The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change (28 page)

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.

P
oP was on the verge of completing its hundredth school by early 2013. When we realized the milestone school would be opened in Ghana, I made plans to attend the ceremony. I hadn’t been there in fifteen months, and I was too excited to sleep on the overnight Delta flight from JFK to Accra. When I deplaned, Freeman, our country director, gave me a warm embrace at baggage claim.

“Welcome, Adam!” he shouted. “We have a busy week ahead, my friend.”

As soon as we stepped outside, I was bathed in heat, a stark contrast to New York City’s January freeze. Women balancing baskets of soda and candy on their heads were selling local goods to buses at traffic lights. Music played loudly from passing cars as young boys dangled their arms out the windows, ready to wave at giggling girls—proving that teenagers are teenagers in every country.

When we arrived at my small hotel in Accra, Freeman told me to get some sleep because the next few days would be long and exhausting. We had many villages to visit, communities to evaluate, and conversations with local authorities ahead.

In an effort to share our work on the ground, I decided to post a one-minute video montage of the previous twenty-four hours on YouTube each night. Despite Freeman’s advice, I stayed up until 3:00 a.m. to work on the first video message. Alone in my room, sitting on a hard bed like the ones that I had grown accustomed to from my backpacking days, I heard quiet conversations coming from the hallway. A group of American study-abroad students were discussing their plans for the upcoming semester in Accra. They talked about their friends’ latest updates on Facebook, comedians they followed on Twitter, and Skyping with their parents. They had no idea what the next few months would hold, but they wanted to experience everything. They wanted to live deeply and fully. They sounded like Impossible Ones.

Back at home, in the PoP office, staffers had a mix of elation and reflection as we approached the opening of the hundredth school—a goal that we had set nearly two years before. Every person at PoP felt tremendous pride in the scope of our impact over four short years. We had exceeded every single expectation others put before us—and outshot our own ambitions as well. But if reaching peak performance is difficult, maintaining it is nearly impossible. I needed to determine how to sustain our momentum. What audacious new goals could I set to motivate our staff and supporters that were still attainable?

It had taken just over four years to break ground on the first hundred schools. But as all of those business courses and consulting projects taught me, organizational growth is rarely linear.
Acceleration rates, when mapped out, usually produce S or J curves because growth can become exponential. I couldn’t look at the pace of the past to determine our future. We had to intensify our scale and more deeply invest into our existing communities to produce true centers of excellence.

I knew I needed help in this next phase, so I called in the experts. The Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit adviser founded by Bain partners, selected us to participate in a special program designed to take stellar organizations to the next level. Something about going back to Bain on my own terms at this point in the journey was poetic. It reminded me of the many steps that had led here and how each of them—even though I didn’t always realize it at the time—was meaningful and essential.

Over several months of strategic sessions with Bridgespan, we developed a new set of goals that were big, but that we could stand firmly behind. We decided to focus on expanding our traditional school builds and developing our new teacher-training and student-scholarships programs. We recognized that children don’t just need safe structures in which to learn, but also qualified teachers and supportive elements, including uniforms, textbooks, and transportation. We set new goals to reach our five hundredth school, train a thousand teachers, and provide ten thousand student scholarships by the end of 2015. To reach these benchmarks we would need to break ground on a hundred new schools in 2013 alone. What had taken us four years to accomplish previously, we hoped to replicate in just one year.

I announced this new goal to our team a week before I left for Ghana, and while part of my trip to the field would be celebratory, much of it would be used strategically to launch our next phase. After our initial meeting with a peer organization in Accra, we spent the next three days bouncing around dirt paths and visiting
villages that had requested new schools in the Volta Region, where PoP Ghana was headquartered.

The poverty was rampant. Families lived in mud huts, corrugated-tin shacks, or basic cement homes. Electricity and running water were luxuries. Children in tattered clothes milled about, eyeing us curiously. In one community we witnessed hundreds of children learning under large mango trees. They had no formal classrooms, only a series of desks grouped together in front of chalkboards nailed to tree trunks. When one teacher told me that he taught the older children ICT (information and communications technology), I asked how that was possible. He explained that they had never seen a computer. Instead, he drew a keyboard with chalk and they practiced typing letters on the board. “What happens if there is too much heat, dust, or rain outside?” I asked. He looked at me blankly and said, “Then we have no school that week.”

As we walked away, Freeman tapped me on the shoulder. “We break ground on a new school here in four months’ time. At the start of the next school year, the children will have their first true classrooms. It will be a very happy day.”

We held meetings with village chiefs, elders, principals, teachers, and parents, and every community was committed to bettering their children’s education. But our evaluation process required several meetings before a project could move forward, and we needed to gather more information on a few of the places we had visited to determine the best-suited communities in which to begin.

