You Betcha She Did! Life Advice, Business Tips for Rad Women Entrepreneurs, Leaders, Coaches and

78 | A Career You Didn't Even Know Existed: Social Impact and Microinsurance Consultant

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Join us for an energetic chat with Cytandra Hoover, a rockstar in the world of microinsurance and a shining example of the strength that comes with balancing parenthood and a thriving career. We'll dive into the nitty-gritty of microinsurance (what is that anyway?), exploring how it provides affordable protection against unexpected challenges like climate change and natural disasters.

But it's not all business talk – we're also pulling up a chair around the metaphorical kitchen table to discuss the real-life struggles and joys of being a single parent while juggling a successful career. Cytandra shares her journey, from navigating the complexities of international development to crafting insurance policies that truly meet the diverse needs of different communities.

Get ready for a chat about:

  • Why Cytandra decided to ditch the constant business travel and be there for her kiddo as he grew up.
  • The wild ride of going back to the corporate world after spending ages working overseas in the international scene.
  • How she took bits and pieces from each gig – you know, the international sector, the corporate hustle – to build up the skills she needed to kickstart her own business. It's a real talk about making moves and learning on the go!

As we unravel these layers, one thing becomes clear – resilience is key, both in our personal lives and when it comes to innovating for social change. Tune in as we tackle these topics and more, facing the challenges of climate change head-on.

Connect with Cytandra:

Your time to shine has come!  Join us for our amazing women-only retreat at the shores of beautiful Lake Michigan.  Spend time away focusing on you and master the art of self-appreciation. This relaxing and energizing retreat includes appreciation training and coaching, yoga, and other engaging activities.  Learn more here

If you're a current podcaster or aspiring podcaster who wants to grow their business with a podcast, check out Podcast Growth Club where Rayna shares her best strategies to help you grow and monetize your podcast with a small audience. 


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Speaker 1:

Hey everyone, I'm gonna start today's episode with a quick story. In the mid-2000s, or actually around 2010, I used to work as a high school and middle school teacher and when we would have parent orientation, we would show this video clip called Shift Happens. I just love that. First of all, it's a nice play on words Shift happens and in the video, the premise was that we are preparing students for careers and jobs that don't even exist yet, and fast forward to 2024, there are so many careers and jobs that are new these days that didn't exist, and my guest is a perfect example of that. My guest today is Saitendra Hoover, and she is a social impact consultant and also works with micro insurance, which, again, if you're confused, you're not alone. This is a relatively new career that has come up within the last, I would say, 10, 20 years. She's going to explain what it means to us and how she's helping populations that need the most help, so stay tuned. It's going to be a good episode. Did she really do that, you, betcha? She did. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of you, betcha.

Speaker 1:

Sheeted the podcast for women. Changemakers, entrepreneurs and leaders, especially from the Midwest. Share their wit and wisdom. I'm your host, raina Rakiki. I am excited today because I have someone in the studio who brings a whole new perspective to the idea of social impact and insurance, and I was confused about it, but she has a lot to share and a lot of things that I think are really helpful for the world. So let me introduce Saitendra Hoover. She is a social impact consultant. Saitendra, welcome to the show. Thank you very much, raina. It's so great to be here. Yeah, it's great to have you here. So I came across you on LinkedIn and I was fascinated right away with what you did, because I know you talked about micro insurance and social impact. So for our audience, kind of give us the cliff-nosed version like what is it that you do for everyday people?

Speaker 2:

Absolutely so. I think what's really fascinating is this premise that insurance, in its essence, is designed to help people. People get insurance because you are looking for a product. You're looking for kind of that safety net to protect you in your time of greatest need. And so the idea of micro insurance or inclusive insurance really is taking that concept and bringing it to people who really truly are oftentimes not able to access it or in products that really are not sold. So, for example, it's focusing on climate solutions or disaster response or even helping populations who, due to income reasons, really cannot afford the types of policies that are being offered by large insurance carriers. And so it really is that intersection of doing good and social impact with the premise of how do you provide and protect those services and those needs and concerns when they occur.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so with micro insurance, when you're looking for people who need to be covered, does it usually happen like after the disaster, the event happened, or are you actively searching? Yeah, like beforehand being like oh, these are people who really need access and don't have it right now.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so just like typical insurance, it's always beforehand, and so it's really fascinating, I find, in terms of the way that it works. And I spend a significant amount of my career and my life working in international development, so basically that was working in global disaster response and conflict management. So I worked with the UN, the Institute for my, international Organization for Migration, I worked with the US State Department and USAID and the Red Cross, and so really it's this idea of how you build partnerships and relationships with NGOs and other on the ground institutions who have that contact with the people who really need the services so small rural farmers or small entrepreneurs and developing those relationships with those entities, those agencies that have the connection to the people that need it, and then working together to figure out what is the protection that they really need and what are the risks that they are most susceptible to. And so the idea within parametric insurance I won't get too nerdy, I promise really is this idea of thinking of climate change and natural disasters and how they're increasing in frequency and severity, and figuring out and understanding who is most susceptible to those different types in what areas so it could be earthquake or drought or excess rain or hurricane, and so figuring out what are the populations that need that protection, long before that it happens, and so most insurance products. You do a lot of analysis to figure prior data and figure out where is the trend and again, as I promised, I won't get too nerdy. And so we pull it all together and figure out what is needed, where and for whom, and then we work together to create those relationships and those partnerships.

