In 2003, I was walking down Howe Street in Freetown, Sierra Leone.
I passed a young girl crouching on the pavement, asking strangers for food. She looked up at me. I kept walking.
That moment never left me.
I didn’t start Develop Africa because I had a strategy. I started it because of one child on one street — and the fact that I could not stop thinking about what I had walked past.
Three years later, on January 30, 2006, I incorporated a nonprofit from Johnson City, Tennessee. No staff. No office. No donors. Just a mission: help children in Sierra Leone stay in school.
Twenty years later, that organization has served tens of thousands of children, raised over $857,000 through GlobalGiving alone, constructed a nursery school in rural Kamawornie, and delivered 100,000 pencils to 10,000 children in a single day in partnership with the Mayor of Freetown.
It has also made every governance mistake this book is designed to help others avoid.
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I didn’t start with systems. I started with a mission. And somewhere along the way, I learned that without structure, even the strongest mission begins to strain under its own weight.
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That is the honest version of the story. Not a straight line from inspiration to impact. A twenty-year institutional journey — through Ebola, through financial crises, through programs that grew faster than the systems to support them — that eventually produced something durable.
The book that documents all of it — the decisions, the failures, the frameworks that emerged — is live today.
Mission to Systems™: Building Institutions That Endure.
It is not a feel-good story. It is a governance story. It is what I learned — often the hard way — about building something that lasts beyond the founder’s passion.
If you are building a nonprofit, leading one, funding one, or advising one — this book was written for you.
And 15% of every royalty payment goes back to student scholarships through Develop Africa in Sierra Leone. The mission this book came from continues.
Link to book on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4cUCgb8
Image: AI depiction. Not a real person