On March 11, Jim Ziolkowski, founder and CEO of BuildOn, visited Siena Heights University to share his stories about traveling abroad and building schools across the globe and explained how one person can change the world. He was the featured speaker at the annual Chiodini/Fontana Lecture Series on Ethics.

BuildOn is a non-profit organization that builds schools in impoverished countries and advocates that education is a human right. Ziolkowski was a former corporate finance employee at General Electric, but he changed his career plans when he saw the poverty in countries to which he traveled. Ziolkowski opened with the famous St. Catherine of Siena quote: “If you are what you should be, you will set the whole world on fire.”

BuildOn has built more than 700 schools in Burkina Faso, Haiti, Mali, Malawi, Nepal, Nicaragua, and Senegal over the past 24 years. Every 26 seconds, someone drops out of school, he said. BuildOn wants to change that statistic. The organization has developed ways for youth to get involved in service not only across the globe, but also in their own backyards. The group manages tutoring and mentoring for younger kids and assisting the elderly.

“(These kids) had no idea they could change someone’s life and make a difference,” shared Ziolkowski.

BuildOn certainly lit a fire under these kids, as they have completed almost 1,461,189 hours of service. One of them, Rayia Gaddy, a young woman from the Detroit area, shared her life story at the event. She overcame the death of a loved one by working her issues out through service.

“The service healed me,” Gaddy said. “Seeing others try to help themselves — I looked at myself. I had to keep moving forward.”

Teenagers like Rayia can use buildOn as an opportunity to reach out to others. Gaddy stated, “When you do service, talk to people. Find out what makes them resilient.”

Ziolkowski talked about the qualifications a town must meet in order to receive help. The people there must be willing to sign a covenant that says they will finish a certain project. The town must be willing to put forward the hours of volunteering it will take to complete the school.  The country must be willing to form a partnership with the local ministry of education to commit to providing the teachers for the school.

Once a school is built, the town must have an equal number of girls and boys attending. Sex equality is very important to buildOn and the people in those countries. Ziolkowski shared that most of the women in the countries in which they have built schools say, “If you teach a boy, you teach one person. You teach a girl, you teach a village.”

BuildOn mostly builds a primary school, consisting of three schools, and then returns a few years later to build a secondary school. When asked how buildOn picks a country or specific place to visit, Ziolkowski answered, “It’s poverty versus literacy. Where you see one, you see the other. It doesn’t matter.”

The country also needs to have a stable government, and the organization researches the country for approximately eight months prior.

Ziolkowski remembered a memory of arriving at a town where they were going to build a school. “People were rallying over a school,” he said. “It was a two-day celebration.”

The cost to build one school is $32,000. There is a massive amount of fundraising and uniting that works towards these goals, he said. Students can visit places for a week and see the difference they make in those people’s lives.

“Anybody can make a change. Everybody has something to offer,” Ziolkowski said.