Speaker 2:

And really the premise again is that the premium, so essentially the amount that you are paying on either a monthly or an annual basis for that policy, for that protection, is very small. I mean, sometimes you're talking like $2.50 a month. So really really small. So the point is that it's accessible. And then figuring out, what is it that you're protecting? So sometimes it's just income replacement, sometimes it's actually a replacement of goods and services that are damaged as a result of the event. But really the whole premise is figuring out how you make insurance accessible to people who can't afford it through traditional insurance means.

Speaker 1:

OK, yeah, that makes sense and there's definitely a need for that. I mean, compared to other countries around the world, especially developing nations, we have so much money in America and I used to live in Nigeria for six years so I definitely saw that in West Africa. So, yeah, we need to make sure people are covered and it's not just like the wealthy countries. So what kind of brought you to this place where you have your own consulting firm in this, in this special niche? Right, because I know you didn't start out that way and I know you have a really interesting upbringing Like, was there something that inspired you to go this way? Talk to us a little bit about that Absolutely.

Speaker 2:

So I think that there's a combination of planning and strategy and then a huge bunch of just luck of the draw and so, yeah, so I grew up my father is a tropical botanist and so I grew up living like a little house on the prairie and on a farm in western Massachusetts and a house that was built in the 1830s with indoor heating by a wood stove and so kind of this very unusual childhood of kind of that day-to-day farm kind of life. But then my father who was traveling all over the world doing his botanical expeditions, and so ever since I was an infant, from about four or five months old, I was traveling on the expeditions with him, and so travel got to go all around the world, and that really exposed me to exactly what you were saying. Right, this like wealth that exists in the United States, you know, wealth of opportunity and education and jobs. But then going with him to places like Mexico and Indonesia and seeing people who are living in slums with corrugated metal and open sewers, and so I really kind of brought that world together for me of this focus on the anthropology and people and culture and needs and how we can figure out how to solve those needs in different ways, and so that's really what I've dedicated my whole life to doing, in many different ways, and so I spent my whole life, you know, living and working all over the world. I think I've lived in like 20 some countries and I speak Spanish like a native, and so it really and, as I mentioned before, and I've worked for the United Nations, for the International Organization for Migration and lots of other agencies.

Speaker 2:

But what I figured out in the midst of all of that was that there was this lack of real focus on looking at solutions from a business sustainability perspective. And it's not a criticism at all of the work that they do, it was just kind of my own personal reaction to working in the space. And so, after doing it for a decade, decade plus, I really started thinking like how can we find other ways of doing this that almost are more, like you know, for profit businesses? And so I left and I got my MBA in entrepreneurship, and then I worked in corporate America for about a decade and it really was this total juxtaposition, like you know, working, you know, in Yemen and living in Yemen and Libya and Columbia, to then all of a sudden, like wearing a suit every day and going into the headquarters of Liberty Mutual in Boston, like totally, totally different worlds. I mean, that was like an experiment in anthropology in and of itself and so, but it was fascinating, right.

Speaker 2:

And so I spent this decade in corporate America, really just like learning business acumen. You know what works, how it works, how you bring money in the door, how you run it as efficiently as possible to generate as much money as possible at the end of the day, and so about a little over a year ago I've got a year and a quarter I left that space and then I launched my own consulting firm, really with that premise of like, how do I know, bring it all together? And I knew for a long time I've known, for, you know, a decade and a half that this was kind of where I wanted to be right. I wanted to bring together all that work that I had done internationally in social impact with the for profit skills to figure out how do I, you know, deliver value at this intersection of impact, inclusion and profit, and so that's kind of what I am doing now, right, I just kind of fell into insurance.

Speaker 2:

That was the part that was definitely not planned, but it's really fascinating right to think about how we can use insurance products to really deliver what the intended good and you know, initial premise of it really is. And you know, as we think of climate change and disaster response, like how on earth can insurance be a solution to that? And so that's what I'm doing now is I work with a variety of different clients to not so much the product design piece of it, but really to help figure like, how do we bring efficiency, you know, in process and organization to these entities so that they can deliver even greater good and deliver even greater impact with fewer resources and more efficiently? And and so it's just fascinating to see how it can all come together and how we can do good in the world through ways that you know most people you know we never would have imagined.

