Sundara: Erin Zaikis

Erin Zaikis knows all about soap. Her non-profit, Sundara, recycles hotel soap and operates across India, Uganda, and Myanmar. Tune in as Erin shares the origins of Sundara, how the organization’s operations shifted during the pandemic, and her current efforts to support early-stage female entrepreneurs working in water, sanitation, and hygiene.

To learn more about this work visit www.sundarafund.org.

Talia: 40% of the world's population does not have access to soap and water at home. Erin, you're the expert in all things soap. What can you tell us about this commodity? 

Erin: So, we actually have enough soap in the world for 11 billion people. Soap has been around for thousands of years since the time of the Romans. But unfortunately, it's not universal. And there are countries like India, one of the countries that Sundara works in, where 70 million people don't have access to soap, not even once a month. And because of that, we have millions of children under the age of five who are dying of diarrhea, pneumonia, things that children here in the US fortunately, don't die of. But it also impacts adults, there's a much higher rate of hygiene related disease and illnesses that are spreading when people don't have access to something as basic as soap and proper hand hygiene. And I think that this problem has really accelerated since COVID. We've seen how important it is to sanitize our hands. And unfortunately, it still continues to be something that is just such a hygiene inequity in the world, and it's something that Sundara has really tried to fix the last eight years.

Talia: So how did you identify this need for better hygiene?

Erin: I think a lot of it comes from my own experience, I went to the University of Michigan, and after I graduated, I lived in Thailand. I was working with organizations that were focused on child trafficking. And we would be going to schools and meeting children and seeing the situations that they were living and learning in. And I noticed that there was never any bar soap or liquid soap for that matter. I would carry my Purell with me. And then I would think, what are these people using to clean their hands?

Talia: You mean like when you went to the bathroom?

Erin: Yeah. Or before I ate, you know, all the critical times one would wash their hands. But I never saw anyone else using hand sanitizer or soap. So, one day, I just pulled some children aside and I said, "where's your soap?" And they kind of looked at me confused. "What is soap?" They asked. And I thought maybe I'm not using the right Thai word for it. I pulled over my translator they still didn't understand. And so, the next day, I went and purchased a few hundred bars of soap. And I remember I gave it to these children. And they looked at it like it was this foreign substance. Some of them put it on their head, some of them scratched at it, some tried to take a bite. And these children are 11...12...13 years old. So, in my eyes far too old to not know what something as basic as soap is.

Talia: Wait, so you bought them these hundreds of bar soaps. So, there was soap nearby, they just didn't have access to it?

Erin: There was soap, however, it was probably a 45-minute drive away. And this was a town with I'd say like three cars in total. So, it was inaccessible for the vast majority of the people who are living in this village. And at the same time, I was living in Bangkok, which is a city of about 10 million people that has thousands of hotels, and we weren't too far away from an urban center like Bangkok. So, I realized when I was seeing these children who didn't know what soap was, who'd never really washed their hands properly before, that this was a big problem that no one back at home in the US -- no one in New York that I knew about was really talking about. I have heard of people talking about, at that time, clean water, vaccinations, toilets, but I didn't know anyone talking about soap and hand washing. So, I felt like when I came back, the onus was on me to do something about it, to talk about it, and to find some sort of solution for this problem.

Talia: So, what was that solution that you found?

Erin: How it started is definitely not how it is today. But initially, it started as -- I’m going to make soap in my kitchen in Murray Hill, set off the fire alarm a few times, and donate money to some schools in India, Haiti, Uganda, and Ghana and see how we can address this by purchasing local soap. I did that for about a year, I remember Arianna Huffington tweeted about this, and our website crashed, I got 3,000 orders overnight and had to become a full-time soap maker. And that was great, but it also just wasn't where I wanted to put my energy. And I was thinking, how can we have a larger scale impact? And I realized that in a lot of these places, there are local hotels, that tourists travel to, business travelers, what have you. And most hotels still use bar soap, and they have a policy where they throw out bar soap after one or two uses. And so, you have so many bars of soap that are hitting landfills every single day. And I realized this is something that we could do something about.  

Talia: You're talking about those individually wrapped, are soaps, right?

