Watch Me Go

ut our story below to find out more! After college, Katie Wood, founder of Watch Me Go, set off on an adventure around the world with one of her best friends where she accidentally stumbled into global poverty. Katie returned home determined to do something to change the lives of people living in poverty. Several years later while working at the World Bank, she took a volunteer trip to Haiti to help build houses for earthquake victims where she met Ian Stanley. Katie and Ian spent hours deliberating the best ways to impact poverty, and they both agreed on one thing: it all came down to education. The desire to put this idea into action led them to embark on another long journey, although this time with a purpose--to learn more about education in slum areas across Africa. In Kibera slum, Nairobi, Kenya, they found a school whose students helped inspire the idea for Watch Me Go. While getting to know the students at Adventure Pride School, they were awestruck by their incredible desire to learn and succeed despite being in an environment that most would find difficult to even visit--one million people living in tiny shacks with limited access to food, water, toilets, electricity, teachers, and school supplies. Among these students was a very outspoken group of 8th grade girls on the cusp of the ultimate make or break moment for kids born in a slum--whether they could come up with the money to PAY for high school and get out of the slum. These girls articulated their dreams for their futures with inspiring determination, and made one thing very clear: the chance to go to high school would change their life. So Katie and Ian returned home to try to find a way to give these smart, ambitious girls the opportunity they wanted so badly. Enter D-Prize--a new competition for distributing development solutions, like education, on a large scale. Katie took what she had learned from the girls in Kibera, entered the idea for Watch Me Go and won! A simple solution to combating one of the biggest poverty traps that can be implemented on a large scale by using things that already exist--the determination of the girls, local high schools, and the concept of crowdfunding with a twist!