Adam Braun said he wasn’t used to having to circle a stage to address an audience on all four sides of a platform. “I’m already getting dizzy,” he joked Thursday at the beginning of his morning keynote at the Omaha Young Professionals Summit at the CenturyLink Center.

It must have worn off. His presentation on Pencils of Promise, a nonprofit he founded to promote education in developing countries, received a standing ovation from the conference’s 1,200 attendees.

“If you could have anything in the world, any one thing, what would it be?” Braun asked. “That was the question I asked when I was 21, and I was on my first round-the-world trip.” He had decided that, rather than collect T-shirts from the various countries he backpacked through, he would ask one child in each country what he or she desired most in the world. He figured he’d end up with a cool map of the world filled with neat wishes from kids instead of pins or photos.

“I thought I would hear these incredible lofty answers,” he said, like cars or TVs. But the first child said she just wanted to dance. The next child said she’d like a book, please. One little boy in Hong Kong did say he’d like to have magic. But the boy in India who said he’d like to have a pencil was the one who quietly changed Braun’s life.

“Just something to write with,” the boy had said. So Braun handed him a pencil. And realized that it may not take tons of money to change a life. Eventually, he decided to raise enough to build a school in Laos and dedicate it to his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. On October 2008, with $25 to start a bank account, he launched Pencils of Promise.

Five years later, Pencils of Promise has broken ground on 100 schools, and Braun wants to double that. This year. Fortunately, the young philanthropist has a bit more figured out than the shallow bank account of 2008. To begin with, “Pencils of Promise doesn’t operate like other nonprofits,” he said. For example:

• One-hundred percent of donations given online go directly to the appropriate project. “We’re not going to play the game,” Braun said. It takes $25 to educate a child for a year, $10,000 to build a classroom, and $25,000 to build a school. “Young people give online and in small amounts,” he pointed out, “and they want to know their money goes right to the schools.”
• Pencils of Promise doesn’t do handouts. Communities, Braun learned, want to own their projects, their education. “We don’t fully fund schools,” he said. “We say, we’ll help you identify what it’s going to take to build your school, but you need to put in 10 to 20 percent of the money.” Because PoP details the cost of individual materials, the community is often able to come up with their percentage in the form of the actual material itself. The scrap wood, the cement, or the clearing of the land, for example.
• PoP invests heavily in teacher training. And the staff is local. “Most of these are actually former teachers,” Braun said.

“Yes, we’re a 501(c)(3), but we’re not going to be a non-profit internally,” he said. Braun added that the term nonprofit puts everyone at a disadvantage. “I’m not a non-profit person,” he said. “I think of myself as an entrepreneur who wants to work on global education.” Non-profits introduce themselves with an apology, he said. They start out by telling you what they don’t do.

“We’re going to be a for-purpose. We’re going to dress ourselves as an organization that has an outcome that we’re working toward, and it’s purpose,” he said.

Credits: Photo by Chris Wolfgang