How to Build a Global Boarding School with No Money, No Campus, and No Students (Yet)
Weekly updates on my journey building DLA from scratch
Hey friends,
It’s been one of those weeks where I oscillated between “We’Re gOnNA ChaNGe tHE wOrLd 🤩” and “maybe I should just get a job at Stripe🥲.”
(Doesn’t help that my portfolio hasn’t been looking too pretty lately, but small price to pay to get those sock manufacturing jobs back amirite?)
But then I remembered—Stripe doesn’t need another PM. The world, however, needs a model bold enough to offshore American education and integrate race and class so unapologetically it’d make George Wallace squirm in his grave—and do so while costing less than a semester at SUNY Binghamton.
So we move.
Here’s what I got done last week:
Redesigned our website (and branding)
DLA started as a wild idea: take (mostly African American) underserved kids to study in Africa—starting in Uganda and eventually expanding across the African Anglosphere. This stemmed from the simple observation that most Americans living in poverty are Black, and I wanted to give those kids a shot at something radically different.
There were also deeper, more personal motivations behind the idea—some of which I’ll save for another post—but, for now, I’ll just share this clip (24:35 - 28:15—but the whole thing is well worth the watch) from my lord and savior Malcolm X Shabazz describing what it felt like to see African leaders—men like Lumumba (DRC) and Mboya (Kenya)—“intellectually exchanging with Western leaders on equal footing”. He said it shifted something in him (and other black Americans at the time). And I think it would shift something in our kids too.
As an “African FOB1”, growing up outside of America, I had the privilege of not seeing my race weaponized every waking moment. I could just be. If I’d grown up here, being told in a thousand ways how badly my people were doing, I might not have grown up to be this optimistic about the world. So yeah—I wanted to give kids that. A new context. A new frame of reference.
That’s what inspired our name, our symbolism—the 13 stars, the Afro-futurist seal, all of it.
Of course, Sal (correctly) pointed out that the model doesn’t just work for Black kids—it works for everyone. And in fact, if I led with a broader vision, I could rally more support from both sides of the aisle.
He had a point. My earlier pitch was beautiful… bold… but slightly lawsuit-worthy. I could already see the headlines:2
“Tax Dollars Funding Boko-Haram??”
“They’re Shipping Them Back to Africa?”
And don’t get me wrong—I was ready to fight. (All the way to the Supreme Court if I had to. 😤🙏🏾)
At the time, I was also struggling with another question: With limited slots, how would we decide who gets in? Lottery? PSAT score? …Auction? (Hey, I’m an economist 🤷🏾♂️)
My mentors at Warner (URochester’s Graduate School of Education) and leaders from the Rochester community challenged me further: How does your model serve the communities these students come from—not just the students themselves?
They saw education as a community endeavor—raising children with and for the neighborhoods they call home. I, on the other hand, was coming from a more neoliberal lens—education as a pathway to individual economic productivity.
I was also asked (gently, but firmly) to better articulate the “Leadership” in Douglass Leadership Academy.
I’ll be honest—I didn’t have good answers. So I paused. Stepped back. And asked:
What would it look like for DLA to serve not just individuals, but entire communities?
Then it hit me.
ZIP codes.
We’d select one young leader from each ZIP code in America. A “Douglass Leader.” Ages 14–17. Nominated by their community. Trained through a globally transformative, mastery-based, entrepreneurship-focused curriculum. Then sent back home—not just to succeed, but to serve.
It was elegant. And symbolic.
If you’ve spent any time around American policy, you know your ZIP code is the single most powerful predictor of your life outcome—stronger than your GPA, IQ, or even your parents' income3. From redlining to school zoning, it’s long been the invisible hand steering inequality. So I figured—what better way to flip the script than by building a school across ZIP codes and making community input part of the model itself?
Layer in an entrepreneurial-leadership track à la African Leadership Academy, and now we were really cooking. (You already know I’m a firm believer in the power of entrepreneurship as world-changing force. I mean—look at what I’m doing.)
I was also inspired by United World Colleges, where each country has its own selection committee—usually alumni—who identify a handful of kids to send to one of 18 global campuses. I figured we could steal (erm... be ✨inspired✨ by) that model.
By the end of it all, I was feelin’ gooood.
