We were lucky to catch up with Sebastian Sanders recently and have shared our conversation below.

Sebastian, appreciate you joining us today. What was it like going from idea to execution? Can you share some of the backstory and some of the major steps or milestones?

Back in 2017 before i founded my nonprofit organization “Sanders Hand” i had the idea of doing a simple back to school drive for my local community. At the time i was 20 years old and didn’t know anything about nonprofits i just had a burning desire to give back. I remember sitting inside of my statistics class at University of Texas at San Antonio, on my laptop googling about community work. Right after i went home and called my dad and told him about my idea of doing a community event. I will never forget he said “son that sounds good, but i feel you can do more for your community” at the time the message didn’t hit home. Years later it all made sense, right after our conversation i came up with the name Sanders Hand and decided i will start a nonprofit organization. Since then the rest has been history, a week later we completed our first project by partnering with Boys Town Texas for a clothing drive for foster home youth in San Antonio, Texas.

Sebastian, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Sebastian Sanders “The Youth Principal” is a 25 year old world renowned community impact Speaker. Born in Houston Texas, Sebastian is a known community leader & youth advocate since his founding of The Sanders Hand international nonprofit organization since 2017 Sebastian has been changing the lives of many families & students across the world servicing over 5,000 students & parents from Texas to Oklahoma by providing free business & financial literacy training. Sebastian is the first African American NGO Executive Director, to establish Sanders Hand education & literacy programs in another country with the founding of Sanders Hand Ghana. Sebastian is a graduate from the University of Texas at San Antonio with his bachelor’s degree in business administration management in his professional career working for Pepsico as a Sales District Manager & Frito Lay as a Supply Chain Network Manager for one of the largest production plants in the country. In addition to Sanders Hand Sebastian is the founder & chairman of SJS Enterprises, serving as the cultivation of community & business as we know it through it. Sebastian is a host & creator of the Money Mondays network show an edutainment division of SJS Enterprises With his expertise in nonprofit consulting & nonprofit coaching, Sebastian is a published best selling author of “Art of Giving” series with the first release in 2020 One Nonprofit Can Change The World, the complete business inspirational guide to founding your own nonprofit organization.

Known for his amazing work with Youth, he is a well perceived businessman & Social Entrepreneur with the creation of “Young Billionaires Club” curriculum & leadership camp. Sebastian is a well rounded social entrepreneur with his unique sense of business & thrive for change in our economy & community.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

It’s not always what you know but more about who you know. Investing in your social capital is the cheat code to success. Over the past years I built a social media audience by the way of community. Creating a community of likeminded followers and being intentional with partnerships. Every new follower i make it a effort to send a welcoming message to identify ways we can add value to one another. Not a sales pitch but an opportunity to create a new business partner with this exchange your audience grows x2. It’s about finding ways to add value to a specific community and by doing so you will be known for a specific cause that your followers will know you by and go to when they need that specific thing you offer.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Often in business you experience ups and downs in the marketplace. You will have some good months, days, years and then you will have some bad times that makes you want to give up. In those bad times is where you see who you really are. Early in my career when i first founded Sanders Hand, at such a young age and having little to no experience in the nonprofit industry one of the struggles we had was funding. After applying to hundreds of grants and being denied a hundred times i was met with a strong opposition. At this time the easiest thing to do is give up or go find another business to start but giving up would mean giving up on the millions of kids who i have yet to meet yet who is waiting on me to change their lives. I decided to pivot and use my business expertise to create alternative resources to fund our programs. By doing so without any major grant support we were able to serve over 2,000 youth in Texas within our first year of operations.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.sandershand.org/
• Instagram: https://www.sandershand.org/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastian-sanders-a4428114a/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ajf-c4egB3c&t=6s