The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change (15 page)

Brad began recruiting a volunteer team that expanded to include technologists, advertisers, bloggers, and designers. Now that we had people all over the city working on the organization, I borrowed a page from Scott Neeson’s playbook and had fifty sets of business cards made for $2.50 per set through a Vistaprint.com promotion. All volunteers who took an active role in the organization received their own business card, listing their name and a title I made up. I usually mailed the cards to these people without even telling them they were coming, but the feedback was always the same: “I’m handing out my PoP card twice as much as my actual business card!” It became a part of their nightly conversations, and it soon became a meaningful part of their lives.

I wasn’t just interested in building one school anymore. I wanted to build a movement that changed people’s perception of charity. And although I didn’t have deep pockets behind me at the start, I had a far more potent weapon—conviction in a set of unique beliefs. When you align individually high-performing people around the idea that they are collectively underdogs, you tap into the cohesive gel that brings early adopters together. We created an enemy for us to rebel against (this belief that our approach was “impossible”), which is one of the fastest ways to unite people around a common goal. And with each new person who joined our volunteer army, we received both the validation and the skills necessary to prove that we could carve a different path from those who came before us.

But we had to find and inspire new torchbearers to carry these ideas forward beyond New York City. We had to find people who would test the edge of the world by feeling its curves. It was time to take PoP on a road trip across the entire country.

A
fter months of toying with the idea, my four best friends and I agreed to fly to Los Angeles, rent a thirty-five-foot RV, and drive across the country to spread the word about Pencils of Promise.

My friend Gabe, after working in consulting for several years, was able to persuade the firm he worked at to allow him to take a brief sabbatical. Tich was in the midst of starting a small business. Dan was a guitarist launching a band that could book gigs in various cities along the way, and Luke wanted to hone his documentarian skills by shooting footage across the nation. We figured that the PoP message would resonate with a younger audience, especially because we were so young ourselves, so we laid out an itinerary of college campuses to visit.

The first stop on the college tour was Oklahoma State University, a school with thirty-five thousand students and the alma
mater of my SAS roommate, Jaret. Dan had contacted the school to set up the speech through its student affairs department, so we anticipated hundreds of students in a massive auditorium. Luke brought his camera and sound equipment, calibrating everything the night before so we could capture the cheering throngs of students perfectly. I even got a Facebook message the day before the speech from a sophomore student, Chelsea Canada, asking us to save her a seat because she might be a bit late.

The night before, I could barely sleep. I was going to give my first major speech. I was nervous and excited to bring my message to a college campus. In the minutes before the scheduled start time, I paced in the bathroom, practicing lines in my head.

I was so focused on my speech, I didn’t give any thought to what I would do if no one showed up. But the room never filled up. I gave it an extra twenty minutes for the students to come, but they never did. I went to the podium in front of five people—my four best friends, and one OSU student. Chelsea Canada.

It was a far cry from what I expected, and it was hard not to feel embarrassed about the thirty-slide presentation I’d prepared, which I was now essentially delivering to an audience of one. But it wasn’t a lost opportunity. One person was there, and I knew well that it only takes one person to make a huge difference. Not wanting to disappoint, I gave as passionate a speech as I could for the next forty-five minutes. I could tell that the message struck a chord with Chelsea, and afterward I assured her that if she made this organization her passion, something magical would happen.

It wasn’t the speech I planned on giving, but it made an immediate impact. We had occasional Internet access on our computers in the RV, and by the time we returned from a late lunch, Chelsea had added me on Facebook. When I clicked into her full profile, I saw the entire thing was about PoP. Her profile pic was now our
logo, she’d started a “PoP at Oklahoma State University” group, and she’d posted a status update linking to a ninety-nine-second animated video that Brad and his BBH colleagues had made about the organization.

She launched our first PoP club on her campus and a few months later presented at her old high school about us. She passed that infectious passion on to another young student, Andrew Gray, who launched our organization in his high school—and opened the door for us to work on the high school level across the country. He eventually spearheaded the creation of PoP high school clubs across the entire country, became president of the PoP Club at Oklahoma State University after Chelsea, and gave a TEDx Talk about his involvement in the organization. To top it off, his work was profiled in multiple press features, celebrating him, and further extending the reach of our message.

PoP operated, in part, through the ripple effect. We knew one individual’s commitment could spread to his or her family, friends, and peers, becoming a part of the value system they passed down to future generations. With this idea, our mission grew from building schools throughout the developing world to also training young leaders to take action at home and abroad. This led to our early PoP slogan, “A generation empowered will empower the world.”

We saw this play out again and again as we traveled to college campuses across the country. We went to the University of Texas, where Tich knew the captain of the cheerleading team. This would be my second speech, and we expected a much bigger turnout given his connection.

