Lighting the Darkness: How Nancy Economou Is Changing Lives One Light at a Time

Welcome to the Legacy All Stars podcast. We feature inspirational stories from people who dedicate themselves to helping others. Here is your host, Alan Pavloski.

Welcome back, everyone, to the Legacy All Stars podcast where we shine a light on extraordinary individuals making a lasting impact on the world. Today is no different. Our guest is someone who took a life changing trip to the Philippines and came back with a mission that would illuminate the world. Nancy Economo is the founder of Watts of Love, a nonprofit bringing solar powered light to the 1.2 billion people living without electricity. But it's not just about light. It's about dignity, security, and economic empowerment. From the stages of the United nations to the villages in Malawi, Nancy has transformed grief into global purpose and loss into legacy. Her work is giving families freedom from the danger of kerosene lamps and the burden of poverty. Get ready for an inspiring conversation about resilience, innovation, and what it means to truly see the people we're trying to serve. Nancy, thank you for all you do and thank you for being on the show. It's a pleasure to have you.

Thank you, Alan. I'm excited to be here.

You know, I want to jump right in and start about the origin story and, and what inspired Watts of Love. You said that one trip changed your life. Can you take us back to that moment in the Philippines that sparked the vision for Watts of Love?

Yes, absolutely. I'd be happy to, but I just want to give a little bit. Before all of this happened, my background was in high end jewelry sales for Cartier here in Chicago. So I say I went from serving the top 1% of the world, now serving the bottom 1% of the world. I was a stay at home mother. I can tell you my marriage was falling apart. We were part of the economic downturn with real estate. There was just a lot of things were not going well. But I had a trip to the Philippines and when I was there, I'm a curious person by nature. And I thought, you know, we have been wined and dined, but what's it like for the people who are living here? And so I happened to be invited to a feeding program. And when I went to this feeding program, there was a little girl whose face was burnt and the teachers were putting toothpaste on her face. I'm like, what happened to her? Like, you know, I don't. Why are you putting toothpaste on her Burns? They said, well, we don't have burn medicine. And this happens all the time. Children are burnt because they use kerosene for Lighting, and they don't have electricity now. A problem I had never heard of. I mean, I had heard, like, people don't live without electricity. But I never really thought of the consequences for that. And as a mother of five boys, I started imagining, what is it like to live in darkness. I can't imagine my child's face being lit on fire and then having no other options. So I can tell you, my heart was transformed during that trip. And there was a lot of other experiences just through the Filipino people. And I came home, and I can't explain it. In 2009, there was no UN sustainability development goals. LEDs were just coming on the market. But I was compelled to do something after seeing that problem. Had a house full of babies and kind of tucked it away. And for years I just thought about it and came up with the name Watts of Love. I'm going to bring solar lights to people. And finally, that first step, I think many times we get in our own head or we get in our own way. Finally, in 2012, I'm like, okay, I believe I've been given this vision for a reason. And what is the first step? Register the name. And so I just started not knowing what I was going to do, how I was going to do it. I just started taking the steps and believing.

Action. What an amazing step, right? Just take action. Very inspiring. What did you see that others might have missed? And why Light.

Great. So I think the first reaction was like, trauma of the little girl's face being burnt and not having any other options as a parent, you know, education, just all of the things that leads to poverty, which I believe is a lack of lighting and opportunities was the first thing. But then when I went to the Philippines in 2013, was my first light distribution. I really felt like a failure because here I was naive enough to think, oh, I can ship lights to the Philippines, get them to this remote island. But logistics, as you know, are challenging in developing nations. And all my lights got stuck in customs, and I thought, I'm going to be a failure. But I had three lights. And those three lights became the pillars of Watts of Love. But it was also from the people that I was serving. They really taught me very quickly within the first 24 hours that they had the lights, the power of what light can do. And so I took that home and started creating really what our program is, our secret sauce, our special recipe. But I'm just going to share with you. The very first person that I went to is an old lady, Nai Nai. And I said, you know, Nye, we're here to give you this light. She burst out crying and said, I cannot accept that from you. Cannot accept that light from you. And I said, why not? And she said, I'm too poor for you to love me. I've been cursed by God, abandoned by my family. My government doesn't know I exist. And so it was at that moment that I realized it's about how somebody feels. The second light was to a mother of seven children, Emily. I was excited to see what her first night was like. I ran down to her house the next morning, said, emily, what did you do with this bright light? She said, well, I stayed up and I made 1,000 bamboo barbecue sticks. So again, I'm them teaching me. Wow. Like, in 12 hours, she became an entrepreneur. Like, can you imagine what this island would be like if everybody took advantage of the light and became entrepreneurs? And then I realized that she was saving money because she didn't buy kerosene. So now you have two streams of income. The last light that I gave out was to an uneducated woman whose husband said, don't speak to her. Only explain the light to me. And what I had learned from him is that that night for dinner, they had licked their finger and dipped their fingers in salt and ate salt for dinner because they had no food. Now, I'm telling you that story because I came back once the lights were released from customs. Went back, and Emily came down from the mountaintop. Excuse me, Ruth. Came down from the mountaintop, and she said, nancy, I want you to know that my family has not gone hungry one day. I said, I don't understand. How has this light been able to feed your family? And she said, every day I hide a little bit of money from my husband. So that's what I'm like, oh, my gosh, I understand. So now, I took that story back. When I started designing our own light, I made sure that our box became a bank. Because now we're serving people with no formal education. They've never heard of banking. They don't understand compounding savings or diversifying. So instead of going to buy batteries, you're going to put your money in here, or kerosene, you're going to put your money in here. In seven days, you open this box, and what can you do? You can buy a chicken and take 10 chickens and buy a goat. So it's this step by step, and this unique way that we teach is ending generational poverty, and we're giving them the power to do it. Themselves, but then also the self worth and the dignity.

