Sometimes our ability to see beyond our own priorities makes it difficult to acknowledge that there’s a wider world filled with unfathomable hardship.
But where one faces daunting challenges, there are always others who are striving to reach beyond themselves to lend a helping hand.
Unbound’s corporate partners are committed to reaching beyond. Their support makes a direct impact in the lives of individuals and families in more ways than one.
Their actions are purpose-filled and specific; they want to drive a legacy of positive impact, not only by supporting families most in need, but by influencing perspectives at a deeper corporate and community level to embrace a culture of giving.
From manufacturing and finance to retail and technology, Unbound’s corporate partners hail from many different industries nationwide, but they all have something in common with the organization — a shared goal focused on supporting individuals in developing countries as they rise above poverty.
“Our unique model empowers individuals and communities, ensuring support is not only given but also that it fosters self-sufficiency,” said Deborah Johns, Unbound’s chief growth officer. “A partnership with Unbound allows companies to make a profound and lasting impact on the global community, enhancing their brand reputation and more importantly, effecting positive change.”
May 10, 2024 | Partnerships
Reaching beyond: Corporate giving leaves a legacy of positive impact
Three corporate partners share the impact of their giving on their companies and on marginalized communities
By Kati Burns Mallows

In the Unbound Experience Center at the organization’s global headquarters in Kansas City, a group of visitors are prepped to take part in the Unbound International Poverty Simulation. Besides taking part in the simulation exercise, corporate partners can tour the experience center, hold meetings in the space or volunteer at Unbound’s headquarters.
But corporate giving is not one-size-fits-all at Unbound. There are a variety of ways companies can choose to support Unbound’s work. More traditional ways might be through child or elder sponsorships, or making targeted donations to special funds. But there are also pilot program options, like Unbound’s Small Business Accelerator that provides funding for entrepreneurs in marginalized communities, or the organization’s new mothers group sponsorship model, which allows companies to sponsor a group of 20-30 mothers for up to 10 years, empowering them to be a force of positive change for their families and communities.
Unbound takes pride in developing a partnership for and with each company that reflects their vision and aligns with their goals and mission in a unique and impactful way.
The stories that follow highlight just three of Unbound’s corporate partners who are, with a partnership tailored specifically to fit their missions, leaving a legacy of positive impact that will be felt and remembered far beyond their own corner of the world.
duvari: Affecting change one relationship at a time with child sponsorship
When Shaun Duvall founded St. Louis-based information technology staffing agency duvari in 2017, he did so with the mission of establishing a culture dedicated to serving others first.
“What I wanted to do was prove that we can still be successful in our industry while doing it differently by focusing on the needs of others prior to ourselves,” Duvall said.
“Unbound was one of the things in my life that influenced me toward this.”
Duvall has been an Unbound sponsor for 13 years. From the letters he exchanged with his sponsored friends, Duvall came to understand not just the impact of his financial support on the lives of those he sponsors, but also his friendship. For him, the human element of connection is at the heart of driving positive impact, and he wanted others — including his team members and other business leaders — to gain a similar perspective.
He established his company under a core value called “Positive Lasting Impact,” and set out to ensure duvari lives its values. Each time duvari hires a new team member, the company sponsors a child or elder, and the new employee gets to choose a sponsored friend from the Unbound waiting list.
“We want our team members to gain perspective that there are individuals who need help in the world,” said Duvall, whose company now has 13 total sponsorships across Latin America and Africa. “Just the act of choosing a sponsored friend is impactful for them.”

