Here’s the thing about doing something big when you’re young—it takes away your ability to make excuses when you’re older.
When I was 16, my best friend Sam and I started a charity. We were attending our church’s youth group Fall retreat and the speaker, Brad Montague, was encouraging everyone in the audience to “find something that you’re not okay with.” Easy enough encouragement, right? There are tons of things in the world that are really messed up. Even the very sheltered and privileged sixteen-year-old me knew that. But then Montague started flashing different slides on the screen showing startling statistics about all the messed-up things in the world. One happened to be “18,000 children die every day from starvation.” As I read those words, the rest of the room faded away. I didn’t hear the rest of the sermon because that slide had spurred something inside of me that was not going to rest until action was taken.
The rest of the weekend was spent brainstorming with Sam about what this pair of high schoolers could do to make a meaningful change in world hunger. A daunting goal, but one we both somehow felt called to focus on at the time. After the retreat and many hours of consulting with the very supportive parents we were, and still are, blessed to have, 18000 for 18000 was born. The idea was that we would raise $18,000 in honor of the 18,000 children that die every day from starvation. And we wanted to do it by our high school graduation, about a year and a half away from the conception of our big idea.
The next year was spent in a whirlwind of fundraising efforts. Selling t-shirts and bracelets, poinsettias at Christmas time, knocking doors in our neighborhoods.
I started a club at my high school called “Matthew 25” (based on Matthew 25:40 “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters, you did for me”) that allowed us to host an overnight lock-in at school for students as a fundraiser. Our church was a huge support, kids in the youth group even gave their birthday money to the cause. We flew to Texas and ran a booth at a large Christian youth conference and did the same in Gatlinburg, too.
We even sang a song on stage in front of 4,000 people at the Summer youth conference held at what would be my future undergraduate university. (Fun fact: my future husband was in the audience when we sang that song, and I like to think he was so enamored at that moment that when we actually met in college a year later, he had no choice but to fall in love with me.)
By the time we had graduated, we had actually surpassed our goal and raised over $22,000. The money went to Heifer International to buy 2 arks, and to Neema House Orphanage to support sustainable community garden and infant nutrition projects. Afterwards, we visited both organizations to present checks and get a tangible vision of what our efforts had been able to provide.
Fast forward 10 years…now instead of a 16-year-old full of passion about solving a problem I identified in the world, I am a 26 year old freshly brandishing back to back Bachelor’s and Doctorate degrees (and a lot of student loan debt) searching for a way to honor the spirit I had to enact change in the world once again.
I chose to be a pharmacist so that I would have skills that I could always use to first help others. 18000 for 18000 taught me a lot about what building a sustainable model for change looked like. I am lucky to now work full time for a nonprofit association that focuses on preserving access to life changing compounded prescription products for patients around the country. I get to live out my dream of making a difference for people every day.
But as the TEN-YEAR anniversary of the birth of 18000 for 18000 has recently passed, it has reinvigorated a sense in me that the world is unfortunately still messed up. And because the endeavor to raise thousands of dollars as a teenager was wildly supported and successful, I proved to myself then that I was capable of big things. Things that seem overwhelming at first, problems that seem insurmountable, and commitments that seem too big to hitch myself to are all just excuses and didn’t stop me at 16, so they certainly shouldn’t with 10 extra years of knowledge, experience, and resources at my fingertips.
No, I don’t yet know what the next big thing will be for me, but I know that there are still a lot of things that I am not okay with.
If not now, then when? If not me, then who?
