"WHY DON'T YOU JUST MOVE?"
MTO 2.0: What Rochester taught me about why people stay
Five years ago, I moved to the U.S. for school. Since then, Rochester, NY has been the place I call home.
And while it has a rich history, Rochester is quietly going the way of Detroit. You can feel the economic stagnation in the abandoned storefronts, the public school struggles, the silence—or sirens(depending on the day)—downtown after 6pm.
The winters here feel like a punishment for something I didn’t do. Half the city is either trying to leave or lowkey hates that they never did.
The ones who stayed frequently complain about it every chance they get, and yet… they still stay.
I've always wondered why they didn't just get up and leave to somewhere nicer, somewhere with better prospects—and yet, here I am… staying. Six years and counting.
Not because of weather (God no). Not because of job opportunities. But because of people.
Because when I quit my tech job to build DLA, the rational thought was to start with Arizona. The state’s school choice policy is way more flexible (there’s virtually no school choice in New York State), and the sun actually exists.
But I didn’t know a soul there.
In Rochester, I had a bank of relationships built over 5+ years—dining hall aunties, professors, city officials, random guy-who-knows-a-guy’s. When I needed a place to stay rent-free? Covered. When my grant got denied for the 13th time and I needed moral support? Handled.
All in all, it was this city and its people—my people—that caught me. Without this support system—DLA wouldn’t exist.
Hell, I might not still be here.
And that got me thinking:
Maybe people don’t stay in broken places because they lack ambition.
Maybe they stay because it’s the only place they know they’ll be caught if they fall.
On moving To Opportunity (MTO)
We love to romanticize the idea of mobility. Just move to where the jobs are. Just apply to better schools. Just… leave.
But anyone who's ever actually tried to leave knows it’s not that simple.
You don’t just move for opportunity.
You move when you’re sure you won’t be alone once you get there.
You move when you know someone will pick you up from the airport.
When someone will co-sign your lease even though you don’t have a credit score.
Moving means giving up your community, your “hey I know a guy” shortcuts. It means navigating an entirely new world with no roadmap—and no one to bail you out when the GPS fails.
I didn’t stay in Rochester because it was optimal. I stayed because when I quit my job to pursue this batshit idea of building a boarding school that shuttles kids across continents… I needed somewhere soft to land.
Somewhere that wouldn’t laugh me out the room.
It’s why “Move to Opportunity” (MTO)—a landmark federal experiment that gave families housing vouchers to relocate to wealthier neighborhoods—didn’t deliver the world-changing results people expected.
They didn’t fail because they weren’t capable.
They failed because no one told them how to navigate the new code.
No one explained how to enroll their kids in school.
No one told them which barbershops were safe or where to buy groceries with an EBT card.
No one gave them a damn welcome mat.
MTO gave people the chance to move, but not the scaffolding to land.
Turns out, uprooting a family without planting new roots just leads to disorientation, loneliness, and (sometimes) return trips.
No one gave them a damn welcome mat.
When I moved to the US, I had a welcome mat.
I’ve had multiple, actually.
When I committed to UofR, I chose it because it had a sizeable African student population. I didn’t overthink it. I just knew: if things got weird, at least I’d find rice.
But that decision—seemingly small—changed everything.
My first year here, my brother Roland lent me a laptop before I could afford my own.
My brother Dewey let me crash at his cozy apartment when campus shut down for winter break.
I learned how to do taxes, how to negotiate rent, how to set up a bank account… from people who looked like me, talked like me, and were rooting for me.
That’s scaffolding.
That’s what makes a leap survivable.
DLA 🤝 MTO 2.0
I think about this a lot as I build DLA. If you squint hard enough, DLA is just “Move to Opportunity 2.0.”: Yes, your ZIP code shouldn't define your destiny. So let’s move kids—physically, intentionally—to places where the odds are in their favor: LATAM, Caribbean, Africa—wherever world-class education can be delivered for 1/6th the price.
But I’m under no illusion that the move is the hard part. The thriving is.
That’s why our model won’t just fund flights and tuition. We’re thinking about:
Helping families find housing in new states. Maybe even offering low-interest “mobility loans.”
Building alumni networks so a DLA kid from Englewood has someone to call when they land in Cincinnati.
Support groups. Cultural onboarding. Even skill-matching tools that help families relocate to places where their labor is actually valued.
Basically, designing an immigration experience for American students—rooted in dignity, mentorship, and community.
Because America’s opportunities aren’t evenly distributed—they’re clumped in weird pockets with better weather and better Wi-Fi. Talent, meanwhile, is everywhere. The real moon-shot is stitching those two maps together and holding the ladder steady while kids climb.
Closing thoughts
So yeah, I could’ve started DLA in Arizona. Maybe I would’ve had more funding. More parents willing to listen. But I wouldn’t have had people.
I wouldn’t have had the auntie who fed me when I ran out of dining swipes. Or the mentor who told me I wasn’t crazy for wanting to reinvent American education… by offshoring it.
You don’t build something like DLA in a vacuum. You build it from couches, from late-night WhatsApp rants, from cold winter walks where someone talks you off the ledge.
We ask people to move all the time in the name of opportunity.
Let’s start asking: who’s going to catch them when they land?
Because at the end of the day,
opportunity without support is just a pretty invitation to failure.