Members of the duvari team pose with framed photos of their Unbound sponsored friends at the Titan 100 awards celebration in St. Louis on April 18, 2024. duvari Founder and Managing Partner Shaun Duvall (pictured second from left) was named a 2024 St. Louis Titan 100, a program that recognizes the area’s top 100 CEOs and C-level executives as accomplished business leaders who’ve demonstrated exceptional leadership, vision and passion in their industries.
Duvall took this concept a step further at duvari, implementing their own internal incentive-driven giving programs. One such program, “Kindness in Motion,” was eventually launched externally, on social media, encouraging followers to nominate and sponsor individuals or families in need. With help from both duvari’s local and virtual community in the winter of 2023, the Kindness in Motion program positively impacted the lives of 10 families in need throughout the U.S.
Duvall believes duvari’s partnership with Unbound has given his team members the kind of perspective that helps them approach and serve their clients in the recruiting industry in a more authentic way, one that he hopes will have a ripple effect in other companies and the wider world.
Practicing the art of giving, Duvall said, is helping duvari build great teams with great people who work well together and who will eventually accomplish more.
Through this partnership, I can see how it influences and shapes [my team], and it’s influencing me in how I lead. It gives me hope that what we’re doing works — that even if they [team members] choose to one day leave our company to work somewhere else, we’ve helped them to see a different way of doing business and life, and they will continue doing intentional, impactful things wherever they go.
— Shaun Duvall, Founder and Managing Partner, duvari
Soleran: Helping entrepreneurs reach self-sustainability with Small Business Accelerator
For 20 years, Soleran has been providing fully integrated compliance management (ICM) software solutions to health care and business professionals in and outside of the Kansas City metro.
Their suite of services and solutions have helped businesses learn to work smarter not harder, making their business processes more sustainable in the long run.
It was the concept of self-sustainability that captured Soleran CEO and President Grady Hawley’s attention when he first began studying global poverty and learning how he could maximize his philanthropic contributions to create more long-term, sustainable solutions. The philosophy, “teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime,” resonated with Hawley.
"This philosophy is important to me in particular when thinking about poverty because it not only creates dignity for the person, but it also educates them to create an economy for themselves," Hawley said.

In 2022, members of the Soleran team toured the Unbound Experience Center at the organization’s headquarters in Kansas City. While there, several of the team members decided to sponsor children who had been on the Unbound waiting list.
Soleran engaged Unbound in 2022 to form a corporate partnership tailored to Soleran’s goal of helping individuals in poverty access the resources they need to become more self-sustainable. The result was Soleran’s support of the Unbound Small Business Accelerator, a pilot program which provides an infusion of capital to entrepreneurs in marginalized communities to help them target barriers preventing the growth of their small business ventures.
Since that time, Soleran has globally supported 13 Unbound small business entrepreneurs across a wide variety of industries, including food service, handicraft retail stores, woodworking, farming and more. This support has allowed the entrepreneurs to increase their production and revenue, gain access to markets and participate in skills training, all of which put their families on paths toward reaching economic self-sufficiency.
Soleran’s Vice President of Marketing, Jill Allen, said the ease of their partnership with Unbound has also been a benefit to them. Each quarter, on behalf of Soleran and with their financial support, Unbound chooses and awards funding to entrepreneurs in the program with the greatest need. Soleran receives a detailed report on the impact of their contributions, including personal letters from the entrepreneurs themselves.
“It’s always impactful for us to hear their voice in those letters,” said Allen, who shares the reports and letters with Soleran’s other employees and displays them on a wall of the office. “Sometimes it’s just something so small they needed to scale up their business; that’s when we’re super excited to see how we helped with that.”
Soleran’s commitment to social good, branded “Soleran Cares,” summarizes their charitable giving philosophy and the three things they’ll continue striving daily to bring to entrepreneurs who live in poverty, including those served through Unbound — dignity, independence and community.

Soleran’s team members have adopted the company’s overall spirit of service. The team frequently takes part in service days. (Pictured above) Working with a local Kansas City organization in 2023, the team helped clean and restore a handicap-accessible home for a family.

Luz, mother of an Unbound sponsored child in Colombia, is a skilled woodworker and artist, and one of the entrepreneurs who received funding from Unbound’s Small Business Accelerator, thanks to Soleran. With the funding, Luz purchased specialized power tools for her woodworking shop with the goal of increasing her production.

