The Akola Project

Then on April 23rd in Houston, we have a Faith @ Work conference that will be held at First Baptist Church in Houston. This is our annual Faith @ Work conference that we take around the country. We were in Dallas a couple of years ago. The plan is to be in Chicago with that conference next year.

This will be the first time you've heard about these. The two conferences that we have sitting in front of us for next year are we're going to have a conference called Brave New World. Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Convention ethics commission is gonna be our main speaker. He's actually gonna be here for two days. He's gonna do the conference with us on Monday, and then it'll be at a chapel on Tuesday as well, the Cultural Engagement Chapel. So we're holding onto him. He's certainly a leading voice in terms of Christian engagement with culture, and that conference will focus on cultural engagement very, very directly.

Then in the spring, we're holding a conference. The Systematic Theology department is gonna hold a conference on eschatology, but it's not a prophecy conference. It is a conference on how eschatology matters for life in the present. So the working title that we have for this one – it's not necessarily gonna be what we end up calling it – is Back from the Future. We're gonna be toying with how thinking about our security in Christ, how that impacts the way we conduct our lives now.

So that's the lineup, and of course you know we do we four Cultural Engagement Chapels every semester. We'll have a couple of dinners as well, but we haven't lined up what we're doing with those yet. So just keep your eyes and ears open for what the center is doing.

So with that as our introduction, we actually have a video that we're gonna use to introduce the evening. We can show that now, and that will get you oriented to what we're doing.

We ended up in Uganda because one of my friends, her father was the executive director of World Harvest Ministry, and they had a boarding schools that needed teachers for the summer. I honestly didn't know where Uganda was on the map. I just signed up, and the next thing I knew we were in a rural village in east Africa. That's where it all began.

Actually, about two weeks in, and I mention this in the video, but we were learning about the community. The local pastor could tell that I wasn't totally engaged, and I think he just wanted to inspire me. So he said, "I want you to meet a woman who just has a really powerful story. She's a member of our community, and I think her story will inspire you."

I said, "Why not?" This woman changed really the course of my life. She just had trusted God with the lives of 24 street children, had no way to provide for them, but gave everything she had so they could live. I thought two things. One, "Here I am, someone who's been given a lot, and I haven't given anything for anyone else to live. She's sharing her daily bread and going hungry for others." And then also, "Here is someone who can trust God for the lives of 24 street kids. I can barely do that for myself."

So that moment a seed was planted, and that grew for the rest of the summer. I actually went to study abroad after that in Italy, which is quite a shift, at SMU, and I broke my leg. It was a crazy story. I ended up back in Atlanta with really nothing to do except for to think about this woman, Sarah, the kids sleeping on her floor.

So it really started as just a small effort. I thought I would just send a couple of hundred dollars over, and they could buy some beans and she could send her kids to school. That grew into this idea of building a building for the kids that slept on her floor, and next thing I knew they had – a sponsorship arm had come in.

They needed a really big building. Somehow in the span from my sophomore year of college to my senior year of college, I somehow found myself raising – we raised close to $1 million for a three-story orphanage with the capacity to house 200 children in Sarah's village. That's when I moved to Uganda.

Soon I was graduating from SMU, and I thought, "I've gotta move over there to make sure this building actually happens. All these people gave us money. I guess I have to go." I had three friends who put their post-college jobs on hold and moved over there and helped me get that off the ground over the next several years.

But after that, I started spending – every three months I would go to Uganda. I told him, "I have a house here."

He was like, "What?" We were engaged, and I had built this house out of local materials on the Nile near where the women work. So he knew early on this is part of what our family is doing. He bought into that. We have a nine-month-old. It's hard to take him at this time, but I still try to go once every six months. When he was six months old, I went for ten days. It was hard to leave him.

We hope it's something that – these women are a part of my life. My husband and I got married in one of the villages we work in. All of the women were there that I've worked with over the years. The hope is our family is fully integrated in what we do. I think that's how it works.

Our COO in Uganda came over. We stole her from Jane Goodall, and she was running all of her women's empowerment programs. She's a better leader than I am, knows more than I do about economic development. I totally trust her. Now she runs our staff of 30 in Uganda, and I just go there 'cause I miss the woman. So I'm kind of irrelevant at this point, but I just like to be there.

