop back to, you know, 2019. You come to Raleigh right before the pandemic, so but you have this now, this new definite life pivot, a new understanding of philanthropy and giving i- in the midst of you having been trying to get your degree and just, just be a dad, go about your regular day. All that happens, you rise up. You didn't plan any of it. You just kept showing up in a way to be supportive, all in trying to help your baby girl have a smile on her face But now you're 2019, right before the pandemic. You're thinking you're gonna open a studio or do something, and dang, then what happened?

Micheal Shaw 42:37

what happened was during the pandemic, again, we came here to start a new life and I made contact and connections. I contacted UNC and Duke, their child life departments, and had some real definitive plans of how I was gonna make the transition and carry things over from New York to here, and the pandemic said, "Not today." Um, the pandemic stopped all those. You weren't gonna get anywhere near an immunosuppressive children during the pandemic with the fear of just breathing alone. We weren't gonna get anywhere near children who were immunosuppressive. So a lot of things were put on hold, but one of the things that came out of it was that same best friend, his name is Gerald, had, reached out to me he says, "Hey, did you hear about the Clubhouse app?" And I'm like, "Clubhouse? What's that?" "You gotta get on Clubhouse. I sent you an invitation." So I finally got on, and as I'm exploring the different rooms that they had all different topics, I go into a nonprofit room, and I share my story, and tell how we grew Team Jenny Bean, and how, we were able to amplify and elevate her mission and her story. And as I'm doing it, found like, wow, I got 19 inboxes that night. "Hey, you know, would you talk to me a little bit? I have a nonprofit, and we started it up, but we even gotten our 501[c][3]. I'd be interested in talking to you." So over the next few weeks, I had literally probably a couple hundred people reach out to me as I was on this platform talking about my nonprofit journey, and I realized, like what I did with my daughter's nonprofit very well could be kinda packaged to help other small nonprofits, many of them BIPOC. I started-- I set up a consulting platform. I, I, I built a framework, and I was talking to nonprofits literally from Compton to Brooklyn and, consulting with nonprofits around the country about how to build their brand. And that just really thrusted me into the space of, you know what? Maybe this is your new thing. Maybe this is a road that you should really look at differently. And how I like to look at it is that it was a pain that turned into a passion that evolved into a purpose. And that really led me to, take a deeper dive into development and philanthropy and how to tell your story in a meaningful way. And it, it brought me to the space that the book really comes from

Caroline 45:24

I love it. Let's talk a little bit about this beautiful book, The Invisible Currency of Philanthropy: Why People Give, Why They Stop, and What Advancement Leaders Must Understand Next. I I read it in its entirety. It's a great read. It's a lot of excellent points. Yeah, tell a little bit about what your experiences have been versus the traditional, philanthropy and giving.

Micheal Shaw 45:47

I've written about three books, and what typically had happened with the first two is I get towards the finish, and I'm like, "Ah," the steam starts to come out. of it. Well, how am I gonna get it together? How am I gonna tie all the strings together? And quite frankly, the steam just, dissipated. And as I started writing this book, I worked as a development professional. I worked as a chief advancement officer. I worked on the front lines of, of closing, uh, major gifts. And one thing that I learned, very little of those experiences have to do anything to do with money. They're about what I consider these five invisible currencies, which are belonging, trust, meaning, emotional return, and transformation. Where those five principles exist, giving continues to exist. And more than just giving once, an investment of seeing themselves in your mission. And one thing I've identified is that, I mean, I was- I tell you, is I was raised by my grandparents, that we were divinely designed to give. Giving isn't this thing we just do when we have capacity or we have a little extra, or just when there's crisis. Giving is literally what I feel like we were divinely designed. You can't take another breath until you release the breath that's in your lungs. There, in fact, is really the premise of how we give. You release and you receive. But what you receive may have nothing to do with money, just like what you give doesn't always have something to do with the transaction of currency. It's really an emotional return on leaving something that will impact lives even when you're not here anymore. And that is really the premise of the book, in its essence, that giving should not be something that we only see during Christmas season or only see when there's a national disaster. Giving is really something that I believe should be a movement. And with some of the climate of, of current politics and divisiveness, we're gonna have to find new ways to get things done. But no one's coming to save us. We're gonna have to save each other and save ourselves