Erin: Yeah -- one ounce, two ounces, some are as big as like four or five ounces. So technically full-size bars of soap that are going into landfills after just one or two uses. But soap is actually something that's very easy to recycle and reprocess. So, I piloted a few different ideas in that same kitchen in New York. And then I pitched a competition that was hosted by LinkedIn -- was called LinkedIn for Good, I won a check for $10,000. And then I moved to Mumbai with a few friends, to test this whole thing out. I picked Mumbai in particular, it's the densest city in the world. It's a city of I think, 26 million people, it's got one of the world's biggest slums. Plus, I had been to India before, I knew some communities in Mumbai, including the Jewish community, and I felt very comfortable -- safe there. So, I felt like it would be a great place to kind of test out this idea and see if soap recycling could catch on.

Talia: Are there other organizations in the soap recycling space that you work with?

Erin: There are -- there’s a few, I'd say maybe five or six in the whole world, it's still very much a new idea. We work a lot with our partner organization, eco soap bank, and we've done some collaborations with them in South Africa and Rwanda. But I think that it's still very much a new idea. And something that is going to be adopted a lot more as a hotel standard by these large chains like Marriott, Starwood, Hyatt, Hilton. However, there aren't that many organizations doing it still. 

Talia: I'm ignorant of this, obviously. I'm sure our listeners are too. Can you walk us through the entire operation of how you get soap from hotels, until it's in the hands of those who need it? 

Erin: Absolutely. So, we get soap that's used once or twice from a hotel room, and we've trained the hotel staff. So, with each hotel that Sundara has worked with, we go in, we give a training to housekeeping managers and staff, and we tell them here's a soap that's worth saving -- here's one that's not. We've also expanded into liquid amenities in particular, liquid soap, body wash, handwash, shampoo, kind of all the same thing! We give each housekeeping staff a bag or bin to separate the stuff that's worth saving. And then each week we collect those amenities. Sometimes if it's soap, and it's very humid out, like in monsoon season, we'll ask the hotel to leave it on the roof or to dry it out slightly, so we prevent things like mold from forming. And then we have the women who we've employed to work with us collect the soap and bring it back to our factories. We have six factories in India. And at the factory, we dry the soap out, we shave off the outside of the soap so that nothing that has touched someone's skin previously will be reused and reprocessed. And from there, we shred the soap in an industrial soap shredder, but you can use something as simple as a cheese grater to do this at home if you're interested. We take the shredded product we add in things like vegetable glycerin to improve the texture. We also add in things like powder bleach to make sure that it's one more step of sanitization. And then we have a soap press which was actually made in North Carolina, and then shipped out around the world through this organization called Full Belly Project. And we use the soap presses to pack this -- I would say it's like dough at this point, it's kind of like pizza dough if you will. We pack that into a machine and then use pressure to make it into a very large bar, and from that bar, we cut it into smaller pieces. And we have different sized bars depending on who it's going to. So, right now 80% of the soap that we distribute goes straight to children's hands.

Talia: And it makes more sense to repurpose the soap as bars rather than as liquid?

Erin: I think so because bar soap is way more widely used across many developing countries. Liquid soap has not caught on as much in a place like India, but it is catching on a bit now. Which is one reason why we've expanded to liquid soap as well. With the liquid soap that we reprocess and sanitize, we distribute it in very large gallon containers. So many public toilets do not have hand washing facilities, so we work with ones that do. And usually if they have a sink, there's no soap, or the soap has been stolen. So, we provide soap toilets like this.

Talia: I know that you guys had to pivot a bit due to the pandemic. Can you talk about what that was like? And now, what the operations look like?

Erin: Honestly, it was a really hard process. I think that 2020 was hard for everyone across the board and working in the hospitality sector, I think it was one of the hardest hits, and still is to this day. When the pandemic hit, we noticed that a lot of our hotel partners shut down. We lost 75% of our funding in a three-week span, which was very hard for us organizationally. We would raise the majority of our funding through an annual gala here in New York for 300-400 people, we had to stop doing that. So, the size of our organization really shrunk. You know, at our peak, we had about 43...44 employees, and it shrunk down to five. And I think that that was so challenging for us. But we wanted to make sure that we were paying the women salaries that we employ until the end of the year, because one thing that really keeps me going is these women who work for us, so many of them have never had a job before, have never had any formal employment. Some of them don't yet know how to read or write. And I think what makes Sundara unique is the fact that we only employ women, and we pay them three times the local wage. And so, I think that even in times that are very difficult for us, we really prioritize as an organization taking care of these women and paying their salaries until the end of the year and making it so that they could provide food for their family amidst some pretty strict lockdowns...health care for their family and their ailing parents. That was really big for us. We supported 14 different emergency aid projects in India, when COVID was searching things like paying for doctors and nurses to come visit communities and provide lifesaving care. We ran 24/7 vans that brought people to hospitals free of charge, we provided thousands of food packages to families who were immunocompromised, and that food lasted them over a month... 

