The meaning of Shawn Seipler’s life coalesced in a bar of soap. By his early 30s, Seipler was a software salesman, husband, father of four and owner of two homes and a BMW 750. One night on the road, he sat looking at a bar of soap and wondered, “What happens to it after I check out?” It began a spiritual journey that would lead him to quit his job and sacrifice his wealth for the greater good. Clean the World, the nonprofit Seipler founded in 2009, collects used toiletries from hotels and repurposes them for distribution in developing countries to help stanch the spread of hygiene-related diseases. It has operations in Orlando and Las Vegas and reaches people in 95 countries. This summer, it got $1 million from Las Vegas Sands.
What was the “Ah ha!” moment in your conception of Clean the World?
I came across a study conducted in a Bangladesh village that had a very high death rate from diarrheal disease. The researchers divided the village in half: Half got soap and education on how to use it; the other half did not. There was a 60 percent reduction in mortality rates among those with the soap. I remember lying on my bed reading that study, and the light bulb went off.
Was there a moment when you considered giving up?
Oh, yeah. We started all this in the middle of the recession, making recycled soap in our garage with family helping out. From the very beginning, we were thinking the Gates Foundation had to be the place that’s gonna give us money, because one of their pillar issues is diarrheal disease. So we filled out an 18-page grant application, paid somebody to do it, were very meticulous. And I remember when we hit send, we were all high-fiving, like, “This is it!” Eight hours later, we got a rejection notice. It said, “Please do not reapply for three years.”
What kept you going?
We had started with distributions in Orlando to homeless shelters and relief organizations. There was one called Central Care Mission that had ties to Haiti through a gentleman named Pastor Brutus. In 2009, he took us to Cape Haitian, Haiti, and I remember going into our first church. There were 10,000 Haitians in this church, and all we had was 2,000 bars of soap. It barely made it through the first two rows of people. They dug into it like it was food and they hadn’t eaten for weeks. I remember getting on the mic and telling them, “We’ll come back. We’ll bring more soap.”
