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 communities was powerful and inspiring. It was also a rat race. People came and went. Consistency was fragile. Impact was hard to prove. WGI looked great on the surface. But the surface has never been enough for me.

So I turned to technology. With our largest partner, a Fortune 100 icon, we built a digital literacy app and deployed it globally. And it failed. We redesigned it as a game with original characters and a full creative team. That failed too. Each time I went back to the drawing board. Each time I refused to accept the surface-level answer. And after years of building, breaking, and rebuilding, I arrived at the question that changed everything:

Why, despite all the apps, tools, games, content, funding, and pedagogy, do so many children still reach age ten unable to read?

The answer was in front of me the entire twelve-year journey. We keep building better tools instead of a system. A child in Brooklyn and a child in Bihar can both fall through the same cracks not because the tools don’t exist, but because nothing connects them. Nothing catches struggle from any source, assigns responsibility, verifies that instruction happened, proves the child learned, and follows that child wherever they go. The connective tissue is missing. Children don’t need another app. They need a system that identifies them, catches them, and never lets them go.

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.