Shout Out to John Legere, Jacob Espinoza, and T-Mobile!

Last Wednesday the 30/30 Project received a generous $100,000 indonations from T-Mobile and its CEO John Legere. The donation was announced at a company Macklemore & Ryan Lewis concert. Legere personally donated $50,000 on top of the $50,000 donated by T-Mobile. That is enough to fund an entire project!This comes on the tail of another awesome 30/30 Project supporter and T-Mobile employee, Jacob Espinoza of Salem. Jacob started a campaign to support the 30/30 Project with the goal of raising $10,000. He has already made it halfway to his goal through selling doughnuts, coin drives, and building his own website (check it out here). He even got Legere to match 30/30 Project donations from his call center!Here is our interview with Jacob Espinoza:

Why did you start the campaign for 30/30?

I’ve been active in the Northwest hip hop community for close to a decade, first as a rapper and then as a blogger so I’ve been following Ryan’s career for a while. I was really inspired by how Ryan Lewis decided to spend his energy following the amazing year he had. I remember having a conversation with a few friends about what his next move would be – was he working on another album with Macklemore, would he produce for other artists or start investing his time on businesses outside of his music career. And then he makes this announcement about the 30/30 Project. Teaming up with Construction for Change on a project that has potential to literally change the world is amazing. It was something I immediately wanted to be a part of on as large of a scale as possible.

How or why did you get John Legere involved?

I work as a Coach in the T-Mobile call center in Salem, OR. John Legere is the most outspoken CEO I’ve ever worked for and he stays super active on his Twitter page. After the 30/30 Project was announced he started Tweeting about it and announced he was going to get behind it and T-Mobile was going to get behind it. As a long shot I sent him a tweet challenging him to match the donations our call center was able to raise. He got back to me immediately with the hashtag #LetsDoIt.John Legere has done an amazing job with T-Mobile since taking over and all of our employees really admire what he has done for us – making us stock holders for example – and what he has done for the company. So the fact that he was partnering with us on something like this was really exciting for our call center.

What has been the most rewarding aspect of spearheading a campaign like this?

For me it has really been learning how many people are impacted by the HIV virus. There is still a huge stigma around it. People aren’t as afraid to talk about a relative who has cancer or other potentially life threatening illnesses as they are to talk about a friend or relative with HIV. People who know somebody with HIV understand the importance of having a proper medical facility available.The great thing about projects like 30/30 is that it not only works to make a difference, but it also sparks conversations about how to make a difference.

Has it been a challenge to mobilize your coworkers to support 30/30?

It really wasn’t. As soon as we decided to move forward with the project I had a ton of people reaching out to me with ideas and offering to help. I had people who helped me organize the entire project, teammates who brought in new ideas on how to make the fundraiser bigger and others who owned specific tasks throughout. It gave me a chance to work with a lot of great people who I otherwise would not have worked with on such a consistent basis. Thanks to the generosity of my peers, we were able to successfully raise $2,000 in the first two weeks and have now hit our goal of $5,000.Thank you John, Jacob and T-Mobile! Your support will go a long way.