Impacting Lives
Positively.

The Impactors Academy exists to impact lives positively. That is not a slogan we adopted after the fact. It is the reason the organization exists at all, and it shapes everything we build, from the projects under our name to the people we choose to work alongside.

The Impactors Academy was founded by Emmanuel Morris (MENDER).

The idea did not start as an organization. It started as one person's plan to sustain himself during his studies, and to become financially independent of his parents.

On May 18, 2020, Emmanuel drafted a personal plan for earning money on the internet. He had hit rock bottom and needed money for rent, with nowhere else to turn. He did what most people do in that position. He went to YouTube and asked it the same question millions of people have asked: how to make money online.

What he found was a flood of scattered, sometimes contradictory information, gathered out of sheer desperation. He wrote it all down on a whitepaper:

Upwork, Amazon (Kindle e-book publishing), Flippa, Shutterstock, TakeLessons, Fiverr, dropshipping, consulting (Clarity.fm, Teachable), online courses (Teachable, Udemy, Skillshare), podcasting, writing a book (blogging bundles, make1kchallenge.com), selling leads, freelance writing, sponsored content, webinars, and community building.

Next to that list, he kept a second one, the methods he actually tried. Some worked. Most did not:

Upwork, YouTube, Amazon, Amazon Kindle publishing, Amazon affiliate marketing, ClickBank, Flippa, Shutterstock, Rover, TakeLessons, Fiverr, dropshipping, Scribie, Google speech-to-text transcription through Google Docs, Google AdSense through Media.net, and affiliate income through Commission Junction, Impact Radius, FlexOffers, and Amazon Associates.

Of everything on that list, freelancing on Upwork was by far the most successful. It earned him his first $1,000 online. Feeling like he had finally made it, he started a YouTube channel called Impactors Academy to teach others how to make money online the way he had just learned to.

The channel launched on October 23, 2020, after months of research and testing across the platforms above. It looked promising at first, but it was built on a shaky foundation: one person, working alone, while carrying a great deal in his personal life that year. Without the structure to sustain it, the channel came to a halt shortly after it began.

In 2024, Emmanuel brought the Impactors Academy back. This time with an actual plan behind it, and a different purpose. Not simply to make money online, but to impact lives positively.

The relaunch was sparked by something he had come to see clearly: a common problem across Liberia and many African countries, a deep and total dependence on government among youth and citizens for nearly everything. He believes this dependence is part of why so many countries keep re-electing leaders who fail them. He came to believe there was another way. That people could learn to earn for themselves and by themselves, using their own gifts, talents, and technical know-how, and that the internet had made this genuinely possible for anyone willing to learn.

By this point, Emmanuel had also picked up real experience in other areas, including trading and software engineering, which fed directly into how the relaunched Impactors Academy was shaped.