What happened next changed my life. My classmates couldn’t read the words. Not struggled. Couldn’t. And it wasn’t one or two kids on one afternoon. It happened over and over, for two years. Some students laughed. Some stared at their pages in silence. I grew up with a mother who read to me every night. Books were how I found the world. But for my classmates, the words never reached their souls because they never got past their eyes.

It would have been easy to walk away from that and never think about it again. But that’s never been the kind of person I am.

I emailed school board members. That earned me a visit to the principal’s office, the best one I ever had, because it meant I was onto something. I’d been reading about the Clinton Global Initiative, how President Clinton would fill a room with the smartest people he could find and make them pledge to act. Not talk. Act. So in April 2014, as a 14-year-old 8th grader in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, I incorporated the Wilson Global Initiative. My aim was simple: figure out why kids can’t read and do something about it.

I created a LinkedIn account and started cold-calling. I pulled together a coalition of local business leaders and sent volunteers into some of Baton Rouge’s most at-risk elementary schools with a book and a mission. People of all ages, races, and backgrounds showed up. For the volunteers it was a refreshing break in their day. For the students it was THE highlight of theirs.

Then I decided to go further. From my bedroom in my mom’s house I started setting up WGI chapters across Asia (Hong Kong, Singapore, Jakarta, Manila) teaching refugees, domestic workers, street children, orphans. Several of my original advisors resigned in protest. They said I was moving too fast. I wasn’t deterred. There was work to be done.

By eighteen I was running programs on three continents. By twenty I had sat in recording studios with global superstars whose employees volunteered with us, launched a partnership with Aston Martin in Tokyo, and built a digital library at an all-girls school in Dar es Salaam. From that scene in Mr. Howard’s theatre class, a movement had been born.

But something tugged at me. Sending volunteers into schools was one of the best things I'd ever done. It was also impossible to hold together. People came and went, and a child we reached one month could be gone the next. I'd never know if it lasted.

With our largest partner, General Electric, we built a free digital literacy app and deployed it at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. We reached more people with it than all our volunteer programs combined. But the same thing was tugging at me. Users downloaded and deleted, they learned and disappeared. We still didn't know if it lasted. This made me arrive at a question that changed everything:

What if someone, or something, was always there to make sure a child could learn to read?

The answer had been in front of me the whole twelve years. The problem was never the child, and it was never the tools. It was that a child's reading has no permanent home. It's scattered across a disconnected set of actors that each do their part and move on. In the gaps between them children disappear. The moment they change classrooms or schools, whatever anyone knew is gone. They start over. What never existed was the something, or someone, always there: a literacy system that follows a child across every app, every teacher, every classroom, and every year, and never forgets them.

So now we’re building that system.

With the support of one of the most powerful technology companies on earth (who I can’t name quite yet) we have designed it and are preparing to build and test it with real students around the world. We are also spinning off a new arm of WGI to focus solely on this effort while we continue the work I began all those years ago.

It’s funny how life comes full circle. After over a decade of trial and error, loud success and quiet failure, I’m right back where I started: a big problem and an even bigger idea to solve it.

Honestly? I feel right at home.