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 fifteen percent of every royalty goes back to student scholarships through Develop Africa in Sierra Leone. The mission this book came from continues.

Link to book on Amazon: To be Updated

Image: AI depiction.  Not an actual girl