Wow. Sustainability, personal sustainability is everything, right?

Absolutely.

Yeah. You turned your own grief into, and hardship into fuel for global impact. Can you share a bit about your personal transformation?

Wow. Yeah. You know, I think very often, you know, men, women, I'm going to speak as, as a woman, you know, I had a house full of five little boys, which I felt like I wanted to be a stay at home mom at a certain time of my life. And when I decided to take that leap of faith, the stepping out into the Unknown, I was 47 years old, where most people are kind of like, oh, life's good. I'm not going to start a whole new business that I know nothing about. I was compelled to be the change in the world and the wrongs that I was seeing, but also as a mother showing my sons the strength of a dream and taking action. I think my sons look at me now and are very proud. My son, who's 20 years old in college said to me, you know mom, you're really different. Not all the mothers do what you do. So sometimes pain and motivation, good things can be birthed out of that. But I'll tell you what I had to get over was a self talk in my own mind. And you know, when I would share like, we're going to bring solar lights to people, we're going to change, you know, end generational poverty, we're going to. I almost felt like an imposter because I hadn't seen this before. No one else was doing it. I didn't have a roadmap. And it was really allowing myself the confidence besides beating myself up saying, you know, who are you? What do you think you can do?

And I mean, we all struggle occasionally with imposter syndrome. I think that's just human nature. And we get to a point where we beat ourselves up over things that we are making good efforts at. But yes, self talk and positive affirmations and moving forward in a positive way can not only serve you, but can serve others. And that's, I think, what we really need to all remember. Yes, let's talk a little bit more. And you mentioned a little bit about the solar light, but I really want to get a little bit more granular in the solar light itself. And how does it unlock such a cascade of impact from saving money to improving health and safety, etc.

Yes, absolutely. So I'll go back to originally. I found a product that was already in the market. It was larger, the light was about this big. It had A wire that connected to the solar panel. And I'm kind of an innovator. So if I see problems, I start hearing things. I'm already, like, redesigning in my mind. And what I started to see, well, first of all, the large light, I would look at that. I'm like, okay, if I'm going to start scaling, I can't ship air, right? So there's so much air in this product that it's not efficient. And especially where I wanted to go, which was the hidden poor, up mountains, over creeks, and getting to the people that need it the most. So getting rid of the air, additionally, the wires, I started noticing that the mice were eating through it. So now they have no access to repairing anything. They have no Internet. There's no way to find out how to figure either have tape or something to fix it. And then additionally, the solar panels were being stolen. So I thought, okay, I need to get rid of the wires. It needs to be small and compact. But really my goal was to make sure that if you tell somebody, especially the ultra poor, which I believe are the best investment in the world, if you're telling them, you can change your life, you can start buying chickens and we leave and the light breaks, it throws them into despair. Additionally, I had a local partner. It's not good for my local partner. We get to leave. They have to stay and suffer those consequences. So I had quite a few motivations to make a product that was better. I also saw problems with living in poverty. You don't have glasses. So when I was creating this light, I put the solar panel on the back so that eliminated the wires. I have a large surface right here that you can see is a push and hold. I put the large heart in the center so people without glasses can feel where to turn on the light. But this large push and hold was based on people with disabilities. I was in a leper colony where people didn't have any fingers in Kathmandu, Nepal, And I saw how they struggled turning on buttons and things like that. So I wanted to make sure that anybody with disabilities could turn this on. So you push and hold for five seconds, number one. Will last five days of continuous run. That's 40 hours, 30 hours, 10 hours. And then there's the emergency stroke. It also comes on a lanyard, so now it can be worn around your neck. It can also. The lanyard can come off. You can hang it inside of your house as a chandelier, or you can put it on your head for hands free. Hands free was the other thing that I noticed was really essential. Living in darkness, whether it's changing a diaper, preparing food, going to the bathroom, so many simple things at night where you need your hands.

