Pencils of Promise

To be honest, I was completely indifferent when I heard that Adam Braun would be joining us as an inter-port lecturer on the leg of our trip from Morocco to Ghana.  When it announced that he would be giving a speech as part of the Explorer Seminar series  I mentioned earlier, I only ended up going because it so happened that I literally had nothing else to do.

Adam started off by explaining that he was a Semester at Sea alumni whose first inspiration for the organization came during his voyage while they were docked in India. It was an encounter with a child, who when asked what he wanted if he could have anything in the world, simply replied a pencil. He began passing out pencils to children throughout the rest of the voyage and in all of his subsequent travels. It was only later, after he had moved to New York as part of a full time job that the idea for Pencils of Promise fully formed.

It is the organization's mission to partner with developing communities in order to ensure a good education is available to the children living there. In the only three years POP has existed they have broken ground on 41 schools throughout Laos, Guatemala and Nicaragua and are still picking up steam. POP is unique in the fact that they truly form a partnership with the community by requiring that each one provides between 10-20% of the funds (either monetarily, through supplies or labor) in order to ensure that the community feels like they own the school instead of viewing it as a handout.

 Adam himself is an incredibly gifted speaker who could start up a non-profit giving silly straws to seagulls and would probably still be successful but his focus on education coupled with the for-profit mindset his business background has instilled into Pencils of Promise make it a non-profit that seems to have a great future ahead of it and one that I might like to be a part of.