Change starts with one.

“If all your prayers were answered, would it change the world, or just yours?”

Our vision is a world without extreme poverty. A world where every child has equal opportunities to learn, to grow, and to dream. A world where my worst day, would never be someone else’s best day. A world where every individual life matters. Where people matter, young or old, rich or poor, healthy or sick, black or white. They matter.

The dream started small; it was to go to Haiti as often as I could to try and help those less fortunate than me. That dream quickly turned into developing an organization of my own to help the people of the nine villages I grew to know and love. And from there, the dream only continues to grow, to expand beyond the one mountain in Haiti and spread over the mountains, the nation, and someday – the world. Our mission is to educate, employ and empower. Our vision, is to change the world.

At 14 years old, I had never thought about anyone other than myself. That first trip to Haiti changed my perspective on the world around me, on how others weren’t as fortunate as I was in this life. But most importantly, it changed my perspective on myself, on what I was put on this earth to do, to become. Being 14 years old and finding your voice is a powerful thing. At 14 I developed a dream that turned into a goal, that in turn, transformed my purpose in life.

Over the years I have been told by numerous individuals how lucky the Haitian people are to have someone like me to care about them and their future. I can tell you right now I cringe every single time someone says that to me. They are not lucky to have “someone like me”, I am lucky to have each and every single one of them. They gave my life meaning and purpose. They filled it with joy, love, laughter and passion. But the most precious thing that the Haitian people have taught me and brought into my life over the past decade, has been hope.

There is nothing more beautiful in this world that I have seen than the hope in a group of people who have had to endure such great suffering and sacrifice every day of their lives. And yet, hope remains for a brighter future. Positivity and optimism remain in their voices and in their prayers. They hold onto hope and they cherish it. I had never really thought about hope in a larger sense of the word before I listened to what it meant to the people of Haiti. The raw definition of the word means “a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen” and the archaic meaning is “a feeling of trust”. I always viewed it as an abstract feeling, something unattainable and that you couldn’t actually feel. Then, I went to Haiti.

So, if all your prayers were answered, would it change the world, or just yours?