To gain more insight we visited Volta Region’s education ministry. Freeman had arranged for me to meet with the director of the education ministry, his key officials, and our direct contact there, a young, superstar employee aptly named Bright Dey. After a few minutes of driving toward Ho, our beat-up SUV stopped along the side of the road and the door swung open.

“You are most welcome to Ghana,” Bright said, hopping into our truck. “We are quite pleased to have you join us, Mr. Adam. Yes, I have heard many wonderful things about your story, with the pencils. It is agreeable to us that we should make a world that educates every child, in particular the children in poverty. But we must do this together. Yes, together.”

Yes, together,
I repeated in my head as we drove on. Upon our arrival at the education ministry, Bright walked us into the small, dimly lit waiting area, before inviting us to join a presentation about the Volta Region’s educational system. After a series of formal introductions, Bright presented a lengthy PowerPoint that demonstrated the area’s greatest needs using graphs, charts, diagrams, and statistics. Primary school infrastructure, teacher training, and secondary matriculation were highlighted. This region and the team were clearly a perfect fit for our expansion plans in those areas. The director then discussed his desire to work with partner NGOs like Pencils of Promise. The meeting ended with warm handshakes all around, and commitments to visit each other again. I secretly wished that all of my meetings were like this one. Too often I was not a part of these local meetings anymore since most of my responsibilities were back in New York City.

At a company’s inception, the founder is usually the one creating the product or delivering the service. The guy who creates a massive pizza chain probably started by making and hand-delivering the pizza himself. The woman who oversees a major fashion line most likely began by drawing sketches, cutting cloth, and selling the first samples out of her apartment.

The bittersweet reality of business is that as things grow, founders find themselves more and more removed from the creation of their product. Their greatest value lies elsewhere, often as a representative
of the brand. In the first few years of PoP, I was the only one on the ground, spending months of my year in the field working with village chiefs, teachers, and education ministries. As we expanded, that became the responsibility of our local staff on the ground.

I knew this would happen. In fact I was proud that local PoP staff were now taking on more responsibility. Few things inspired me more than witnessing a staff member who’d grown up in a bamboo hut with no running water or electricity now organizing digital photos into PowerPoint presentations while uploading Excel documents to teams across the world via Dropbox. But I still missed those moments in the field, sharing stories and laughter across cultures. And deep down I was somewhat worried about whether others would feel as strongly about our work as I did.

The next morning, when we arrived in the hilltop village of Goviefe Todzi, chairs and tents were arranged around the school grounds to protect the elderly villagers from the blistering heat. Behind me sat George from Ashesi University, a Ghanaian student I’d met when I returned to lecture on SAS, and a bus full of his Ghanaian classmates who created the Ashesi University PoP chapter. They had organized concerts and sold shirts to help fund this school. I couldn’t help but feel inspired by their commitment.

The ceremony kicked off with the students marching into the square, singing traditional songs and dancing to the beat of djembe drums. Two grandmothers rose from their seats to dance in the square as well, reminding all in attendance that this was a family affair—and that brittle bones could still boogie. When the music ended, the village deputy announced each of the distinguished guests. A district official spoke of her own journey, emphasizing the importance of her studies, and concluded with
one of my favorite quotes: “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”

Following the speeches, I helped the children carry their wooden benches into the school to set up their classroom. Just then local hip-hop music blared through the loudspeakers. I couldn’t see where it was coming from, but it sounded like it was emanating from the other side of the school.

I sat down with the village leaders for a meal of delicious red-red, a popular Ghanaian dish of bean stew with fried plantains. Men and women shared jokes while sipping on bottled Coca-Cola and Fanta, but as much as I tried to focus on the conversations in front of me, my mind kept drifting toward the blasting music from the schoolyard. My favorite part of school openings in our other countries had always been the dancing. “I’ll be right back,” I said quietly, and slipped away from the table.

When I rounded the corner, I saw something I almost couldn’t believe. More than a hundred kids, ages five to fifteen, were furiously dancing in the schoolyard, sweating through their bright orange uniforms, and sending dust from the ground into the air. They saw me and grabbed my hands, pulling me into the middle of their circle, cheering with delight. No adults were in sight, and without the glaring eyes of judgment around us, for the next twenty minutes I danced harder than I ever had in my life. A student would teach me a move that I’d replicate to the laughter of the kids, and then I would teach him one in return. The funky chicken, the tootsie roll, the disco fever—all of the moves I’d perfected in my childhood bedroom played well in Ghana. I moved and a schoolyard of kids would mimic my move. The noon heat beat down on us, sweating profusely and laughing uncontrollably. As the dust filled in the air around us, we celebrated to a single rhythm.