So great innovation. Amazing.

So I'm happy to share that the next round of lights that we're getting, again, we are the only non for profit that had designed, manufactured, and is distributing a light like this. So we just were seeing some problems. The light originally was like rainproof, but now we just figured out how to make it completely waterproof. So we're excited about that.

Goosebumps. They're really amazing. In your programs, there's a focus also on financial literacy and asset ownership. Why is that so important? Just as the light itself, people spend.

30% of their income on batteries or kerosene. So to put that into an American context, Alan, that would be like me saying to you, okay, I'm going to pay off your mortgage for the next 10 years. We spend 30% of our income on a mortgage or a rent. It's a significant amount of money that's going into something that is toxic. So it's helping the planet. Our lights should last at least 10 years. So explaining what I wanted to do is prove to them, you already have this money. We're just diverting it into chickens. We're diverting it into something that's going to start to multiply for you. And it's again through these stories and pictures that they're starting like all of a sudden they're like, oh, I can get a chicken in seven days. They never thought that was possible. And one stream of income, the additional is light offers. Like Emily, she made bamboo barbecue sticks. Entrepreneurship.

Yeah.

This is where I say dream. What do you want to do that the darkness has been preventing you to do? You make donuts. Great. Now you can do them at night when it's not so hot out. You make sleeping mats. The women come together, they make jewelry. Like light transforms everything.

Yeah. You've talked about breaking generational cycles of poverty, which, you know, let's just dovetail right into that. How have you seen it play out in the field in addition to the chickens and jewelry and other things, how has it played out in your personal anecdotal experience?

Yeah. So the goal is to make the family successful exactly where they are. Because leaving the, you know, the African bush and moving into a city is not going to help them. There are no more jobs, especially if they don't have any formal education. So can we make them successful right where they are with the teaching and the light and so now they have this teaching and light they can start saving. If their daughters or sons need book fees or do they need to pay for school. They sell a few eggs. So they're preparing the children and can now study at night as the parents are working, the children can now study. When a light enters a home, the education radically changes. So additionally, the children are seeing their parents and learning from their parents how to save, how to reinvest multiplication. I can tell you when I go back a community, the young children will say, I remember the day the light came to our home. Everything changed. The stories are fantastic.

Well, I'm happy to say, based on our conversation, that Watts of Love is now in over 50 countries. How do you choose where to go and how do you partner with local communities?

So how do we choose? So I took the entire world and put it into the poorest nations, least electrified and population. So I started kind of a bucket list of nations that I thought and obviously for starting up this program where I could go and monitor and to be able to launch the program. And so I chose Malawi to kind of launch what I call the Watts of Love Lighthouse. The Watts of Love Lighthouse is where we identify a local partner. We make a four year commitment that we will be back. It's 5,000 lights per year, 20,000 lights and homes will be lit over four years. So the Lighthouse program is based on having this local partner. They identify a second in command and then they create a team of 12 to 15. And then so that's what a Lots of Love Lighthouse is. So they are, it's all locally led, there's not a dual translation. They help, they put together a whole business plan before we even come in. So how are they going to distribute 20,000 lights? So we ask them to have vision of how they're going to start lighting their community. My favorite part of what we do is we train local women and men who don't have a formal education. Again, we are giving a voice to the voiceless. People, especially women are not allowed to speak. They're not the people. You know, a lot of the communities think women can't make money. So now I want like a local woman to stand up where she is the example to her community. Like, I never had a chicken. My children weren't going to school, we didn't have food. But now it's six months later. I have chickens, I have goats, I started a business, my children are in school. They now become the role model and they have the soft skills to now share their own personal Testimony, man.

It's the ultimate multi level marketing. Success breeds success, right?

I will give you an invitation to come to Africa and see what is happening. We are actually creating a movement where I believe Malawi will become the lighthouse to Africa.

Wow. I'm going to take you up on that, by the way. That sounds amazing. What role does storytelling play in building awareness and support for your mission? Not just here on podcasts, but in general. Where does storytelling play that role?

Storytelling from the very beginning was so important to me personally because I wasn't sure what I was doing, was it going to work. And they're the heroes, right? They're the ones who have been living in darkness since the beginning of time. They're the ones who have scorpions falling in at night. They can't see them. I mean, just the stories are unbelievable. And I think as human beings, we all want an opportunity. You know, in America, people have said to me, nancy, you can't give these lights away for free. They won't respect it or they won't value it. And with some people, that may be true. But I can tell you, somebody very early on, a man I've never met, donated an entire building to me. And I can tell you, every single day I walk into that building, I am so grateful. It's how we make people feel more than charging them. Like, what am I gonna, you know, they live on 80 cents a day. What am I gonna say, you need, you owe me $5 or, you know, they would never be able to afford the quality of the light that we're giving. I just believe in investment, and the ultra poor is the best investment in the world.