So we started drilling these clean water wells around Uganda. We'd go into all these different villages, and it was the same story. There are so many women like Sarah who had 20 street kids sleeping on their floor and no way to provide for them.

We just started to realize, "There's gotta be a more sustainable way to address the orphan crisis and be able to provide for disadvantaged children." You can't just build $60 million orphanage structures around the country. That's not gonna solve the problem, and it's not sustainable. It's expensive, and there's a lot of issues with that model, period. It's a really antiquated model that we don't use here for a reason.

So we just learned a lot along the way, and once we finished the building, we thought, "I wonder if there's a better way to do this." So we started the Akola project in 2007 with the intention of working with other women like Sarah who had street kids – an average of ten kids was our metric – living in their home, no way to provide for them and no way to earn income. The kids weren't in school, weren't getting proper nutrition.

We thought if we could just help build capacity for these women, they have the heart. They're already taking care of these kids. They just need the money to send 'em to school and some basic training. They should be able to handle this. These kids don't have to go to an orphanage home.

We started Akola for that purpose with 15 women working under a mango tree. We said, "Well, in order for the women to make money, we've gotta create some kind of business or product." We looked at a lot of local programs that we could just – these women are cut off from the global economy. These women that we work with are in very rural villages, barely have roads that are functioning, women in northern Uganda who have survived the 20-year war up there and conflict.

We thought, "We need to create a product, something that we could market and sell that we know can fund these women so they can take care of those kids." We picked jewelry honestly 'cause it was easy to ship. That was our first. We were like, "This is easy. It's small."

I went to SMU, so I know a lot of people who have good fashion sense, and we knew – I had a lot of friends who were designers. I thought that would be something we could build. So we in 2007-2008 set out to build this business to support the women.

So we started building centers, training centers around the country, and then the next thing we do is once we've built a center, and we accompany that with the clean water wells, really building the infrastructure that they need for economic opportunity. Once we do that, we train women who are not artisans, women with no educational/vocational background, to make the products that we sell in the global marketplace. We design them. We create high-fashion products.

Part of that is it can't be a charity purchase. We're working with 500 women whose livelihood depends on our ability to sell this product, and so we learned pretty early on to do a good job in that area. So we started retailing our product around the U.S. We've been sold in 450 stores around the country, one department store, potentially another specialty store this fall, and large accounts with Tons and Metavani and been able to offer the women dependable employment because the products sold well.

One the women have dependable employment, they're able to provide for the ten kids in their home. We were able to set a metric where they made enough money to not only send the women who were working fulltime, all of their kids to school, provide for their health care, rebuild their homes, but also invest in local businesses in their communities, 'cause once these women realized, "Gosh, we're capable," they have dignity and they have opportunity. They want to do more.

So instead of using microloans for them to start small businesses, we just trained them to save the money – a portion of the money they would earn through us to invest in these businesses. We walked alongside of them and launched a series of classes in finance and business to really help them be successful. We believe that really helps drive sustainability for generations to come, whether we're there for five years, ten years, one years, and they're investing that money in long-term solutions for their community.

So after going through Akola's program, these women have become candidates for loans. We have women who have worked with us for seven years who have run for local office. Again, these are women who could barely look you in the eyes when we first started working with them. They were so severely marginalized, and now their kids are in school.

Their communities are functioning. They're injecting and infusing capital into a traditional barter community. So now the local brick-maker, who never got paid for his bricks, gets money, so he sends his kids to school. So we have seen entire communities – we work in nine of them – just totally transformed by this model. It's been really exciting.

There's not a lot of them around, and the ones that are there are very supportive. We also provide opportunity for them through building our centers. We always employ local men, use local labor, and that's a way that they get involved in these projects and earn an income.

But, yeah, these are women who have been through war, 20 years, and we have women whose children were abducted by the LRA and forced into sexual labor and some forced into becoming child soldiers. We have women who the majority of their family members died of HIV/AIDS, and they're survivors of that.

