Connect deeply with others. Our humanity is the one thing that we all have in common.

If you want to lift up an economy in Africa, you basically start with the women.

Childbearing, I mean, if there's no place to go to deliver your baby, then you're the one that's delivering in those unhealthy circumstances. Or if you can't get access to family planning, your chances of surviving and being able to bring your kids up if they come one right after the other, that locks you into a cycle of poverty.

One life is worth no more or less than any other

I've travelled extensively in the last 16 years - to slums in Bangladesh, to townships in South Africa, to all kinds of places in India, etc. When I would go and talk to villagers about something like vaccines, if I stayed long enough, the women would bring the conversation around and say: "What about this family planning tool? We can't keep having the number of children we're having."

That's universal - we all want to bring every good thing to our children. But what's not universal is our ability to provide every good thing.

We look in our own backyard and say, 'How do we help at-risk families, at risk youth? How do we think through some of the problems affecting the Pacific Northwest and make some change there?'