OAKLAND — When Josip Markus decided to sell his Upper Rockridge house, he wanted to also “make an impact.”
So he’s donating $100,000 from the sale to a nonprofit group — The SOFIE Foundation — that is working to preserve the culture of indigenous communities, including the Yawanawá tribe in the Brazilian Amazon. He said he’s giving back to the tribe, in part, because of its life-changing impact on him.
“I realized that selling my home represented an opportunity to provide me with the financial resources to make this donation and I also recognized that I wanted to use the sale of this home as a platform for sharing the story,” said Markus, 44, who is moving back to Ohio to take care of his 75-year-old father with Parkinson’s disease.
“I want to sell my home, but I want to sell not only a house on a piece of land; I want to sell the story of the owner and what I’m doing to make a difference in the world in hopes of inspiring other people,” he said.
The Upper Rockridge house, built in 1938, is listed at $1.095 million. The four-bedroom house is 1,859 square feet on a 11,077-square-foot lot. Its features include dark wood floors on the main level; a vaulted wood beam ceiling in the living room; an updated and open kitchen and dining area; a lower level that offers a private guest suite or potential in-law unit; and a quarter-acre lot with patio areas, deck, raised planting beds and oak trees. It went on the market May 23.
Markus bought the house in October 2014 for $985,000. At the time, he had moved to California from New York, where he worked for Google, to become the director of business development for Ekso Bionics. The Richmond-based Ekso Bionics is a leading developer of exoskeleton solutions that ampilify human potential for medical and industrial uses. Markus left Ekso Bionics in April 2018 and a few months later began his own life coach startup called Walk Your Path.
“In 2015, I reached a point in my life (where) I was always trying to climb the corporate ladder. I’d been chasing promotions, I’d been trying to be successful in a way that society defines success: earn more money, get a bigger title, work for a great corporation and all that,” Markus said. “And I thought, ‘To what end and what point?’
“Meanwhile, I’m watching all this suffering happening in the world, and I’m seeing that I’m chronically stressed and at what point do I actually begin to enjoy life?” he said. Markus turned to a community of people in the Bay Area involved with self-improvement, meditation and healing practices. He began spending time in nature and going on hikes. And he heard about the Yawanawá tribe and an upcoming trip to the Amazon.
So, in the summer of 2016, he traveled to Brazil. The trip took four days to get to the tribe and three days to get back out. Markus was among a group of a dozen people who stayed for 10 days. They arrived in time for a three-day festival, which attracted about 500 people and was a celebration of the tribe and its culture.
Those 10 days in the Amazon jungle changed his life, Markus said.
“I had this really powerful experience — call it an awakening — where I began to understand the ancient wisdom that these people carry, and I began to feel what it felt to let go of the modern world that we’ve created and all the imbalances that it perpetuates,” Markus said. “And I remembered what it felt like to be balanced again.
“These seemingly obvious but profound realizations came to me, and it was then that I began to question everything about my life — what’s really important. Why am I really pursuing what I pursue? I started to really look at everything. … I really looked at my impact in the world, the impact that we all have on Earth.”
Markus said the tribe’s reception was “extremely warm and welcoming. It felt like they were welcoming family.”
He has returned twice since then to visit the Yawanawá tribe — in December 2017 and, most recently, this past February.
“The third time, I felt my body just relax and I felt at home,” he said. “I began to really connect with them as family and I also understood on this third trip how profoundly impactful both this community and their teachings, wisdom and medicine, as well as the roughly half-million acres that they are the caretakers of, how profoundly instrumental they’ve been in my own healing and transformation.”
And that’s when he got his idea of the donation. He said the $100,000 figure “just came into my head. You’ve got to be big, you’ve got to be bold, you’ve got to really commit to make a difference if you really believe in this and believe it with everything that you have.”
Markus is lending his business expertise and volunteering to SOFIE, which stands for Saving Ourselves From Indigenous Extinction. The foundation, formed in 2016, began as a way to fund a documentary on the last days of shaman Tatá Yawanawá, who died at the age of 103.
Markus said the organization is in need of funding, volunteers, donors and partnerships in its work to preserve indigenous communities. He said he envisions SOFIE becoming a global effort.
“Josip openly asked me, ‘What if we could make this sale of the home more than just a business transaction?’ and that was really so enlightening,” said listing agent Linnette Edwards of Abio Properties. “(My reaction) was a blend of a wow factor and a humbling factor. In 17 years in doing business, I’ve never had a client come to me and say I want to donate such a substantial amount toward a cause that he feels so passionately about.
“And when he said that, it just moved me and inspired me to say, ‘I want to support you and what you have going on’ and I would like to provide part of my commission to go toward your cause,” Edwards continued. She is donating 20 percent of the home’s sale commission to the foundation.
Edwards also is launching a new charitable venture called Abio Impact to support home sellers who want to donate a portion of their sale proceeds to charities.
“What I hope this inspires is to help people think beyond themselves and their lives and the bubble that we live in,” Markus said. “We live in a safe bubble; life is beautiful. But when you step out of that bubble, there’s a bigger reality.”
If you’re interested
For more information about The SOFIE Foundation, go to www.sofiefoundation.org