This ZIP code model? Still disruptive. Still transformational. Still exclusive (only one kid per ZIP)—and yet radically inclusive.
Before DLA, the only time someone from Compton and someone from Westchester might end up in the same room was... at a record label.
Now? They’ll be classmates. Teammates. Co-founders. (Can I get a HELL YEAH?)
We’re still putting kids from forgotten places into rooms they never imagined—just without lighting the policy world on fire.
Hence the rebrand.
Onboarded my first hires!
At this point, the vision’s solid enough that I figured it was time to scale myself a little—i.e., stop being the sole bottleneck for everything from copywriting to cold outreach. So I decided to bring in some help. This help came in the form of three 19yr olds (no, not the 19 yr olds currently eviscerating government departments—these ones are based in Uganda).
I put together what I thought was a straightforward (ok, kinda extra) application process. It involved (among other things):
Have a polished Linkedin Account
Write a cold email to Bill Gates introducing DLA and asking for something bold. A donation? A LinkedIn endorsement? A kidney? Their call.
Build a personal website (very doable using AI, in fact, that’s how I created the current rendition of my personal website)
Pretend you're the CEO of DLA and record a 5–10 min pitch for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
Out of 60+ applicants, only two young women finished the application. You can check out their work here:
Courtney Nnabagala (personal website, presentation)
Michelle Ramos (personal website, presentation)
Now, if you're unimpressed by the deliverables, remember—these kids don’t use computers regularly. Most Ugandan boarding schools are still pencil-and-paper galore. Internet once a week if they’re lucky. And yet, they learned design, web development, pitch recording—from scratch—in a week. That’s grit. That’s follow-through. That’s who I want on my team right now (I’m still surprised that only *two* people made it, though.. YIKES…).
But more than a job, this is an apprenticeship—it’s a speedrun to becoming the type of founder who gets profiled in Wired before they can legally rent a car. My goal is to accelerate their learning curve so they skip the “stuck in the system” years and go straight to being builders, owners—hell, even millionaires—in their 20s.
I basically asked myself: What kind of opportunity would’ve turned me into a Bezos-in-training at 19? Then I handed them exactly that—minus the Amazon gulag.
So what are they doing?
They’re leading the launch of Khan Lab School-style pilot programs within Uganda’s most elite (but aging) boarding schools—think the Etons and Exeters of Uganda. These schools have produced alumni who are now leading UN agencies4, building multinationals, and advising heads of state… but they’ve been slow to modernize. When COVID hit, most couldn’t pivot to online learning. They were shut down for *two years* (a world record). No real digital infrastructure to fall back on. So we’re bringing them 21st-century learning—AI tools, mastery-based pacing, personalized feedback—and hoping they can do what emerging markets do best: leapfrog.
And who better to lead the charge than alumni themselves?
Courtney and Michelle (and James, my DEI hire) are now meeting with school leadership, pitching this radical idea of a modern learning model within an old-school system. If all goes well, we’ll have a pilot school in Uganda and a sister pilot in Próspera, Honduras.
We’ll both be figuring out the all important question: How does an individualized, blended model look like in a residential setting?
No exaggeration when I say this, but we are quite literally making history fr fr!!
Pilot in Prospera, Honduras this fall
In my previous post, I mentioned that we had pivoted from Uganda to Prospera, though I didn’t quite get into the why. Well—several reasons:
The turnaround in Uganda was sloooowwwwww. I spent weeks trying to get elite school leaders to respond. Meanwhile, Prospera hit me back with a campus offer in two weeks flat. No brainer.
Uganda’s beautiful. But it’s also 23 hours and three layovers away. Many parents I talked to did not fw that. Prospera, on the other hand, would be a sweet 7 hour flight from NYC. Even JetBlue could swing that.
The super discriminatory environment (“can I call you mista”) wasn’t doing us any favors.
For DLA’s longer term vision (retirement homes, health insurance), I figured it would make more sense to plug into a place that was home to founders reinventing biotech, finance, even governance itself. That’s exactly the sandbox we want to launch DLA in. We’re not just building a school, we’re building a blueprint—one that could anchor entire charter cities and reshape the way education, infrastructure, and opportunity scale across the Global South.
