Who is Joel Skene …and Why is he doing this?

I’d like to thank you for spending your time listening to my show and reading my blog. Your time is quite possibly the most valuable thing you own, and I don’t take that lightly. I want to give you a little background on where I’m coming from and why The Mindful Marketplace exists.

I was raised in an extremely small town where most people were dairy farmers. My father was a Protestant Minister and my mother worked part time while she went back to school to become a librarian. My parents raised me with a desire to serve others, and a commitment to care about people less fortunate than myself. This lead me to study Community Development in college and begin my career with the Peace Corps, then as a social worker and director of a food bank.

My last position in the Non-Profit sector was as the Social Enterprise Manager for a Healthy Food Access non-profit. That afforded me the opportunity to attend a Conference for an Organization called BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies). That week, I learned from entrepreneurs who were using their businesses to fund social change. I met investors who were pooling their money into local and independent businesses rather than Wall Street. All around me were people who were using business and capital as a means to a greater democratic good. My eyes were opened to an entirely new way of thinking about helping others and social change.

I decided to cross the Rubicon into the business world, but I had never taken a single business class, or even worked at a for-profit company aside from washing dishes. I stumbled for a while, and after a couple years of failing in commission sales, I surprised myself and found success in financial services by finding solutions for families to protect their assets, prevent foreclosures or market loss, and educate them on how to best get out of debt.

Looking back on my last eight years in financial services, I realize that one of the largest motivators for my success has been my desire to follow in the footsteps of the investors and community developers I met back at BALLE. I want to leverage any position and capital I am fortunate enough to have by investing it into local, independent, and mission driven businesses. I went looking for a podcast or radio show based on these ideals, but was unable to find one that giving me what I was looking for…

The Mindful Marketplace is my best attempt to create the show that I want to hear. The show where we share the stories of entrepreneurs, investors, economists and business leaders who are not only making a profit, but who are creating more equitable, sustainable, and democratic business practices and communities along the way. It's where we learn how to connect our money and our time to our values, our community, and ourselves.

I invite you to join my journey of discovering how we can at every level do our part to create a more Mindful Marketplace.