A lot of times, the orphans come from the community, and that's why orphanages don't make that much sense, because in these communities everyone knows who the orphan kids are. There's not like a random kid that comes along. These are very interconnected communities. Generally, the orphan kids come from the father leaves.

The mom generally contracts HIV/AIDS. A fourth of the women we work with are tested positive. I would guess probably half of them are. She passes away. She's got four kids. They go to her sister. Something happens to her sister. Her sister has three kids, too. The grandmother takes them, and next thing you know there's ten dependents.

Really, how it's worked out for the women we work with, the average is ten dependents, seven children and two adult dependents. All of them fully rely on the mother to care for them, and she has no way to provide.

They would come in and burn down a village, kill parents in front of their children. They tie the children up and make them watch human mutilation to a degree that is just – it's hard to even talk about. But the children would watch that and know that they had nowhere to go back to.

So they'd take them. They would become part of this army. They give them guns and drugs and God knows what else, and the next thing you know, the child then becomes sort of a mercenary. That war is essentially over. It's disbanded. But the remnants of it, it's a disaster.

We work in the Pader district and Pajule, which was one of the hardest-hit areas in the war, and they're still rebuilding. They were living in internally displaced camps 'cause the government tried to protect them. The camps would get attacked, which it wasn't a very safe place for them.

Then once the conflict – they started negotiating peace treaties in 2007. It's been kind of rocky since then, but they moved people to satellite camps, and now they're moving back to their ancestral homes. In our project in northern Uganda, we really focus on that rebuilding effort. By helping the women generate income and learn these soft and hard skills, we're hoping they'll be able to get back on their feet.

We also have production. We have women in West Dallas who actually string the beads on the necklace that are made in Uganda for sale for here. A big thing about our model is we run everything through a nonprofit framework. Our organizational structure is a nonprofit with a mission-related enterprise, same as Goodwill.

That's probably another equivalent to our – but that means 100 percent of our profits are reinvested in our social mission. So when you buy an Akola necklace, not only is it – every bead on the necklace empowering women, the assembly empowers and employs women, the distribution empowers and employs women, but also all the money goes back to that mission. So it's really high-impact.

They make the components of the necklaces, and that money goes back to paying school fees for their kids. And then it's assembled by either our assembly team, which is our fulltime workers in Uganda and based in Jinja in eastern Uganda or the women here in West Dallas. It's kind of interchangeable. Some stuff is produced there, some here, even in the same order. Then it's distributed by women who have been referred us to by New Friends New Life, who have been formerly incarcerated or sexually trafficked, trying to get back on their feet.

So we really here in Dallas just focus on the training and employment whereas in Uganda we do a whole suite of programs around their employment called Akola Academy. So there's business classes and wellness, yeah, just a series of classes to help their development. But here we're able to rely on partners for that.

I got to the point where I was so burned out and I was so tired and just thinking, "Lord, what am I even doing? We've probably done more harm than help in a lot of ways. I'm sick. I'm tired. My friends are getting married, and I'm in the middle of nowhere." I really became disillusioned.

I actually had a former professor of mine at SMU, who is on our board, who said, "I think you need to take a break to get – retool and look at your model and take a step back and work on your heart and figure out why you're doing this." That's when I went to Fuller Seminary in Pasadena and did my master's in intercultural studies and international development. I studied under Bryant Myers, who I really respect his development theories and theology.

It was at that time that I – actually, my best work came from that. We were able to take, just by taking a pause, all of the good things and bad things that we had done and experienced over that first five years I was in Uganda in my early 20s, able to form a real model out of that, a model for social business. It's actually crazy. It's in a McGraw-Hill textbook now, which is nuts.

But I formed it there, and part of that was taking a step back and learning more about international development, studying it after I had experienced it, and taking again my experience from the ground and really thinking it through, dissecting it, figuring out what can we do better, and how can we serve these people better.

But another piece was my heart: "Why am I doing this? Where is God in the midst of suffering?" There's a lot of things that I wrestled with coming out of that, and I was able to resolve a lot of that just by taking a step back for two years at Fuller. Once I finished my degree there and came back here to Dallas, that's when Akola really took off in 2013.