Yeah. I mean, look, we could either keep providing aid in general that is not used efficiently, or we can help build people up to the point where they are self sustaining. I applaud your approach because I believe strongly in that approach. I mean, you can say it any way you want, teach a man to fish, however you want to say it, but it's much more important to provide somebody with personal sustainability and to give them training and tools that will allow them to live without receiving aid. So what better could a person do than to provide that to an individual to make them self sustaining? I can't imagine a better way to do this.

And there's pride. I'm sending my children to school because I think in looking at community development, a lot of times we look at, they need a hospital, they need schools, they need a well. And I'm not saying that they don't. Right? So please hear me sure. But when a family has financial freedom, which comes through our teaching and our program, when you bring a school in, guess what? We don't need sponsorship because they can afford the school fees. They can afford to pay because the money has been released. So the money comes in and through the house into the community. When a well comes in, it will break. They will have the money to participate. So once a family is stable and they can feed themselves and there's extra money and there's growth with chickens and goats and pigs, and people are buying farmland, and it's a small ripple effect that goes out to the community. So any other hospitals, they can buy their own medicine. They can pay for the doctor, and that's what they want. That's what we all want, right?

For sure. All right, Nancy, you know, I want to move on to the next question. You recently visited the Texas flood zone, and that's a true tragedy in our country. How does a light help there? And what impact do you think you were able to have there while visiting?

So I returned last night from Texas. I was there for four days. And, you know, the devastation and what has happened and. And really caught that community and individuals off guard is an understatement for the problems there. But Watts of Love responds to disasters because light is often overlooked in what is important in the search and recovery, the rebuilding. It is, again, a tool, but also the psychological impact of having something to hold onto after you've lost everything. And darkness, when you're still sitting in the dark. We gave a light to a gentleman whose entire home was destroyed, so can't stay in his home. And I ran into him two days later, and he said, thank you so much. He said, I have such fear at night because it was still raining in Texas. He said, I now sleep with this light. So it helps on the emotional and the rebuilding of their life. But also just, you know, people, tornado, hurricane, they. You lose electricity. So now trying to find maybe a photograph or a wedding ring, it's dark inside of your house. There's mud. You know, the people in Texas, their homes, the water came up to their ceilings. I mean, it was catastrophic. And then, you know, the loss of life. Another father said to me, I wish I had had that light to save people. I could hear them. I couldn't find them. They were saying, we went. Once the water started rising, we went to grab a flashlight. The batteries were dead. I couldn't find, you know, so where ours, once it's charged, it stays charged, right? You don't have to find new Batteries. You just have to find the sun in the daylight. So I'm so passionate about trying to make a difference and, and get people prepared. Whether it's here in America. We will always respond when people are hurting.

Yeah. You know, I like to ask everybody on this show this particular question and I'm going to give it to you now. What does legacy mean to you and how do you hope to be remembered?

Legacy to me is leaving a legacy of light, but really giving people the ability to for freedom and self worth. And that's something that I heard from them and those two words that I would be remembered for those two things and how I made people feel.

That's amazing. Thank you. How can listeners get involved, whether that's donating, volunteering, or spreading the word? Talk to us about what we can do.

Yeah, well, we're a non for profit, so donations are always appreciated. I am on a large campaign right now. I have somebody that will match $4 million. So I have a big goal. I believe we're going to do it. So that's obviously our number one. Number two, I love for people to travel with us. I want you travelers to have their own story, to come back and to see firsthand the impact and the legacy that people now have because they can transform their lives. And then also just very simply share this podcast, share on social media like Watts of Love on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, whatever that is. Just share our story so that other people can see what we're doing and know that light can change.

Yeah, definitely. What gives you hope right now?

You know, coming back from Texas, how the communities rallied together. I feel like very often in the world, light. And I'm going to talk about light is used as a weapon. Right. We're going to cut off your power. We're going to, you know, there's different ways that you can use light. What I'd like is for my legacy, that light is used as a bridge to unite politics, religion. We can all agree that light helps. So I saw the best of humanity in Texas and it gave me hope for that.

That's great. Well, I want to just thank Nancy for coming. Nancy, Economo is a living proof that one person guided by compassion and vision can light up the world, literally. To learn more or donate, visit wattsoflove.org your contribution could replace a dangerous kerosene lamp with a safe solar light and spark a future filled with opportunity. Nancy, thank you for reminding us that when we shine a light for others, we illuminate the path for ourselves as well, until next time, I'm Alan Pavloski signing off for Legacy All Stars.