The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change

by Braun, Adam

  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.

  Mantra 15

  FOCUS ON ONE PERSON IN EVERY ROOM

  After 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 bro
ught 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.

  Nuth on the steps of the first Pencils of Promise school.

  (Photograph by Nick Onken)

  Ready to see photos, videos, and more?

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  • Photos from beautiful locations

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  • Icons to download for each mantra

  Mantra 16

  READ THE SIGNS ALONG THE PATH

  After your third year at Bain’s New York office, nearly every member of the class is expected to either go on to business school and then return to the company, or avoid business school and go to work elsewhere. Recruiters knew this, so they came after us aggressively. I received calls every few days from top-tier private equity firms like Blackstone and KKR offering positions that promised the potential to make $250,000 for the first year on the job. One of these places was supposed to be the next stop on my path, providing the over-the-top earnings that I had dreamed of as a kid. For my coworkers who weren’t interested in those jobs, slots at Harvard’s and Stanford’s prestigious business school programs awaited.

  But I didn’t even consider applying to any of those places. I loved what I was doing with PoP and wanted to give it a little more time to see its full potential through. I decided I would stay at Bain through August to complete the third and final year of the associate consultant program, then work full-time for one year on PoP, then determine what would come next.

  As right as it seemed to return to my job, an amazing but time-consuming opportunity for PoP had just cropped up. Chase launched its first Community Giving program, which offered donations of up to $1 million to nonprofits that received the most votes through a social media campaign. Social giving was being democratized for the first time, and it couldn’t have come at a more opportune moment.

  I was not on Twitter, but the Chase Community Giving program gave us the impetus to sign up. A team of ten volunteers took rotations throughout the day to post on PoP’s account, interacting directly with every supporter we could find. We had friends change their profile pictures to a graphic we created saying “I voted for PoP” with the URL to the voting page. They created massive Facebook event pages that invited tens of thousands of people to vote on our behalf. After two weeks of campaigning, we made it into the final round.

  To prepare, I built a Bain-style Excel model to determine the likely front-runners. It would normally have taken me a day or two to fill in all the data fields (e.g., website rating, Facebook Cause members, Twitter followers), but I enlisted assistance. I put up a Facebook status saying, Who can spare a few hours to do some virtual volunteer research for PoP? Within minutes, I had twenty volunteers from California to Cambodia that I could assign five organizations each. Two hours later, I aggregated their collective research and the model was complete. We had crowdsourced our first research project.

  The results showed that we’d most likely be able to finish in the top twenty. If we placed first, then we would win $1 million. Second through sixth meant $100,000. All I could think about was funding the third school, and then our fourth, and then our fifth. Five schools, I started to think, that would be crazy.

  As I had expected when I left on my externship, there were no active cases leading into the holidays, so I was tasked with client-development research. When they finally staffed me on a bigger case, I was assigned to work remotely for a manager who was living in Boston. They asked me to complete a detailed analysis of a $3 billion potential client and produce the forty-slide “redbook” that would be used to brief the three senior partners who would be pitching the company.

  That same week, the final round of the Chase Community Giving campaign launched. When I started pulling together the deck for the Bain pitch, I felt like pulling out my hair. I emailed my manager to tell her I was too sick to work, but that wasn’t why I barely returned her emails for the next ten days. My priorities were elsewhere.

  PoP was up against huge organizations with long histories and enormous mailing lists, but Brad worked with me to create a microsite that highlighted and o
ffered prizes to the supporters who referred the most votes. We activated an army of advocates who relentlessly recruited their friends. We hit the number two spot on the opening day of the final round. By tapping into several major blog networks and social media influencers, we stayed in that position for the next three days of the competition.

  But in the latter half of the week, bigger organizations grabbed a foothold and pulled ahead. Although we eventually dropped out of the running for the $1 million, we ended up with thirty thousand votes—enough people to fill Madison Square Garden nearly two times. We finished in eleventh place, putting the Pencils of Promise name on the map and winning $25,000—enough to build an entire school.

  Our next party filled our coffers even further. Several hundred people showed up for our second annual masquerade event, guaranteeing we would close out the year with enough funds for at least three new schools. We committed to breaking ground on these new schools in Laos, which we aimed to complete by April. We had seen the power of small donations in effect, but for the first time we tasted the tremendous impact of a large donation. Of course it was secured through many small acts—in this case thirty thousand people clicking a button—and it wouldn’t have been fitting any other way. Meanwhile, I still had eight long months left at my job. An eternity.

  * * *

  When I was on the road in the RV, Hope Taitz, a mother of three who was extremely active in philanthropy, discovered our organization. She had cofounded an impactful education nonprofit twenty years earlier and was interested in our work. We met for sushi on a chilly January afternoon, and I told her of my conundrum. While PoP was growing beyond my expectations, my work at Bain was suffering immensely and was holding me back from what I wanted to do. For the first time I shared something I hadn’t told anyone: “I might want to leave Bain early.”