Speaker 1:

You hadn't done it before, right? Well, I like that story. I love how you're kind of intentional. You're like okay, I've done all these things around the world, now I'm going to dive into my corporate America study for 10 years, soak it all in and then use that, like you said, for the for the greater good. So I know there's a lot of confidentiality surrounding who you work with and we will respect that. I'm just curious, like when finding people, do you like, do you go to NGOs and pitch it? Or do they come to you or like how does how does that work?

Speaker 2:

Yes, I mean it's a little bit of everything. So you know I've reached out to entities, entities have reached out to me and then the work we do, you know, differs, right. So because of my, my longstanding relationship in the, in this international space and working with the UN and all sorts of other agencies and entities, ngos and for profit entities on the ground, so that's a big part of it, right is just kind of helping to build and create those partnerships and understanding how that's called international development. So understanding how international development works, how you deliver impact on the ground and all the nuances around community and relationships and trust building and deliverance of goods and services. So that's one part of it is just creating that bridge and those connections. Then the other side is really the business efficiency. So it's being the chief financial officer, the chief operating officer, the chief strategy officer, like all of that kind of work of helping businesses to figure out how to do the work, do it differently, do it more efficiently so that they really can deliver greater good.

Speaker 1:

Now, I know you're based in Chicago right now. Do you often get to travel to where your clients are? Are you more homebound in the States now? How's that working out for you?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so I'm a single mother of a nine-year-old boy who is the love of my life and the joy of everything that I do. So I used to travel a lot, like 60 percent of the time, but my choices is really to be here. So I do travel occasionally, but this is really where I'm based, because I want to be here and I want to go to his games and his events. But our family is also Colombian and so we travel to Colombia quite a lot for that work. But there's the part of me and you, having lived and traveled abroad a lot, you understand the gap, that yearning and burning feeling of wanting to travel. But it's a balance that we definitely find.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think also there's a season for everything too. It's really enjoying the season of motherhood. It's super key and especially as a single mom, that is not easy. We had a great guest a couple of weeks and we talked a lot about how we all need to support single moms more. Like it is not easy. It's not even easy if you have a partner. I give you all the props for running your old business and making it happen.

Speaker 2:

But you know what? There's no perfect Right, there's no perfect, so there's always some kind of trade-off that you do, no matter what the choice is, and so this is what I'm choosing to do right now, because it gives me that availability to work with a whole bunch of different clients that are all working in different spaces to generate impact, and my focus is not unnecessarily making the problem go away, because, having worked in development and globally my whole life, trying to make the problem go away will rarely happen, and so to me, it's more about incremental change. How do you reduce the suffering even just a little bit, how do you make the lives just even a little bit better? And so that's really what my focus is on. Right Is working with this variety of different clients so I can help every one of them just bring incremental change, and I think it's fascinating. And then it also allows me to learn from each one of them and figure out how I can deliver even more good to other clients.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, I think that's a super smart way to go about it. I mean, you can't tear down the whole system. It's too much, it's not going to happen. But yeah, if you can just make small little pivots that, like you said, make people's lives a little better, that's awesome and that's making really meaningful change over years and years. What is it like being a woman in this field and I know obviously it's like a relatively new field has that, have you had any challenges, or is it? It's pretty good because it's new? I'm just curious about that. You know, from a feminist perspective.

Speaker 2:

It's a great question. So, and traditional insurance, right, when you think of your usual insurance, of home and auto, right, all of those, you know that's definitely, you know very much of the stereotype, right, that comes to all of our minds. I find what's really interesting in this space is, you know, there's definitely some of that kind of male dominant I don't want to say dominant, male influenced, because, right, that's where a lot of the typical insurance expertise comes in but it really is that intersection with so much of what I experienced in development, which really was much more female dominated. And so that, to me, is the other thing that I really love about this space is it really is not, you know, biased one way or the other, and it is very international, it's very global. And so, you know, with any of the either the clients that I have or had, or people that I have conversations with, it really is that mix, and that's what I love right, Because my career in life has been global, and that's what I love right is being able to talk with people from so many different backgrounds and it's not just one, you know, profile that's dominating this space.

Speaker 2:

I think that's what's really important and missing in so many companies today is that it really is kind of one dominant profile and it makes it very difficult to be agile and flexible and change and adapt. And so I think that's what makes this space really interesting is by bringing in so many different perspectives and backgrounds, you're able to be very agile to what the needs are that are arising.

Speaker 1:

Glad it's such a positive experience. And it's, yeah, you know, like I said, there's no one profile. There's room for everybody to exist with their perspective. So that's great to hear.

