OUR JOURNEY TOGETHER

Why We Started...

 

                I know what it feels like to be the kid nobody expects anything from. I grew up poor — the kind of poor where the house gets foreclosed and your family ends up living in a 23-foot RV. In seventh grade I brought home straight D's and had to repeat the year. I sat between two classrooms, belonging to neither one. I know exactly what an invisible child feels like, because I was one. I also know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a stranger's kindness. Years ago, when I was a struggling single father, a restaurant manager I'd barely spoken to pressed $2,500 in gift certificates into my hands — for my children's school supplies. I wouldn't take cash, but I took those certificates, and we went shopping for the kids together. I have never forgotten what that lifeline felt like. Someone saw my children, and decided they mattered.

 

            That stayed with me. All my life, my deepest instinct has been to protect a child, whatever it costs me. My faith has always been simple — I talk to God the way I'd talk to a friend, and I believe love is something you do, not something you preach. Years later, I was living in the Philippines, traveling through the provinces, when I came to know a young woman — a high school senior with a dream of going to college. For her family, it was an impossible dream; there simply was no money. I paid her tuition myself. And I have never met her in person — not once. Hours of phone calls across the ocean made her like a daughter to me, and watching her come alive in college was like watching a light switch turn on — I watched that light carry her through her fourth year, toward her teacher's certification.

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                But she was one student. Everywhere I looked, there were more — bright, determined kids with no path forward, for no reason except poverty. I couldn't pay every tuition myself. So I started Small World International Ministries, so that no learner would be left behind for lack of means. Today that young woman serves on our Philippines team. The charity she inspired now puts school supplies in children's hands, food in their stomachs, and safe places to study within their reach.

             

              I started this charity with my own paycheck — about $500 a week, nearly every dollar I earned. I can't keep doing it alone. That's the honest truth, and it's why I'm telling you this story. Every child deserves a chance. If you've ever been the overlooked kid — or the struggling parent lying awake at night wondering how you'll pay for school supplies — or the stranger who once decided a child mattered, then you already know why this work exists. You know what it feels like, because you've lived it.

               

                So I'm asking you directly, person to person: reach into your heart. Reach into your emotions. Remember your past — and change somebody else's future. For the kid out there tonight who is exactly where we've been. Everyone has the power to change a life. No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted. Here, a single dollar goes further than you can imagine — pencils, paper, a hot meal that keeps a child in school one more day. Every dollar adds up. Your five dollars and someone else's ten becomes a child's whole school year.

 

Your smallest gift could be the biggest thing that ever happens to them. Will you help us reach the next one?

 

    — Rev. William "Bill" Olsen, Founder