Caroline 48:19

You know, you and I both have, we, we share a belief in, in God. Some people are gonna say universe, some people are gonna say God, they're gonna say life force, whatever it is. But the point is, the way the work gets done is through us. It is through us, but it might not be, our work. It's, it's maybe God's work happening through us, and that's how it is. So nobody's gonna save us 'cause we're already here. We already have gifts and talents and beautiful things and passions and experiences that have given us amazing new insights and opportunities You, you didn't ask for the, for the gift you received to get to know all about childhood cancer, to get to know all about giving. And yet it's been amazing to see how that was amplified both, you know, for your own family, for your daughter, for her purpose and her mission, and then for you to then have the extension of that to help so many other nonprofits, where people like yourself had once been not really sure what we're doing, how we're doing this. But you managed to come up with systems and processes and, understanding, and you share so freely with the gifts and the knowledge that you have. And that impact just really, transforms lives and makes a big difference, where people may have started in a place of not hope or not understanding what to do. So I love that about, the work that you do and the things that you're continuing to do, in spite of the challenges,

Micheal Shaw 49:46

I, I, I can't say You said it. Look, can I record that and use that? Um, absolutely. Yeah, it, it is quite frank um, I believe The book is written. I have two workshops that align with the book, and I have a couple webinars and, keynotes that have aligned with the book. But it's really not about trying to peddle a book or get people to buy a book. I think it's really, to me, about a movement where we look at giving differently. We don't look at giving, again, as a transactional thing. If there is a transaction, it's the transformation that happens when you sow a seed into someone else. And, and to your point, whether you're a, a believer in God or you're atheist, that to me really doesn't matter. At the end of the day, we're all human. We all have times where we're gonna need something beyond ourself, right? There are times where you're gonna have something befall you, and that's not a denominational thing. It's not a religious thing at all. It's just a, a part of the human condition. We all go through things. But it's not what you go through as much as how you go through it. So when you talk about my family facing, childhood cancer, there, with my daughter, I've had people write me from all over the world. This one lady wrote me, and she talks about how Jenny would skip down the hall going to radiation, and we have videos of her skipping down the hall in her little, pink overcoat going to radiation. And it was like, well, is she just naive and she doesn't really know the severity? And when I talked to her in those days, it wasn't that she didn't, wasn't aware. It's the way she chose to face it. It was the way that she chose to, tackle it head-on. Even as a six-year-old, seven-year-old child, she looked at it differently. And I don't miss the point that so many people, unfortunately, don't have the outcome that my family had and my daughter had. But that's why I think it's even more of our mission and our work to sow into missions of other nonprofits, because the work won't wait. At the end of the day, the work won't wait

Caroline 51:55

Yeah, yeah. How do people find you? How do they come to work with you?

Micheal Shaw 52:02

I do consulting. I do some one-to-one for nonprofit organizations. I've worked with, at this point, probably several hundred nonprofits across the country, but most of my work now is based in the Triangle. They can go to my website, and that's michealshaw.com. My name looks just like Michael, but the E is before the A, so it's M-I-C-H-E-A-L-S-H-A-W dot-com or they can go to theinvisiblecurrency.com, and both, will connect you to me, whether it's through the website or email, and I would love to have a chat or, or further help, organizations to increase and elevate and amplify their missions

Caroline 52:47

I love it. And now from this vantage point, how do you define authentic success for you?

Micheal Shaw 52:56

I'm a person and, and you hear it, it's almost cliché sometime about service or servant leadership. I believe my purpose is to leave things better than I find them. So I find success not in a measure or metric of how much I accumulate, but how many people that I can impact, how many lives that are impacted because my life existed is how I measure success

Caroline 53:25

thank you so much for sharing more about your journey. I'm so glad that, that we met, I look forward to more amazing things, more awesomeness that you help unlock for others, and thank you so much for being on Your Next Success

Micheal Shaw 53:38

Thank you so much. I appreciate it, and I'm so grateful for the time and to get to know you better

53:44

Thanks for listening to Your Next Success. And remember, authentic success is yours to define and includes aligning your career to support the life you want