Earlier in the year, I had the pleasure of attending a dinner in Boston held by an organization called BuildOn. I sat with its founder and CEO, Jim Ziolkowski, and during the evening met numerous students from Boston’s inner city schools who were on their way to Malawi to build a school. This diverse group of students had earned their trip by performing community service locally, and exhibiting leadership, discipline and commitment in their schools and their communities.
Jim wrote a wonderful book called “Walk in their Shoes” which I would recommend to anyone interested in social enterprise or education. It’s an accessible and compelling tale of Jim’s decision to drop out of the General Electric’s prestigious Financial Management Program to start from scratch a new organization to serve the poor and the poorly educated, both here in the US and in the developing world. (As an aside, many NU students co-op at GE and some in the FMP program, several joining the FMP program upon graduation each year.)
The mission of BuildOn is to break the cycle of poverty, illiteracy and low expectations through service and education. Recognized by President Obama for his outstanding service, Jim calls BuildOn “a movement, not a charity” that is inspired by the courage, hope and thirst for change of the students and villagers that the organization serves.
BuildOn works with inner city schools in several American cities to ensure that at-risk young people stay in school. One of the tools they use is community service, including having students work in and with community centers, elder care facilities and other deserving organization in their own neighborhoods. Another is global service, where upon completion of local community service these students who come from challenging backgrounds of their own, travel overseas to live and work in an impoverished village, from Haiti to Mali, Nicaragua to Nepal. There they build a school, side by side with local people and skilled craftsmen.
One of the Board members of BuildOn is Jeffrey Bornstein, a Northeastern alum and currently Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of GE. GE’s high potential people in the finance organization work in partnership with BuildOn. This partnership allows GE employees to broaden their perspective on the world and their role in it, and in particular to see the power of business to do good. In an age of growing inequality and continued poverty in pockets of the developing world, the BuildOn experience both opens eyes and hearts of people from all backgrounds and interests with the potential and power to change the world for the better.
We will be starting a BuildOn partnership at Northeastern in the coming weeks, together with the Honors Program, and we hope that our current and former students will consider joining our new partnership and offering what they can to help BuildOn make a difference. Our students interested in BuildOn will be doing local community service with the Community Academy of Science and Health (CASH) public high school in Boston ] starting in November.
With BuildOn, anyone can work with the organization to build a school in a developing country. To build a school, a group or chapter needs to raise $30,000, plus the costs of their travel. Home stays in local villages enrich the experience, as does the knowledge that you’ve “paid it forward” and served others.
Through our growing partnership with Honors and BuildOn at CASH, we hope to bring Jim Ziolkowski to campus in the spring to tell his story and the story of his work in the coming months.