Speaker 2:

And having worked, you know, informal insurance and being a very strong woman myself. Right, I don't think you could be a single mother and working on the global scale and launching your own business and be a very quiet or passive person. Or, if it does exist, I would love to talk to you because I could probably learn a lot from someone who's like that, but I think it's. You know, I don't think necessarily every space is for every person, but I think this is a great space for people who are trying to figure out kind of how to strike that balance between Doing good but also working in for-profit solutions and working in business models and not, you know, ngos, and so I think that there's a. It's a really great opportunity for people who are looking for something different but where they can do good.

Speaker 1:

I think I already know the answer to this question. I'm gonna ask it anyway Is there one region of the world where you really see Climate change and natural disasters Ramping up more than others, or it's pretty much, it's kind of all over? I feel like the answer is probably it's all over, but yeah, I was just curious from your perspective.

Speaker 2:

Unfortunately, I don't think anyone is safe from climate change. What's interesting, though, is what types of disasters are becoming more frequent and what areas, and I think that's a lot of what it is. You know, the hurricane cycle, for example, in, you know, in the North Atlantic and the Caribbean right, is becoming more frequent, more severe. The storms are, have you know, reaching areas that they didn't used to before, like we've had hurricanes up in the in New England right, so in mass, you know. In the US, right, we've had hurricanes are hitting Massachusetts and Vermont right, like we never used to have hurricanes up there. And so, and then the areas that are, you know, traditionally prone to them the Caribbean, central America, right, they're just getting Hummeled, just, with no respite between the storms.

Speaker 2:

So one comes, causes, you know, billions of dollars of destruction, and they have no time to recoup. Between that, you know, and then another storm comes through again, and so, and then, you know, you know Africa, right, I mean the drought sister, you know the drought in Africa, right is, and so I think what's really happening is, you know, areas that we're experiencing some types of natural disasters, maybe on a more infrequent or less severe base, are just experiencing those, but amplified. And so that's to me, I think, what also is so important about the data and the analysis of what we look at in terms of where we go and what kind of products and solutions, is to figure out, like, where is that tendency and where is that trend, and kind of extrapolating that to figure out well, where is it going to go next? And trying to get in, because insurance, really, while you buy the policy and your product before it happens, it is very reactive, right, you wait for the event to happen and then you get it.

Speaker 1:

And so.

Speaker 2:

And so I think what's really interesting here is trying to figure out, like, where is it going to go next, so that we can step in before it happens and protect people before it happens. And and then you know it's not talked about or done a lot, but what's really interesting and fascinating to me is the prevention side right. So if you can figure out where it's going to happen, what else can you do before those storms come about to try to protect the populations? You know, before they even have the losses, and that the you know the property Exactly.

Speaker 1:

Before we go, I just wanted to pick your brain about advice you would give to someone else who might want to follow in your footsteps. You know, dealing with helping with social impact and making people's lives better. You obviously took a very interesting route with your life, but knowing what you do now is I don't know what. If there's a path you recommend or experience they should get, what do you think?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So there are a lot of pieces of that. I think one is is really understanding what your motivation is to do it and I was talking to someone about this the other day and If the motivation is really to go and to change, right, to be kind of this, you know white person with this great privileged background and now I'm going to go and I'm going to help the poor African starving children, that's a really bad motivation. So I think it's a lot of kind of self reflection of you know, why do I want to do this? And it goes to that to me, that incremental change. But I think a critical piece of it really is also the anthropological side, right, it's like, let me, I really want to understand, right, I want to be inquisitive before I try to bring my solutions in, and so you know, words of advice that would definitely be one of it. Right is just kind of checking on you know, what is it that you want to do, you know, before you jump into it.

Speaker 2:

But then I think, if you have the passion and you have the desire and the knowledge and the willpower you know, find organizations to volunteer with, whether you know it's paid or unpaid. Find organizations to work with and pursue it like the world needs needs a lot of help and they need creative problem solvers from lots of different backgrounds to figure out how to do it differently. And you know, talk to people, reach out and gauge, listen. But to me it's I use kind of this three prong premise of listen, learn and leverage like just listen a lot, talk to people, learn as much as you can and then leverage all that to bring it together. So I love connecting people. So if you're interested, feel free to reach out. But but I definitely think that there's so much opportunity that can be done in this space.

Speaker 1:

Well, that's great to hear. I love that. Listen, learn, leverage, analogy. That's a. It's easy to remember and powerful at the same time, right? Well? So, tandra, thank you for being on the show. I'll have your information linked in the show notes if anybody wants to get in touch with you or follow you and see the work that you're doing, as always, if you like what you're hearing and you bet you she did don't forget to share this episode with a friend, a neighbor, a colleague, a cousin, a sister. You never know who might want this information, so don't get hold of it. Pass it on. Well, thank you for doing it. Until next time, take care.