So I think one of the best lessons in this is just having the courage to take a pause sometimes and the courage to fail. I really look at the building that we did, the orphanage structure. I'm glad we did it. I know God was in it. But it's not a great model. In a lot of ways, it was a failure, in my mind at least. From a development perspective and how it's serving those children, it's not doing that very well. We have no control over it. We didn't even put the title in our time 'cause we didn't know better at the time. There was a lot of ways we failed.

I had a mentor right before I went to Fuller who said to me – I said, "I'm just leaving. I don't even know why we came. I'm just confused about the whole thing. I feel like again we've hurt more than helped." I said, "I'm out of here."

He said, "That's the problem with people in your generation. Things get hard, and you bail and you go to something else. I really challenge you – everyone who comes here. It doesn't matter if they have a Ph.D. in international development. You're gonna fail at first. Probably the first five years you're here, you're gonna do a lot of harm. But if you can take the lessons that you learned from that, then the next 50 years you'll really be able to help."

He said, "I challenge you to commit to this country." I took that pause, and I did, and now 12 years later, we're really paving the way for social businesses and have hit a scale that most organizations haven't and have been able to show that you can do it through a nonprofit framework where all of it goes back. You can do that with faith and integrity.

It's been an incredible journey, but I could have very easily given up every year along the way until the past couple years when things really took off. I guess some really good advice is take a pause when you need to pause, have the courage to fail and to face that, and just learn from your experience and make it better.

We've had churches all along the way partner with us. We have some of the bigger churches in Dallas that support us and have from the very beginning, but we also have organizations like United Way that are not faith-based supporting us. That's always been important to us in the very beginning is that we wanted everyone to be a part of this journey, and my faith has informed this whole process and everything that I do. The women's faith has transformed my life. They have taught me more than I could ever give to them.

But we wanted to create a company that anyone could be a part of it, and that's been really beneficial. We've had some people challenge us and say, "Well, why aren't a faith-based organization? It's coming from that."

What we say is God's working in every part of this every day through our staff, through the women, in ways that are hard for me to even describe. So we haven't had to necessarily have a ministry component to make it what we feel like is honoring to God.

So I think from that angle, I would say really work on your product and on your business model, and tap into things like social finance, impact investing, all of these great new philanthropic tools that are brand-new in our generation to help fund these kind of ventures in ways that were never possible before.

Advice interpersonally, again, don't be afraid to fail. You learn from that, and as long as you take those lessons, you can create something really beautiful out of your experience. That would be the interpersonal piece.

Also, just realizing God has a different plan for everyone's life. I wasn't someone who grew up and wanted to change the world. I just wanted to be faithful. I took step by step small steps of faith that have led to something really big, but that was never the intention. It would have been okay if it didn't grow to this scale. The orphanage structure, we learned from that, and God called me just to be a mom. That would have been just as beautiful as what Akola has become.

A lot of people say, "That's so cool. I want to do this." That's great, and I think it's great to set out to do it. But I think also just to look at your life and look right in front of you like what has God put in front of you? Who has he put in front of you? And being faithful to that. I think that's when big things happen is they grow out of that.

But as we've grown, we mainly get our support through foundations now, and I think that that's something you earn over time. Once your organization gets to a point where you have a proven impact model and theory of change, and you're able to measure it, and you have a track record, that's when foundation money is accessible and important.

So if we have a purchase order for 10,000 units and that costs a lot to make, we got a half-a-million-dollar impact investment last year for this department store order. We're able to put that into our product, and we end up making five times that amount of money for our programs and the women, but would never have been able to do it without that. That was basically structured as a low-interest loan with a five-percent return from a foundation, and it gave us the money we needed to scale. That's actually been the greatest tool that we have been able to use to grow.

But I'm like, "I don't feel like it's work. This is my passion. This is what I love to do, and it's all intertwined." If I'm working on a Saturday, it doesn't feel like, "Oh, gosh, I'm working on a Saturday." It's, "I would rather do this than most other things minus being with my family."

That's also where the balance becomes hard, 'cause you're like, "My work and my vocation and my calling and my faith, everything is tied together." So it's really easy to work all the time because it's just your life.

