This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Hello, greetings, and welcome back. This is Side Hustle School, where every day you hear a different story of someone who starts a hustle, an income-generating project specifically, without quitting their job. Now, since I started the show, a number of listeners have asked about social entrepreneurship or some kind of hustle that makes the world a better place. But of course, side hustlers are busy. You work full-time. You have other responsibilities. Can you really have
a day job, maybe even a career, and make money and do good? Well, if you wonder about those things, you might like today's story. It's all about an attorney for a professional baseball team who co-founds a jewelry company that becomes a sustainable social enterprise, meaning that it supports itself by being profitable while making a difference. I'll tell you about that in just a moment. Originally from upstate New York, Amy Peterson moved to Detroit after earning her law degree. Every day is different. She has no idea what will cross her desk, and Amy feels fortunate.
She had always wanted to work with sports. Baseball was a huge deal for her during childhood, and that stayed with her throughout her life. Growing up, Amy describes her family as being working class and not having a lot of money. But with the baseball team job, she works on contracts with players who are paid $5 million, $10 million a year, maybe even more, and it's quite a contrast. Amy likes the work, but she didn't forget her upbringing, and when she moved, she chose to live in downtown Detroit, not in the suburbs. She lived by a homeless shelter,
and whenever she went for a run or walked her dog, she would stop to talk with the women who were staying there. She was inspired by their stories and the unique challenges they faced. For most of them, she saw getting out of poverty wasn't a question of motivation, it was a question of opportunity. Then as she was running one day, Amy went past a part of town near an old railway line. She noticed that there were layers of graffiti coming off the walls. She peeled some
away and took it back home with her. Back in college, she had paid for her education by making jewelry, and that day she had a big idea. Her big idea was to combine each of these elements to make jewelry from fallen graffiti in a way that employed women from the shelter and taught them new skills. Amy didn't want to go it alone, so she found a partner. Together, they chose the name Rebel Nell as a reference to Eleanor Roosevelt. They set up an Indiegogo campaign to raise funds. The campaign
brought in $25,000, which helped them buy supplies and find a space. Rebel Nell is a jewelry company with a purpose, one that employs disadvantaged women in Detroit to help them transition from a life of dependence into one of self-reliance and self-empowerment. Everyone who works in the project is or was once transitioning from a shelter. Amy and her partner teach them how to make jewelry from that local graffiti as a way to repurpose the city. The profits earned directly impact their programs and services that help the community of women to lead self-sufficient lives.
At Rebel Nell, they operate under what they call the Teach a Woman to Fish mentality. Despite employing a number of people in the side hustle, Amy continues to work her day job as an attorney. But that's not all. Over the next five years, Amy and her partner hope to continue their pattern of growth while at the same time helping women who are ready for the next step in their professional path. They want each woman to be able to realize her dreams and watch them come to fruition. They
recently helped one of their ladies launch a first business of her own. Knowing that Rebel Nell provided her the tools she needed was incredibly rewarding and they are excited to watch her grow as an entrepreneur. Amy used her skills as a lawyer and what she learned about making jewelry to pay her way through school to level up with the sustainable side hustle. Remember that one thing often leads to another and everything is figureoutable, as I said recently. Did you pay your way through college? Maybe not the whole thing, but did you ever do something to support
yourself at some point in your life? Did you ever do something creative even if it wasn't necessarily for a large amount of money? What did you learn through that process? What skills did you acquire? And as you went on to something else, did that experience help you in some way? Maybe in some
way that you haven't even thought about until now. And maybe it's been five years, 10 years, 20 years or longer since you did that experiment or had that experience. But like we see in the story with Amy, maybe there's something you can do with it. Maybe you learned that thing for a reason. Now on the technical side, Amy chose to use Shopify for their website, which as I've explained is a very simple system that is especially awesome for e-commerce. You can have a website and sell
items like jewelry or anything else. And that website can look super professional without paying super professional rates. I didn't even realize it was a Shopify site until I looked at the very bottom where there was a link. And the pricing of Rebel Nails jewelry is between $75 and $200 per piece, which I think is an ideal price range for something like this because it's not cheap, but it's also not highly expensive. And it looks really great. If you wonder what wearable graffiti
art looks like, come take a look at the show notes on the site. You can see the photos. Those show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/78. We'll include links to Rebel Nail and to Shopify and maybe some other social good projects. So is it possible to have a busy career and a side hustle that also makes a difference in a community? The next time people ask, I'll think about Amy Peterson in
Detroit. I hope that you are working on your hustle. Inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better. I'm Chris Guillebeau. This is Sadduce School, and I hope to see you tomorrow.
