Ep. 12 - Mike Steele talks about the W.I.S.E. Scholarship Program

[MUSIC] Hello and welcome to the ArtSync podcast with Lynette and Ari, sponsored by the Why Scholarship Program. I'm the Marketing and Event Specialist at AZ Big Media, and the Managing Editor of Arizona Health and Living Magazine, Lynette Karington. My co-host is the Executive Director of the Madison Center for the Arts, and Executive Producer of Jolom Productions, Ari Levin. We have a very special guest today. Our guest for today's episode is Mike Steele, President, Secretary and Director of the Steele Family Foundation, which heads up the Why Scholarship Program, which if you've been listening, they are our sponsor. They sponsor this podcast. We are so grateful to them. Mike has a degree in civil engineering and also has a background in a really wide industry, really wide variety of industries, including mining, real estate, oil and gas, food processing, and architecture. Welcome Mike Steele. Thank you for having me. We are so happy that you were able to be here in person with us today. And more importantly for sponsoring our podcast, which is so wonderful of you. Great pleasure. Thank you. Glad we could help. So how did the formation of the Steele Family Foundation come to be formed? It's a great story. I'll give you the Cole's Notes version as we call it in Canada. But my father was an immigrant from the UK after World War II. He returned to his home in London. He was a served for seven years in the British Greens as a Green Bray hand-to-hand combat commando. He saw five tours during World War II, including D-Day. And he miraculously survived an invasion by the Japanese in 1942 in Burma where he was badly wounded and met Mother Teresa. Oh wow. And so legend has it as he tells us the story that when he finally immigrated to Canada, because he had no home left in London, that while he wasn't religious, he remembered that encounter. So fast forward almost 40 years later, he died early of cancer. Melanoma specifically. But back then when you are a British Marine, Fared Skin, fighting in Egypt with Montgomery, fighting in Burma, fighting where they're not handing you out very much protection. He ended up getting early stage skin cancer. So unfortunately passing on early, but when he died, having immigrated to Canada with not really very much money, as you can well imagine, he just asked us to do one thing. And that was to remember the people that helped him during the war in India. So when my mother wasn't too long after that, that she passed away, my parents left me everything out of the four siblings. And I really didn't want it and they knew I didn't need it. And so we sold everything and started up a foundation in their memory. And then since then, we've been adding quite a bit of our own capital and our own time. But to sort of complete the circle, we returned to India and built a school in his honor and his name there. And by the direction of the missionaries of charity, which is the sector that Mother Teresa organized. So that's kind of what was the beginning, was the inheritance. And really decided to put it to work and create a legacy for my father. And of course my mother was a great influence. And she was an immigrant as well from Scotland. So those are the two heroes in my life that stimulated the idea of giving back. That's fantastic. And how many schools have you opened? And it's not just been India. It's been several locations, correct? We've, so we do a combination of things on both the infrastructure side and on the material learning side. As far as the infrastructure goes, we've built from ground up only one school. That school is designed to accommodate up to a thousand students. So the first phase, there's 285 kids going there now in phase one. That cost us a little over a million dollars to build the first phase. Then we renovated the church and the town that now becomes a bit of a community center. And then we renovated the actual community center in the town of Bank, just south of Bangalore, if you know what I'm saying. The other projects we've done were more infrastructure repairs. So improving the kitchens, helping with upgrades of the schools that are already been built. So those are what we call our infrastructure projects. That's exciting. Wow. So you and your wife, Stacy, live here in the valley for part of the year. And then you're up your neighbor up to the north in Canada for part of the year. And you are basically, you are introducing the WISE scholarship program to people here in the valley. What can you tell us about the WISE scholarship program in your words and the importance of what you're doing with that program? Yeah, thank you for that question. So the WISE scholarship was an evolution of us looking at how kids really, you know, what we call the stranded superstar. So we have a couple of buzzwords that surround the evolution of the WISE scholarship. One of them is the stranded superstar and the other one is the earned to learn program. So let's just sort of hone in on those. So the stranded superstars are meant to find those superstar adults or adolescents or children soon to become adults that are living in the dark corners of the world that haven't had a chance to be, shall we say, recognized or found. And the objective of this scholarship program is to be more of a social scholarship than an academic scholarship and to be able to find that sort of global citizen that's responsible for not just good academics, but for giving back to the community. So when Stacey was actually more Stacey's idea than mine to be very honest with you, when we created the platform called the WISE, which by the way stands for world impact through scholarships and education, kind of a tricky little acronym. And so Stacey created this image of the WISE scholarship with the very catchy owl and, you know, everything kind of just works really neat on the branding. Sure. We started to look at partnerships that we thought could be, let's just say, expand quicker and accelerate the penetration of this type of digital scholarship. To do that though, we had to create both partnerships and a digital platform. So we think we have developed sort of a million and a half dollars later in development costs. We think we've created the world's first digital social scholarship, which is quite a mouthful when you think about it. But it means that anybody in the world can apply for this. And principally, we're looking for those