Wrong again. Eight people came. But one of them was a student named Alex, who moved to New York City that summer to become our first official intern. She, like Andrew Gray, later
attended Semester at Sea, both of them wanting to explore the vast world beyond their own backyard.

In Alabama we met a hysterical elderly woman running a restaurant who gave us our favorite line of the trip. “Honey, a stranger’s just a friend I haven’t met yet!” she proclaimed. It was hokey, but it was true, and we experienced it again and again on the road.

When I gave a speech at Tulane, the room was finally packed, this time with about fifty students who were studying international development. One student met up with us for a beer later that night and in the months ahead began organizing concerts to benefit PoP.

I started to realize that it didn’t matter how many people were in the room. If I could inspire just one person to take one action on our behalf (organize an event, donate his or her birthday, or launch a PoP club), then the organization would have a committed individual to carry it forward. In Chelsea and Andrew and Alex I had seen the impact of having an anchor.

So with every speech I gave, whether to a large or a small audience, I focused on finding the one person whose eyes lit up most when he or she heard our story for the first time. It took lots of practice to identify that person during a talk, and I still work on it with every speech I give, but the goal is always the same—find one person in every room and convert him or her into the next Chelsea Canada.

After three weeks on the road, late October arrived, and we flew back from Atlanta to New York for twenty-four hours to throw my annual Halloween birthday fundraiser. It had been one year since we started. In 365 days we had pursued an impossible idea, built a school, and sparked a small movement. It was time to celebrate the organization’s accomplishments and also raise some money.

To liven things up, I bought five bumblebee costumes and
insisted we wear them through airport security. We rocked antennae and wings and tight black shorts over black stockings, and people couldn’t help but crack up. The five burly bumblebees brought some serious Halloween spirit onto that Delta flight to JFK. We carried it into the party that night, greeting every one of the guests that showed up, raising another $10,000 from small but meaningful contributions.

*  *  *

Time was running out before my externship ended, so I planned two last trips, one to Nicaragua and another to Laos. I kept hearing people refer to PoP as “that Laos organization” when the goal was to become an organization working with children globally. I decided that we should establish a presence in each of the three major poverty zones—Asia, Latin America, and Africa—so that we could ensure our work was replicable on a global scale. Latin America would be next. I found a partner organization called Seeds of Learning that worked in Nicaragua, and after many phone calls and emails, I spent two weeks in the country to lay the foundation for a partnership.

Months earlier I’d received a Facebook message from Leslie Engle, whose best friend had attended SAS with me and shared my contact information after seeing the pictures I was posting on Facebook. Leslie wrote that she was moving to Luang Prabang toward the end of the year. She had backpacked there years earlier, and with her background as a writer and preschool educator, she planned to work in Laos for several years and find a happier way of life. After exchanging a few messages, we arranged an hour-long phone call that went amazingly well. She was different from our New York City volunteers. She’d traveled extensively through the developing world and had a strong grasp of how to
live and work with rural communities. She also knew how to educate. She was an “on the ground” person through and through, but I wasn’t ready to take on a full staff in Laos. I was still covering all travel and administrative costs out of my own pocket, so that every dollar raised went into our schools. “Hopefully we’ll link up when we both head there in December,” I said to clarify how little I could commit.

After returning from Nicaragua, I emailed her a few days before my marathon flights to Laos and found out we were both arriving the same morning. We had separately booked the same flight into Luang Prabang, which is where we met for the first time. The serendipity of it all was too strong to ignore. The next afternoon Nick Onken showed up to shoot photographs, and for six straight days the three of us rode motorbikes across the Laos countryside. We made a great travel trio, and some days Lanoy was able to finish early at the guesthouse and join us as well.

Just days before I headed back to New York City, we went up north to the village of Phayong for the opening ceremony of our second school. Lanoy translated the ceremony for us while taking notes in her Shark Book, except at one point when she interrupted a speech by one of the many men sitting around us. Everyone in the room seemed to be shocked.

The ceremony then progressed, but we had no idea what’d happened. Later, she explained, “That man was saying how happy he was about the school, but he started asking for more things. I told him that Pencils of Promise does not give handouts. The village needs to prove that they will use this school well. It’s up to us as Lao people, not you and Leslie and Nick, to prove we are dedicated to the education of our children.” In that part of the world, women rarely interrupted men the way Lanoy had. I knew in that moment that she was exactly the person I wanted in charge
of our local programs. She was our anchor. The petite woman I first encountered doing laundry at the guesthouse was turning into a bold, confident leader.

With two completed schools, a plan for expansion into other regions, and a solid group of supporters, we’d come much further than I could ever have expected in my nine-month externship.

Leslie had only known me for a week, but she kept asking me the same question: “How will you go back to being a consultant?”

“It’s not going to be a problem at all,” I assured her. I genuinely believed every word I said. I thought I’d be fine. I had never been so wrong about anything in my entire life.