I also realized that this residential campus (especially at scale) worked well as a anchor tenant for a charter city. I’ve written about charter cities before and believe them to be the answer Africa’s poverty and urbanization woes. If we got it right, DLA could educate thousands in charter cities across the developing world while pulling millions of people out of poverty.
Lastly, security. While Uganda is generally safe, it’s still… Uganda. Hosting 5,000 American teens in one place makes you a very shiny target for Al Shabaab, and I wasn’t fully convinced the Ugandan government could handle that smoke.
If we got it right, DLA could educate thousands of Americans while pulling millions of people out of poverty.
Right now, our Prospera campus can host ~20–30 students. We’re fleshing out the budget and dialing in how we select that first batch. My current thinking is to start as a study abroad leadership camp, do self-funded ZIP codes first and layer in underserved communities as we fundraise.
Academic work will likely be delivered via ASU Prep (Sal Khan’s online high school). It’s honors-level, which makes me a little nervous for students with learning gaps—but we’re exploring ways to support every student, wherever they’re starting from.
We’re also going full-send on programming: visits to Mayan ruins, deep-sea diving around Roatán’s coral reefs. I want this to be the most transformational semester of their lives.
I’m targeting $500K for the pilot. That gets us 20–30 changemakers in one house, four months of high-touch mentorship, epic fieldwork, while we lay the groundwork for what comes next: scaling to a 3,000–5,000 student campus that looks and feels like the Google Bay View Campus.
As for selection: No GPA beauty contests. No “I love school because it is good” essays. We’ll work with community orgs and schools to nominate 2–3 teens per ZIP, then screen for entrepreneurial ability and grit: Who raised the most money? Who built the most creative project? Who showed the most follow-through?
Still cooking on the final process. If you’ve got ideas, HMU!
The elusive fiscal sponsorship
If there's one thing that's kept me up at night, it's establishing our legal structure. We need a 501(c)(3) to access the grants we've lined up, but creating one from scratch with a proper board would delay us 6-12 months.
We're exploring fiscal sponsorship(basically leveraging another organization’s 501(C)(3) status to receive tax-deductible grants) options with Warner and a few other organizations. If you know anyone who might be able to help, please DM! This is legitimately our biggest bottleneck right now.
Entrepreneurial Musings: “Flow Like Wata” ~ Bruce Lee
There's something I keep telling my team that has become our mantra: "You gotta flow like wata (water)."
When water encounters an obstacle, it doesn't stop – it simply flows around it. I've found myself constantly pivoting and adjusting our approach as we hit snag after snag.
Original plan: Khan Lab School in Uganda → Pivot: Douglass Leadership Academy for Americans in Uganda using vouchers
Next iteration: DLA in East Africa → Pivot: Próspera, Honduras (better regulatory environment, closer to US)
Initial model: Full 2-4 year high school experience → Pivot: Start with semester-long pilot to prove concept
Original scope: Focus only on Honduras campus → Pivot: Dual-track approach with Uganda partnerships
None of these pivots changed our fundamental vision – democratizing access to world-class education through educational arbitrage—build a system where $10-15K can fund an experience that would cost $80K in the US.
The key is distinguishing between your core mission (immovable) and your methodologies (flexible). When you hit a roadblock, don't abandon the mission – find another path to the same destination.
Other Wins
Exploring accreditation through Cognia
Met with some heavy-hitters, I’m talking fellows overseeing $400 billion AUM
Rochester READY ( Education accelerator in Rochester) is fascinated by our model and is interested in how they might support DLA. We’ll flesh things out this coming week
What's next?
Next week's focus:
Flesh out the student selection process
Flesh out our pilot budget
Lock in that fiscal sponsorship and finally get some grant funding.
Oh, and I might be visiting Prospera in May to see our campus in person. Getting real, folks!
Until next week,
Kev
P.S. If you know anyone who'd be excited about supporting the pilot—whether through donations, connections, or expertise—please send them my way. We're building this thing one ally at a time.
FOB- Fresh Off the Boat—(slang for first generation immigrant)
If you think I’m reaching, you haven’t experienced an American news cycle
Source: Trust me bro!… lol, for real though, check out Raj Chetty’s(Stanford/Harvard) work on economic mobility
For example, Winnie Byanyima current head of UNAIDS attended Mt St Mary’s College Namagunga—an all girls catholic school in Mukono, Uganda.