Talia: You had already developed these deep relationships with these communities. So, you were well equipped to provide them with basic support that they needed during that time?

Erin: Exactly. I mean, we already had boots on the ground, and a trusted network of people that we have known for eight years, and we have the ability to move money quickly and supplies quickly and transportation. And so, we were really well equipped to basically be able to bring whatever this community needed. So, we kind of pivoted to be more of an emergency relief organization in India when things were very bad there. But at the same time, we were thinking about how we can best support this work and keep the mission going. When hotels are shutting down or operating at 10-20% capacity, when people are scared to travel... I haven't been to India since the pandemic started. And I think for us a lot of that really landed on supporting local female changemakers. You know, I was so lucky to get $10,000 from a LinkedIn award, I realized my privilege and doing that a lot of people are just making ends meet. But it doesn't mean that they can't be architects of change. And I think that especially for something like hygiene and public health, we have to empower women, especially who live the problem who see the problem every day to say you know what, I know an idea that's going to work in my community, and here's how I want to change this for the better. And so we raised around $100,000 And we started an innovation fund which we call Rise and we made a call out around July of 2020  -- we said women of the world what are your ideas to prove your public health in your own community that you live in, we'd like it to focus on communities who are living on less than $3 a day, and how can we come side by side with you and support you and your work? And so, we have 1,400 applications to date from 63 countries around the world. It's been amazing to read these ideas and find ones that we can actually support.

Talia: All of them are centered on hygiene? 

Erin: All of them are centered on hygiene, but some of them focus on building toilets that recycle waste into biogas, or fuel for female farmers. We also have a woman in Armenia who's building the first ever public laundromat in that country. She had been going to Columbia University, and saw all these laundromats in Morningside Heights and thought, why don't I bring this back to my country. We have women who are working on menstrual health, and menstrual hygiene, which I think has also faced a lot of inequity, especially around COVID, seeing which women are fortunate enough to have access to menstrual pads and which ones aren't. And so, we really have expanded to not just soap, not just hand washing, education, but whatever these communities are feeling are of biggest need. And we give the women a year of mentorship with us, we connect them to experts in fundraising and social media and business training. We give them seed funding around $5,000. And then we provide them with a business expert that's working with them constantly and helping them get their innovation to the next level. So, after they're with us for a year, we're seeing that they're able to connect with much larger foundations to get grants of $35,000, $50,000...

Talia: How many women are in this fellowship every year?

Erin: We have 11 fellows right now.

Talia: What is the plan moving forward? Are you going to try to expand your soap operation expand your fellowship?

Erin: Yeah, I think it's really important for us to mentor our existing fellows, especially the ones that are in India, and Nepal, because we see a lot of potential in these women and their operations. I wish we could support you know, 50 women or 100 women, but with these 11, we're really trying to focus on going deep with them, and getting them connected to much bigger foundations, getting them connected to mentors that can help them build toilets across seven states in India.

Talia: Erin if our listeners want to support this work monetarily how can they do?

Erin: There's a few ways. So, one is if they like the idea of supporting female changemakers, it cost $7,500 to support one changemaker for a year. We currently have changemakers in Indonesia, Nepal, Zimbabwe, India, Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria. And so, we're always looking to fund more being as though we have over 1,000 women waiting for funding right now. So, the need is great. And it keeps growing. We got so many applications, we actually had to take our application off the website. But we hope to put it back on shortly. And if soap and so recycling and handwashing education is important to these donors, I would say that it costs anywhere between $25,000-$50,000, to support a factory in India each year, and that supports four to five women full time and bring soap to say 200,000-250,000 children each month with soap deliveries, hygiene education, activities. And we're able to support clean water projects here and there with the soap so that we're really providing something that's holistic, and not just giving people soap and not access to clean running water. So, I'd say those are the two biggest things that we need at the moment. And I'd love if anyone's interested in supporting us to get in touch because that's something that we really are struggling with. And we really need support right now.

Talia: It's amazing to listen to you talk about your work because it seems to be extremely fulfilling for you, especially this new piece of working with women to elevate their entrepreneurial ideas. I bet you could never had anticipated the kind of impact you were going to have when you were making soap in your apartment downtown.

Erin: Yeah, yeah, totally. It's it has been a whirlwind, and it's a really fulfilling one. I feel very lucky to have gotten to have this journey.