Luz creates intricate wooden handicrafts such as paintings, birdhouses and frames. With the Small Business Accelerator funding, she has thus far reduced her production time and cost of materials by 50% while doubling her production, averaging an additional 45 products per month to her inventory.
We want to see entrepreneurs succeed. We get excited when there's a way we can help them build their businesses to make personal and sustainable economic transformation as well as within their communities. We want to be along for that journey.
— Grady Hawley, CEO and President, Soleran
Financial Cornerstones: Providing communities access to clean drinking water through Agents of Change
Several years ago, while on a mission trip to Central America, Mark Lasseigne witnessed the failure of a water well project meant to bring clean drinking water to a marginalized community.
This experience weighed on Lasseigne’s mind for some time. “It was a great project that could never happen because the implementor wasn’t as connected into the network of the country as he needed to be to get the local approvals,” said Lasseigne, who pondered what organizations might have structures in place at the local level to get projects like this completed.
Lasseigne, whose family had already been sponsors through Unbound for 22 years, turned to the organization with his questions and a growing desire to share the continued successes of his company with others less fortunate.
Lasseigne is the founder and managing member of Financial Cornerstones, a registered investment advisory company in The Woodlands, Texas, serving a unique niche — faith-driven investing. Financial Cornerstones helps investors align their investments and financial decisions with the cornerstones of their faith.
“We wondered how we could go beyond what we already do,” Lasseigne said. “Water is the gift of life, and we thought, ‘let’s incorporate that into our business.’”
Unbound created a partnership plan for Financial Cornerstones that allows the company to fund water-related initiatives in marginalized communities via Unbound’s Agents of Change platform. With Agents of Change, communities in the areas where Unbound serves identify a local need, craft a proposal for access to a grant of between $500 to $2,000, and then use the grant funding to implement a solution themselves.

Mark Lasseigne and his wife, Kendall, (pictured left) have been Unbound sponsors for more than 20 years. Through their company, Financial Cornerstones, the Lasseignes support Unbound's Agents of Change and have helped make clean water more accessible to communities throughout Latin America and Africa. Kendall works alongside Mark as director of communications and client services at Financial Cornerstones.
Lasseigne has the benefit of choosing which proposals to fund, either searching for available Agents of Change proposals on the Unbound website or perusing a curated list of water-related initiatives Unbound shares directly with him.
Since 2021, Financial Cornerstones has made clean water more accessible by funding six Agents of Change initiatives across Latin America and Africa, ranging from fixing a community’s damaged water system to constructing potable water wells or providing water storage tanks. Through quarterly impact reports, Lasseigne can visibly see the changes their contributions are making in communities.
“We can see that these will be lasting projects that will not only impact the generation that we supported, but their children and, hopefully, their children’s children,” Lasseigne said. “It’s a legacy project.”

One such Unbound Agents of Change initiative supported by Financial Cornerstones positively impacted a secondary school in Tanzania. The school lacked water infrastructure, forcing students to carry their own water to school each day in heavy drums. Before the community’s Agents of Change proposal was supported by Financial Cornerstones, the school was considering reducing enrollment due to the shortage of clean water.

With the $1,920 USD awarded to the group as a result of the Agents of Change proposal, they installed water pipes and tanks at the secondary school.

The implementation process took two months and positively impacted 5,487 children and families.
Running a business, I can’t always be the hands and feet directly when it comes to giving back — but I can be the fuel that allows Unbound to be the hands and feet. I know there’s a larger world that has a need beyond what I can do right here, and I want to be a part of that. I want my family to be a part of that, and I want my company to be a part of that. In the same way, I would like other people to see the work we are doing through Unbound’s Agents of Change and say, ‘Wow, look at that. I want to be a part of that, too.’
— Mark Lasseigne, Founder and Managing Member, Financial Cornerstones
Are you interested in exploring how to build a workplace partnership with global impact? Learn more about corporate engagement through Unbound.