The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change (27 page)

This was amazing news. I pumped my fist in the air.

“Here’s the thing, though, how are you with feedback?”

“Good, great, please tell me,” I said, bracing myself for whatever was next.

“First, Adam, if you are asking people for large sums of money, you need to dress the part. You can’t wear jeans to a meeting at a private members club. You have to get a nice suit.

“Second, is follow-up. The difference between good leaders and great leaders is in the details. At the end of our meeting I asked you to tell me about how the juice fast went. You told me you’d let me know, but you didn’t. If you make a commitment to inform me about how your juice fast goes, you have to let me know how the juice fast goes. You need to find a deliberate system so that you are relentless with your follow-up. Nothing should slip through the cracks. This is where I excelled, and it’s going to become integral to your ultimate success.”

Paul has since introduced me to countless stellar people, many of whom have become significant funders of our work. Immediately after each meeting, I now send out a follow-up email detailing the commitments made by both sides so there’s mutual alignment. Paul then calls them to ask what they think, gains critical feedback, and calls me to relay exactly what was strong and weak about my performance in the meeting. I now have someone who is brutally
honest with me on a daily basis and coaches me through my greatest areas of personal growth.

We all spend so much time putting up walls so that others can’t see our vulnerabilities, but those same walls often enclose us within our own insecurities. By showing my true hand to my board of directors, they helped me turn a weakness that I was avoiding into a newfound strength. We all know which tasks are the most important in any given day, yet we still choose to do them last. Choose to do those things first.

When I initially asked Paul to invest I was hoping to get over my fear of asking for money to support our organization. His generosity helped in that area, but I ultimately gained so much more. I got over parts of myself that were holding us back, and I learned that the hardest climbs are the ones that yield the most reward.

S
ince 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.