Since PoP’s inception, the main way that we’d communicated with our supporters was through digital content, and as we grew, we desperately needed someone to run our social media presence. Brad and I had been doing it for years, but it eventually became a part-time job in itself, requiring someone to monitor our feed round the clock. Your most valuable commodity is your time, and we needed to spend ours meeting with our biggest donors face-to-face.
One afternoon, in walked a twenty-two-year-old guy with a full mouth of braces applying for an assistant position. Dressed in a stylish black shirt and red, skinny tie, Carlo was so nervous during his first interview that his mouth ran dry and he left to get a glass of water so he could continue speaking. But despite the nerves we saw in the meeting, his personal Twitter feed reflected a confident, engaging voice that made us want to bring him on board. As he walked toward the elevator after his final-round interview, I used my favorite tactic to get someone to commit to working for us. I asked him not to send me a traditional follow-up email that night, but to take a few days and send me a marathon letter from the heart about whether he wanted the role. If he was unsure, in writing that letter he’d convince himself of just how much he wanted it. That weekend, I got his note:
I do not think I can be as focused and dedicated to the cause as I would like to be working only two days a week, so I am willing to decline the internship offer I received at Bad Boy Worldwide, a position I previously believed I always wanted, if offered this position at Pencils of Promise, for the cause, staff, and work environment of your company have already captured my heart. I am willing to come in 4 days a week, but I would like to spend Friday and Saturday working part-time so I will not have to be financially dependent on my parents for the next year if offered the position. . . .
Two weeks later, Carlo started as an administrative assistant at PoP. He eventually taught himself to run all of our social media accounts and to write code, and he became our lead designer too. By having someone with design skills leading our messaging, the brand became more beautiful and engaging. When he doubled our digital following within months, it became apparent that I had a lot to learn from him about building a community online as well.
The more he progressed, the more Carlo took off my plate. As his confidence grew, he not only freed me up to start putting Paul Foster’s lessons to work by securing new major donors, but he also became a leader among our young staff. He was more than the eyes and ears of the organization, he established himself as the glue that held it together too.
At the time, it was clear that everyone expected us to keep growing. Expectations are the daunting shadows that trail behind accomplishments; no matter how high one goes, the other follows on its footsteps. We couldn’t rest on our previous successes, so we had to keep identifying ways to inspire others. I was out on the road pursuing potential donors one afternoon when Carlo wrote to me about the girl who would inspire us to finally launch our next big campaign:
AB, you’re not going to believe the tweet I just saw. Check out our Twitter feed.
The post had been written by a seventeen-year-old girl in California named Kennedy Donnelly, and at first glance I thought it was a hoax: Biking across America to raise money for @Pencilsofpromise, follow my blog www.pedalingforpencils.blogspot.com.
Was she serious? I sent her a quick message to make sure her parents knew of the plan. They were on board. She had discovered PoP online and become so passionate about our mission that she had committed to ride thirty-eight hundred miles across the entire United States to raise $10,000 to build a new classroom. I was floored.
She explained that when she had the original idea, others told her that it was crazy. They told her it would be impossible. But the more they doubted her, the more it motivated her. In her words: “At first I was playing around with the idea, but the more that people told me that I couldn’t do it, the more committed I became.”
We’d noticed a lot of people launching fundraisers on our website that required them to take on personal challenges with seemingly insurmountable odds. Some raised as little as $25, others raised in excess of $50,000. The common thread seemed to be their belief in the value of education, and a desire to reach for an aspirational goal.
We needed a way to capture this and decided to build something around this idea to unify these people. We launched a campaign called the Impossible Ones, just as I’d discussed with the students on Semester at Sea, which celebrated those who took on new challenges in support of our mission. We asked supporters to either donate toward these efforts or to launch a fundraiser of their own to help us reach the “impossible goal” of our hundredth school.
Kennedy’s pursuit embodied the same spirit through which PoP had been forged and became one of the stories Carlo featured on the campaign website. Her story of hope galvanized thousands of others to sign up and take on their own challenge too. After Kennedy rode for fifty-five days across the country, we held a huge welcome party for her at our brand-new Manhattan office, which Larry’s team had built out, just as he had promised.
My brother Scott was in town, after having joined me on a trip to Guatemala where we opened a school dedicated in his honor. He had asked for donations rather than gifts for his thirtieth birthday and had raised more than $30,000 as a result. Our trip to Guatemala not only brought us closer together as siblings, but it brought him closer to the work he’d been supporting for years. Nick Onken joined us on a day’s notice to shoot photos of our newest schools, and by the time we left, Scott insisted, “I’m going to cover my entire office with the photos from this trip. I want every person I meet with to ask me about Pencils of Promise.”
When he met Kennedy, he asked to hear her story too. She told him of her long, grueling days riding under the hot sun and her restless nights sleeping in public parks. He asked how much she’d hoped to raise. She proudly said, “Ten thousand dollars, and I just reached it this week.”
