What Happens To One Of Us Happens To All Of Us

Robyn Link and Luis Galvis, who are two highly successful entrepreneurs that have found success in the real estate world and abroad. Robyn brings nearly two decades of outstanding work in the real estate world emerging as a maverick who was a key individual that helped reposition the torn northwest market from the housing debacle of 2008. Luis Galvis once served as a former appointed Ambassador to the UN by the Mexican GNI, where he contributed to international relief discussions. Now Robyn and Luis are focusing all their efforts on a new charitable organization called the Entanglement Foundation; whose main mission will be able to help disadvantaged people all over the world.

I had the opportunity to speak with Robyn and Luis recently. Here are some of the highlights of that interview:

Jill Griffin: How did you initially come together? How did you know each other?

Robyn Link: Well, I was doing a charity event for supporting women initiatives in New York. We had the opportunity to do a Netflix show after we had met through a mutual friend in New York, and with my background in real estate and Luis’s international work that he’s done, we were going to do a pilot for Netflix. It got scrubbed due to COVID. But everything happens for a reason… And it actually turned out to be a blessing. By chance, we both needed to renew our passports, and the only passport office in the country was in Seattle, which would be able to renew our passports in time to get to where we needed to go. I happened to live in Seattle, it worked out perfectly. The process to renew passports during the pandemic well… It was quite a process, but we were thrown into the middle of a homeless camp right downtown in Seattle, where the passport office is. Right then, we made the decision to help with this, provide dignified housing and feed these people that were just devastated. So, we created Entanglement Foundation.

Griffin: That’s a great story. Where does the word entanglement come from? Tell me the meaning of the word entanglement as it applies to your project.

Luis Galvis: Well, entanglement is a quantum physics action, that one particle, when it vibrates, has a mirror image somewhere in the universe that vibrates at the same time. Doesn’t matter the distance or wherever it is, when one vibrates, the other one vibrates as well. That’s where our motto came about, “what happens to one happens to all.” Going to that homeless camp, to me, I came from Venezuela many, many moons ago, and when I walked through downtown Seattle and saw that it was like being in a refugee camp destroyed by war and famine, it was terrible to see young kids just with no aim and no life, just doing drugs, doing their bare necessities on the street. We said something has to be done, this cannot happen here in America, while we blow many millions of dollars in other things, let’s help. That’s how it started.

Griffin: Talk to me about feeding the hungry. How do you get the funds? How do you distribute the food, so forth?

Galvis: When we met and when we saw that scene in Seattle, I came up with the idea since I’ve been working with this indigenous group in Mexico for a while. Life took me down to Mexico for a good portion of 15 years, and I was working for a Canadian company in electronics, but I related to the natives there because every little town I went into I saw those kids struggling, it felt like I was like looking at myself. Just by chance I wasn’t born in their predicament, so I decided to help the indigenous locally. The GNI are a group of 35 million indigenous people. Even though they’re born in Mexico, they are their own people. It’s like the native Americans here in the United States.

I represented their culture, customs and needs in New York, I was their appointed ambassador to the UN, their voice in the UN. I did that briefly. It was very well received and then I told Robyn, “Listen, these guys in Mexico, they pretty much are in charge of 80 plus percent of the crops in Mexico, and they have this initiative locally there, where they make food baskets for the needy.” So, I said, “Why don’t people donate here, they get their tax-free donation, we help down there to grow the crops, bring the food for a very low cost to the homeless locals in Seattle,” and that’s how we started this.

Link: It worked out well. And for a family of four, they can eat very healthy for only $50 a month. So, it’s really unbelievable we are able to help so many Americans with just a few dollars. With the structure we have put in place it also benefits the indigenous in Mexico as well. It upholds the definition of entanglement for sure.

Griffin: Tell me, Luis, a little bit more about your UN experience. So, how did you become an ambassador to be able to present at the UN?

Galvis: After being in Mexico for so long, life takes it turns and curves and it was time to head back home to the United States. I came out of there and I said, “I’m going back home where my relatives are. I left everything down there and I headed to the US. Somehow, I end up in New York, and I met some wonderful people who were running a seminar on poverty across the world. I told them about what I did with the indigenous, so they invited me to present my indigenous project in Mexico to the world.

Now, what I was doing at the time with the indigenous was a broadband initiative, to bring minimal connectivity to some regions that the local companies won’t service, because it’s not cost effective. I did my presentation in 2018. Everybody loved it. It was worldwide broadcast, with particular interest from China.

Griffin: So, tell me about the core goals for the Entanglement Fund, what are the core goals?

Galvis: Well, being that Robyn lived here in Seattle, it was a natural place for us to start. Seattle also was where the pandemic started here in America. It came through here somehow and then created all this havoc among society with so many people living on the streets and giving up. So we basically decided to start here in the Pacific Northwest. Robyn has been involved in politics, locally, for a while. You were even running for a position, right Robyn?

Link: Well, I’ve thought about it yeah. I was a mayor years ago in Colorado.

Griffin: You were a mayor of a city in Colorado?

Link: It was on the military installation at Fort Carson.

Galvis: She knew all the people involved, I knew the people in Mexico, so that’s how we accomplished all this.

Griffin: Tell me some success stories that you’ve had with this initiative

Galvis: Well, we’ve been able to secure those baskets that I told you about. Also, at the local level, we talked to the tribes, several of the elders in the tribes here, and we’re putting together some programs for them, not only in housing, but also in ancient medicine from Mexico.

Because during the pandemic and because of the scarcity of treatment… Robyn and I had COVID three times. We had the British variant, we had… I think it was the Delta and the Omicron. But we were taking this medicine from Mexico and every time it cured it that very day. Right away. So, Robyn and I traveled down there. Remember Robyn? And we had several things that we tried, and the medicine was amazing.

Link: Yes and indeed the medicine is amazing.

Galvis: We’re trying to bring that in, especially when the doctors and nurses started getting in trouble for not vaccinating and got fired or laid off. Robyn had this idea that these people should be like Doctors without Borders. I said, yeah, we can call them Doctors without Mandates. So, it clicked and that’s another initiative we have planned. So many doctors are still unemployed and we are getting them to help us with medicine to apply to certain diseases.

Galvis: All these projects, we plan to put in through the blockchain. We’re going to generate NFTs on some of these projects for people to follow for transparency and that will be generating an extra amount of help for those who need it.

Link: We are really excited to have Entanglement Foundation bring two countries together to work in unity and be able to help so many people locally, nationally and globally. After all… we truly are all entangled and what happens to one, happens to all.