Hi! I'm Josiah Mackenzie, and I started this because I believe business can be a force for positive change in the world. More specifically, we have the opportunity to help others through the soap we buy for our hotel rooms - which number more than 4.6 million in the United States alone.

I'd like to invite you to join me and a growing number of good people and organizations around the world as we use hotel soap to fight poverty through providing business support and microloans to the working poor.

But it would probably help if I gave you the story behind how all this got started.

My parents instilled in me a strong sense of giving back. And while I've always tried to support organizations I've believed in, I thought there must be a way to fix the root causes of these problems. This led me to begin studying the issue: reading books and having conversations with people seeking a sustainable way to end poverty. What many of these sources introduced me to was a concept called microfinance.

It was probably Muhammad Yunus' Banker to the Poor that sealed the deal for me. As someone involved in growing businesses my whole career, giving people a "hand up, not a hand out" seemed to be a very logical route to ending poverty.

When I was in college, I applied for an internship at Hope International. I didn't get into the program - which was crushing at the time. But at that point I made it my mission to support Hope International and other microfinance organizations however I could in the future.

I come from a strong tradition of small business ownership - going all the way back to when my great-grandparents arrived in the US from Germany and opened their first shop in Iowa. Since the age of 15, I've run a variety of ventures. After returning from the Dublin Business School in 2007, I decided by focus on the hospitality industry. To prepare for the 2020 opening of my own hotel, I test new ideas and provide marketing advice to over 15,000 hotels through the world's #1 source of original hotel marketing content, Hotel Marketing Strategies.

I'm always looking for new ways to help hoteliers improve their guests' experiences, and a unique opportunity presented itself one Saturday morning last February while spending some time with family in Napa. I received a call from Salah Boukadoum - founder of Dallas-based Soap Hope, and I was instantly engaged.

While Soap Hope makes some very high quality products, it was their business model that especially intrigued me...

HotelSoap partners with Soap Hope to serve hotels

Many conversations later, this project was born.

To introduce these great soaps to hotels and expand Salah's mission, we set up an exclusive distribution partnership to supply the hospitality industry with Soap Hope products through this website, HotelSoap.org.

Three ways we help hotels fight poverty

We aim to accomplish some good at every stage of our operation here. And we see this happening in three steps:

#1 - Buying soap from the right manufacturers
We work with soap producers that:

• exhibit environmentally-friendly operating practices as a core value
• create jobs in their local communities
• produce world class, all-natural soaps that your guests will love

#2 - Fighting poverty through profits
100% of the profits made through our operation become microloans. Small business owners in developing countries use these loans to build businesses and help their families become self-sufficient. This approach has been proven to lift entire communities out of poverty.

#3 - Recycling soap
The final stage in this process is helping hotels recycle leftover soap. With over 4 1/2 million hotel rooms in the United States alone, it is estimated that several tons of soap are thrown away each day. We have joined Clean The World's cause to recycle your leftover soap, and send it to needy parts of the world in an effort to help fight disease and reduce deaths caused by a lack of proper hygiene.

Are you ready to help change the world by changing your soap supplier?