stranded superstars in Africa, India, even the United States that live in impoverished areas that don't think anybody's ever going to find them. And the objective behind it is to earn points. So as I said, the second catch phrase was the earned learn. Yes. So we came up with this 100 point scholarship program, which is driven by three relatively equal legs to the stool. The first leg is, of course, about 30 points goes towards academic. So you can never ignore academics when you're passing out scholarship funds. The second leg is for what we call extracurricular activity. So things that might involve your school or your peers, things that you would do after the school hours or for the school or social things. Well, yes, but things that are attached to the school versus the third leg, which is the social responsibilities. So things you do away from the school. So things you might do to help in your community, your volunteering, your try to improve other people's lives that are not your peers and are not part of your school life. So to take you outside your comfort zone and see if you can stretch your social skills beyond just your comfort zone being out away from your family and your school. So with those three legs, they're each worth 30 points. And you could earn those total 90 points over the course of four years. So we generally get the applicant starting around age 13, 14. And then by age 17, going into university, they've earned enough points and then write an essay for the last 10 points. And the essay has to describe what they've learned during this journey, what they want to do with the scholarship. And they must also produce reference letters from people that they've touched along the way. So it's meant to help you articulate your own feelings. It's meant to help you confirm it with third party verifications that you did these things. You add all that up. And if you score 90 to 100 points, you get a full four year scholarship. Wow. Everything's paid. Your your your food, your room of boards, your books, your tuition, and it's managed all through a digital portal. So your life actually just starts when you sign up for this scholarship. So a child in Africa, age 14 could get on the digital platform, start engaging with the merit points and then build on that for four years. When they then get the 90 to 100 points, they move into post-secondary life. We then continue to manage them with mentoring and guiding them through to the right career paths. So it's not just, here's a check, good luck. It's a full it's a full evolutionary program. That's great. It sounds like. like you're really preparing a really great group of up and coming superstars. Exactly. That's fantastic. You're hired. And so yeah, expand more on that. Tell us what are your endeavors for the coming years with this? Great question. I did mention partnerships. So look, we are not ever going to be able to expand this program without the help of partners. So we're looking for key influencers that have already made some form of a mark in the adolescent world of age 13 to 18. So those are very impressionable years. Stacy and I love the concept of getting in and having those years become social responsibility years, not getting absorbed into yourself, but getting absorbed into society. Something that's in our opinion lacking in a lot of ways today. So we're basically baiting the hook with a scholarship, but what we're really trying to do is create these relationships. So partnerships are very important for us. So let me give you some examples. We have forged a great relationship with SOS children's villages out of Vienna, Austria. Fabulous story, by the way, started in 1942 by Dr. Herman Giminer who was hiding children from the Nazis while their parents were being shuffled off to the work camps. The view that they would return the children after the war was over. The outcome wasn't that. As a result of this, he inherited over a quarter million children himself and had to raise them in the Austrian Alps. So there became the genesis of SOS children's villages, which today is one of the largest orphanage programs in the world. And so Stacy and I have been fortunate enough to, through our travels, see about seven or eight different villages in seven or eight different countries and decided that this was a partner we wanted to introduce our wise program to. So we've now signed a partnership program with SOS out of Vienna. We've launched the first program in East Africa and we're actually going back in March to do a Pan-African reviewed for four more countries with them. Another partnership is the Duke of Edinburgh Awards out of London, England. You know, extremely well known around the world for its informal education. So we forged a partnership to introduce their program as one of the three legs to our stool in our Earn to Learn program. Another one that we are just on the verge of signing right now is with Matthew McConaughey's group called Just Keep Living. And he's got a great after-school program. I think it's an 11 or 12 American high schools and has created this sort of bond of putting together after-school energy groups for them working together, learning how to do physical activities, learning how to manage their capital, their diets, how they can become sort of, I guess, engaged with them with each other's social responsibilities. So the nut of this, and there are others. We've got three or four others building here right now. Some of them are right here in Scottsdale and we're excited to announce some of those in the next few days here. And those partnerships lead us to an incredible leverage point, if you will, for charities that are already engaging 13 to 18-year-olds and all we're doing is stepping in and giving them a structured platform to help them deal with life after age 18. That's great. Sounds like a fantastic roadmap. And of course, anybody who can learn more about the Steel Family Foundation at www.thesteelefamily.com and you can also learn about the WISE Scholarship Program. And we talk about it every week here in the podcast and we'll definitely have you on again in the future. We will have Stacy Steel on to talk about her endeavors as a communications director and keep up the fantastic work. Well, Stacy's doing most of the heavy lifting. I'm just raising the money, so it's a team effort, that's for sure. That's great and you're a fabulous team. Yeah, great. Thank you, Mike Steele. Thank you, Mike. Thank you.