But I also think that's such a gift because I think that's how it's supposed to be. If we look at different biblical references on what it means to really live out our vocation and our calling, it's discovering what we were created for and living that out. I feel like I've used every gift I've been given by God in this work, every talent. I've just pushed it as far as I can. I've exhausted every part of myself in this and feel like not only does my life have meaning, but I'm – the way I was designed, the way God made me is being fully used. That's so rewarding, and honestly, there's nothing better than that.

The only challenge is, again, I'm also designed to be a mom to my little nine-month-old. It's not competing, and I hope as he gets older that becomes more integrated and he becomes a part of what we do. He goes down to Akola. We have a store on Main Street – please come see us – near Pecan Lodge. He'll come down there and get passed around by every staff member, all the women. He's kind of like the community kid. I love that. So in some ways, too, that balance is just the integration of all of your passions. Again, God's in all of that.

But, yeah, how that plays out on a day-to-day basis, it's really hard, and we've had to have a lot of tough conversations about what happens when we both have to travel. His job funds our family. I don't make tons of money from Akola. So there's that. But then mine's making a difference in a lot of people's lives, and then there's that.

Today is a great example. I normally only work till 2:00 on Tuesdays. So I have a nanny that comes till 2:00, and then I'll take Lathe in the afternoon and still try to get some work done. But today I had a meeting with Neiman Marcus about launching one of our collections through them, and then we had this.

My cousin picked him up from the baby sitter. My mother-in-law got him from my cousin, and Baxter, my husband, is picking him up from my mother-in-law at 6:45, and then he's going to bed. Some days are just like that, and Baxter has been really patient. But, yeah, that isn't easy, and he bears a lot of the cost, probably the majority of the cost, of what I do.

Financially I don't – I'm not able to contribute much, and yet I work all the time. Spiritually, I'm pulled in so many directions. Emotionally, he doesn't get that much. He's a great man to have signed up for that.

That's really it. We have an amazing team on the ground. Yeah, in the beginning I was doing everything. In the middle, I was putting out – every time again there was a fire, I had to fly to Uganda and solve it and figure it out. There was no one else to do it.

Now I have a team that does that. So I get to really be an innovator and an encourager. I meet with our team, and we think about, "What could this be in three years and five years?" We get to dream together, and I get to just be a champion of them. That's really fun.

But here the need was really the training and the job opportunities for women who because of their history can't get a job. For the nonprofits, their big dilemma here was, "Great, we've just rehabilitated this group of women, but they're gonna go back into prostitution, back into poverty, back into jail because they don't have an economic alternative."

We worked with Serve West Dallas, which is an amazing organization, a collective-impact organization that brings all of the ministries in West Dallas together. We said, "Hey, we can offer 45 women jobs." They worked with nine nonprofits who sent us women from their program who were ready to work, women who were ready to get back on their feet.

So we did that, and then for the women in our distribution center we partner with New Friends New Life, who sends us women for a three-month internship period and then a one-year fellowship. Then we hire them fulltime, and a lot of times it's the first job they've ever had after a lifetime of being incarcerated over and over and over again. So it's a great opportunity for them, and that's worked so well for us. We thought, "We've been able to offer something that these nonprofits can't, and that's getting these women back on their feet from the rehabilitation program."

In Uganda and anywhere we go in the future, it's kind of the same thing. There are other organizations now that we can partner with like Butner who are already providing those services. So we can focus on what we're really great at and what other people can't offer, which is the training and employment. So if we ever go to another village – we're looking at Kenya as the next place we'd grow in – we would do it alongside a partner like Butner where they would do all of the holistic development, even the financial training and business training, and we would go in and do the basic product training and employment. That's a great question.

Father, we do thank you for just the beauty of a story of simple, energetic, committed, faithful faith. We lift up Brittany, and we lift up Akola. We just pray for these women both here and in Uganda and pray for the success of the ministry. We ask that you would continue to lead and guide the team that oversees this and that you would continue to open doors, and that opportunity would continue to exist to help people not only rediscover who they are and rebuild their lives, but also come to appreciate what capabilities you give people who sometimes are told that they don't matter at all. So we thank you for these many gifts that you give us in Jesus' name. Amen.