Walk in Their Shoes

In 2013, with the help of ghostwriter James S. Hirsch, the philanthropist Jim Ziolkowski wrote a book chronicling his decision to become a humanitarian activist and the story of his school-building nonprofit, buildOn. The book contains not just Jim’s story, but also high-quality photographs of the places where buildOn has been working. Titled Walk in Their Shoes, the book asks in its subtitle, Can One Person Change the World? Jim’s answer is that when motivated by a commitment to helping others and when constantly asking whether one’s actions are effective, then the answer is yes.

Jim starts with his happy and uneventful childhood growing up in a Catholic family, where ski and hiking trips with his father were a frequent and memorable tradition. He goes on to graduate from Michigan State University with a degree in business, but decides to take a year to travel the world before starting a career. Jim is an avid and adventurous traveler, visiting out of the way places in countries such as Thailand, India, and Nepal in addition to the typical tourist destinations. A small village in Nepal makes a huge impression on him – he happens to be there during a celebration of the building of the town’s first school. Other places also impress him, but in a different way – he never quite gets over the incredible poverty and disease he encounters in places like Africa, Nicaragua, and Brazil.

After returning home, Jim goes into corporate finance at the huge corporation General Electric – a job that would comfortably set him up for life. But at twenty-five years old and nine months into his comfortable new lifestyle, he still can’t quite “reconcile the intense work in the comfortable offices in Connecticut with the harsh suffering I had seen in those overwhelmed cities in India.” Drawing on his Catholic faith for guidance, and on his memories of what he had seen in his travels, Jim decides to leave GE to start buildOn, an organization with two goals: to think globally by building three schools in three far-flung locations, and to act locally by turning inner-city youths from at-risk statistics into community leaders at home and abroad.



Jim is lucky that GE is willing to back his dreams, and after a fundraising campaign that refused to take no for an answer, Jim, his brother, and one of their friends are ready to start their work. Moving to a run-down neighborhood in Harlem in order to "walk in the shoes" of the US kids he wants to work with, Jim learns that just like the people in the distant villages in other countries, these kids don’t want to escape from their home neighborhoods – they want to transform them into better places.

Guided by this lesson in getting buy-in from those whom he would like to help, Jim does his best to avoid the white-savior stereotype of the clueless cultural imperialist. Instead, buildOn’s plan is to work in collaboration with the residents of villages where the schools would be built. That way, when the organization leaves, the villagers would have ownership of the school and be emotionally invested in making sure future generations benefited from it. Just as he had in Harlem, Jim makes sure to “spend time walking in the shoes” of each locality, facing similar difficulties. It’s clear that even despite this intention, Jim’s privilege can never be totally erased – he can get medical treatment for malaria, for example, unlike the poorest villagers.

Despite threats from diminishing financial backing, armed militias, and local politics, buildOn persevered. Jim makes it clear that although he has never preached his faith to others, he does rely on it to see him through hard moments. He is also driven by his awe of the way villagers would step up to contribute to the organization’s efforts. In the book, he describes seeing women, in particular, lugging 100-pound sacks of cement on their backs up steep mountain trails. They explain to him that they recognize that educating girls is crucial to ensuring a future. As one mother put it to him, "If you educate a boy, you educate one person. If you educate a girl, you educate an entire community.”



From that initial dream of building three schools, buildOn has now established more than 550 schools in the world’s economically poorest countries, from Haiti to Nepal. At the same time, in the U.S., thousands of high schools students in cities spanning the country have spent more than 1.2 million hours of direct community service in their own neighborhoods and schools. What is fascinating is that the very same challenges of apathy, violence, and political resistance that the organization encountered abroad also plague them when they start trying to reach young people in the United States as well.

Still, regardless of the level of buildOn’s success, the book makes sure not to shy away from Jim’s useful and humbling self-assessments. He often reexamines his motives in order to make sure he isn’t stumbling into self-aggrandizement or vainglory. Similarly, the program is designed to have frequent check-ins about its own effectiveness and strategy, asking whether existing methods are working, whether the right priorities have been deemed most important, and what he needs to learn to be able to do his job in a better, more efficient way. There is some suggestion that this process of self-evaluation comes from Jim’s business background.

The book ends with an exhortation for the reader to do something – not necessarily with buildOn, but certainly in service to some guiding moral imperative.