“Are you sure? I heard you actually raised twenty thousand dollars,” he said with a smile.
“I wish! It’s taken me months to raise ten thousand dollars.”
“Well, I’ve got good news for you. I’m going to donate another ten thousand dollars to your campaign. You just raised twenty thousand dollars.”
Her jaw dropped. Her eyes started to well up, and her hands began to shake. She couldn’t believe it. After regaining her composure, she jokingly blurted out, “I should have just started here!” As everyone cracked up, she added, “But seriously, your support of PoP means the world to me.”
“I could say the same to you,” Scott replied, smiling ear to ear.
* * *
One of the other stories we featured as part of the Impossible Ones was that of Joel Runyon, a blogger whose website, ImpossibleHQ, helped people take on the impossible. He committed to running his first ultramarathon to build a new school, and in response his subscribers rallied over several months to raise $25,000 on his behalf. After visiting his school to meet the kids in person, he posted before and after pictures on his blog and wrote, It would be almost impossible to pull off something like this on my own, but PoP’s mission to create opportunities with sustainable models and ongoing community programs is one of the things that I love about them. They’re not just there to build a school and leave; they’re there to build a school to help change the community. As I read that, I started to realize those words were no longer mine. They now belonged to Joel and Kennedy and Scott—and with that, they were reverberating forward with more force than I’d ever imagined possible.
Countless other Impossible Ones were extending our message. Sophia Bush aimed to raise $30,000 for her thirtieth birthday, just as Scott had done the year before, and her fans ended up more than doubling her goal by contributing nearly $70,000. When asked why she supported us, she responded, “Because I want young girls to know that the sexiest part of their body is their brain, and education is the way forward for them. PoP gives me that opportunity.”
Thousands of individuals and groups have created fundraisers to support PoP since our start. One family raised $250 by selling $1 pencils; a company raised $5,000 by donating the proceeds of their annual holiday party; a thirteen-year-old girl raised $22,000 by asking for donations instead of bat mitzvah gifts. I got into the habit of beginning my day searching for articles about people who had made PoP a focal part of their lives. As I watched our school-count rise and read about why it meant so much to these people, it dawned on me that meeting our growing expectations would not be dependent on my voice alone carrying the message forward.
If an idea grows, it expands far beyond the confines of any one person’s control. By limiting it to a single story told by a single voice, we strip it of its true potential. The role of the founder should eventually be to listen to the echoes of his or her initial words, and then encourage and amplify the most genuine among those you hear. The more I embraced this as my true role, the more I became inspired by the journeys of the individuals, families, and companies in our PoP community.
Our success was now in the hands of any person who made the choice that it was more important to educate a child than to receive birthday gifts that year. Our growth would be dictated by how many people decided that Back to School campaigns should be used to ensure that more children actually returned to school the following year. The number of lives we impacted would not be determined by my efforts alone, or even PoP’s efforts, but by the efforts of every person who decided that 57 million children without access to education wasn’t just a concern, it was a crisis that urgently needed to be solved.
* * *
In an effort to understand how we could amplify our impact, I decided to sit down with the most knowledgeable people I could find in the global education space. Week after week we opened a new school, steadily progressing toward our hundredth. Our work demonstrated with hard data that 85 percent of teachers in communities with PoP schools saw gains in literacy and 88 percent saw improvements in mathematics. Students in PoP schools scored three times higher on tests than students in non-PoP neighboring community schools. But was that enough? Should we continue to just engage communities through school building, or did we need to expand our core programs further? I figured that because I’d only worked in the space for several years, someone else had to have the silver bullet to solving the global education crisis. If I could just find out that one thing that would most improve the lives of children in poverty, perhaps PoP could galvanize others to rally around that single solution. Yet in conversation after conversation, I heard differing opinions.
What I have ultimately come to realize is that education is complex. You can’t inject someone with education the way you can with a vaccine. You can’t force it upon people. They have to reach out and work for it themselves. Such a fragmented issue requires a fragmented set of solutions.
Every child needs several key things to attain a quality education. Most important among these are a safe place to learn, a support system of well-trained teachers and invested parents, and the ability to progress from year to year as the cost of learning increases. We wanted to dedicate ourselves to making these things realities for communities around the world.
The opinion that ultimately shaped our future course of action, though, was not my own, but that of our staff in the field. My voice may have set our initial vision, but they experienced the impact of our work every single day, and their voices rose with candor and confidence when deciding what our future programs should entail. Based on their recommendations, we decided that it was important to go beyond just building schools and move into teacher training and student scholarships as well.
As we developed these programs, I constantly asked myself, would we one day be able to reach the level of impact that we envisioned? But the future of the organization was no longer mine to determine. It belonged to our staff and supporters. It was the progression of people like Carlo that would guide the next great PoP campaign. It was the inspiring story of someone like Kennedy that would draw in our next supporter. And it was no longer just my birthday that would help us raise funds, but the birthdays of thousands of people like Sophia and Scott that would be used to provide the gift of education to others.